Six months.
That's how long it took for me to start seeing the patterns—not the ones written in books or whispered by old masters, but the real ones. The kind that hide in the pulse of the living world.
When Kael and I began this journey, we thought the key to Life Energy—Aetherka—was resonance, a matter of rhythm and breath. But the more we traveled, the more I watched, the more I listened… the more I realized how naïve that belief was.
It's not just rhythm.
It's emotion.
Every living being has a pulse. Not just the beating of their heart, but something deeper—the pulse of who they are. Their essence. Their truth.
Over the last six months, I've watched hundreds of people—Naturals, Hollows, and everything in between. I've seen soldiers in battle, mothers comforting children, lovers arguing in the street, merchants cheating customers with forced smiles. And through them, I began to feel the difference in their energy.
When a person feels rage, the air thickens. The Aetherka around them vibrates faster, the color—if you can call it that—shifts to deep crimson. When someone feels grief, the energy grows heavy, sluggish, tinted gray-blue like dying embers. Joy ripples gold; serenity, pale green; determination, silver-white.
It's subtle. Invisible to the naked eye. But once you learn to listen, you can sense it in the world itself.
Life Energy reacts to emotion.
It doesn't just flow through us—it answers us.
And that, I think, is the first law of awakening.
I didn't realize how emotional the world really is until I started tracking it. Every day, I write. Every night, I meditate and test my theories. Kael helps when she can, though she has her own path—her connection to wind has deepened into something graceful and unpredictable. Sometimes she'll spar against the breeze just to "listen to what it says."
I used to laugh at that. Now I understand it.
Emotions are not weakness. They are frequency. Each one has its own resonance, its own vibration. When we feel, truly feel, our energy harmonizes with those waves—and that's what the Naturals unconsciously tap into.
It's not talent. It's alignment.
It started to make sense why only 20% awaken successfully. The elders used to say it was divine will, or genetic chance, or natural selection. But when I observed the initiation ceremonies across different towns, I noticed the same thing every time.
The tests are performed on children—barely five years old. Their hearts are pure, but their minds are unshaped. They feel emotions strongly, yes—fear, joy, curiosity—but they lack the one thing that emotion alone cannot replace:
Will.
Life Energy may answer emotion, but it follows will.
Emotion opens the door, but will decides who walks through it.
That's why so many fail. Children don't have a sense of purpose strong enough to anchor their emotions. Their energy flares brightly for a moment—wild, untamed—and then fades into nothing because there's no core to sustain it. No direction.
The Naturals who succeed aren't just lucky. They're the rare few who, even at that age, feel something so deeply and purely that it forges a bond between emotion and will. Maybe it's love. Maybe it's pain. Maybe it's just the desperate will to be seen.
Whatever it is, it resonates—and the Aetherka answers.
Kael said once, half-jokingly, "So you're saying our whole lives are powered by feelings?"
"Not feelings," I corrected her. "Resonance between the soul and the world."
"Sounds like feelings to me," she smirked.
Maybe she's right. Maybe I just like dressing emotions up in fancy words.
But this discovery still doesn't solve my real problem.
If emotions trigger resonance, and will anchors it… then where does breathing fit in? How can I translate that bond into a technique—something repeatable, teachable, something any Hollow can use?
For months, I've chased that question through every village, every ruined temple, every battle-scarred field. We've watched mercenaries train, monks meditate, performers dance. Each has a rhythm, a breathing pattern tied to their emotion—but none of them share the same sequence. The patterns are personal. Instinctive. Like fingerprints.
You can't teach instinct.
Not directly.
So the question became: how do I teach someone to feel?
My notes are starting to look like madness. Dozens of pages filled with sketches of auras and color gradients, lines connecting emotions to flow strength. Rage, for instance, increases output but reduces control. Calm amplifies precision but dulls responsiveness. Joy expands reach. Fear sharpens instincts. Grief… grounds you in terrifying ways.
Each emotion has its power—and its price.
Kael says I'm overanalyzing again, but she's been helping in her own way. She's been training with the wind to map emotional flow to motion. According to her, when she feels alive—when she moves without hesitation—the wind bends with her, faster and sharper than when she tries to consciously control it.
It's strange. When she's happy, her power sings. When she's serious, it hums. When she's angry… gods, the world itself trembles.
And I realized—emotion doesn't just influence the color of energy. It changes its texture.
I started experimenting on myself.
Every day, I isolate one emotion—fear, joy, grief, determination—and let it fill me while meditating on my core. I monitor how the Aetherka reacts, how my body changes. Sometimes I feel warmth spreading through my limbs, other times pressure in my chest, or vibration in my skull. It's like tuning a thousand instruments at once.
But something is missing. No matter how much I experiment, I can't reproduce the perfect resonance that Naturals achieve instinctively during awakening.
Emotion gives me color. Will gives me direction. But there's another factor—something that binds them into permanence.
The core.
Naturals form theirs during awakening—either in the brain or heart—because their resonance reaches a critical point, fusing energy into a stable structure. For them, it happens unconsciously. For us… we had to force it.
And forcing leaves scars.
Maybe that's why we can't progress further.
Our foundations are stable, but they weren't born from harmony—they were forged from defiance.
Six months of data, and all I've truly learned is that the world runs on feeling.
That, and the fact that control is an illusion.
The more I try to command the flow, the more it resists. But when I listen—when I let myself be vulnerable, open to whatever the world wants to show me—it responds like a friend.
It's maddening.
It's beautiful.
It's terrifying.
Sometimes I wonder if that's why the elders fear us Hollows. Because if we ever learn to wield this truth, the balance between Naturals and the rest of the world will shatter overnight.
Kael noticed something last night.
We were camping near a waterfall, the mist cold against our faces. She was tracing her hand through the spray, laughing softly as droplets formed tiny whirlwinds around her fingers. Then she frowned and said, "You ever notice how your energy changes color when you think?"
I blinked. "Changes color?"
"Yeah," she said, tilting her head. "When you're calm, it's pale blue. When you're focused, it's silver. But when you get that look—you know, the 'I'm about to overthink everything again' look—it goes white. Like snow."
That shouldn't be possible. I've never consciously tried to change the color of my energy. But the fact that she could see it… means the theory is real. The energy isn't just reacting to random feelings—it's reflecting them outward.
Every emotion paints the energy differently, and maybe, just maybe, those colors represent the individual's true connection to the world.
If that's the case, then maybe awakening isn't about discovering power at all. Maybe it's about the world discovering you.
Still, knowing that doesn't bring me any closer to what I want.
I need a system—a breathing style—that can bridge emotion, will, and energy flow for those who never awakened. A path that makes resonance a skill, not a miracle.
But how do you teach someone to synchronize with the rhythm of their own soul?
How do you make the intangible tangible?
That question haunts me every night.
We'll be leaving the lowlands soon, heading toward the Veylen Frontier—a place said to be untouched by the kingdoms, ruled only by beasts and wanderers. Kael thinks we might find answers there. I'm not sure, but the thought of facing the unknown feels… right.
Because every time I get close to understanding something, the world seems to whisper a little louder. Like it wants to show me more, but only if I prove I'm ready.
Before I slept last night, I tried something new. I opened my core, let my emotions flow without filtering them. I thought about every moment—pain, loss, victory, hope. I didn't try to control it. I just felt.
For a brief moment, the world went silent.
No sound. No wind. No heartbeat.
Then I saw it.
A faint shimmer in the air—colors swirling together, forming patterns I couldn't comprehend. It wasn't my energy.
It was the world's.
Aetherka itself was breathing. Responding.
As if it had a consciousness of its own.
And as I stared at it, I realized something that made my blood run cold.
We've been trying to control Life Energy.
But what if Life Energy… has been watching us?