Key to the Void: A self-made isekai

“Alright,” I said, trying to bring the conversation back on track. “We’ve already pretty firmly established it. Our souls are our true selves and are where our memories from our previous lives are kept. Our bodies are just something that’s moved by our souls, and our spirit is the tool our soul uses to do it. My understanding of the spirit has it acting in a very similar manner to how nerves work. It doesn’t come fully formed, it needs to grow and gain capabilities within the body in order to control it.”

Rolwen and Levin both seemed to be nodding along with this. Even Nymph seemed to understand my explanation, and her projection that had been hovering around us also nodded in agreement. It was only Tia that was looking around very confused. “I… have heard about nerves before. Umm… how do they work, though?” she asked.

I looked up and considered this question. How detailed of an explanation should I give? I may have been a martial arts instructor, but the thing I used to pay the bills was my career as a nurse. I wasn’t a neuro-surgeon, but my understanding of nerves was likely the strongest of anyone here.

“Well, nerves are a type of cell in the body. Their primary job is to relay and process information. There are nerves that run across every single fraction of an inch of your entire body, both inside and outside. Nerves tell the muscles to move, and nerves sense things in the body to bring it back to your brain in order to process that information. If I touch your arm, the reason you can feel that is because the nerves in your arm carry the sensation up into your brain.”

As the former adopted child of a goddess of healing, I’m just going to assume she knows what the brain is. I won’t get into details about the brain also being made out of nerves.

“Oh!” Tia said. “So, is it that white stuff that looks like a plant’s root that comes out of the spine?” she asks.

“Yes! That’s exactly it!” I said, deciding not to comment on the fact that her question definitely meant she’d seen several fully dissected corpses. I have too, but the dissected corpses I saw were 99% pictures on the page of a book. I have no place to fault her time-period though.

“Ok…” Tia muses. “Well, that’s… I guess something like that, except the spirit doesn’t just move information. It also moves power from the soul to the body. Your body can actually change and become stronger as you utilize more of your soul’s power. You can make your soul stronger too, but I don’t think we’re not going to have to worry about that for a long time. We don’t have spirits that are anywhere close to developed enough to use all the power our souls can give us.”

“So, we can also get our bodies stronger just by making our spirits stronger?” Rolwen asked. “And I take it that it’s a lot easier to strengthen our spirits than it is to strengthen our souls? So, as long as it’s only strengthening our spirits, we can keep improving a whole lot faster, up until we reach the cap of what our souls can allow, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Tia said.

“And this is mostly managed through meditation,” I mused, talking as much to myself as to everyone else. “Ok, I think we have covered the base frame-work on this subject enough. Now, let’s get back to the main subject. Meditation. How much detail can you give us?”

“Ok,” Tia said. “Well, there are a lot of different kinds of meditation. There are the ones that give you magic, those can give you either the magic of order or the magic of nature. There are also the ones that are just for strengthening the body.”

“Tia, you’re doing it again.” I decided to cut her off there. “You have not even explained about this order and nature magic stuff before just now.

“Umm… well, I don’t know a lot about it. I just know that mine is of the nature type because I am a divine beast. Nature magic is mostly instinctual, and mine works to give me both natural magic I don’t have to think too hard about and it also strengthens my body a lot.” Tia explained

“So Tia is the biggest cheater of us all, huh?” Rolwen commented.

“Ok, great.” I said, almost groaning internally at how difficult this was getting. I had long since decided to just ignore Rolwen’s little off-color quips entirely.

“Ok,” I said as I tried to find a way to get things back on track. “What about specific meditation techniques? I know about mantras and mudras, certain patterns of how to move the energy through your body. Also a few things about external stimuli. Do you know anything about those techniques?”

“Hmmm…” Tia groaned, “I really really don’t know that much about that stuff, it sounds like a lot of it might be stuff humans came up with after the time I was with my mother. But… If any of those are part of your own technique that you learned on Earth, you should keep doing it. Like I said before, yours is way way more powerful than anything that existed in my time. So, I can’t really tell you a lot. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” I chastised her. “You can’t be blamed for what you couldn’t possibly know in the first place.”

“So… you really don’t know anything else about meditation?” Levin asked, finally breaking his silent side-line routine.

“If she doesn’t know, then she doesn’t know. Just like Asa just said.” Rolwen chastised him.

“Grrr…” Tia groaned as though Rolwen’s comment was a challenge to her pride. “Well, I do know SOME stuff. There were some techniques for moving energy. If you have a nature type meditation, you can use magic under certain conditions. If you have an order type meditation, well, I don’t know much about how they do it, but they make some kind of mold for a spell out of spirit energy inside of themselves and that mold helps them to be able to control magic without having to look out for the conditions around them. I can’t tell you a lot more, mostly we just… gathered energy inside our bodies and used it to make ourselves stronger. It was easier for me too, I got my energy mostly from the blood I drank, so I never needed to know a whole lot.”

“Well…” Rolwen said, “it sounds like we might actually be able to learn more from Asa about meditation than from Tia at this rate. What were all those meditation techniques you just rattled off, anyway?”

“Mostly they are just different ways to help focus the mind.” I said. “Although, now that I know a little bit about this spirit stuff, I suppose the visualization related practices might be more central to what needs to be done than I might have given it credit for back on Earth.”

I pushed myself to a standing position and stretched, and I was rather pleased that my knee-length robe/sun-dress/sheet-with-a-hole-for-the-head-and-arms kept my body covered effectively through the motion. “Well then,” I said, “I’ve got a direction for myself now. Tia says the meditation Ether-guy taught me is not going to work to conceal my spirit? Well, I think I might have a solution within my own repertoar for this one.”

“Can you teach us your meditation?” Rolwen asked. “Tia keeps going on about it being powerful and stuff, so that’s definitely the one I want to learn!”

“Well, I can teach you the basics, but you are going to have to learn my fighting style in order to use it at its fullest. Mine is a moving meditation, and the movement is the practice of combat itself. The footwork, the combat techniques, the mind-set of awareness of your surroundings, this meditation has permeated every last aspect of this combat style to the extent that you simply cannot use one without the other,” I told him.

“You mean I get to learn magical Kung-fu? Sign me up for that!” Rolwen agrees, only getting more excited from my explanation.

“Well, if that’s how it’s going to be, you’re going to have to get Levin into it as well. I teach both of you or neither. This also has to do with the style, it involves a lot of really subtle grappling and joint manipulations. For that, you need a partner. You could train with me, but there’s just too much of a skill gap between us for you to learn effectively from my example.”

“Well, I definitely would like Levin training too, but I think you might be underestimating me there a bit, old man.” Rolwen protested. “I learned some BJJ and MCMAP, I might be a better challenge for you than you think.”

“You were in the marines then?” I asked. “I thought maybe you had served. Marines though… I’ve had some pretty good friends and fellow students who were marines.”

“Wait, how big is your style?” Rolwen asked. “I was picturing some secret top-of-a-mountain thing.”

“Oh, no,” I said, “we’re not one of the big commercialized styles, but we very well might be the biggest of the actual war-time martial arts that has been preserved from feudal times. I doubt meditations of my degree were in any way rare in those old styles either. There is almost nothing among the things that I have to teach that are not also known by hundreds of thousands of people back on Earth.”

“So, what? Is it some kind of secret ninja society recruiting members in plain sight as a huge martial arts school or something? Even the school itself hiding in plain sight right under everyone’s nose?” Rolwen jested.

I had to do my best to keep a straight face and just laugh that one off. He has no idea just how close to the truth his flippant comment there really was.