HP: Spirit Talker

A small traditional hut. Thin wooden walls, paper with bamboo paneled interior doors and walls, partitions. Four rooms on the first floor: kitchen, living-dining room, bathroom, toilet, three small living rooms on the second floor. All enchanted for durability, protection from moisture, drafts, fire, and so on. Modest, ascetic furnishings.

But all this doesn't matter to me, for the next few days I will be in a trance, which means that my mental body will be gone and my physical body will remain, with two nutrient drips. In the past, before drips were invented, mages suffered a lot from such long meditations and trances, and it takes a long time to restore the body after such a thing. It is painful and expensive, because you have to take special mixtures that contain expensive ingredients. But even a simple "look into the past" was rarely traded, usually such a step was taken only for the sake of something very important, necessary.

It was good that now you could inject a needle into a vein, ask your partner to keep an eye on you, and go about your business. And when you're done — a couple of restorative compositions, deep energy meditation, or three hours of yoga, and that's it, you're fine.

Anyway, I set up in the biggest room, the living room. I removed the furniture, spread out a large sheet of paper on the floor, three by three meters. I drew the necessary figures on it, laid out the ritual objects — a bowl with water, fire, earth, a piece of iron and a flower in a pot, lit eight smoking bowls on the outer perimeter, sat in the center of the drawing, closed my eyes, fell into a trance. The ritual began.

***

Nearing the end of the third day, her son sat in the center of the room, rocking slightly from side to side. Junko kept a close eye on the IVs, the integrity of the ritual, and to make sure no one disturbed them. She had been visited by the landlady here three times in the past three days.

People everywhere say that the neighborhood is a place free of politics and power, but few people know that its only mistress for the past century and a half has been Tenno Hinako-no-miko. And before that, the mistress was her mother — Tenno Kiriko-no-miko, according to the chronicles — a rather eccentric and impetuous person of unimaginable power, immeasurable. She ruled for more than four centuries, accomplished much, and then suddenly disappeared without a trace. To this day, her fate is unknown.

Or rather, as Junko suspects, it was unknown. If her suspicions are confirmed, the woman herself is afraid of what might happen.

And today she came — light, weightless footsteps of the girl in unchanging, opulent and solemn clothing, barely perceptible, more given away by the rustle of the clothes and the slight chime of the ritual bells on the exposed ankles. Standing next to the boy's mother, she said a brief hello, without the ceremonialism they had abandoned on the second day.

— It will be soon. — After a few minutes of silence, the girl spoke suddenly, meeting the anxious gaze of her mother. — I can feel the barriers between worlds trembling. — The girl covered her eyes and spoke more softly. — We, like myself, the priests blessed by the Deity, feel when a mage walks through the boundaries of the worlds, how he pushes through the barriers with his will and his power. Unlike us, who know the only path that has been open for centuries, the mages of the spiritual paths open roads for themselves and follow them. But they are easy to hear, if you know how....

Here, the boy was covered in a ghostly silvery glow, as if he were dressed in spiritual robes. His sharply open eyes radiated a white light. His sharply parched lips moved. The sounds were probably words, but none of the witnesses could make them out.

For a minute, there was a strange whisper that sent a shiver down the skin, then, as if in slow motion, the young mage moved. His body rose slowly on bent legs and bent into a "bridge" with his arms outstretched to his sides. There was a ringing crack in the joints, but neither his expression nor his voice changed.

Junko could barely keep herself from running to her son. She'd seen a possessed man before, one who tortured his victim by mutilating the body. The resemblance was too great to limit herself to mere alarm.

They waited about an hour, watching the man's bent form, until the glow began to flicker, to fade, and the whispers began to stop, to falter, to disappear. In an instant, everything stopped, and Sora simply fell to the ground, unconscious, breathing heavily and dripping with sweat.

The mother immediately rushed to her son, using almost forgotten spells to check for any threats to the boy's life. To her surprise, there were few injuries — sprained back muscles, bruised joints, minor bleeding, and magical exhaustion.

 She knew how to deal with such things, but she wasn't in a hurry to get down to business until she got permission from the priestess — what if the ritual wasn't finished yet? It took a few days for the boy to come to his senses, and another day for him to start training.

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