After pausing to applaud my input, the Mayor, who was behaving more like a neighborly Uncle Robert at the moment, continued with his explanation,
"Simply put, vampires are beings born with an innate skill to control their blood and have an awakened 'essence' and elves are beings born with a heightened sense of awareness and an awakened 'spirit'.
Humans, on the other hand, have both their spirit and essence dormant since their birth. If it wasn't for the cruel yet heroic experimentation of the Lunar Frask tribe, we would have continued to think that such innate deficiencies could never be changed or overcome.
But the ground-breaking success of the tribe made it so that we are now able to utilize the concentrated essence of powerful beings. That discovery changed everything. It made every humanoid species on the face of the continent acknowledge our power as all of them were forced to make sense of the changing status quo of human beings.
Totems were the fundamental reason for this change. They are the key to breaking our physical and mental limits, as only through totems can we awaken and nurture our dormant 'essence' and increase our power like the Vampires and Elves.
Unfortunately, even after a thousand years of research and experimentation, we haven't been able to find a way to naturally awaken our 'spirit' or 'essence', but there's another important piece of information that we have managed to uncover, which is quite possibly as important as everything else I've just mentioned.
It is that as the power of an awakened hunter keeps increasing with the concentration and improvement of their 'essence', their awareness improves to some extent as well, which means that the vice-versa is also true, that is a rise in 'spirit' would affect the 'essence' of the body to a certain extent as well.
Our researchers have been using that fact as a foundation to further our research in the field of 'spirit' as well but the progress has been slow.
Anyway, the fact that we require the awakened blood of the Vampires to increase our powers after the totem engraving process makes us their natural enemy, while the elves are the neutral faction.
Now, do you understand what 'essence' and 'spirit' are?"
His question shook me awake from my dazed state. The knowledge that I received wasn't some precious secret, but to be able to explain it in such simple terms was the merit of that experienced former teacher.
I nodded my head with force, showing my confidence. My 'teacher' also seemed pleased with himself as he took out an exquisite quill from his robe and dangled it in front of me,
"This quill, as you see, is worth around a tenth of all my fortunes. And that is because it's a magic weapon, a revolutionary tool. What's so special about it you ask? It has countless inscriptions engraved on it that work as pathways to allow the essence to be channeled through it. With it, I can channel my essence into your body, and create artificial pathways, which would allow your dormant essence to awaken. Ironically though, while the name of this process of engraving the essence circuit is awakening, it only half-awakens the potential.
This is because breaking through the limitations set on the human body is not possible merely through the establishment of an artificial essence circuit known as 'totems'. It needs an additional powerful push of concentrated essence, a catalyst that makes it possible to truly break that limit, and that's where the blood of the vampires comes in.
The quality of vampire blood would determine the power of that push and the foundation that your artificial essence circuit would grant you. In the case of Initium Class Hunters, since the push granted to their essence circuits is very small, their foundation, therefore, remains weak and unstable.
They might have broken through their limits, but the essence that they could channel and utilize is limited.
Imagine the dormant potential inside your body being as big as a sea but the limits set on you are a vast curtain that stops you from utilizing any of it. Through the use of 'totems' or the 'artificial essence circuit', I'm preparing to tear a hole through that curtain, but the quality of the vampire blood that you'll circulate through your circuit would determine how big of a hole you could tear through.
Do you understand now?"