Even though I did not find any instruction manual for Aura, I did not give up on uncovering its secrets. To the delight of my dad and the disheartening of my Mum and grandparents who think I lost interest in magic, I stuck to my dad to see if I could glimpse any clues about Aura, or more specifically stamina energy, while he went about his daily duties and training.
It was on this world's equivalent of Wednesday, (Yes, this world's dating system is much like my previous world's, the only difference is all 12 months have 30 days, no more, no less) which is the day I usually do not see Dad due to self-training, that I finally got the first hint of stamina energy.
Dad brought me to a rather bare room that was lit with a torch and sat down cross-legged.
Dad put me down between his legs and said, "Daddy is going to meditate now, try to be quiet and maybe go to sleep."
He then sat up straight and started taking slow deep breaths. As Dad was doing his meditation, I was concentrating my senses on the flow of his inner energy, I already can sense what the mana is doing in his body, but I don't see much of anything else.
My hypothesis is that I am unable to sense stamina energy, I was only able to catch a glimpse of it when it was ignited by mana and became Aura, hopefully, whatever meditation Dad is doing will trigger something in his body strong enough for me to sense, as long as it is not mana or aura.
A minute goes by, nothing. 5 minutes, still noting. 10 minutes, still not a bloody thing besides maybe the mana around his body trembling in pace with his breathing. What am I missing?
Maybe I should try to imitate his breathing, so I sat up and leaned against Dad's stomach and followed the breathing of his body. After 15 minutes of doing so, I do not feel anything different.
Noticing me emulating his breathing, Dad opens an eye to peep at me and chuckles, "Oh? Trying to copy your old man? Do you want to be a knight when you grow up?"
I look up at him and make excited baby noises.
Dad laughs while patting my head, "Haha, it is not so simple, one must learn to perceive the energy in one's own body, it is even harder than perceiving and controlling mana. Ah, I could remember the time when I was training to perceive my stamina energy. The knight order trainers would make us meditate before training, exercise us half to death then make us meditate again to let us try to perceive the difference, it was plain torture I tell you. But all that is for when you get older, for now just follow your old man in this breathing exercise."
Well shit, there is no way I am doing that method of training to perceive stamina energy. Maybe there are other ways, let's try to put all that past life knowledge to use.
I try to recall all the knowledge of meditation and breathing techniques I learned in China and Japan. Their teachings may defer slightly, but boil down to the same concepts.
First, I must be relaxed, which I am while currently sitting on Dad's lap.
Next is deep diaphragmatic breaths, in from the nose, and out from the mouth. Some of the schools I went to paired this with flowing movements.
Next, I must be aware of my surroundings and myself. And in order to perceive this stamina energy, I need to zone out all distractions. Luckily we are in a rather isolated room. The first thing I try to zone out is my dad, which seems kind of impossible because I am sitting on him, but I accept him and his breathing as part of the environment, next thing I need to zone out is the ever-present mana within me and the environment.
But doing all that is fucking hard, which brings me to the final step, Visualization, just as I did to perceive mana in the first place, now I must try to un-perceive it. Is un-perceive even a word? Who knows, but I will try anyway.
Time flies by, and I am able to successfully zone out my dad. I am not sitting on Dad, I am sitting on a suspiciously body temperatured hill and leaning on a tree, and as more time goes by, the waves of mana I perceive in the environment start to smooth out to nothing, and my mana pathways fade out from the visualized form of my own body.
That is when I am abruptly brought out of my meditation by Dad lifting me by my armpits, "Alright little man, I am done with my meditation, lets get you back to mommy, I still got paperwork to do."
Noooo, dammit, I was almost there.
I let my displeasure be known by crying until I am passed back to mum.
The days passed as I practiced my meditation to sense my stamina, and like the RPG games I played in my previous life, I visualized the yellow color of stamina energy flowing through my body. At first, I saw it as blips and flashes at different parts of my body before I lost track of it, and as I continued, one day, I first sensed it from my heart.
From there, my sense of this new energy spread to my major arteries, followed by my internal organs, my muscles, and lastly my skin.
Ok, so this may or may not be stamina, and now that I can sense it. Now I will need to confirm it, and the only way to do so is to stick with Dad again. My stamina is constantly flowing through my body even if I am not doing anything strenuous, I can only assume it is the same for Dad.
The next day after being able to sense what I think is stamina, I attach myself to Dad after breakfast. And while he was carrying me, I made sure I was in direct skin-on-skin contact before trying to sense Dad's stamina, only to find that I could not sense any stamina energy like I could sense within myself. This needs more testing.
Throughout the rest of the day, as I was passed around from the maids, Mum, and my grandparents, I tried to sense stamina energy from them in case Dad had some kind of passive technique to prevent his stamina energy from being sensed.
The results were negative. From what the books say, everyone has stamina and mana no matter how minuscule the amount. I could sense their mana but not their stamina.
So this leaves me with a few conclusions. Either I am too weak to perceive stamina energy from others, or stamina energy can only be sensed by oneself.
The only way to confirm that this energy is stamina is to ignite it with a spark of mana, and I do not want to do that when I am not in the presence of the resident Aura expert, my Dad.
So as I am laid to rest for the night, I practice with this new energy. I tried a few breathing techniques I learned in his previous life, to mixed results.
Unlike mana which I had ease of control for both internal and external mana, the best I could do was speed up and slow down the flow of what i think is stamina energy, and I could not stop the flow or accumulate stamina in any part of my body or project stamina energy outside my body like I could do with mana
Before my baby body could no longer stay awake, I mixed and matched different breathing techniques to go along with my meditation, and came up with 2 different breathing techniques, one to accelerate and one to slow down the flow of stamina energy in my body.
Just as I optimized the 2 breathing techniques, sleep took me.
***
I wake up the next day ready to finalize my experiment once and for all to see if this energy is indeed stamina energy.
Mum fed me my morning boob juice before joining the rest of the family for breakfast. At the dining table where I was sitting in my booster chair between Mum and Dad, with my grandparents opposite me, I waited for them to finish breakfast and the servants to pour some tea before I began.
If I am going to test out something potentially dangerous, it is better for my dad who is an Aura user, and grandpa who can use some basic healing magic to be in the same room.
While they are idly chatting about what they are going to do today, I close my eyes and meditate to feel the flow of stamina energy. Then I copy what Dad did when igniting his stamina.
At the core of my body, around where my solar plexes are, I ignited a spark of mana.