Chapter 4

Me and Dento reached the shrine after a day as he said. I was impressed by the fact that I didn’t seem to need to stop and rest, my body didn’t need to sleep apparently, of which I’m glad since at the pace I was going it would have taken at least 2 days if I needed to stop for 8 hours, though one feeling started to Manifest while reaching the shrine, hunger... But it was still manageable, nothing but a pang, and I’m thankful for that, I didn’t want to turn into some kind of beast driven by its hunger, since, as Dento has said before, I feed on life energy.

The shrine itself was beautiful it looked kind of like a Japanese shrine, mostly made of deep brown wood and gray stone bricks, but did not have any torii gates leading up to it, and it didn’t have offering boxes, most likely because money isn’t what the last owner of the body wanted, and I doubt one can just drop their life essence in an offering box, instead it looked much more secure and fortified. 

The lack of these things left the shrine with a dirt road leading up to a big courtyard with a big tree in the middle, the place was still well kept even though it was clear a fight had happened, the door to enter the temple was busted open like someone made it explode, there were scorch marks at random intervals in the courtyard, and things didn’t get better once I walked inside. There was smashed furniture and pottery everywhere seemingly whatever fight went on, it went on through the whole temple, though I could feel something deeper in the shrine.

I followed that feeling and reached what looked like a meeting hall, it had what I guess once was a comfy seat against the further wall, now it was just a broken down fancy chair, a now scorched red carpet going up to it, it looked kinda like a throne room, this must have been where those willing to sacrifice their life energy were led, or whatever the fox did to harvest life force.

In this room there were several charred beyond recognition bodies, I could count at least 6 of them scattered about the room.

In front of the now smashed throne, there was a circle on the ground at which center there seemed to be a small tree growing a single big white and round glowing fruit, for reference, the tree was small enough for me to reach the fruit with a single hop.

<Dento? what is that thing?> I asked motioning towards the tree.
Dento floated over to the circle stopping just outside of it and said: <Seems to be what’s left of your magic, the scorched bodies must have been nature aspect mages and tried to seal you inside a tree. I guess that you must have shot your soul away, to save yourself using most of your magic and slip through the seal as it was being made, think about a big fish suddenly shrinking to pass through a fisherman’s net.>

<the last inhabitant of this body must have been very cunning> I said walking over to the small tree, thinking if I could be as cunning as that if need be.

As I got close I could feel the circle on the ground repelling me so I asked: <how do I get to it?>

Dento chuckled and said: <well if I tell you everything you are never gonna learn, but I’ll explain the basics of a magic circle since I at least know that much about magic, a magic circle is generally drawn with either magic or chalk but it’s used to define a boundary, and they are used to isolate the area inside, for whatever reason, it might be too many of them to list right now, and that’s about all you need to understand theory wise to be able to figure out how to deal with it. I’ll be frank Ivo, the Mistress wasn’t cunning because she was evil, she was cunning because it's the only way to survive in this world, being soft and simple might be good for a peasant, but if you want any amount of power you need to be smart and quick-witted. Plus magical circles are made to keep stuff in, not out, or at least this one is, whoever made it didn’t have the time to idiot-proof it, my guess being it was one of those charcoal piles around the room>

I gave a big sigh looking at the wisp feeling like I was being treated like a child, I thought about giving a snarky response but Dento was trying to help me so antagonizing him wasn’t the best idea.

I looked at the circle, it was dark yellow and smelled of tree… most likely sap, what he noticed is that the circle drawn on the ground projected a magical one a few centimeters off the ground, most likely preventing whoever gets trapped inside from touching the real circle, I paced around the seal once to make sure the circle was the same all around, but, well, it's not like I could understand all the weird symbols that were on the inside of the arcane circle, and since Dento didn't mention anything about it, then it must not matter.

Well staring at it won’t quell the hunger growing inside of me, so I started trying things.

First I tried pushing against the seal, which only matched my strength in pushing back, then the next option was breaking the seal by cleaning the sap, I tried to scratch at it from under the projected magic circle and found that under there, there was no magical push back, it kinda worked, but the sap was still sticky and not easy to remove with my fox paws. It took me way too much time to scrape enough off of the seal to break up the circle. Once I finally managed it I saw the magical circle shatter like an egg.