Early release today because no release tomorrow

Once I returned to my room, I locked the door and began studying the soul technique. Although it had no official name, I decided to call it Tracking. I was pretty lucky because Tracking seemed to be made for beginners in using soul essence - what the book called parts of your soul. The essence of Tracking was sending small unnoticeable wisps of soul essence around your vicinity while paying attention to each of them. When the essence collides with another soul, it would naturally dissipate, therefore, you would know that someone - or something - exists in that direction. Tracking stated that the essence lost when using it was usually minimal and could be recovered relatively fast. On the other hand, it also stated that overusing Tracking will cause one's soul essence to be permanently damaged. Lastly, the notes stated that the essence manipulation technique in Tracking shouldn't be used to manipulate large amounts of soul essence.

I was a bit disappointed with Tracking, it only told you whether something existed in that direction, it didn't tell you anything else about the existence. 'It could've been worse I thought to myself, 'At least this can be used.'

In addition to the Tracking, Torus also wrote down his own notes. He stated that before one can start the first step in Tracking, they needed to have at least felt a portion of their soul essence, it didn't matter how much they felt, but it would be impossible to learn the technique if they didn't feel it. He wrote down some tips from his personal experience, and concluded his segment by writing "As you start to become more familiar with soul essence, you will develop more control over your body and movements." I had a sly grin on my face when I read that, what Torus described was similar to what I felt during my childhood. It took me a few years to gain complete control over my body back then. I decided to test this by going right into the first step of Tracking, feeling the essence.

This step was simple, one has to meditate until one can completely sense one soul. Although the description was rather brief, Tracking stated that as long as someone can feel their soul power, sensing the entire soul would only take a few days- sensing was just a stronger form of feeling after all.

For the next few hours, I meditated and accomplish the first step of Tracking. Unfortunately, I could not feel my soul no matter how hard I tried. Although I was a bit worried about whether my childhood experience was actually feeling my soul, I decided to take it slow and not jump to any conclusions. I didn't expect to get a soul technique this early in my life, and therefore I have a buffer I can experiment with.

Instead, I began to think about the first half of my runaway plan- how I could increase Kasa's emotional dependence on me. What I aimed for when I approached her was someone who would try to save me at any cost. From what I knew about her so far she was so engrossed in her study of magic that I was the only person who actually held a conversation with her in the past few years. I'm not experienced in manipulation, but I feel like the first step in manipulating someone is to create trust and attachment to you.

'It shouldn't be too hard to establish those things, I'm the only real relationship she has right now. I'll wait for a month or two and see what happens. For now, it's important that I keep bringing fruits and try to spend more time with her whenever possible.'

I decided to cancel my prison visits for the next month and focus on buttering up Kasa and understanding Tracking.