The Tower of Emnu

When Aaron woke up, it felt like he had a really bad case of hangover. Like he had done a few rounds of boxing and had lost badly, then drunk his sorrows away and fell asleep in a strange position. His throat was parched, his mouth disgusting, his body hurt, but he felt much better than when he had passed out. The headache that had made him literally faint was only a gently pounding reminder of the sensory overload he had experienced.

Aaron opened his eyes carefully and blinked into a new day. His eyes hurt from the light and he felt awful, but he could bear it now. The world looked entirely different than yesterday. Gone was the sensory overload, instead his senses worked more or less like they had before. No, better than before, much better actually he started to realize. He could see, really see for the first time in his life. It felt like a shadow had been over his eyes before and things were now so much sharper, so much more distinct and the colors! The colors were so vivid it made him stare at the green pine needles and then up at the sky for minutes until he could wrap his head around these changes. It felt like he had been nearsighted his entire life and then finally got glasses that enabled him to see, to truly see everything as it should be, as it was. But it was not just his sight, his ears were sharp, he could hear everything in his close vicinity so clear and distinct it was like he had eyes on the back of his head, no all around him. His sense of smell was muted unless he concentrated on it, which he did not really want to do at the moment, he was just too filthy and he had puked on a branch next to him yesterday. Yuck.

Aaron took half an hour to just sit and acclimate some more to the sensory enhancements. His brain did a wonderful job of not focusing on things that were not important to him right now. Just like one does not feel their clothes on their body unless you think about it. Same with smell, taste, hearing and even sight. It was a matter of focus. The more he focused on one sense the more muted were the others and the more heightened felt the sense he was concentrating on. Eventually he stood up. He came to the conclusion that his senses were just as enhanced as they had been yesterday, but they were not as overwhelming, because his focus switched between them. Which meant he could finally get rid of the disgusting taste in his mouth without collapsing.

He activated Wind Steps and felt the Qi rush through his body and coat it in an instant. His sensory feedback was instantaneous and new, completely new. Since when was he able to feel the Qi around him like this? Aaron paused, standing on the branch he had sat on and felt the Qi within him for the first time like he felt his arms or his legs. It was like the world had another dimension, like Qi had become another sense, another layer of existence revealed to him by his newly improved senses. But the really surprising thing was that he did not just feel Qi, he felt the mana around him and being absorbed inside of him as well.

His nebulous mana sense had evolved alongside with his other senses and mana was now just as much a sense of the world as smell or hearing was. In around a 100 meter radius he could sense all the mana fluctuate and flow, could feel it working on things like the wind, felt it stream down from the walls towards the center of the first floor. It was difficult to describe, it was just another sense which meant it had no bodily equivalent. It was a spatial sense, like you would get for being in a really big room. The distance and open space had its own quality to it. His Qi sense was just as, if not more distinct and accurate than his other senses. Before he had to concentrate hard to feel his Qi, now it was just there. Like another limb, same with mana. This was an utterly fascinating boon and he was not even sure if the great master had seen that coming. No, who was he kidding, of course he had known. It was probably his intention from the start. How easy would it be to cultivate like this?

A sense of anticipation and joy filled his stomach and the feeling made his senses flutter and heighten at the same time. Aaron paused and as he calmed down so did his senses. His emotional response was tied to his senses? But enough, he had things to do. He could and would research this later.

The first thing he did was grab his waterskin and rinse out his mouth and drink. It was not pleasant to say the least. The water was stale and his mouth even after rinsing it out disgusting. But it finally made him breathe a little easier, made him focus a little more on his sense of smell and taste, because both of them were being overwhelmed by how disgustingly filthy he was. The Qi around his body created by his Wind Steps technique pulsed when he wanted to move. He jumped and he could feel a ripple through the Qi as he broke through the top of his hideout and jumped almost up to the top of the three trees that made up his hideouts outer shell.

“Huh?” Why was his technique that strong all of a sudden? Aaron slowly drifted downwards and he could move the Qi around him as easily as turning a hand and guided the direction he could float just as easily as taking a few steps down some stairs, easier even than that. Taking a single step required coordination from many muscles, from his sense of balance to his leg muscles, but changing directions through manipulation of his Qi required no effort whatsoever.

He landed on the forests floor, the slushy, muddy and cold floor felt surprisingly good under his feet, but he had to concentrate and not fall for his own sense impressions. He had things to do, goals to reach. He could not always stop to admire the feeling of balance he suddenly had, enhanced by Wind Steps, instead he deactivated the technique and the Qi coat vanished within the fraction of a second.

Aaron walked over to an ice cold stream, barely two feet wide and 2 hands deep and stripped out of his clothes. Then he took a long and very thorough bath, brushed his teeth with a herb that to his new sense of smell smelled delicious. His teeth and mouth scrubbed and filled with a subtle minty and earthy flavor he took a deep breath and his world opened up as his smell reactivated in force.

He smelled mud and water, melting ice and drying tree bark, wet pine needles and drying leaves releasing aromas as he focused on his smell. He smelled like barely anything now, a little body odor was impossible to get rid of, but besides that he only smelled clean skin from himself and a slightly herbal note from his newly discovered and improvised tooth paste/ toothbrush herb. He had found it within moments and now that he concentrated on his sense of smell he could smell so many herbs it was insane. It was still winter and there were comparatively few herbs than there would be on any summer grassland, but the few that were already sprouting smelled absolutely insane to his new sense of smell. And then there was the smell of animals, droppings had a distinct stink and so did fur and its musk. He could smell the path a deer had taken and then a small pack of 4 wolves that had followed it. In his mind it felt like the smells formed a timeline, a path in time through the forest he only had to follow. There was nobody around him, no people, only a few rodents and a few birds that fluttered quickly in between trees aproximately 30 feet away from him.

Aaron chuckled to himself as he tracked one bird by sound of its flapping wings alone. He had not even known that there were that many animals in this forest, but he must have just not seen many of them. Had ignored them, but now all he needed to do was close his eyes and he felt the spacial expanse of his mana sense, his ears and his sense of smell fill the void with a very complete spatial awareness that even went so far as tracking insects through the air. Aaron shook his head and opened his eyes, his senses were still abnormally strong and his head still hurt, a lot. It was an almost constant reminder of the downside to this new and incredible ability of his. He would experience pain with utter uncaring intensity it could overwhelm him. Strong smells were like physical attacks, so were loud noises or bright lights. He could acclimate to probably all of those, except pain. He knew he would not be able to just wave away that sense at all.

It was like a glaring stabbing that always fought to the forefront of his mind, disrupting his concentration. Aaron groaned in frustration and pain. He knew now how people with bad migraines must feel, because he felt like curling up in a dark cool spot and just closing his eyes until the pain was gone. But he was hungry, ravenous even and he had to continue, he could not stop. He had to learn to live with pain and with hunger. Because hunger was just as terrible a feeling now, than pain. It felt like he was dissolving his own muscles for sustenance in his stomach it was that kind of a stabbing pain. Aaron had grown very skilled in ignoring and accepting hunger in his new life, it had become part of how he felt normally. But that equilibrium was impossible to reach now. It was just so much more intense. But at least he could sate this feeling and so he followed the smell of dead meat to the hunk of deer he had tied up in the trees. He brought it down and the smell told him so much it felt like he had a commentator next to him telling him useless nutritional facts about it.

The meat was cold, there were barely any bacteria on it, he could smell where the meat was still a bit bloody, where he had done a bad job butchering it and for the next 20 minutes or so he cut the meat and prepared it until he had dissected the deer into neat, pretty looking portions of meat that he tied together and drew back up into the air to store.

It was so freaking easy now it felt like he had a butcher course inside of his head, but no it was just that he could smell and see the difference, literally. He took almost half of the deer with him after cleaning himself again, the smell of blood, tendons and meat would be unbearable otherwise. Then he went back to his camp site, which he found instantly because of the smell of ash and coals. He fired it up again with his firestarter kit and then he looked for proper things to use to cook the meat. He decided to just use cleaned sticks, stripped of their bark and turned in the fire. Then he skewered the meat as evenly as possible, his fingers were sensitive enough he could feel millimeters of differences and then he cooked the meat. It was like nothing he had ever done. His eyes, his smell, even his ears worked in tandem to tell him how done the meat was. It felt like if he concentrated hard enough he would be able to sense the proteins denature inside of the sizzling meat.

Aaron knew exactly when to turn which skewer and when to pull it off the fire. He knew because it smelled delicious and when he sank his teeth into the meat he groaned in pleasure. His sense of taste was just as developed as his other senses and that meant this meat, that was cooked perfectly was otherworldly delicious. He sated his appetite in a strange Zen like trance of cooking without actually thinking about anything. His mind too focused on the sense impressions and the desire to bite into more deliciously cooked meat. When he was done and his hunger had moved into the background even to his new senses and he felt a sense of fullness, he realized he had eaten every scrap of meat he had brought. Aaron felt satisfied in a way that was difficult to explain.

He looked up into the sky and knew he was a different man again. That the him of now and the him of yesterday before learning Sensory Harmony were two different people. This technique had changed him again, but he felt like it had been in an entirely good way. His new senses could really cut through the world and show him its truth. Because the more he grew accustomed to his senses the more he noticed that this world was wrong, fabricated, created. The wind flowed through usage of a spell, the spellform of which he could sense as it faded away, only to begin anew to create another gust of wind. He could feel the mana that sustained and ensured plants grew. He even observed how an insects had spawned in. Literally appeared out of nothing after a spell had deposited or created it. He could feel the mana thrum in the floor of the Tower and he could if he wanted to look past this facsimile of a Forest and see that it was a curated garden instead. Few things were really natural. He suspected the massive population of deer was only regulated by their food supply and not spawned in, but he would not be surprised if that was not always the case.

This world was fake and even though he had known that, now it was an inescapable fact. It was clear from so many things it became a compounding sense of wrongness in the back of his head. But he supposed he would grow used to it eventually. Already his sense of touch had stopped acting up with his clothes, although he had stopped using shoes. His feet were tougher than leather anyway and so he did not see any reason not to feel what was under his feet at all times.

With a sigh Aaron stop up and made sure the fire would burn out, before he cleaned up and moved on. He had goals, he had things to do. It was time to see how his new training regiment would feel with his new senses.