Harem of Villainesses: I Awakened SSS-Rank Skills After Killing a God Chapter 49 - Forty Nine. First Lessons

Mira arrived early.

Seraphine was still arranging the table when she heard the knock, two precise raps, the sa as every day, even though the door was open and had been open since sunrise.

She looked up.

Mira was standing in the doorway with two books under one arm and a small cloth bag in her other hand, her glasses already slightly askew from the walk over.

"You’re early," Seraphine said.

"I know." Mira pushed her glasses up. "I couldn’t sleep."

"Thinking about yesterday’s session?"

"Thinking about the vision from yesterday’s session." She ca inside and set her books on the edge of the table, careful not to disturb Seraphine’s arrangent of the ritual components. "The cold room with the stone walls. I keep trying to rember more of it and I can’t. It’s like trying to hold water."

"That’s exactly what it is," Seraphine said. "Sit down."

Mira sat. She set the cloth bag on the table between them and pushed it across. "I brought sothing. From my own collection." She hesitated. "It might not be useful. You can ignore it if it isn’t."

Seraphine opened the bag. Inside, wrapped in a piece of worn linen, was a flat disc of pale stone about the size of her palm, carved on one face with a series of concentric rings and a marking at the center she didn’t imdiately recognize.

She turned it over.

The back was smooth and slightly warm to the touch despite the morning cold.

She looked at Mira.

"Where did you get this?"

"A trader, two years ago. He said it was pre-Church. He didn’t know what it was so he sold it cheap." Mira pushed her glasses up.

"I’ve been researching it since. The marking at the center appears in three separate pre-Church divination texts as a symbol for, roughly translated, the place where sight begins." She paused. "I thought it might be relevant."

Seraphine looked at the disc for a long mont. The warmth of it was consistent, not fading the way residual heat faded. Sothing in it was still active after however many years it had been sitting in Mira’s collection.

"It’s very relevant," she said.

Mira’s shoulders released a tension they’d been holding.

Seraphine cleared the center of the table and placed the stone disc between them, face up, the concentric rings catching the morning light from the window.

"Before we use anything," she said, "I need to understand what you know about how your ability actually works. Not what the books say. What you’ve observed yourself, from years of experiencing it."

Mira looked at the disc. "It cos when I’m calm," she said. "More often when I’m just waking up, or just falling asleep. The edges of things." She paused. "Noise makes it harder. If there’s too much happening around it’s like trying to hear sothing quiet in a loud room."

"What does it feel like when it starts?"

Mira was quiet for a mont, thinking about it properly rather than reaching for a quick answer.

"Like sothing shifts. Inside, not physically. Like the way your eyes adjust when you walk from a bright space into a dark one, there’s a mont of change and then things look different than they did." She pushed her glasses up. "And then I’m sowhere else, or I’m seeing sothing that isn’t here."

"Does it feel like you’re moving? Or like sothing is being shown to you?"

"Shown," Mira said imdiately. "Definitely shown. I’ve never felt like I’m reaching for it. It arrives."

Seraphine nodded. "That’s important. It ans your ability is receptive in its natural state, it receives rather than projects. Training is going to teach you to project as well." She put her hands flat on the table on either side of the disc. "But we start with what you already do. We just make it deliberate."

"How?"

"ditation first. Everything else cos after."

Mira looked at her. "I’ve tried ditation. It doesn’t work for , my mind just—"

"Not the kind you’ve tried," Seraphine said. "Sit back, hands in your lap, and close your eyes."

Mira sat back and put her hands in her lap and closed her eyes. She already looked like soone bracing for sothing not to work.

"Stop thinking," Seraphine said.

Mira opened one eye. "How did you—"

"Your shoulders. Close your eyes."

Both eyes were closed this ti. The shoulders dropped fractionally.

"Your ability activates at the edges of sleep," Seraphine said, keeping her voice level and unhurried. "That’s because at the edges of sleep your mind stops arguing with itself. The part of you that wants to analyze everything and explain everything and maintain control goes quiet, and the part that can actually see has room to work." She paused.

"What we’re trying to do right now is find that state while you’re awake, not sleeping, not unconsciousness. Just — quiet."

"My mind doesn’t go quiet."

"I know. That’s not what I said. I said quiet, not empty." Seraphine watched her. "Thoughts will co. Let them co and let them go. Don’t follow them and don’t fight them. Just let them pass through."

Mira’s brow drew together slightly.

"Stop trying to do it right," Seraphine said. "There’s no right way to do it."

The brow smoothed.

They sat in silence for a while. The cottage held its morning warmth around them, the fire in the hearth down to coals, the sound of Valeria’s session with Lucius occasionally audible from outside — an impact, a correction delivered in Valeria’s flat carrying voice, silence, another impact.

After ten minutes Seraphine said, "What do you notice?"

"My breathing," Mira said, without opening her eyes. "It got slower without doing anything." A pause. "And my hands. I can feel the fabric of my clothes against them more than usual."

"That’s your attention narrowing. That’s what we want." Seraphine reached across and placed the stone disc in Mira’s hands, setting it into her upturned palms carefully. "Don’t open your eyes. Just feel it."

Mira’s fingers curled slightly around the disc. The warmth of it was imdiate, Seraphine could see the mont she felt it, a small shift in her expression.

"It’s warm," Mira said.

"Yes. It’s been active for a long ti. What else?"

A longer pause. Mira’s breathing slowed further, the brow drawing together again and then releasing.

"It feels like it’s, moving," she said. "Not physically. The warmth isn’t still, it has a rhythm."

"Follow the rhythm," Seraphine said. "Don’t analyze it. Just follow it."

Two minutes passed.

Then Mira’s focus shifted, Seraphine recognized it imdiately, the subtle change in the quality of her stillness, the eyes moving beneath the closed lids.

She let it run.

Thirty seconds, forty. Longer than any previous session.

Then Mira exhaled, a long slow breath, and her eyes opened and she looked at the disc in her hands and then at Seraphine.

"A valley," she said. "From above. Like I was a bird looking down at it." She pushed her glasses up with the back of her wrist, both hands still holding the disc.

"There were people moving through it. I couldn’t see their faces. But I could see the direction, they were moving north." She paused. "And there was sothing ahead of them that felt wrong."

Seraphine looked at her steadily. "Did you try to see it? The heavy thing ahead?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"It slipped." Mira’s jaw tightened slightly. "The mont I tried to look at it directly it was gone. All of it."

"Because you shifted from receiving to reaching and you don’t know how to reach yet." Seraphine took the disc carefully from her hands and set it back on the table.

"That’s not failure. That’s the exact boundary we’re working to push." She looked at Mira. "You held it for nearly a minute."

"It felt like ten seconds."

"That’s how it feels when it’s working." Seraphine folded her hands on the table. "The valley you saw, the people moving north. How certain are you about the direction?"

Mira thought about it. "Certain enough. That part was clear, more clear than the rest of it."

"Direction sense tends to be the most reliable elent in early divination. The ability knows the location before it the knows detail." Seraphine made a note in the margin of the open journal in front of her. "We’ll use that. Direction first, then distance, then detail. We build in that order."

Mira watched her write and pushed her glasses up.

"Why direction first?" she asked. "Why not just try for the full picture?"

"Because the full picture requires control you don’t have yet, and attempting it before you have it teaches the ability to collapse early rather than hold." Seraphine looked at her.

"You’ve been trying for the full picture your entire life and it’s been slipping away from you your entire life. We’re going to stop doing that and start building foundations instead." A pause. "It will feel slower, but it will be faster."

Mira looked at the disc on the table. At the concentric rings carved into its pale face, the symbol at the center that ant the place where sight begins.

"Again?" she said.

"Again," Seraphine said.

Mira set her hands in her lap and closed her eyes and this ti she didn’t brace for it.

**

They worked through the morning in careful stages.

Each attempt built on the previous one, Seraphine adjusting the conditions slightly, moving the disc further from Mira’s hands, having her hold it without touching the carved face, eventually setting it on the table entirely and asking her to sense it from a distance without contact.

The results were inconsistent, which was exactly what Seraphine had expected. So attempts produced nothing, so produced fragnts.

One produced a sustained thirty-second window in which Mira described a room Seraphine recognized from the pre-Church texts as a known historical divination site three hundred kiloters north.

That one Seraphine wrote down in full.

Mira didn’t know why she was writing it down, and she didn’t ask. She just pushed her glasses up and waited for the next instruction with the specific patience of soone who had decided to trust the process before they fully understood it.

By midday Mira’s hands were trembling slightly. Not visibly, Seraphine only caught it when she reached for her water cup and the cup moved more than the lift required.

"Stop," Seraphine said.

Mira looked at her. "I’m fine."

"Your hands are shaking."

Mira looked at her hands, then looked back at Seraphine. "It’s not bad."

"It ans your energy is running low. Divination draws from the sa reserve that everything else draws from. You don’t feel it the way physical exertion feels but it accumulates the sa way." Seraphine closed the journal. "We stop when the hands starts shaking. That’s a rule."

Mira looked like she wanted to argue. Then she looked at her hands again and put them in her lap.

"What did we actually accomplish today?" she said. The question wasn’t ant for discouragent, it was genuine accounting, the instinct of soone who processed progress in asurable terms.

Seraphine considered it honestly. "You held a vision for nearly a minute using the disc. You held another for thirty seconds without contact. You identified a location three hundred kiloters from here that you’ve never been to and have no way of knowing." She paused. "And you found the quiet without being told how a second ti."

Mira was still for a mont.

"That’s more than I expected," she said quietly.

"It’s more than most people manage in a first real session." Seraphine stood and began returning the components to their organized positions on the table. "Co back tomorrow. Sa ti."

Mira stood and gathered her books and the cloth bag and pushed her glasses up.

At the door she stopped. Didn’t turn around.

"Nobody ever wrote down what I saw before," she said. "When I told people. They’d listen and then they’d move on. Nobody ever wrote it down."

Seraphine didn’t look up from the table. "Everything you see from here on gets written down. It’s data. We don’t lose data."

A pause.

Then Mira’s footsteps continued on the path outside, heading back through the village toward her own cottage.

Seraphine looked at the page of notes in the journal. The sustained vision, the location, the direction sense. All of it written carefully in the margin of Cophey’s surviving work, building on what the oracle had started.

She picked up the pen and added one more line.

’Considerable potential. Treat accordingly.’