Here is what the books don't tell you about cultivating aura: it hurts.
Not the dramatic, screaming, cinematic kind of pain. The small kind. The persistent kind. The kind that settles into your bones at two in the morning when you're sitting cross-legged on a straw mat trying to push energy through pathways that have never been opened, and your body your five-year-old, malnourished, slave's body decides that what you're doing is fundamentally wrong and tries to stop you.
The manuals describe the first stage of cultivation as 'awakening the dormant channels.' They make it sound peaceful. Meditative. A gentle unfolding, like a flower turning toward the sun.
It's not a flower. It's a fist. You are forcing open pathways in your body that have been sealed since birth, and the body does not appreciate being forced. Every channel you open feels like a wire being dragged through your veins not sharp exactly, but hot and wrong, the kind of sensation that makes your teeth clench and your eyes water.
I did it every night. Midnight to the third hour. Three hours of cultivation while the compound slept. Three hours of sitting in the dark, feeling the first current the aura current, the body's river inch through pathways that resisted every centimeter. Three hours of gritting my teeth against pain that I couldn't make a sound about, because sound meant discovery and discovery meant the end of everything.
Aighon slept through it. He slept through everything. A herd of buffalo could stampede through the servants' quarters and Aighon would roll over and keep snoring. I loved him for it. His obliviousness was my cover.
Osawe didn't sleep through it.
I knew because I could feel him watching. Not every night he was smart enough to vary his surveillance but often enough that I understood he was aware something was happening. He never asked. Osawe didn't ask questions he couldn't frame as negotiations. He gathered data until the data told him what to ask, and then he asked precisely the right thing at precisely the right moment.
I let him watch. I had no choice. And frankly, if Osawe decided to report what he saw a slave boy sitting very still in the middle of the night it wouldn't mean anything to anyone. Meditation wasn't a crime. Insomnia wasn't suspicious. The cultivation itself produced no visible effect, no sound, no light. It was internal. Private. Invisible.
At least it was, until the changes started.
* * *
The changes were subtle. So subtle that no one noticed not Oba, not Adesua, not the other children, not the Handlers who oversaw the slave quarters. Not even Osawe, whose powers of observation were sharper than most adults', detected the difference initially.
Esigie healed faster.
A scrape on the knee from slipping on wet stone the kind of minor injury that haunted every child in the compound closed overnight. A bruise from bumping into a doorframe faded in a day instead of a week. A cough that swept through the children's quarters in the cold season lasted three days for Aighon, five days for Iye, four days for Osawe, and twelve hours for Esigie.
He was stronger. Not dramatically not in any way that would be visible to the naked eye. But the pots he carried from the kitchen to the armory were slightly easier to lift. His legs ached less after a full day of standing in the library. His balance, when walking on the uneven flagstones of the outer compound, was surer.
These were the signs of Veil Basic. The first, most elementary stage of aura cultivation. The energy, now flowing through opened channels, was suffusing the body at a cellular level strengthening tissue, accelerating recovery, optimizing the baseline functions of a physical form that had been operating at its unenhanced default.
By the standards of this world, it was nothing. Veil Basic was the level of a child who had just begun formal training at a noble house the very first rung of a ladder that rose twelve levels into the theoretical and the impossible. It was the minimum. The floor. The point from which everything began.
For a five-year-old slave with no teacher, no resources, and no one's permission, it was a miracle he had no intention of letting anyone see.
* * *
I became more careful about the changes.
When I scraped my knee, I made sure to limp for two days even though the pain was gone by morning. When the cough came through the quarters, I faked symptoms for three extra days coughing into my mat, moving slowly, looking tired. When I carried the stew pots, I strained and puffed the way I always had, keeping my face tight with effort that I no longer felt.
Performance. Constant, exhausting performance. The role of a weak, ordinary child played by a man who was becoming slowly, agonizingly slowly something else.
In Lagos, the boys who survived didn't show their money. You earned a good day, you tucked the cash deep inside your shoe, behind a loose brick, somewhere the world couldn't see. Because the moment you looked like you had something, someone came to take it.
My aura was my money. My cultivation was my savings. And I hid it the way I'd hidden every naira I ever earned deep, invisible, deniable.
Three months of night practice. Ninety sessions. Two hundred and seventy hours of silent, painful, invisible work.
Veil Basic.
The first step on a staircase I couldn't see the top of.
Good enough.