Spirits were something to be marveled at. They painted the world of spirits blue and by combining the spirits, you could create magnificent effects. They had the habit of returning back to their original position, and even if they didn't, a new one would take their spot.

Orou was staring at a particularly bright spirit in the chandelier. It was many times bigger and brighter than regular spirits and it seemed to give out a blue glow which spread out throughout the house. Simply looking at the blue glow was calming, Orou wanted nothing more than to lay down and sleep as he continued to look at the spirit.

"A protection from evil spirits is what people used to call it back in the day. I still haven't found out the use of it, but it seems to pacify the mana in the air." The woman passed by Orou and entered another room to the right. She was holding a book in her hands as she passed him staring at the lamp.

Orou tried to will the spirit to move, but it didn't listen. Most of the times when he ordered spirits and they didn't move, it seemed like they were bound by something and he couldn't force them out of their positions, but this one seemed different. He wondered if it was possible to use him to use his spirit sight, but it wasn't like he could move it anyways.

The rest of the room had nothing special going on about it in the terms of spirits. It was fancily decorated, but it didn't matter to Orou as long as it had nothing magical about it. He looked around and decided to follow the woman into the room, as she seemed to be keen on talking to him.

He entered into a large roomed, filled with all kinds of alchemical reagents. There neatly organised shelves with all kinds of vials and bottles, each of them having something written on them. In the corner of the room was a completely still basin filled with green liquid. Blank paper sheets coupled with a quill and ink stood on a writing table, looking like they have been untouched for a bit.

The woman walked next to the writing table and set down the book on the table. She flipped through it and opened a specific page. She simply sat there for a while, thinking about something or other. After a while, she turned to Orou and said: "Don't disturb me while I'm working."

She took a red-feathered quill in her hands and dipped it into the black ink. She slowly laid the quill on the paper and started drawing on the paper. It was excruciatingly slow, each line of the formation she was drawing took multiple minutes. Orou initially watched with interest, but he simply didn't have the patience to look at her writing something.

Using his tail as a support, he lifted himself up to look at the book that was opened. An entire page was filled with writing Orou couldn't decipher, but what made his eyes light up was the drawing on the second page. The drawing had several brighter spots that were drawn like wisps he saw in the air, a single wisp in the middle with three rings of spirits around it.

This discovery made Orou ecstatic, if he was correct in his train of thought, this was a formation of a spell! He couldn't wait to try it out as he turned on his spirit vision, looking at the spirits around him. The first thing he saw was that there were so many magical things in this room. The quill, the ink, and paper and the basin of water all had spirits in them.

This was like a dream to Orou, his thoughts racing all throughout the place. The paper wasn't that special in terms of spirits, it simply had spirits mixed in with the paper. The quill seemed like some sort of funnel, the tip of the quill had the most spirits while the feather had sparsely arranged spirits, sort of floating down into the tip.

The spirits in this room were slowly flying towards the ink on the paper and imbuing itself into the lines being drawn. In the middle of it, the basin filled with water was a cloud of light-blue spirits. The cloud was constantly losing and picking up mass from the water itself.

Now, Orou hasn't been dabbling with magic for a long time, but he had seen the spirits making up spells. Items worn by adventurers seemed to be like that paper, they were both stronger and harder than usual. The quill was beyond him, but the slave collar also drew in spirits just like that ink, and while he wasn't sure about the cloud of spirits, he had seen special spirits being made by formations. The crescent of wind, the fire lance, and the lightning arrows all featured different kinds of spirits, those he hadn't seen normally in the forest.

He was most excited about the water as he wanted to experiment with the cloud, but his mind was split on doing that and trying to imitate the formation he had seen. The woman still seemed to be drawing the formation that was visible on the page, not having finished the central ring of the formation yet.

Simply looking at the book once more had convinced him of trying out the new formation. The spirits around him were slowly moving closer to him, being drawn into the collar around him. Deciding to use this momentum, he picked one of the spirits closer to him and he willed it to stop.

Just as expected, the spirit stopped dead in its tracks. Orou didn't know how big the formation should be, but the formations he had seen were all very big, so he decided to make the ball several meters. While concentrating on the spirit in the middle, he drew in more spirits and stopped them to make a circle around the spirit in the middle.

He regretted making it so big, the space between each spirit was too wide and he was having trouble concentrating on so many spirits. His concentration slipped as he tried to add spirits to the ring and all of the spirits scattered, returning back to their original positions.

He expressed his displeasure by hissing at the air. The woman didn't react as she continued to draw the formation with pinpoint precision. Orou calmed down and thought about what happened. He didn't have much experience maintaining concentration on so many spirits, all he had to do was guide the spirits to him and the thing inside of him arranged and held them in position.

This time, he decided to make it much smaller. Half a meter in diameter to be exact. He held the spirit in place and guided the others to surround it. Now that it wasn't so big, his mind wasn't all over the place and he could easily complete the first circle. The second circle was a bit harder, but as long as he kept the spirits in his sight, he would be fine.

The third circle was a bit trickier. He had to hold the two circles in place while still moving other spirits, which placed a lot of stress on his mind. He continued to move the spirits, much slower this time. Eventually, he succeeded in doing it. The three circles around the lone spirit seemed to click in place and the circles started rapidly spinning around the spirit.

In the place of the circle was a ball of light. Orou's eyes started burning as he looked at it, he quickly averted his gaze and retreated backwards. He didn't feel any heat from the ball of light, though the light was blindingly bright. Orou would have jumped in joy if he could, this ball was the first spell he had cast without the help of the thing inside of him.

He looked at it with his spirit vision, the three circles were rapidly rotating around the spirit in the middle. The spirits weren't glowing in his spirit sight, he wondered why that is as he inspected it from every angle. Looking back, he saw the woman continuing her work with the scroll, she wasn't disturbed in the slightest by this bright light suddenly appearing in this room.

The ball of light was nice and all, but Orou quickly got bored of it, not to mention it was hurting his eyes all this time. He didn't know how to dispel the spell that he cast, once the spirits started spinning they wouldn't obey his command. He experimented for a few minutes, but just like every other spell that he had interacted with, the spirits seemed beyond his control.

Since the ball of light wouldn't go away, he might as well create a few more. Orou wanted to create a small ball of light, one that wouldn't burn his eyes and wasn't that big. He didn't make any calculations or anything like that, he simply imagined a smaller ball, with the rings being less dense in terms of spirits.

He had the formation of the ball the size of the woman's hand floating in the air. It was much simpler as he didn't have to spread out the spirits over as wide of an area nor did he have to concentrate on as many of them, but it wouldn't work. He didn't know what the problem was, so he simply started adding more spirits to each one, distributed evenly. It took a few more spirits to create a faint ball of light in the air. It was nowhere as bright as the one earlier and it was much smaller.

Continuing with his "experiment" on the ball of light, or as Orou liked to call it, his new toy, he created the same kind of formation as earlier, but this time he made one ring denser and one less dense. The result wasn't spectacular, in fact, the ball of light didn't even materialize. He went on for about two hours, experimenting with various sizes and shapes and whatnot. In the end, the only thing he could change was the size and the brightness of the ball, nothing else.

The room was covered with tens of balls, each one of them letting out a light of different brightness. Some of the old balls of light had dissipated, but the room was simply bathed in light. At this point, the woman was practically done with the scroll she was writing. From what Orou could make out, the formation inscribed in the scroll cast a much bigger, brighter ball of light than he could currently create.

As she drew the last line, she mechanically stood up, picked up the scroll and went over to the basin of water. She slowly lowered the scroll into the water, completely soaking it. The ink disappeared into the water and Orou saw the scroll absorb some of the cloud of spirits. As the woman pulled out the scroll, where the ink once stood, the formation was burned inside of the paper.

She snapped out of her trance as she held the completed scroll up in the air. She looked around, only to see tens of balls of light everywhere. She sighed, closed the book on the table and started heading out of the room, without saying a single word to Orou.

Orou followed her into the room where she picked up the book in the first place. The room was filled with bookshelves and shelves which stored scrolls. She placed the scroll in one of the empty positions and placed the book back in the bookshelf. Her expression was stern as she looked towards Orou and said: "From now on, you shall follow me to wherever I go."

He didn't know what to make of that sentence, so he simply threw it to the back of his head as he looked around the room. Besides the books and the scrolls, there was a single rocking chair and a fireplace. Orou wondered if it was safe to put the fireplace right next to the scrolls, wouldn't they just burn up?

Orou would love to unravel each of those scrolls and inspect the formation, but he couldn't even take them out, perhaps with his fangs if he tried. He didn't see much to do, so he simply turned his back to the woman and started slithering to the other room, hoping to experiment with the pool.

"Did you not hear what I said you damned beast!?" The woman raised her voice, but Orou was more interested in the pool than the woman at the present. He slithered over to the pool and looked at his own reflection, before turning on spirit vision. The woman had followed him and Orou thought that it would be nice if she could show him a few more formations, for him to learn magic.

Orou had the idea to use the weird cloud of spirits as the middle of the formation he recently learned. He willed the cloud to stop, and it did, though the task was multiple times more difficult than commanding a regular spirit to stop. He didn't go overboard and created a reasonably sized formation, about the size of the woman's head. He had cast this spell multiple times and he had rested for a bit, so this wasn't a problem to Orou.

A ball did appear in the air, though it wasn't a ball of light Orou was used to. It looked like a ball of water that shining light blue light, simply floating there. In his spirit sight, he saw the cloud expand to envelop the three rings and the rings started to spin the cloud into a ball. It was constantly compressing and expanding inside the circle formed by the three rings.

Orou used his tail to smash down the middle of the ball. Water splashed throughout the whole room, but as his tail passed through the ball, it reformed back into a slightly smaller ball of water. All that did was get Orou's tail wet, the woman was looking at this all with a cold glare in her eyes, unsatisfied with something.

The ball of water expired a bit quicker than the rest of the balls of light, the cloud of spirits went back to the basin and continued to stay there, unphased by what just happened. Before he could experiment more, the woman said: "That's enough, I've felt the effects of the spirit vision quite well, you will follow me to a tamer, and if that doesn't work out, you will accompany me for a trip around the city."

She took the ring she was given when Orou was sold to her and said: "You will not stray more than ten meters away from me," the mist inside the ring travelled to the collar and then back to the ring. The mist was different from the cloud of blue spirits, though Orou couldn't tell what it was, something was wrong with the mist, it didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the spirits like the cloud did.

The woman started walking away, but Orou's mind was filled with thoughts of spirits and mists, he continued staring at the basin without budging. He heard the woman open the door and walk outside, and that's when he felt something. Something travelled from the collar into his body, and the second it did, Orou was in excruciating pain. His body twitched as it continued travelling further into his body and spreading out.

Thankfully, the pain was over as soon as the waves washed over his body from the inside. The thing inside of him devoured the thing from the collar in no time. He heard footsteps walking further away from him and he once more, the collar injected something inside of him. The same process happened, but Orou didn't want to experience it more than once. He quickly moved out of the house and caught sight of the woman, he was about to hiss and lunge at her in anger, before the collar once more injected something inside of him.

Twitching in pain, he remembered the conversation about the collars he overhead as all hostile intent dissipated, though bitterness and resentment remained. He slithered behind her, keeping up with her pace, his mind occupied with how to get rid of this collar and how to escape.