Chapter 19 - 18. A Sea of Darkness
Every guide had their own way to visualize an esper's corrosion. Some saw it like a billowing smoke, and visualize their guiding like an exhaust that sucked the smoke away. Some use a rusty sword as a visual and imagined themselves chipping at the rust. It was one of the first lesson guides would receive on their training course.
But Zein never received a proper training course.
Zein didn't see the corrosion inside the esper through analogical visualization. He looked straight into the root of an esper's system; their mana core. In the first place, corrosion didn't happen all over an esper body, it happened on their core, taking root like a disgusting black vein coiling up their soul. It was probably why he had such an effective guiding, because rather than taking a roundabout technique like visualization, he attacked the roots of the problem.
It wasn't that the teaching was wrong. It was just that most guides could not sense this mana core. Zein, thanks to his stigma, could sense his own core and with time and hard practice, managed to sense other people's core too, provided that he had access to their system through guiding.
But it was also wrong to say Zein didn't visualize. What he visualize, however, was the esper's mana core. And he always saw them as a body of water.
Body of water that was full of mud. It was this mud that he would wash over with his guiding.
Depending on an esper's core strength and mana quantity, the visualization ranged from a mere puddle to a pond. He had once guided a 5-star esper that felt like a lake during his first year in the borderland.
But Bassena Vaski was...
A sea.
A sea of darkness.
It was like he had dipped himself inside a pool of black ink that swirled ominously. At first, he thought it was the corrosion, but if that was the case, then it would mean the esper was on the verge of eruption already.