Magical Auras

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Magical auras are to magic users what a suit of armour and a shield is to a soldier; they're our primary line of defence against foreign attacks, as their power prevents magic from affecting us in horrendous ways that it could otherwise achieve, but they're also a status symbol, as they indicate one's magical power, and being able to overcome one easily is another mark of greatness for a magic user.
— Shirahime

Magical Auras are the core part of the actual ability for someone to wield magic; the leylines, mana, mana pool and whatnot may be important resources, but without a magical aura, a creature cannot hope to manipulate these things to begin with. Beyond even that, though, the Law of Magical Fortitude within the Mana Weave stresses the importance of the magical aura in and of itself.

A Dual Purpose

As stated to the right, magical auras serve to identify people's magical power - and indeed, they are also a unique magical identifier just in general - but almost as important as their identifying nature is how important they are to a magic user's defensive prospects. A magical aura has a certain degree of strength, which replenishes naturally over time - a depleted aura will regain its full power after 24 hours - and increases in magnitude with the magical talent of the wielder - a beginner has a relatively weak magical aura, a master magic user has a far more powerful one.
This is important, because magic cannot affect the mind or deal damage to a person with non-physical spells (such as a mental laceration; a fireball is a physical object by contrast) so long as their magical aura is active, instead they damage the integrity of the aura. Indeed, even physical magical spells such as the aforementioned fireball lose potency when a magical aura is active, and sufficiently powerful ones can completely disperse the magic of weaker spells harmlessly. The aura always takes damage while it does this, however.

Type

Metaphysical, Arcane

A Magical Beacon

The magical aura of an individual serves a myriad of vital roles, but one of the most important is to actually identify that person as someone with a talent to use magic. This can be a good and a bad thing, depending on who you ask and where you reside, but the consensus is that it's more good than bad, as it allows the detection and recruitment of magic users very reliably early in their lives, allowing them to be trained accurately. Indeed, all that is actually needed for this is the means to detect a magical aura, generally referring to spells in Pearalos and powerful magic-assisted artifice in the broader Milky Way galaxy. So long as this is in someone's possession, they can read another person's magic aura... though it is worth noting that in almost all cases, this is seen as profoundly rude and very taboo, with only magical institutions being generally viewed as okay to be doing it.

This vital feature is what allows magic to be so dangerous yet so survivable at the same time; most magic duels are never seriously lethal, because almost every magic user agrees that the duel ends when one participant's magic aura collapses, but in a proper live combat situation, this also serves to even the playing field a bit between a magic user and a normal person; the magic user can still resort to big flashy spells like fireballs, but unless someone's aura has already collapsed, a magic user cannot go around mind controlling people.

Overpowering Magical Auras

While magical auras are powerful, they can absolutely be depleted with concerted enough attacks - indeed, this is the entire ideal of magical warfare in the modern age! - but a lesser known fact is that if a powerful enough magic user wields their best magic against a weak enough magical aura, the aura can be completely overwhelmed outright, immediately collapsing.
Where this gets interesting is the fact that even in this case, the magical aura is still capable of dispersing that single massive magical attack before collapsing; this generally means that being able to do this is a status symbol, but not a practical combat technique - forcing most magic users to resort to smaller scale magical attacks or area of effect magic to deplete multiple magical auras at once...
The real status symbol, however, is the fact that there is an exception to this; when the attacking magic is so much more powerful than the defending magical aura, it is completely incapable of dispersing the hit. This is typically capable of instantly killing the target due to the damage.

Magical Auras and Chi

Magical auras are additionally one of the most important lynchpins of Chi manipulation, and by that extension cultivation and martial arts in regions that practice it. Chi magic ties directly into cultivation and allows for the expansion of the person's magical aura through cultivation ascension and practicing chi magic, and through that metric the cultivator's magical aura is capable of processing more chi - the vital energy that beings require to move and do exercise.
Magical auras are so important to chi manipulation that in many regions they're more known as Cultivation Auras, as they are extremely reflective of a cultivator's stage in their journey - owing to the fact that cultivation is replete with large, sudden jumps in power, and thus the magical aura of a cultivator at one stage of their journey is vastly different to that of a cultivator even one stage higher, and even compared to normal magic users, the difference is night and day. This can be seen best when comparing the cultivator Chun Li - the Empress of the Peacock Empire - to her non-cultivator, regular magic using sibling, Mei Lijuan, who is herself a powerful mage, yet the difference is like comparing a beginner magic user to a master magic user.

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