Many kids your age are afraid of the dark. For a lot of them, it's more a fear of the half-imagined creatures that might be lurking in shadowed places, waiting for the lights to go down so that they can spring out from beneath the bed, within the closet, or those little cupboards under the stairs, and terrorize any unsuspecting child whose nightlight has failed. Others have very real reasons to fear the night, having encountered its more predatory denizens in the flesh - entirely too many of them not supernatural in nature - and survived to tell the tale. Some just plain don't like the dark.
You are different. Even as a baby, darkness was always soothing to you, and by the time you learned that there really were monsters running around in the night, you'd already unlocked enough of your magic to defend yourself against the usual suspects. Simply being able to fight back made the things that go bump in the night seem a lot less scary, the more so when factoring in Ganondorf's memories of commanding even worse things - to say nothing of being one himself. Consequently, you've never needed a nightlight - Briar doesn't count - and you convinced your parents to stop using the one they seemed to think was standard-issue kid gear by the time you were three. True, they brought it back out when Zelda was born, but that's neither here nor there. The fact remains: you're not afraid of the dark. And these mere shadows? Please.
Gained Dark Affinity F
There is, however, a difference between not being afraid of something, and being reckless in how you deal with it. If this area of gloom was a natural phenomenon, you'd walk through it without concern, but it's clearly the work of somebody's magic - either somebody who's trying to mess with you, or someone who's pretty sloppy about their self-control. No matter which is the case, a certain amount of caution is merited, and one of the key components of caution is information - because you have to know what you're up against, if you're to properly protect yourself from it.
You sigh. You just got through telling Altria that you didn't want to do something that might get the attention of who- or whatever is creating the shadow effect, too.
"Suppose I don't have a lot of choice," you reflect aloud.
"What was that?"
"I'm going to try to scan for the source of the shadows," you tell her. "Mind covering me, in case I flinch?"
Altria gives you an odd look."Did you not just say that doing so was a bad idea?"
"I said I didn't like the idea. I like the idea of walking into an area of active magic blind even less." As Altria considers that, you focus your ki.
Looking about with your eyes reveals nothing unusual. The only life-forms above bacteria in the hall are yourself and Altria. You didn't expect to find anything different in that respect, but it's seldom a bad idea to cover your bases. That part done, you redirect your energies and send out a pulse of ki.
The large concentration of life-forces in the main arena becomes obvious almost instantly, and shutting it out takes you a moment. After that, you have to similarly account for and ignore the smaller collection of lives that must be where the Under Eighteens Prelims are being held. It's almost as difficult, as some of the individuals gathered there are remarkably strong. Next is setting aside Altria's intense presence, and after that...
?
...okay, something is very odd here. There is another life-force ahead and to your left, most likely inside one of the rooms. It's weak enough that it could be a kid or an unwell adult, although there's a peculiar feel to it that makes you think the source is stronger than he or she seems, and is concealing their actual strength. Badly, but they're doing it. Aside from that, the life-force feels human, in a creepy kind of way. You can't tell the gender or general age.
None of that is what is confusing you. The problem is that there's something else near the half-hidden life-force, a presence that doesn't react to your ki scan like any of the handful of people and things you've tested the ability on before. Normally, this skill works something like radar: you send out a pulse of ki which expands outwards in all directions; where it encounters other sources of ki, a certain amount of the signal is reflected back; and from the subtle qualities picked up in the brief contact and carried back to you, you're able to distinguish various traits about the beings in your sensing radius. In this instance, however, there is a region where absolutely nothing is registering, not even the ambient ki of that poorly-concealed life-force, which would normally be giving you a vague glimpse of the non-living contents of the room. It's almost as if something in that room is absorbing the trace amounts of ki, leaving a gap in your scans.
It's unsettling, the more so because you don't recall Lu-sensei ever mentioning something that could do that.