Body of wholy water, Elfen Lied, route maxing
In this extensive tutorial, Edward MacLean guides viewers through a ritualized sign system he calls “Elfen Lied,” which comprises hand, arm, leg, and full‑body sign routes derived from the letters of the word ELFEN LIED. He demonstrates each sign, explains the positional numbering (e.g., hand‑letter positions, arm‑position indices, leg‑position codes), and shows how to combine them into three distinct routes for each body part. The session also incorporates ancillary ritual actions—singing/canting the anime theme Lilium, breathing exercises, drinking water, vaping/smoking, eating a potato chip, and meditation—each counted as a “route” in a process he calls “route maxing.” Edward frames the practice as a staged progression toward a metaphorical goal called Victory Island. Stage 1 requires one rep of each sign; Stage 2 adds cumulative reps; Stage 3 adds further reps and mixed‑body routes. He introduces “Training Field 2,” “Final Rest,” and the concept of participants becoming “prop” elders who can assist others. Throughout, he emphasizes a community‑building vision likening the system to Pokémon gyms or theme‑park training centers, and he grounds the practice in personal spirituality, invoking God, a safe word (“water”), and a love for words and books. The video is both a live demonstration and a pedagogical blueprint for others to adopt the system.
Chapters
Hello, I am Edward, and welcome to the body of holy water. So today I wanted to go through all of the viable routes that are currently considered for Victory Island and then demonstrate, and demonstrate them for you right now. So the way this is going to work is the first stage is just going to be performing one example. It's just one example of the task. The current tasks are hand signs, arm signs, Leg signs and body signs. And then there's also speaking, singing— singing and/or canting. You may read along. You may smoke. You may drink. You may practice a breathing exercise. You may sleep. Sit in concentrated meditation, and you may eat. The first stage is performing one of each of those actions, so we'll do those now. And the sign we're working on and the piece of text is the Elfen Lied Omnibus Volume 1.
I'm on page 124.
You may start wherever you want, and first stage is one of each task. So I will do one of the hand signs for elfin laiv. That is an E, that is all of your fingers up. L, that is just your middle finger down. F, that is your thumb and your ring finger up. E, all the fingers up. N, that is your thumb and your pointer finger down. That's elfen.
Space.
L, those are your middle fingers down. I, that is your index finger up. E, that is all fingers up. And then D, which is your pointer and your middle finger up. And now at St. Joseph's Church in Brookfield, Connecticut, on the cross, Jesus holds his hands like this. So if I'm not looking for my second knuckle signs, then I will close, uh, close the P together, uh, to be closer to him. I would encourage you all to look at the Jesuses on your crosses and try to see what his hands are doing. So that's "elfin lae" on the hands. And then on the arms we have "el"— that is an "e" on your hands, and then your arms in the 7th position. And then we have—
sorry, "el"—
and then we have "Fe," which is an F on your hands and your arms in the 6th position. Then we have "N," which is an N on your hands and your arms in the 0th position. That's "elfin." And then "lai" is an L on your hands with your arms in the 5th position. And then an E on your hands with your arms in the fifth position. That's the first arm form of Elfenleihe.
El-fen-lai-he.
The second arm position is L, that's the inner hands, arm in the seventh position, and then fen is the 47th position. Double-check that. So that's F on our hands, their arms in the 47th position. And once you get to the 40s, the set for 40 is 40— sorry, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, sorry, 47, 48. There it is, 48th position.
That's fen.
And then lai is L in the 40th, no, 30, 3, 4, 35th position. And then I use the strong, strong D at the end, which is D in its 11th position.
Lái. So then L, fèn, lài, í.
That's the second arm root. The third arm root is E in the 51st position. This is elf. And then E in its 4th position, which is en, E-N. Elf, en, and then capital L, L in its second position, and then -ied, which is I in its—
oh yeah, a little bit more—
sorry, this isn't 58, this is 68. 64. Let me correct that. And if this is 64, then that means this is 67. So that means that, that IED is 43. So then we have "la'eed," "L" in the second position, "a'eed" in the 43rd position. "Al-fen la'eed." Those are all three arm routes. And then for the legs, you have Um, so we have L, L, E-L, yeah, it's just like E-L, F-E, N, So EL is our light squat, FE is our left warrior, and then N is our feet together. That's Elfen. And then Lai, you're just a left warrior for both positions. I encourage you to do the mirror. So if we did our, uh, I'll call it our forward Elfen Lied.
Elfen Lied.
We can also do our inverse.
It'll be Elfen Lied.
And, uh, something that I like to do When I'm in a position like Laid, where the legs and arms stay the same, it works especially well with my warriors, as you've seen in Smells Like Teen Spirits. But I will, like, if I'm doing Laid, I will kind of like, like, pronounce the two signs by dropping further into that position but still holding the same essential shape. That's the first form of the legs in Alpha Mai.
Second form of the legs in Alpha Mai is: el, fen, lai, E, L, sorry, L, Ben, Y, E.
And then the third form of the legs is—
oh, and L, I-E-D, help, N, L, I-E-D.
Those are the 3 leg routes, and then I'll do each of them in body, and then there's a mixed division, but I think the body and the mixed are mostly things that are learned on Big Tree Island rather than used to get there. Yeah, and so then the body forms for alfanlaid Yeah, we can get into that, but, um, yeah, I'll explain that once I get through the first stage for everyone. Is, uh, L, pen, I, E. That's the first body form.
And we have L, fen, wai, i.
That's the second body form.
Then we have l, l, n, wu, Aye!
Those are all 3 body fruits. And then for water, we're just doing sips. This is called route maxing. We're trying to let as many people reach Victory Island in this video as possible, so that's kind of the goal. How many people can we get to Victory Island through this, you know, through this method? So the idea is, you know, yeah, at least everyone can do one of these skills in this capacity, is the hope. Um, so that was my sip of water. So right now we have Completed one set of the hand signs, the arms, legs, body. I've been speaking Elfen Lied this whole time. We will do the singing, and then I just took my first drink. So we can do Elfen Lied. Elfen Lied. You can sing it to whatever tune you want. If I don't have a tune in my head or backing music, I tend to just cant it, which is something I learned from St. Marguerite's Church in Brookfield over by Candlewood. Canting, as far as I know it, is a kind of— it's almost monotonal singing. Essentially, sing through your words in simple melodies to breathe. And if you want, you can just do it on a single note, which is why this is nice. Elfin Light is perfect Completely valid. So we've done our singing. Now we will read a page from the book. It's a comic book, so this is gonna be pretty quick. So there's the page. Moonran, I will smoke. Well, I say smoking, uh, right now I'm vaping. I do end up smoking, uh, yeah, I guess vape smoke could be two routes. Should probably get the smoke. And then I have to get the thing. So I think we just say, you know, it's a broad category. I've got 2 units right here. We're loading that up. And then breathing exercises, I usually do, I do a couple of things. My favorite is like 4-count inhale, 4-count exhale for so many reps. Um, so I think we'll do 4-count inhale, 4-count exhale for 8 reps and call that 1. Um, yeah, and then as far as the smoking goes, I think it's just, uh, like I'm gonna— like, if I'm doing sips of water, it's puffs. So 1. All right, so smoking. Um, then I also have sitting, so I do have the sitting signs. Um, I think, I think I have sitting signs, so I think for people who do opt into legs and body, they can just translate my standing into the seated positions that I have on board Day. Sitting here is more like intentional meditation, like, like, hold this position for a minute type thing. Yeah, so we'll do the breathing. I'm gonna count my 4-count on my hands. So I just did 4 rotations of that 4-count breathing. What I did there is I counted 1, 2, 3, 4 on my hands. For my full inhale. And then once I got to the inhale, I counted down 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 to my full exhale. The letters for that are A-I-T-S on the way up, and then we're still on our S, so then we go T-I-A, silence.
On the way down.
So that's our set of breathing. The nice thing about breathing and sitting is if you do the breathing right, you usually get the sitting. So I think we can count that. Uh, and then eating. So we're gonna have one potato chip. I think it's just like one unit of food. Right now our units are potato chips. All right, I'd like to thank my Uncle Greg MacLean for this. All right, so that is, uh, oh, and then I have mix, uh, the mix signs, um, but I'll show those at the end. But that's essentially like— well, I can do mixed sitting and then I can show you mixed legs at the end. So mixed sitting would be like, I can hold elfen, right? I can hold el on my right arm and fen on my left arm. That's elfen, and then this is laed. Then I can go to the other side, so now it's el on my left arm, fen on my right arm, and then la'ed. La'ed on my left arm, di on my right arm. Then you also go like, elfen, la'ed, elfen, la'ed. I think they call that swimming. Yeah, so those are the two mixed routes. You can do an elfin. I mean, if you do this, you'd want to knuckle your F so you can get a fen on there. So you could do this: elfin and then laid, elfin, laid. Yeah, so there's some mix. Yeah, and then passing the first stage is just, uh, is just doing 1 rep. I think we're going to do 4 reps for the second stage, like cumulative. So, uh, yeah, a little bit, but also, um, so, uh, we have to do 3 more reps of each of those to get past the second stage, and then two more after that to get past the third stage and onto Victor Island. So yeah, and then once we've passed the first stage, you know, I say we've been in training field slash the school right now, then you can head to rest and aid Theoretically, this could be like a weeks-long process to get to Victory Island. So like, if your task for the week is to get to Victory Island, then on the first day, you know, you go to the first stage, you go to the school, you learn all of your skills, and then the next day you're like, okay, I wanna, I wanna get my signs in tomorrow, and then when I get to the next day, I can get from voice to eating or something like that. And yeah, that was kind of the idea behind there being like, you know, daily, weekly, and monthly goals. Yeah, so then I'll work on the— we'll start on Stage 2 with the hands. So we need 3 more reps on our hands with Elfa Ma'ed. And you're more than welcome to double task. However you want. One way you could double task with the arms here, I won't count it, but just for demonstrations, is you can do "El Fen Lai," which is like doing your hands in all the arm positions. And then also I do say it, so you can count the saying it. I could sing it, "El Fen Lai." So I get 3 checks there. Um, yeah, that's kind of how I design my days is, you know, it's like moment to moment I try to see how many routes I can hit and then throughout the day I try to, you know, I try to build a day to see, to like have a moment in the day where I'm concentrating on hitting like all the routes I can fathom. Um, Yeah, so we'll do the hands. Elfenbein, Elfenbein, Elfenbein. That's our 3 reps of the hands. We'll go through our arms. Now I'm doing all 3 arm routes. You only have to do one in order to get the credit for it. Um, yeah, I'm doing it for demonstration purposes. Elfen lei, elfen lei, elfen lei. That's the first arm route, 3 reps. Uh, and then there's "elfin laiv." Elfin laiv.
Elfin laiv.
That's the second arm move for 3 reps.
Then, elfin laiv.
Elfin laiv. Elephant, la-i. So third arm root for 3 reps, uh, and then legs.
L, fin, la-i, e. L, fin, la-i, e. L, pen, Y, E.
That's the first leg word.
And then L, pen, Y, E. Oh, fan. Y, eat.
Oh, fan.
Sorry, open.
Y. E. It's the second leg root.
Then— oh, N, Y, E. Oh. N, Y, E, L, N, Y, E.
Those are all 3 leg routes. Looking to the body.
Um, not in the water.
So Body.
We have L, pen, I, eat. L, pen, I, eat. L, pen, I, eat.
It's the first body route. Second body route.
L, fen, y, i, L, fen, y, i. L, bend, I, E.
That's the second body route.
Third one: L, bend, I, E, L, bend, Bye, Eve, Elle, and bye, Edie.
Okay, 3 body wraps. Um, doing our voice the entire time. And so the Alpenlaien main theme in the anime is this gorgeous song called Lilium. And when I— part of the reason that I do these things is because it feels like a way to show a greater amount of love and appreciation to words and books and God who made them in his image. So part of the reason that I learned to read in so many ways and then spend so much time reading books over and over again but in different styles is to like show my appreciation for them and try to let them know as much as I can that I do love all of them. So there's our water. Anyway, that being said, I do like to— if you watch my other videos, you've seen that I've done most of my first Elfenleid signing to the main theme, Lilium. So I'm gonna sing my next 3 sets of this to that as best I can.
Elfenleid.
Health and life.
Health and life.
There's a free singing. Uh, and then I will take my pot as I read my next 3 pages. I'm really doing Uh, counting the number of pages I turn. So like, yeah, it's like I read both of these and then I consider it a page. You can do like, this is a page, that is a page. Alright, so that's my smoking and reading. Drinking, take 3 sips. Then we can do breathing, sitting, and eating. Little mix. Okay, now we'll do our breathing. We're gonna do 3 sets of our 4x4 count, so we're gonna do 4 inhales 4 inhale, exhale counts as 1. We do 4 of those, 3 times, 12 in total.
Makes sense to me.
Okay, so those are 3 sets of meditation. Drinking, breathing, sitting.
Now we have eating.
I'll have 3 more chips. Greg says have a 4th to show you don't care.
1, 2, 3, 4.
Anything more you do that you don't write down is considered a donation to God. We've done 3 eating plus 1 donation. I've got at least half a dozen donations sitting in my armscyes. Um, another mix. Yeah, we'll just keep it sitting for now. Um, so that's Alfen, Laid. With mix, you kind of have to do both sides, or I— with mix, I only consider it a rep once I've done both sides because I am so intense about my balance. You may do whatever you like. In the dancing, I don't require the inverse. I think just in the arm sitting signs, it really depends on the length of the passage that I'm doing. Right now this is short enough to where I feel like I will do the left and right inverse because it feels balanced. So that looks like elfen laed, elfen laed. That's one.
Elfen laed.
Elfen, laid, that's 2. Elfen, laid, Elfen, laid, that's my 3 for the mixed arms.
Um.
Um, we have Alfen, Laid, Alfen, Laid, Alfen, Laid. Elfin, laid, Elfin, laid, Elfin, laid. That's 3 sets of our second mixed route, and then the final mixed route "Elfen Laien." So that's all 3 of our mixed routes right now. Um, alright, so we've now passed the second stage. Um, we're now going to Training Field 2 and the final rest before we reach the third stage. Now the idea behind the final rest And yeah, this is still something I'm trying to understand that I'd appreciate some help with is, you know, the process of going through the stages is to get to Victory Island to prove that, or to essentially say that like you are capable of working with brand new material and creating correct frameworks around it. But then also at the same time proving that you could go back to any other stage and help anyone else pass those stages. So the idea behind the Final Rest is this is where people who were on Victory Island, uh, if the like Frontier wasn't, you know, if they didn't want to run the Frontier that day, they can go to then go to Final Rest. I guess there should be some sort of like, yeah, so maybe Final Rest is where the like It's like the, uh, like if this is like the partner to the schools, like this is a school, this is the company, and then the company's job is to look at everyone at the body of holy water, see where they are in the stages, and then ask them if they would like assistance. And then Victory Island can go to final rest and kind of route the people, the victors, from there to assist the people still passing stages. And that way people from Training Field 2 just like default pass through the final rest because theoretically the third stage—
yeah.
Yeah, so I think that's a pretty good mock-up of it. And then tradition is, yes, you're supposed to swim from the third stage to Victory Island. But realistically, I'm imagining some sort of like floating dock boardwalk around and like running track and stuff. Like, this is supposed to be like a running loop and, you know, like training fields adjacent and whatnot.
Yeah.
So then, uh, I think in honor of being kind to myself For this third stage, we're only going to be asking for two more of each of the positions because it is a bit of a long haul, especially if you're doing it in rapid succession like this. But also, this is like a— like, for the tutorial purposes, I'm passing through all these three stages in a single sitting and getting to Victory Island. Uh, it, you know, I think, I think the idea is there are so many bodies of holy water about, much like Pokémon gyms. It's like you have your home gym where you can get to Victory Island in a day, and then maybe there's one like across town where it takes you a week to get there. So like, you know, you train at your home gym and then you're slowly like working up to where that one that takes a week then takes a day, and then you like moving up on and up like that. Yeah, and I think it'd be really fun to just like, you know, it's like I have the body of holy water as my like training paradigm right now. I have another vision of a kind of Pokémon Colosseum mountain venue that I'm currently trying to negotiate with. And honestly, like, any theme park in America could just like adopt a science school and this could be like implemented in instantly, you know. Um, yeah, and like you can just have like, you know, local community centers, like all they need is like one teacher and then they just like run a, run a group through at the local field. Yeah, so we'll finish this up. I'm going to do 2 more reps of each of our routes, and then everyone who's participated in following along— you could follow along in any one single one of these categories and consider yourself having reached Victory Island for just having reached Victory Island, which is essentially becoming a prop in the eyes of the eldership. So congratulations everyone, we're on our way. And the hands wanted to do something a little special. They wanted to show you their double sign for Elfen Lied.
So that's: Elfenlied. Elfenlied. Elfenlied.
E, E-L, F-E-N, L-I-E-E. There's our double hand signs for alpha mai. Um, then the arms. That's all our arms, legs, um, and a quick little thing, uh, so So this is my, uh, this is where my God leg position is. It just has a kind of fun nod. Uh, one of the, one of the kind of nice things about these signs is you can set like, you can set landing positions. And so I have like really firmly cemented in my mind, like when I'm trying to transition from standing to sitting or sitting to standing, I try to pass through this leg position on the way because it is bound to God, uh, and I always, you know, I like to check in with them whenever I can. You know, I'm always doing love lords as a little heartbeat. Um, yeah, so then leg positions: alfin, pai, alfin, Aid.
Elfin. Aid.
We'll mirror these right now. Elfin.
Aid. Elfin. Aid. Elfin. Aid. All right.
Now second leg positions.
L, bend, lie, deep. L, bend, lie, deep.
Then the other side.
L, fan, Y, E, L, fan. Lai. E.
All right, then third positions.
Elf. N.
Lai.
E. Elf. 10, 5, 8, 11, 10, 5, 8.
Other side.
11, 10, I, I eat oats and I eat oats and I Alright, those are the legs.
I'm gonna do her body. I'm gonna grab some water. Oh, and so I have a personal safe word in all my training.
It's water.
If I ever tell myself water, it can be a little context it's essentially like either finish this set and grab a drink or stop right now and grab a drink. I think if I say it once, it's finish the set. If I start repeating it, it's in that moment. So now I will do all 3 of the body positions. I'll do all 3 body routes with balanced All 3 body routes, balance on either side, 2 reps. What that looks like is, "Elfen, la yid." "Elfen, la yid." "Elfen, la yid." Lai. Elfen. Lai. So that's the first round. In the balance, you only have to do one of the other sides to pass.
Elfen. Lai. E-L-Fen-Y-E-L-Fen-Y-E-L-Fen-Y-E. Okay, third route. L, pen, 5, eat. L, pen, 5, eat. Outside. L. Fan by E. L.
Fan by E. All right, so there's all our body. We've been saying it the whole time. So for the, for the cantors and singers out there, some of the ways, some of the ways that I like to you know, challenge myself and find fun new ways to explore songs is singing it in different keys or different pitches. So I can— sometimes I'll practice switching between two pitches, so I can do "Elfenwein" Elfín Lai.
Elfín Lai.
Elfín Lai. So I think there's another singing route where You know, the, like that Fifth Element blue-skinned Aqua Woman technique, pretty much. Anyway, that's my 2 reps of singing. And for canting, you know, it's like, "Elfen Lied," and then you can just practice on that last syllable, just try to go up Or down a note. Elfin light, elfin light. Doesn't even have to be in key, you know, if you don't need to. So there's just ways that you can play around and have fun with it. There's the singing. And we'll read.
Spoke.
All right, reading or smoking?
Drinking? 2 chips.
Not a half.
Thinking, eating.
All right, now we'll do 2 more of our breathing sets. Alright, and there's the breathing and sitting. Now I'm going to finish up the mix. I'm gonna bring the legs in a little bit, show you how we can work that, and then I'll swim to Victoria Island.
Um, we can tilt this up.
So for the mix, you've got, uh, let's see, elfen. This is EL on our right hand, FE on our left— sorry, EL, E on our right hand, L on our right arm, F on our left hand, E on our left arm, and then N on the legs. This is elfin. And then lae. This is a kind of nice one because they share the leg position, so you don't have to, you don't have to differentiate it that much. It's elfin.
Baib, Elfen, Baib.
On the other side would be Elfen, Baib. Elfen, laid, elfen, laid. So that would be the first mixed root for the full body.
Um, the—
yeah, these full body mixed roots, um, do the arm mixed routes to get past the third stage. These full body mixed routes are supposed to like be on Victory Island essentially, um, because this is still like my frontier, um, yeah, in my world, um, and then so you can do Uh, Elfin. And then Lai.
Elfin. Lai. Elfen.
Why? The other side.
Elfen. Why? Open light, open light.
Then another form of light. I don't know if there's another form of But well, let's see. Yeah, so the other form of la'eed would be— there's a couple, this would be one. Uh, so you can do another phone with Elfin. Yeah, I think I just do my favorite, so I just do— since the light's balanced—
Elfin, bye. Elfin, bye. Elfins, fly, elfins, fly.
So yeah, that's all the mixed body routes. I think we're good. All right, so I'm gonna jump in the pool, get the picture out. And we'll wrap this up.
