"There's one problem," I said.
"Which is?"
"I already know how to do this." I picked up one of the training spheres. "I practiced thermal differentials yesterday. I can split these with ninety percent consistency."
Vasir's expression didn't change, but I saw something flicker in his eyes—concern, maybe, or resignation.
"Then you need to unlearn how to do it," he said quietly. "Because if you split that sphere on the first try in front of the Council's diagnostic array, you're not leaving this Tower in the way you want to, and that's the best case scenario."
The first day of performing failure was harder than any real training I'd done.
I stood on the diagnostic platform, the training sphere resting in my palm, while Vasir activated the surveillance runes that would record every detail of my attempt. The runes pulsed with a soft amber light—I could feel them watching, analyzing my mana signature, my pathway fluctuations, even my heart rate.
"Begin," Vasir commanded, his voice taking on the formal tone of an instructor for the benefit of the recording.
I pulled Fire-aspect mana into my right hand and Water-aspect into my left. The sphere sat between my palms, its seam perfectly aligned.
The right way to do this was to create a sharp temperature gradient—superheat one hemisphere while flash-freezing the other, letting the thermal stress do the work. I'd successfully split twelve of these yesterday in my cell, using the technique Vasir had taught me.
Now I had to fail.
I deliberately unbalanced the Fire aspect, pushing too much heat too quickly. The red hemisphere began to glow—bright orange, then yellow-white. The metal started to soften.
On the Water side, I introduced cold, but not enough. The differential was too shallow.
The sphere didn't split. It warped, the softened metal bulging outward like a balloon. Then it ruptured, spraying molten metal across the platform.
Vasir's Earth-aspect barrier caught the droplets before they could hit me.
"Again," he said, his tone carefully neutral.
I tried again. This time I overcompensated on the Water side—flash-froze the entire sphere before the Fire aspect could heat the other hemisphere. The metal cracked, but not along the seam. Jagged fractures spread randomly across the surface.
"Again."
Third attempt: I lost control of the Fire aspect entirely. The heat spiked, and the sphere exploded in my hands like a small grenade. Vasir's barrier absorbed the blast.
"Again."
By the tenth attempt, my hands were shaking—not from exhaustion, but from the sheer frustration of deliberately doing something wrong. My brain kept trying to correct the errors, the Compiler spinning up to optimize the spell efficiency, the Library suggesting better approaches.
I had to manually throttle every instinct, every learned pattern, every optimization. It felt like trying to write with my non-dominant hand while someone shouted the correct spelling in my ear.
"Enough," Vasir finally said. "That's adequate for Day 1."
I collapsed onto a bench, breathing hard. My mana pool had dropped from 1,147 to 890—not from the spells themselves, but from the constant effort of suppressing my actual ability.
Mana Cost of Failure: 257 units
More than twice what success would have cost.
Vasir deactivated the surveillance runes and walked over, handing me a water flask.
"How did it feel?" he asked.
"Like self-sabotage."
"Good. That means it looked authentic." He pulled out a diagnostic crystal and waved it over my residual mana signature. "The recordings show a student who understands the theory but can't execute. Perfect. Tomorrow, add more visible frustration—curse, throw a sphere, look defeated. The Council needs to see emotion, not just technical failure."
I drank the water, the cool liquid doing nothing to wash away the bitter taste of deliberate incompetence.
"How long do I have to keep this up?" I asked.
"Six days of failure. Six days of the Council watching you struggle. Then on Day 35, I present my 'breakthrough'—a modified technique that compensates for your 'contamination.' You succeed, I submit a glowing report, and we buy another extension."
"And while I'm failing publicly, what am I actually training?"
Vasir smiled—sharp, dangerous. "Everything else."
The workshop's true value became apparent over the next several days. While the diagnostic platform in the center was reserved for my "official" training—the failures the Council would review—the rest of the vast chamber became my real laboratory.
********************************************************************************
Day 30 AVULUM TIME
Vasir led me to a section of the workshop where the floor was covered in different materials—wood, stone, metal, bone, even samples of biological tissue preserved in crystal stasis.
"Your Earth-lattice skeleton is functional," Vasir said, "but you're using it passively. You sense vibrations, you reinforce structure, but you're not weaponizing the full potential of the Earth aspect."
He placed my hand on a block of granite.
"Earth isn't just stone," Vasir continued. "It's the aspect of memory. Every material remembers every force that's ever acted upon it. The granite remembers the mountain it was quarried from, the pressure that formed it, the tools that shaped it. Your job is to make it remember wrong."
"Remember wrong?"
"Tell the granite it was never compressed. That it's still sediment, loose and unconsolidated." Vasir's eyes gleamed. "Convince the stone it's sand."
I closed my eyes, sinking into the Earth-sense Vasir had taught me. The granite sang—a deep, slow harmonic of crystalline structure, of pressure and time locked into physical form.
I pulled Earth-aspect mana and tried to... what? Argue with the stone?
The Library flickered to life, cross-referencing the Architect's notes on Earth manipulation. A passage surfaced:
"Earth is not commanded. It is reminded. Every material exists in a state of tension between what it IS and what it WAS. Find the memory of a less-ordered state. Amplify that memory until it becomes present reality."
I focused on the granite's history. Traced the vibrations backward through time. Found the memory of when these crystals were loose grains, before pressure fused them into solid rock.
I fed Earth-aspect mana into that memory. Made it louder than the present.
The granite under my palm began to shift. Not breaking—transforming. The crystalline bonds loosened, the rigid structure softening into something more fluid.
I pulled my hand away.
Where solid granite had been, there was now coarse sand, sitting in a neat pile on the floor.
"Liquefaction," Vasir said softly. "But not through vibration. Through temporal resonance. You didn't shake it apart—you convinced it to remember being apart."
Mana Cost: 45 units
Success Rate: First attempt
I added it to my growing arsenal of assassination techniques:
Target: Structural materials (bone, concrete, armor)
Method: Remind material of pre-consolidated state
Result: Instantaneous structural failure
Application: Fortification destruction, skeletal disintegration
"Don't log this in the official training journal," Vasir warned. "This technique is... concerning. IF The Council sees it, they'll start asking questions about temporal manipulation, which is restricted research."