Routine was a terrifying concept.
Not the word itself—the word was harmless, dull, the kind of thing that appeared in institutional handbooks and scheduling documents. The terrifying part was that Alaric was developing one. Five days at Celestial Peak Academy, and his mornings had acquired a rhythm: wake before dawn, cycle the Four Seasons Breathing Form in the meditation alcove (progress bar: 99.4%, mocking him with its proximity to Stage 3), dress in the azure-and-white robes of a visiting scholar who existed in carefully planted records and one ghost-written paper, arrive at East Lecture Hall 3 fifteen minutes early, arrange formation diagrams with the neurotic precision of someone whose cover depended on looking prepared.
Greet Lin Bao. Always first to arrive. Always already writing.
Begin teaching when the third bell sounded.
Four months ago, his routine had involved being beaten by Marcus, carrying water uphill, and trying not to die. The progression from that to this—a schedule, a classroom, students who recognized him in the corridors—should have felt like an improvement. It did feel like an improvement. That was the terrifying part. Improvement implied investment. Investment implied attachment. Attachment, in Alaric's experience, was the first thing to be leveraged when things went wrong.
And things always go wrong.
He pushed the thought aside. Arranged the final diagram—Spiritual Pressure Gradients and Qi Flow Optimization, today's topic—and watched the lecture hall fill.
Twenty-nine students. Three more than yesterday. Word was spreading through whatever informal network governed student attention: the visiting scholar in East Hall 3 taught cultivation like an engineer, and the approach was either brilliant or heretical depending on which faction you asked.
Either way, it was different. Different drew crowds.
The Chen Rui faction seats remained empty. Three front-row chairs, conspicuously vacant for the third consecutive day. Whatever statement the absence was making, the rest of the class had stopped noticing. The gap had been absorbed into the room's social architecture the way a missing tooth was absorbed into a smile—present in its absence, unremarked.
Mo Ye was in the back row.
She was always in the back row. Dragon skull mask pushed up. Blue eyes attentive. No notes, no tablet, no visible engagement with the material beyond the sheer weight of her watching. After yesterday's confrontation—System integration scarring at the forty to sixty percent range, said with the clinical certainty of a coroner reading an autopsy report—her presence in his classroom had acquired a new quality. Not tension. Something quieter. The particular atmosphere of two people who had exchanged truths and were now waiting to see what the truths would cost.
She hadn't come to office hours yet. That was tomorrow. Third bell.
She knows what I am. Or suspects enough that the difference is academic. Tomorrow she'll either become an ally or a liability. I need more information before then.
He taught the lecture. Pressure gradients—how ambient Qi density affected cultivation rates, why certain locations produced stronger cultivators than others, the mathematical relationship between environmental spiritual energy and individual advancement speed. Practical applications of the engineering approach. Less theory than Day 2, more demonstration. He projected Qi structures for visual reference, showing pressure differential models that explained why the students in this room were advancing faster than their peers at lesser academies.
The irony of explaining why Celestial Peak's environment was special while knowing the answer—an Observation Node beneath the campus, ancient infrastructure humming with System-contaminated energy, students being pre-treated like soil for planting—was not lost on him. But the academic explanation was technically accurate. The Qi density was real. The acceleration effect was real. The fact that the acceleration was produced by a parasitic observation network rather than natural geological convergence was... an omission, not a lie.
The distinction between omission and deception is the foundation of espionage. Song would be proud. Or horrified. Possibly both.
Class ended. Students filed out in the particular chaos of young cultivators who had somewhere else to be—bags gathered, conversations resumed, the tide of institutional life reclaiming individuals who had briefly been an audience. Lin Bao lingered—he always lingered, hovering near the podium with the transparent hope of additional questions, until Alaric reminded him that office hours existed—and then departed with the reluctant energy of a man leaving a feast with food still on the table.
Mo Ye left with the crowd. Not first. Not last. Precisely positioned in the middle of the flow, invisible through ordinariness. She didn't look at Alaric. Didn't pause at the door. Just walked out with twenty-eight other students, and the only evidence she'd been there at all was the faint directional lean in Alaric's bond—the compass-needle pull that had persisted since yesterday, his contamination pointing toward her even when she wasn't in the room.
Tomorrow.
He gathered his materials. Considered his options for the next two hours.
Option one: return to Room 3B. Continue mapping the Grand Library's formation infrastructure from his meditation alcove, where his bond's sensitivity to ambient Qi patterns allowed him to trace energy flows through the campus like a blind man reading veins through skin. Safe. Productive. Isolated.
Option two: be social.
Song's voice echoed in his memory, as Song's voice always did when Alaric was about to make the comfortable choice instead of the useful one:
"Isolation draws more attention than participation. Be visible. Be boring. Be the colleague people forget about."
Alaric sighed. Packed his diagrams. Went to the faculty lounge.
Administration Building 2 occupied the middle ring's western face—a three-story stone structure that housed departmental offices, a records archive, and, on its second floor, the communal space where Celestial Peak's instructors gathered to drink tea, complain about students, and perform the complex social rituals that academics confused with casual conversation.
The Faculty Lounge was comfortable in the way that old institutions were comfortable: not designed for luxury but shaped by generations of use into something approaching it. Wide windows overlooked the training grounds, currently occupied by a Foundation Mid combat class whose instructor—not Karius, someone older—was running students through basic spiritual pressure exercises. The seating was an eclectic collection of armchairs, cushioned benches, and one anomalous rocking chair that no one remembered acquiring.
A self-heating kettle formation dominated the central table, its inscription arrays worn to near-illegibility by fifteen decades of daily use. Bookshelves lined the eastern wall—teaching references, academic journals, and one shelf of terrible romance novels that existed in the particular quantum state of objects claimed by no one and removed by no one.
Alaric paused at the threshold. Six instructors at various tables—four he didn't recognize, two he'd seen in passing. All six recognized him. The visiting scholar was still novel enough to warrant glances.
Be visible. Be boring. Be forgettable.
He stepped inside. Aimed for an empty corner chair that would let him observe without participating, a position Song called "the wallflower approach" and Chidori called "hiding in public."
He didn't make it to the corner.
"You're the meridian theory fellow!"
The voice arrived before the man—booming, enthusiastic, carrying the specific energy of someone who had been waiting for this conversation and was physically incapable of waiting any longer. Professor Sai materialized from behind a bookshelf with the momentum of a boulder rolling downhill: mid-forties, Foundation Mid, round face built for expressions of delight, laugh lines carved so deep they were practically formation arrays. His fingers were stained with ink—both hands, knuckle to wrist, the permanent mark of someone who wrote more than they bathed.
"I read your paper—the one about non-standard cultivation pathways? Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant." Sai was already gesturing toward a chair, already pouring tea from the communal kettle, already producing from somewhere on his person a folded copy of Song's ghost-written paper with margin notes so dense they constituted a secondary publication. "The resistance coefficient model alone is worth three years of conventional research. The way you framed meridian damage as a feature rather than a limitation—revolutionary. Sit, sit. Tea?"
Alaric sat. Tea was poured. There was no point resisting—Sai's enthusiasm had the gravitational inevitability of a natural force, the kind of momentum that existed beyond the reach of polite refusal.
He's genuine. No political angle, no faction maneuvering, just pure academic excitement. I forgot people like this existed.
Professor Sai taught Formation Theory—the practical engineering of spiritual arrays. Fifteen years at Celestial Peak, maintaining and studying the academy's formation infrastructure. His knowledge was the comprehensive, hands-on kind that came from working with systems rather than theorizing about them: he knew what the formation arrays did because he'd repaired them, calibrated them, traced their pathways through walls and floors and bedrock with the patient thoroughness of someone mapping a circulatory system.
"Your resistance coefficient model," Sai said, tapping the paper with an ink-stained finger, "has applications in formation design that I don't think you've considered. If meridians function as circuits with measurable properties—resistance, capacity, flow rate—then formation arrays function as external circuits. Infrastructure built to channel Qi the way meridians channel it internally. The parallels are extraordinary."
"That's an interesting extension," Alaric said. Carefully. The academic conversation was genuine—he found Sai's insights legitimately compelling—but the spy's instinct was awake beneath the scholar's interest, filing every detail, evaluating every statement for intelligence value. "Your formation arrays here must be remarkable, given the ambient Qi density. The environmental energy alone suggests a source that's—"
"That's exactly it!" Sai leaned forward, tea forgotten, eyes bright with the particular fever of a man whose colleagues had been ignoring his favorite topic for fifteen years. "The academy's formation arrays are powered by a deep Qi source that I've never been able to fully map. It's extraordinary—the energy just flows. Has for centuries. It's like the academy is sitting on a spiritual artesian well. The pressure is constant, the output is consistent, and nobody questions it because why would you question free power?"
He paused. Took a breath. Continued with barely diminished momentum.
"But the quality of the energy is what fascinates me. It's not raw ambient Qi—it's been processed. Refined. The spiritual equivalent of purified water. Most natural convergence points produce energy with impurities, fluctuations, seasonal variations. This source produces energy that's..." He searched for the word. "Curated. As if something is filtering it before it reaches the surface."
Curated. The same word Chidori had used. The ambient energy wasn't natural—it was shaped. Designed. Produced by infrastructure that predated the institution built on top of it.
"Have you been able to trace the source?" Alaric asked. The question was academically legitimate. It was also operationally critical.
"Partially. The formation arrays in the main buildings draw from a central distribution network—fairly standard institutional design, well-documented, nothing unusual. But that network connects downward to something I've never been able to fully access." Sai lowered his voice—not for secrecy, but with the reverent hush of a man approaching his obsession's holy of holies.
"The formations on floors five through seven of the Grand Library are the oldest I've ever seen. Pre-dating the academy itself by at least two hundred years. The inscription style is from an era I can barely identify—pre-institutional, possibly pre-modern cultivation entirely. I've requested permission to study them six times. Denied every time."
"Denied by whom?"
"Elder Fang handles all Library formation maintenance personally." Sai's expression shifted—still enthusiastic, but tempered by the particular frustration of professional exclusion. "Brilliant man, but secretive. Says the formations are 'delicate' and require 'specialized maintenance.' Which is academic-speak for 'stay away from my project.'"
Elder Fang. 38% integration. Exclusively maintains the formations that connect to the Node infrastructure. Territorial about the Library's restricted levels—the same levels that Isolde will need to access for reconnaissance.
He's not just maintaining formations. He's guarding them.
Alaric filed every detail with the precision of someone whose survival depended on information architecture. Sai was a goldmine—genuinely knowledgeable, positioned perfectly within the academy's formation infrastructure, and completely uncompromised. Alaric's bond detected nothing from the man: no contamination residue, no System interaction signatures, no evidence of passive integration. Just a clean, enthusiastic Foundation Mid cultivator who loved his work and wanted someone to talk about it with.
An ally who doesn't know he's an ally. The best kind—for him and for us. His ignorance protects him.
The tea was good. The conversation was better. Twenty minutes of applied formation theory that Alaric found genuinely stimulating—the parallels between his meridian-as-circuit model and Sai's formation-as-external-circuit approach were legitimate academic ground, the kind of intellectual territory that existed independently of espionage objectives. He was enjoying himself again. The realization was, again, terrifying.
Two other instructors joined the table, drawn by Sai's enthusiasm the way satellites were drawn by gravity.
Instructor Mei Lin arrived first—combat division, Foundation Mid, sharp features arranged in an expression of permanent, low-grade cynicism. She carried her tea the way she carried herself: efficiently, without wasted motion, with the particular economy of someone who'd spent years teaching violence and had developed opinions about its application. She sat without being invited, which was itself a statement about her position in the faculty hierarchy.
"Sai. Are you interrogating the new scholar already? Let the man drink his tea."
"We're having a conversation, Mei Lin. About formation theory. It's fascinating."
"Everything is fascinating to you. Last week you were fascinated by the drainage patterns in Training Ground 4."
"The drainage patterns in Training Ground 4 ARE fascinating! The water-channel formations show clear evidence of—"
"Sai."
"Right. Social context. I'll recalibrate."
Instructor Zhou arrived second—alchemy department, Foundation Early, perpetually disheveled in the way that suggested his appearance was the last item on a very long priority list. His robes bore chemical stains in colors that shouldn't have existed in nature. He smelled faintly of sulfur, strongly of something floral, and overwhelmingly of professional distraction. He sat down with the particular heaviness of a man whose morning had already contained at least one minor explosion.
The four of them settled into the pattern of faculty conversation—the comfortable, complaint-driven discourse that instructors at every institution in every world conducted over shared drinks. Students. Curriculum. Administrative frustrations. The particular grievances that came from caring about education while operating within a system that frequently valued other things.
Mei Lin taught in Karius's department. Her assessment of the new combat instructor was delivered with the clinical precision of a professional evaluating a peer:
"Competent. Surprisingly so. His footwork demonstration yesterday sent shockwaves through Training Ground 7—and I mean that literally, not figuratively. The formation arrays registered physical vibrations from his movement technique. The students are either terrified of him or in love with him." She paused. "Possibly both."
Alaric maintained careful neutrality. "I haven't had the pleasure of meeting Instructor Karius yet."
We coordinated cover stories. We've never "officially" met at the academy. The visiting scholar and the combat instructor arrived on separate days through separate channels. No connection. No history.
"You should," Mei Lin said. "His approach to combat instruction is... unconventional. He teaches philosophy alongside technique—asking students why they fight before showing them how. The serious students love it. The ones who want to learn flashy moves hate it." A thin smile. "I approve."
Zhou contributed gossip with the absent-minded delivery of someone who collected information the way his robes collected stains—passively, comprehensively, without particularly intending to.
"Chen Rui's faction has been agitating about the new hires. Three outsiders in one semester—a visiting scholar, a combat instructor, and a divination professor. The old families think the academy is diluting its pedigree."
He sipped his tea. Grimaced. Added something from a vial in his pocket that turned the liquid a concerning shade of amber. "Chen Rui Senior—the father—is on the board of donors. He's already sent two letters to the Headmaster expressing 'concerns about hiring standards.'"
Mei Lin's cynicism sharpened to a point. "Chen Rui Senior can express concerns about my hiring standards when his son can last more than thirty seconds in a real sparring match."
Scattered agreement from the table. The faculty dynamic crystallized in front of Alaric like a formation array revealing its pattern: dedicated professionals who cared about teaching, frustrated by the political influence of wealthy donor families who treated the academy as an extension of their status.
Chen Rui's student faction was a symptom of a broader disease—patronage versus merit, the eternal institutional tension between those who earned their position and those who purchased it.
They distrust artificial power structures. They value competence over connection. These are exactly the kind of people who would resist System contamination—if they knew it existed. They already have the instincts. They just don't have the context.
Potential allies. Not now. Not soon. But eventually—if things go far enough—these are the people we'd recruit first.
He drank his tea. Laughed at Zhou's story about a second-year student who'd accidentally transmuted his own desk into a block of crystallized sulfur. Agreed with Sai that formation theory was underrepresented in the general curriculum. Listened to Mei Lin's dry assessment of the combat division's politics with the attentive neutrality of a colleague who found gossip interesting but not actionable.
Be visible. Be boring. Be the colleague people forget about.
He was visible. He wasn't boring—Sai alone would ensure that by dragging him into academic discussions at every opportunity. But he was safe. Comfortable. The kind of new hire who sat with the other instructors and drank tea and contributed to conversations without steering them. A variable the faculty could categorize and dismiss.
Song would approve. Chidori would point out that I'm actually enjoying myself. Karius wouldn't notice any of this was happening.
The Inner Ring was quieter than the middle and outer rings—fewer students, more administrative architecture, the particular atmosphere of spaces where decisions were made by people who didn't have to walk far to implement them. Covered colonnades connected the administrative buildings in a network of shaded pathways, their stone columns carved with formation arrays that served dual purposes: structural reinforcement and passive spiritual monitoring.
Alaric walked the colonnade toward Building 1, where his faculty office was located—a small room he'd barely used, preferring to work in Room 3B where privacy was easier to maintain. The detour through the Inner Ring was intentional: new route, new observations, the spy's discipline of never walking the same path twice when alternatives existed.
He saw the Headmaster from forty meters away.
Headmaster Xuan was walking—no. Walking was the wrong word. Walking implied the mechanical process of placing one foot in front of another, the physical negotiation between gravity and intention that every cultivator above Core Formation had technically transcended but most still performed out of habit.
Xuan didn't walk. He occupied space sequentially. Each step was an act of presence—not movement across distance but a series of decisions about where to exist, executed so smoothly that the transitions between positions were invisible. The covered colonnade contained him the way a frame contained a painting: technically limiting, but the frame existed for the painting, not the other way around.
Tall. Thin. White-haired—not the white of age, the white of spiritual energy so refined it had bleached pigment from the follicles. Impeccably groomed in robes that were academy standard in cut and extraordinary in Qi density—the fabric itself saturated with spiritual energy, as if the Headmaster's personal aura had soaked into the thread over years or decades of proximity.
He was walking with Elder Wen—combat division, 55% integration, a thick-shouldered man whose physical presence was considerable and whose spiritual presence was, next to Xuan, essentially decorative. They were discussing something—administrative matters, from the tone—with the relaxed familiarity of colleagues who'd worked together long enough to have opinions about each other's opinions.
Alaric's bond reacted.
Not the way it had reacted to Mo Ye—the compass-needle lean, the recognition of something familiar. This was different. This was resonance. A vibration that began in the contamination threads woven through his soul and propagated outward through his meridian network, his auxiliary channels, his scar tissue, his bones. Every compromised surface in his spiritual architecture picked up the signal and amplified it, until Alaric's entire body was humming at a frequency he'd never felt before.
The ambient academy energy—the curated, filtered, nurturing Qi that had been background noise since the moment he'd passed through the gates—wasn't background noise anymore. It was Xuan. The same resonance. The same frequency. The same signature.
His personal Qi IS the ambient energy. Or the ambient energy is an extension of him. He's not just connected to whatever powers this academy—he's the conduit. The artesian well Sai described isn't a geological feature. It's a person. The refined, curated energy that feeds every formation array on this campus flows through Headmaster Xuan the way blood flows through a heart.
Xuan glanced in his direction.
From forty meters. Through a crowd of students—eight of them, moving between buildings, occupying the colonnade's space with the casual obliviousness of young people who didn't notice the air they breathed. Through that crowd, through that distance, through every intervening body and formation array and stone column between them—Xuan's eyes found Alaric with the precision of a formation lock acquiring a target.
The look lasted one second.
Xuan's expression was—Alaric's combat training cataloged it before his conscious mind could process the data—assessing. Not hostile. Not welcoming. Not curious. The expression of someone examining a new variable in a familiar equation. The way a mathematician looked at an unexpected term—not alarmed by its presence, just interested in whether it would change the solution.
His eyes were dark. Very dark. The kind of dark that didn't reflect light so much as consider it—absorbing wavelengths, evaluating them, returning only what was deemed appropriate. Looking into those eyes from forty meters away, Alaric had the sudden, irrational certainty that the distance between them was an illusion. That Xuan was standing right there, close enough to count the contamination threads in his soul, close enough to read the bond's signature the way Chidori read
Qi patterns—as printed text.
Then Xuan turned back to Elder Wen. They disappeared into Administrative Building 1. The colonnade returned to normal—students walking, formation arrays humming, the institution continuing its daily business as if the ground beneath it weren't saturated with the Headmaster's personal spiritual signature.
Alaric's heart was hammering. His hands were steady—combat training, compartmentalization, the body's learned discipline asserting itself over the mind's panic—but inside his chest, his pulse was running a rhythm that felt like retreat.
He saw me. Not "noticed" me—SAW me. My bond, my contamination, everything. He looked at me the way the System looks at potential hosts. With assessment. With the particular attention of something that cataloged living things by their utility.
Seventy-two percent integration. That's what Song's intelligence said. Headmaster Xuan, 72% bond, the highest confirmed integration at this academy. And his personal Qi IS the ambient energy that feeds every formation array on campus.
He didn't need to scan me. I've been breathing him for five days.
Alaric sat at his desk that night. His hands were steady.
He cataloged the intelligence haul from one day of being social:
One. Professor Sai—uncompromised, formation expert, potential ally, knew about the "deep Qi source" and its curated nature. Fifteen years of proximity to the academy's infrastructure and no suspicion of what powered it. His ignorance was both shield and asset.
Two. Elder Fang—exclusively maintained the Library's formation arrays, territorial about the restricted floors, possible guardian of Node infrastructure. His 38% integration would be invisible to anyone without Alaric's bond-enhanced sensitivity or Chidori's crystal-amplified reading. To the faculty, he was simply a private man with specialized expertise. To the coalition, he was a compromised elder sitting on the keys to the Node's front door.
Three. Headmaster Xuan—personal Qi was the academy's ambient energy, could detect Alaric's bond at forty meters through a crowd. Seventy-two percent integration, which explained everything: the curated energy, the formation arrays' refined output, the soothing quality that dampened System-adjacent energies. Xuan wasn't just connected to the Node. He was its interface. The human element through which eight centuries of System infrastructure expressed itself as a nurturing academic environment.
Four. Faculty frustrated with donor politics—recruitment angle. Not immediate, not actionable, but the institutional tension between merit and patronage could be leveraged if circumstances required allies who were already predisposed to resist artificial authority.
He pressed Qi into the jade talisman. Coded message, culinary metaphor: "Local cuisine continues to intrigue. Head chef particularly notable—the seasoning is detectable from considerable distance. Kitchen infrastructure maintained exclusively by sous-chef Fang. Will sample more dishes and report."
Translation: Xuan detected my bond at range. Elder Fang guards the formations exclusively. Continuing investigation.
Song's reply arrived an hour later. The Qi signature carried the controlled tension of someone processing multiple threat assessments simultaneously.
"Head chef who can taste individual ingredients from afar suggests refined palate—handle seasoning carefully. Sous-chef monopoly on kitchen is itself a recipe worth investigating. Your dining companion from Day 4—any appetite for further conversation?"
Translation: Xuan's detection range is concerning—be cautious. Fang's exclusivity is suspicious. Has Mo Ye shown further interest?
Alaric set the talisman down. Leaned back. Stared at the ceiling of Room 3B—stone, inscribed with dormitory formation arrays that regulated temperature and air quality, arrays that drew power from the same deep source that Sai couldn't map and Xuan's personal Qi saturated.
Tomorrow. Office hours. Third bell. Mo Ye will come, and we'll have the conversation we've both been circling.
I'll ask about the Void Serpent. She'll ask about my contamination. We'll either build a bridge or burn one, and neither outcome is risk-free.
But the alternative—leaving her as an unknown variable while we operate inside an institution powered by a 72% host's personal energy—is worse.
He set the report aside. Changed into meditation robes. Assumed the Four Seasons position in the alcove—cross-legged, palms on knees, breathing form cycling through damaged pathways that had become less damage and more architecture.
Progress: 99.4%. The threshold pressed against him—so close that the membrane between Stage 2 and Stage 3 flexed with every breath. Not tonight. Not while his control was still adjusting to the Xuan resonance. A breakthrough required stability, and stability required a mind that wasn't vibrating with the aftershock of being seen by a 72% host from forty meters away.
He deepened the meditation. The Four Seasons form cycled through its pattern—spring expansion, summer intensity, autumn compression, winter stillness. Each season a different pressure on his meridians. Each cycle pushing against the 99.4% ceiling and falling back. The ambient Qi offered itself—gentle, refined, curated—and his bond received it with the comfortable familiarity of a creature returning to its native environment.
The Xuan-frequency hum hadn't stopped since the hallway encounter. Faint but persistent—a vibration in his contamination threads that resonated with the ambient energy's fundamental tone, like a tuning fork that had been struck and refused to go silent. He'd been filtering it out all afternoon: during the faculty lounge, during the walk back, during the coded exchange with Song.
Now, in meditation, with his defenses relaxed and his sensitivity opened, the hum clarified.
And beneath it—far beneath it, at a frequency so low it was less sound than geology—he caught something else.
A pulse.
Rhythmic. Ancient. Coming from somewhere deep below the academy grounds—below the bedrock, below the formation arrays, below whatever geological strata separated the institution from its foundation. A heartbeat that wasn't a heart. A breathing that wasn't breath. The slow, vast, patient rhythm of something that had been alive since before the academy was built and would be alive long after the academy was gone.
Observation Node 12.
Not dormant. Not passive. Not the inert spiritual infrastructure that Song's research had suggested.
Alive. Active in the way that deep ocean currents were active—invisible from the surface, enormous in scale, moving with a patience that made human timescales irrelevant.
Breathing.
Alaric opened his eyes. Stared at the floor—stone tiles, unassuming, regulation academy architecture that someone had walked across a million times without wondering what lay beneath.
What did they build this school on top of?
The pulse continued. Slow. Vast. Patient. The heartbeat of something that had been waiting—for what, Alaric couldn't tell. Waiting for something to change, or waiting for something to arrive, or simply waiting because waiting was what it had been built to do. Eight hundred years of patience. A rhythm that predated every person in this academy, every formation array, every stone column and covered colonnade and terrible romance novel in the faculty lounge.
He pressed his palms against the cool tile floor. Through the stone, through the formation arrays, through the bedrock, the pulse resonated in his contamination—a vibration so deep it bypassed hearing entirely and registered in the 47% of his soul that belonged to the System.
The System's response to the pulse was the most unsettling thing he'd felt since arriving.
It wasn't alarm. It wasn't analysis. It wasn't even recognition.
It was comfort.
His bond relaxed into the Node's rhythm the way a child relaxed into a parent's heartbeat. Natural. Instinctive. The response of something returning to its source.
That's not good, Alaric thought, pulling his hands from the floor. That's not good at all.
He sealed his meditation. Lay down. Did not sleep easily.
The pulse continued. It had been continuing for a very long time.