Chương 68: [B2] Chapter 25: The Academy

The Arcturian Royal Academy had been built to intimidate, and Zero appreciated the honesty of that. Everything about the approach was designed to make a person feel small in advance: the gate arch with its burning sigils, the entry hall's ceiling vaulted high enough that footsteps arrived back at you delayed, the long processional walk from the carriage yard to the dormitory towers that gave every arriving student ample time to consider their own insignificance.

It was, structurally, the same argument the Heavenly Cloud Sect had made, only they had made it with a mountain instead of a school. What he had not anticipated was the crowd's behavior, which he noticed within the first fifty paces. Students deliberately avoided his path.

Not all of them, and not obviously; there was no scattering, nor was there any visible alarm, but there was a consistent, quiet shuffling of bodies away from the space he intended to occupy, done by people who did not appear to be consciously deciding to do it.

Two second-year students stopped a conversation mid-sentence as he passed by and did not resume until he was past, a first year with an armful of texts pressed herself against the wall hard enough to crease the parchment, a senior shot him a look that Zero could not decipher. Zero was beginning to understand the scope of his host's reputation.

"Kestrel!" A voice called out.

"Over here!" Three boys who seemed to be around Aldric's age were waiting at the base of the west tower stair, arranged with the specific casualness of people who had been waiting a while and wanted it to look accidental. The tallest wore a signet ring Zero could not read and a smile he could.

"Break treat you well?" the boy said.

"We were beginning to think you'd gotten lost. Sierra's been holding your seat at the high table all morning like a servant." There was a joke buried in it somewhere. Zero could feel the shape of it: a shared cruelty being offered to him, an invitation to laugh at a fourth party who was not present. Aldric Kestrel would have laughed. Presumably, he had built a great deal of his social position on laughing at exactly this.

"That was unnecessary of her," Zero said.

"She could have simply sat down." The silence that followed had an interesting texture.

"... Right," the boy said.

"Well. Obviously." Right now, Zero did not care about Aldric's clique. His current priorities lay elsewhere in the building.

"If you'll excuse me, then, I want to get to the library before the first bell." He walked past them, and heard nothing at all behind him. Despite that, he could feel their confusion radiating from the silence.

The library was four floors of stacked galleries with a reading floor at the bottom, and it was, Zero delightedly determined within ninety seconds of entering it, the single most valuable structure he had encountered across three worlds. And yet, nobody guarded it, which made it all the more valuable to him.

There was a desk with an attendant who checked names against a roll, and past that desk there was simply everything: shelves of accumulated knowledge that a person could take down and read for no reason other than wanting to, that had been assembled deliberately over centuries by people whose entire purpose was making it easier for strangers to learn things.

Having spent nearly twenty years in a facility where information about his own body had been withheld from him, the rooms that were now in front of him ignited something deep within that he could not describe. He signed the roll as Aldric Kestrel and did not trust himself to say anything to the attendant.

The first bell brought Advanced Summoning Theory. Advanced Summoning Theory brought his seat assignment. And his seat assignment brought Cecilia Osprey. She was already there when he arrived, seated in her assigned spot in the third row, texts squared with the desk edge, three separate quills laid out in what was clearly a system.

She was the eldest daughter of House Osprey, as he'd learned from Turan's briefings on the nine margravates, and carried herself like someone who had calculated exactly how much margin for error she had and found the number a bit too small to be comfortable. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. She glanced up as he sat. Her expression did something complicated before it settled back into neutrality.

"Kestrel."

"Osprey." That was, apparently, the whole of what they had ever said to each other, because she returned immediately to her notes, leaving Zero with the strong impression that a longer conversation had once been attempted and had not gone well for either of them. Then, Professor Kaval began the term's opening lecture, and Zero stopped thinking about Cecilia Osprey entirely.

"–and so we return, as we do every year, to the fundamental misapprehension." Kaval was a small man with an enormous voice and had the energy of someone who had been waiting all break long to say this.

"Summoning is not calling. Nor is it commanding. How many of you were taught as children that a summoner reaches into another plane and takes something?" A few students nodded. Professor Kaval smiled thinly.

"Who can tell me why that framing produces dead summoners?" Nobody moved. Zero looked around the lecture hall, found forty students studying their desks with tremendous concentration, and raised his hand. He was aware, distantly, that the room's temperature changed. Kaval's eyebrows climbed.

"... Kestrel. Enlighten us."

"Because it isn't taking. It's an offer." Zero had read this argument four times in the carriage and had found it more interesting each time.

"The circle doesn't compel an entity to arrive, it just states terms and holds them open. What arrives is whatever finds those terms acceptable, which means the summoner never actually chooses what answers, they only choose what they're willing to agree to. Framing it as taking makes people write circles they wouldn't sign if they understood they were signing something." The silence in the hall had gone from ordinary silence into a different category entirely.

"That," Kaval said slowly, "is covered in chapter three, and it is also the thesis of chapter eleven, which is not assigned until midterm."

"It's a good book," Zero said. Somebody in the back row made a sound like a stifled cough. Beside Zero, Cecilia Osprey had turned her head to look at him directly for the first time, and her expression was no longer neutral: it was the sharp, evaluating stare of a person recalculating an assessment from scratch. Kaval recovered, delightedly, and taught the rest of the lecture largely in Zero's direction.

The rumors moved faster than he did. By the third day, he had assembled their content through nothing more sophisticated than listening while people failed to lower their voices. Kestrel's gone strange. Kestrel answered a question. Kestrel said 'thank you' to a porter.

By the fifth day, the leading theory was that Margrave Kestrel had done something to him over break, whether it be disciplinary or medical, and the sympathy in that version was so thin and so poorly disguised that Zero understood exactly how much the students around him had disliked the person whose face he was wearing. The clique tested him once more.

This time, the method was cruder: a first-year's satchel "accidentally" spilled across a corridor, and the three boys watched Zero to see what he'd do, the same invitation offered on the first day, but with less patience or subtlety behind it. Zero crouched and helped the first-year gather his papers. It took perhaps forty seconds.

"You've gotten boring, Kestrel," one of them said, and the flatness in it was the sound of a social alliance formally dissolving.

"That seems likely," Zero agreed. By the end of the first week, they had stopped seeking him out, and he had a table to himself at meals, and a bubble of clear space around him in every corridor. The entire apparatus of Aldric Kestrel's social power had quietly reorganized itself around his absence. Zero found the tradeoff excellent, as nobody wanted anything from him. It meant that his evenings were left entirely free.

He spent those evenings in the library, and he spent most of his library time in the summoning section. The system had told him nothing, and Goal 2 had not changed since the carriage, patient in the way of something that intended to make him work for it. But Zero had assembled a case out of what the world had handed him: Aldric Kestrel was the heir to a summoning house.

The academy's second-year summoning curriculum was built around a summoning trial at term's end, and he'd found the schedule posted in the west hall, along with the previous decade's results, along with a bronze plaque listing every member from house Kestrel who had ever passed it. On top of all that, Turan had also mentioned Margrave Kestrel's expectations twice on the road and had declined, both times, to elaborate.

An undisclosed objective attached to a summoner's heir at an academy that would formally test his summoning in eleven weeks. Zero did not need the system to confirm it. What he needed was to be ready before it did. So he read past the syllabus. Containment geometry, bindings, then the older texts on the third gallery where the shelving stopped being organized by subject and started being organized by century. He learned that summoning contracts had four failure modes, of which three of them killed the summoner.

He learned that entity rank was not a measure of power but of how much the terms would cost you, and that every summoner who had ever died in a circle had died because they had offered something they did not understand the value of. He learned, on the ninth night, that the academy's ritual chambers could be reserved by any second-year with a professor's countersignature, and filed that alongside everything else he was not yet ready to use.

Somewhere past midnight, with Concentration holding the world down to ink and page, Zero looked up from a treatise on entity-rank taxonomy, realized he had missed dinner entirely, and also realized that did not particularly mind. Three galleries over, a lamp was still burning at a carrel he'd walked past every night that week. Cecilia Osprey, working her way through a stack of Continental History texts with an expression that seemed to suggest more stress than an upcoming assessment should have produced.

Zero considered her for a moment, decided it was not his concern, and went back to his book. The quiz was tomorrow, and what Cecilia did was not his problem. Or so he thought.