Chapter 20
The Weight of Gold
The first real class was Mana Theory, and it destroyed him.
Not literally. He sat in the back row and took notes and didn't say
anything and nobody paid particular attention to him. The destruction
was quieter than that. It was the specific destruction of understanding,
for the first time, exactly how far behind he was.
The lecturer was a Silver-rank professor named Dast who taught with the
brisk efficiency of someone who assumed his students had a baseline and
was building from it. The baseline was things Cyan didn't have.
He knew what mana was in the abstract â€" he'd been living adjacent to it
his entire life. What he hadn't known was the theory behind it. The
architecture of it. The way it worked inside a ranked mage's body: the
internal reservoir, the channels that developed through training, the
relationship between rank and capacity, the mechanics of shaping mana
into spells.
All of this was apparently foundational knowledge that general cohort
students had been developing since they were twelve.
Cyan wrote everything down.
Mana generation, the professor explained, was a passive biological
function in ranked individuals. The internal reservoir filled
automatically, the rate of filling determined by rank and training.
Shaping mana into spells was an active skill built on top of that
passive foundation â€" the reservoir was the resource, shaping was the
technique that used it.
The students around him nodded along. Some of them were taking notes.
Most weren't â€" this was review for them, the theoretical underpinning of
things they'd been doing intuitively for years.
Cyan wrote: passive generation â†' active shaping. He underlined passive.
He had no passive generation. He had a mark that pulled from outside
sources. The architecture the professor was describing was built on a
foundation he didn't possess.
Which meant everything the Academy taught about developing mana ability
was built on a foundation he didn't possess.
He sat with that for the length of the lecture and didn't let it show on
his face.
After theory came the practical component. Students were brought to a
measurement room in small groups, where each one pressed their hand to a
calibration stone â€" different from the Runestone, this one measured
current output rather than maximum rank â€" and the reading was recorded.
He watched the General Cohort students go first. The Bronze students
produced readings that made the calibration stone glow a dull amber.
Silver students got a brighter orange. One of the Gold students made the
stone flare white for half a second before she pulled back.
Then the provisional group.
Most of the provisionals got something â€" small readings, dim glows, the
low end of what the instrument could register. Even Fen, whose Runestone
result had been dim and uncertain, produced a faint amber.
Cyan put his hand on the calibration stone.
Nothing.
Not dim. Not uncertain. The stone registered zero output and the
instructor looked at the reading and looked at Cyan and looked at the
reading again.
'Are you pressing firmly?' the instructor asked.
'Yes,' Cyan said.
The instructor made a note in his ledger. He wrote something, then
paused, then wrote something else. When he handed the ledger to the
assistant to file, Cyan caught a glimpse of what the notation said.
It said: absent.
Not zero. Not null. Absent. Like he hadn't been there at all.
He walked out of the measurement room and stood in the corridor for a
moment.
The mana of the corridor moved through his palm â€" the enchantments in
the walls, the residual output from the students who'd just walked past,
the faint signature of the calibration stone still warm from use. All of
it feeding into him, steady and constant and completely invisible to
every instrument the Academy had.
He thought about the word absent.
He thought about what it meant for a sixteen-year-old with a null result
to be not just low-ranked but categorically absent from every
measurement system the kingdom used.
He thought about the Warden's open door.
Not yet, he decided.
He needed to understand more before he asked questions. Questions told
people what you didn't know. He wasn't ready to show that yet.
He went to his next class.