The first artifact took three months.
It was nothing like he expected — not a dramatic forging process with fire and force, but a series of tiny, precise, increasingly maddening adjustments made to the blue crystal's internal lattice using a spatial manipulation tool that was itself barely functional at his current level.
Valeria, in the refinement class, had shown him the principles: material assessment, formation carving, attunement. She was a good teacher — specific, corrective, unimpressed by partial success and appropriately impressed by genuine progress. She didn't know what he was making. He had described the artifact as a spatial sensitivity amplifier, which was true in the same way the Void Catalog was truly a library.
What he was actually making was a communication device.
Sirath walked him through the design: a formation carved into the crystal's internal lattice that would allow a practitioner — specifically, a practitioner with spatial cultivation sufficient to attune to it — to make precise, controlled adjustments to the spatial coherence signal that flowed through the formation network. Not disruptions. Adjustments. Modulations of the coherence signal in the same way that you modulate sound to create language.
The principle was the same as Aela Voss's contact method. She had used her raw perception. He was building an intermediary to make the contact precise enough to carry real information.
"The carving," Sirath said, on the fortieth day, when Aaron had been staring at the crystal for an hour and making no progress on the formation's fourth layer. "Think about the problem differently. You're not carving lines into a crystal. You're guiding the crystal's existing lattice into the shape you want."
"What's the difference?"
"You're fighting the material. The lattice has a natural flow direction — you found it in the assessment phase. You've been trying to carve against that flow." A pause. "Work with it. The formation you need is compatible with the lattice's natural direction. Rotate your approach ninety degrees and see what happens."
Aaron rotated his approach ninety degrees.
The fourth layer resolved in twenty minutes.
He sat back and looked at the crystal. The fourth of seven layers. Three to go.
"Why didn't you tell me to rotate ninety degrees forty days ago?" he asked.
"Because forty days ago you didn't understand the material well enough for the instruction to mean anything," Sirath said. "Telling a student to do something before they can understand why it works creates a practitioner who follows instructions without comprehension. That's not what I want to build."
"It would have saved forty days."
"It would have saved forty days of frustration and cost you forty years of understanding." Sirath paused. "The frustration was the teaching."
Aaron looked at the crystal.
"I hate that you're right," he said.
"I know," Sirath said, with the particular quality that was the closest he ever got to warmth. "Fortunately, I've had three thousand years to develop patience with people hating it."
— — —
The fifth layer, the sixth layer. The seventh took two weeks alone — the deepest part of the lattice, where the formation had to interface with the crystal's fundamental spatial resonance structure, the layer Sirath called the root. At the root, the carving was not measured in centimetres but in fractions of spatial particles, and the tool Aaron was using was inadequate.
He went to Valeria.
"I need a more precise instrument," he said. "A particle-scale spatial tool. I don't know if the academy stocks them."
Valeria looked at what he'd been working on. She had been periodically examining his progress throughout the semester with the expression of someone who was trying to decide whether to be impressed or alarmed, and had settled on a careful combination of both.
"What are you carving at particle scale?" she asked.
"An interface layer," Aaron said. "Between the formation and the crystal's resonance root."
"That requires a root-touch tool," she said. "We have two in the advanced refinery. First-years don't have access to the advanced refinery."
"Is there a procedure for exception access?" he asked.
She looked at him for a long moment. "There is a petition process," she said. "Supported by an instructor's recommendation." A pause. "Come back tomorrow morning with documentation of what you're working on. Don't over-explain it."
He came back the next morning with three pages: material assessment results, formation structure diagram, and a brief technical description of the interface layer's function. Clear, accurate, minimal.
Valeria read them. Made a note. Signed the petition.
Two days later he had access to the advanced refinery, the root-touch tools, and the particular quality of quiet that came from working in a room built specifically for extreme precision.
The seventh layer took nine days once he had the right tools.
When it was done, he held the crystal in his palm and looked at it.
The lattice inside was changed — not visibly, because the changes were at a scale below what could be seen with the naked eye. But he could feel it: the formation hummed in the crystal with the steady, clean frequency of something built correctly. The spatial element moved through it like water through a properly set channel.
Sirath was quiet for a long moment.
"Let me feel it," he said.
Aaron extended his perception, the way he'd learned to do in their years of training — opening the interface between his mind and the Void Catalog, letting Sirath's awareness reach through.
Another long silence.
"That is," Sirath said, and stopped. And then, in a voice that Aaron had never heard from him before — a voice that was old in a way that had nothing to do with age, that was the voice of someone who had built many things and lost most of them — "That is the best work I have ever seen from someone at your cultivation level. In three thousand years, I have not seen that."
Aaron sat with that for a moment.
"The root-interface layer is clean?" he asked.
"The root-interface layer is perfect," Sirath said. "You did it correctly. You understood it correctly." A pause. "Aaron. I need you to understand what this means. This artifact, at your current attunement level, will allow you to modulate the coherence signal at node level. Carefully. Precisely. With the forty symbols from Aela's contact system —" another pause. "You can speak to them."
"When?" Aaron said.
"The next disturbance. When the signal spikes, the modulation will be visible above the baseline noise. Clear enough to be deliberately shaped."
"Can we initiate contact without a disturbance? From our side?"
"The crystal amplifies your attunement, but your attunement at rank three is not sufficient to reach the boundary level without the amplified conditions that a disturbance creates." A pause. "In two years, when your rank advances — possibly. It requires —"
"Rank five," Aaron said.
"Yes. At rank five, with the crystal, initiation from this side is possible." He paused. "But you don't need to wait. The disturbances are coming more frequently. The next one —"
"Ryan's tracking the pattern," Aaron said. "He estimates approximately eight weeks."
"Eight weeks," Sirath said. "Enough time to prepare the specific symbols you want to transmit."
"What do I say?" Aaron asked. He held the crystal up. The academy's late-afternoon light came through his cave entrance and caught the crystal, throwing silver-blue flickers across the stone walls. "If I get one transmission — one response to their contact — what's the most important thing to communicate?"
"That we received their signal," Sirath said. "That we are here. That we are actively working toward the same goal." He paused. "And ask what they know about the organisation in this world that is suppressing spatial mages."
Aaron lowered the crystal.
"You think they know about it," he said.
"If they have been trying to communicate for three hundred years," Sirath said, "and the organisation in this world has been suppressing the spatial mages who would be able to communicate — then the people across the boundary know that their communications are being interfered with. They may know by whom." A pause. "Information is not free. But sometimes the best trade you can make is to tell someone what you have and ask what they have in return."
"Trust," Aaron said.
"Or the gamble of it," Sirath said. "Which is what trust is, before it becomes something else."
Aaron set the crystal down on the work ledge and looked at it. Eight weeks.
He needed to develop the transmission formation for the crystal. He needed to master the forty symbols from Aela's contact system well enough to transmit them with precision. He needed to keep his cultivation progressing so the rank three ceiling didn't become a limiting factor.
He needed to do all of this without the watcher, whoever they were, noticing that something had changed.
He thought about the problem. He turned it over the way he'd turned his mother's stone over in his hands on the mountain — until he found which end was sharp.
"Sirath," he said.
"Yes?"
"The Tenders — the people who've been maintaining the network for eight hundred years. Lysander said they don't know how it started."
"Yes."
"But you built the network." Aaron looked at the crystal. "Before the Shattering, you said. As a precaution. So you must have told someone — someone in this world, before you went wherever you went — that the network was here and what it was for."
A very long pause.
"Yes," Sirath said. "I told several people."
"What did you tell them to do?"
"Maintain it. Guard it. Wait for someone who could do what I couldn't." His voice was very quiet. "I told them the inheritance would find its way to a successor. That the successor would find their way to the academy." A pause. "I told them to make sure the path was walkable. That was all I said."
"And they've been doing that," Aaron said. "For three thousand years."
"And they've been doing that," Sirath agreed.
Aaron was quiet for a long time. Outside the cave entrance, the mountain was going to shadow, the light fading off the silver tower.
"You told them to wait," he said. "And they waited."
"Yes."
"What would you have done," Aaron said slowly, "if I hadn't found the cave? If I hadn't been born there, or born at all?"
A very long pause.
"I don't know," Sirath said. "I hoped. I tried to build things so the path would remain open. But hope is not a plan." Another pause. "You're not the first person who tried to receive the inheritance. Over three thousand years, others have touched the formation — they didn't have the resonance to open the scroll. I don't know how many."
Aaron absorbed this.
"I was lucky," he said.
"You were lucky in your arrival and in your aptitude," Sirath said. "What you did with that luck was not luck."
Aaron picked up the crystal.
"Eight weeks," he said.
"Eight weeks," Sirath confirmed.
Aaron set it down and opened his cultivation manual.
Time to work.