The meeting took three hours.
Not the demonstration — the demonstration had been twenty minutes. The three hours were the methodology review, the questions about the progression model, the specific technical challenges that Dean Zephyra identified in the Stage 3 acoustic isolation protocol that required a design revision before it could be safely deployed to practitioners who were not already running at elevated Perception, and the extended discussion of what the empirical verification process would look like when applied to a practitioner who had not been through the beast-core activation pathway.
The last section of the discussion was the one Dean Ignis led.
He had arrived in the vault with the specific energy of someone who had decided in advance that the claim was not credible and had been prepared to say so directly. By the end of the stage-five observation sequence, his position had updated, and the update was visible in the quality of his questions — no longer addressing the claim's validity but the claim's implications.
"If the attribute exists in dormancy across the general practitioner population," Ignis said, "and the training programme activates the dormant capacity without requiring the beast-core trigger, then the current measurement system for practitioner potential is missing a significant variable."
"Yes," Markus said.
"How significant."
"I don't know precisely. My own Perception is at 26 after three months of passive cultivation and selective absorption. The training programme is designed to produce the initial activation in approximately six to eight weeks at the Stage 1 and 2 protocols. The expression level in an untrained practitioner with no prior exposure will be lower than my baseline. But the gap between zero Perception and functional Perception — even at a lower absolute value — changes the threat assessment ceiling in a combat context by a measurable amount."
"Define measurable."
"Sufficient to prevent the category of loss that results from an attack arriving faster than visual and mana-sense processing can accommodate. Jessica's individual final against Leon was decided by her ability to read a 140-millisecond window in a technique's deployment sequence. That is not a mana-sense capability. That is a Perception capability. She had three days of targeted preparation. A practitioner with six weeks of Stage 1 training would have a version of that capability without the targeted preparation."
Ignis was quiet for a moment.
"The academy's battle-loss analysis," he said. "The senior practitioners who have died on external deployments in the past ten years. Do you know what percentage of those deaths occurred because a technique arrived faster than the practitioner's response window."
"I don't have the classified data," Markus said. "But the pattern is documented in the border garrison reports I have access to through Sloane's clearance. It's significant."
Ignis looked at Elena.
Elena looked at the data on the screen.
"Forty-eight hours for the methodology review," she said. "Then a closed faculty session to review the verification results. Nothing leaves this facility until the verification is complete, and the verification data is classified at the level that requires Imperial sign-off to access." She looked at each of the Deans. "If the second-candidate trial confirms the attribute's independent existence, we convene a curriculum restructuring committee within the month. The programme does not become standard before the committee process is complete. Is that clear."
It was clear.
She removed the shackles herself — the release sequence applied with the care of someone who understood that taking away a practitioner's mana suppression required the same deliberateness as applying it.
His channels re-established with the specific quality of something returning to its natural state rather than something being switched on. The spatial sense extended outward and confirmed the room's geometry. The mana-stone array's ambient output resumed in his awareness.
He was, again, fully himself.
"The Stage 1 methodology for the second-candidate trial," he said. "Use rubber-round projectiles at low velocity with a rhythmic firing pattern. The goal is pattern recognition — the trainee building the neural architecture for the sensory input before the intensity requires that architecture to be reliable. Pushing to high intensity before the pattern recognition is stable produces trained avoidance, not trained Perception. They're different outcomes."
"Noted," the lead scientist said.
He was writing very quickly.
Elena called the earthen lotus and the vault returned to the academy above.
He left Elena's office and sent the team notification from the corridor.
[Dorm room. One hour.]
Then he went to the palace to inform Butler Obama that his arrival date for the tutoring arrangement had been confirmed, and to receive the schedule for his first session with Rosalind, and to walk through the guest quarters that had been prepared for his residence during the assignment.
The guest quarters were considerably better than the academy dorm room, which was not the primary consideration but was noted.
The archive access agreement was waiting on the desk in the guest study, which meant the palace administration had processed the Emperor's arrangement and had it ready before Markus arrived to confirm it. Obama had been thorough.
He signed it, thanked Obama, and went back to the academy.
The team was in his dorm room when he arrived.
He had been thinking, in the transport, about how to explain the next two years without making it into something it was not. The palace tutoring arrangement was not a deployment. It was not a separation. It was a two-year assignment at a location that was forty minutes from the academy by earthen lotus, with archive access that had direct bearing on the spatial law comprehension work the ceiling at 62% required, and with the palace kitchen, which was Wolfgang Puck.
He started with the practical information.
"I'm at the palace for the Rosalind tutoring assignment starting next week," he said. "The schedule is two sessions per week, which leaves the rest of the week for cultivation and the archive work I need to be doing at the 62% ceiling." He looked at them. "I'm not disappearing. I'm forty minutes away by earthen lotus and I will continue to review your training progress remotely."
He placed the Ghost Sense programme files on the desk — the full five-stage version, with the individual benchmarks he had calibrated for each of them based on their current Perception baselines and their primary affinity's specific interaction with the Perception architecture.
"These are yours now," he said. "One week of rest. Then Stage 1 begins. You run it with each other and with Candle as faculty oversight — I've already briefed her on the protocol. The escalation to Stage 2 requires two weeks of consistent Stage 1 performance before the transition. Don't rush the transition."
He looked at each of them.
Mika had the file open already, reading the density calibration section.
Donna was looking at the acoustic isolation protocol, which was the section she had identified a question about during the earlier faculty discussion.
Jessica was reading the Stage 5 methodology, which was consistent with her wanting to understand the full programme before committing to the beginning of it.
Rosanne was not looking at the file.
She was looking at him with the expression she had been managing since he said starting next week.
"The palace is forty minutes away," he said, to her specifically.
"I know," she said.
"You'll be able to reach me on the communication channel."
"I know," she said.
"Elena can relay anything urgent."
"Markus," she said.
He stopped.
She held his gaze for a moment. The expression was the one she used when she had decided that the practical information was not the relevant category of thing to be addressing and was waiting for him to also arrive at that conclusion.
He reached over and ruffled her hair.
She closed her eyes briefly, the way she did when she was accepting something rather than arguing about it. Then she opened them and straightened, and the expression shifted to the one she used when she had decided to be practical.
"The Stage 1 schedule," she said. "The firing cadence in the second week — is the fifteen-second interval adjustable or is that a fixed protocol parameter?"
"Adjustable within a range of ten to twenty seconds," he said. "The interval needs to be long enough for the sensory processing to complete between rounds but short enough to maintain the attentional focus. Shorter intervals for practitioners with higher baseline sensory processing rates, longer for those who are developing the capacity rather than refining it."
"So I should start at twenty and decrease as the week progresses."
"Probably," he said. "Read Candle's weekly assessment before adjusting. She'll have the biometric data."
Rosanne wrote this in the margin of her file with the small, precise handwriting she used when she was being thorough.
"One more thing," he said, when the practical briefing had concluded and the team was beginning to disperse.
He looked at the team.
"Shiela Cahill," he said. "The blood affinity practitioner from the finals preparation. She understood what the technique was doing and taught it to you in forty minutes. She is also, from what I observed, considerably more capable than her current mission participation level reflects." He paused. "Ask her if she wants to join the group for the upcoming training cycle. Don't frame it as charity. Frame it as what it is: you need a fifth while I'm at the palace, you need someone who understands the Ghost Sense programme's mechanisms at a technical level, and she is the most technically capable person you've encountered in this cohort who is not currently in a training group."
"And she's lonely," Rosanne said.
"And she is under-utilised," he said. "Which may be associated with the other thing but is the part that is within our ability to address."
Rosanne looked at him with the expression she used when he had said something accurate in the least emotionally accessible possible framing, and had also said something true.
"I'll talk to her," she said.
"Thank you," he said.
He looked at the room — the four of them, the files on the desk, the late afternoon light through the dorm window that came through at the same angle it came through every afternoon of the semester.
"One week of rest," he said. "Actually rest. Then the work begins."
He picked up his jacket.
"The palace kitchen," Rosanne said, before he reached the door.
He stopped.
"Wolfgang Puck's team," she said. "They're the residential kitchen for the palace."
"Yes," he said.
"You're going to be eating better than us for two years."
"Yes," he said.
"That's very unfair."
"I'll send photographs," he said.
She made the sound.
He left.
In the corridor, he checked the time and the transport schedule and the archive access agreement's first permitted date and the Rosalind session schedule and the Ghost Sense programme's Stage 1 initiation timeline and the spatial law ceiling and what he needed to do about it and the Ambassador's scroll and the Heavenly Scriptures of Space and the section of the Nyx 1.0 communication that referenced 100% spatial law comprehension as the threshold for the next conversation.
He had a great deal to do.
The week of rest came first.
He walked through the academy's corridor toward the afternoon light and thought about what it meant to rest when you knew precisely what was on the other side of it, and concluded that the answer was: you rested anyway, because Elena was right, and because Isolde had said the same thing with the Tier 4 body refinement pills and the herbal bath in the basement laboratory at Cedar Grove, and because the ceiling at 62% was not going to crack by being approached from a depleted state.
He rested.
Tomorrow, the palace.
After the palace: the ceiling.
He walked into the afternoon and let the week begin.