"Before we start," Markus said, "I need a secure space."
Rosalind waited.
"The palace's standard practice fields are monitored," he said. "Not maliciously — that's standard imperial security protocol, and I don't object to it as a general policy. But if your void affinity is going to develop the way I think it's going to develop, the early breakthroughs are going to look unusual on a monitoring feed, and unusual readings get flagged, and flagged readings get reviewed by people who aren't necessarily the people we want reviewing them yet." He looked at her. "Do you have access to a private vault — something with mana-current isolation and no standard surveillance routing?"
She thought about this for a moment.
"There's the meditation vault beneath the eastern garden," she said. "It was built for my grandmother. It's not actively monitored — the wards are isolation-focused, not observation-focused. But it requires Imperial-level clearance to grant guest access."
"Can you get that clearance approved today?"
"Yes."
She was already composing the request — the device's interface lighting with the specific encrypted protocol that palace-internal communications used for anything routed directly to the Emperor's terminal. He watched her work through the security layers with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been navigating the palace's bureaucratic architecture since before she could read, the request moving through what she described as three separate firewalls before the haptic confirmation pulsed against her wrist.
"Sent," she said. "If he approves it — and he will — the vault recognises your signature as a guest instructor within the hour."
"Good," he said. "While we wait, tell me where you actually are."
"Recount your training history," he said. "Not the official record. What you've actually done, what's worked, what hasn't, and what you think your own potential looks like. I want your assessment before I form mine."
She sat across from him at the Annex's desk and gave it to him the way she gave most things — organised, precise, the specific quality of someone who had been raised to present information clearly because the information she presented mattered.
She had been reading the void-element source texts since she could read at all — the restricted archive's holdings on the affinity, thin as they were, absorbed across years of independent study because the palace's tutoring staff had little to offer a ten-year-old whose affinity predated the standard curriculum by half a decade. Beast-blood compounds had been part of her diet since age six, the specific formulations designed to pre-condition a developing mana core for an early Awakening. Since her fifth birthday she had been practising the Celestial Heart technique — a meditation method that synchronised the practitioner's pulse rhythm with the broader planetary mana field, intended to give her system a stable external rhythm to entrain to before her own Awakening provided an internal one.
It was, by any standard measure, a significant cultivation investment. The kind of preparation that most practitioners' families could not access at any price, applied with the specific resources that only an imperial household commanded.
He listened to all of it and ran the assessment the spatial sense's continuous reading of her current physical and mana-channel state had already begun building.
"How's your body handling the beast-blood compounds," he said. Not as a formality. He genuinely wanted her assessment before he gave his own.
"Fine," she said. Then, after a pause: "Mostly fine. Some days my joints ache without explanation."
"Your skeletal density hasn't kept pace with your mana-channel development," he said. "The compounds are building cultivation capacity faster than your physical structure is developing the foundation to support it. That's the joint pain — micro-stress at points where the mana-channel pathways pass through underdeveloped bone density."
She absorbed this without visible alarm, which told him something about how she processed information about her own body: analytically, the same register she used for everything else.
"Is that dangerous," she said.
"At your current cultivation pace, not yet," he said. "If you Awaken at this trajectory — full mana-core activation on top of a physical foundation that hasn't caught up — the activation surge would be operating through channels that aren't structurally ready for sustained high-volume mana transit. That's not immediately fatal. It is the specific condition that produces chronic channel damage over the following decade, the kind that limits a practitioner's eventual ceiling regardless of how much raw potential the affinity itself has."
She was quiet for a moment.
"No one's told me that," she said.
"No one's looked," he said. "The palace's tutoring staff have been managing your cultivation timeline. They haven't been reading your skeletal density against your channel development rate, because that comparison isn't standard practice for void-affinity Awakenings — there's no precedent population to compare you against. You're not a known quantity. You're the first documented null-element practitioner in the archive's records that anyone has found. The standard playbook doesn't apply to you because there isn't one."
She held this for a moment with the specific seriousness she brought to information that mattered.
"So what do we do," she said.
He reached into the dimensional inventory and retrieved a set of plain vials — Tier 1 Body Strengthening Pills, the basic foundation compound that addressed structural density rather than mana capacity.
"Before your Awakening, your body needs to catch up to where your mana development already is," he said. "One pill every seven days. They'll accelerate skeletal density and muscle-tissue integration at a rate that's safe for sustained use. This isn't about power. It's about building the structure that can hold the power you already have access to."
He activated the Annex's desk terminal and opened a blank file rather than pulling from any standard palace template.
"The standard imperial cultivation programmes are built around practitioners who Awaken on the typical Tier-1 trajectory and develop their physical foundation in parallel with their mana growth over years," he said. "You've front-loaded the mana development. We need to front-load the physical foundation to match it before your tenth birthday, which gives us approximately—" he checked the date "—six months."
He began building the schedule.
"This isn't about aesthetic outcomes," he said, while he worked. "I'm not building you toward mass. I'm building structural integrity — the specific density and tissue integration that lets your body channel full mana volume without the channel damage we just discussed."
She exhaled, and the posture shift that followed told him something he had noted through Perception before she said anything: relief, specifically about the body type the training would produce.
"I'd rather not become a — " she paused, choosing the word. "A Goliath type. I don't want to chase mass."
"You won't," he said. "Lean structure, high density. The needle rather than the hammer."
"That's what I want," she said. "Fast enough to maintain my speed advantage, dense enough to take a hit without breaking."
He noted, through the Perception that read more than her words, the specific vanity underneath the practical concern — she cared about this beyond the tactical logic, in the way that a ten-year-old reasonably cared about not becoming something she didn't want to look like. He held that observation without commenting on it, because the vanity was harmless and the underlying concern about functional capability was legitimate, and the two did not need to be separated for the training plan to be correct.
"Lean and dense," he confirmed. "That's the target either way."
He finished the schedule and projected it.
Monday — Stillness Drill. Tuesday — Mobility and Flexibility. Wednesday — Kinetic Loading, bodyweight-calibrated. Thursday — Active Recovery. Friday — Kinetic Loading, second cycle. Saturday — Perception baseline and balance work. Sunday — Pill ingestion, full rest and meditation.
"This is the structure," he said. "We're not chasing tier advancement in this phase. We're chasing the physical foundation that makes tier advancement safe when it comes. Until your skeletal density and channel integration reach the threshold I've calculated, this schedule is the priority over everything else on your calendar."
She looked at the projected timeline.
"My current schedule has court appearances, diplomatic functions, the weekly tutoring sessions with the language and history staff—"
"All of that creates physical and mental load that competes with what this requires," he said. "I'm not telling you to cancel your education. I'm telling you that for the next six months, the physical foundation work takes priority scheduling, and everything else gets arranged around it rather than the reverse."
She was quiet for a moment, looking at the schedule.
"You've essentially designed a closed-door cultivation period," she said.
"Yes."
"My father will need to approve a formal court announcement. A Princess entering closed cultivation isn't a private decision."
"I'm aware," he said. "I drafted a postponement notice for your existing engagements. It's in the file. You can review and adjust before it goes to the court office."
She looked at him for a moment — the specific assessment she had been developing toward him since the palace tour, the recognition that he treated her capability and her authority as real rather than performed, that he gave her the information and let her make the call rather than making it for her and informing her after.
She activated her communication device.
"Clear my schedule," she said, to whoever received the instruction on the other end. "All standing engagements for the next six months are to be rescheduled or cancelled per the attached notice. Inform the court office that I am entering closed-door cultivation to stabilise my physical foundation ahead of my Awakening." A pause. "Yes, all of it. I'm aware of what that means."
She closed the channel.
"Done," she said.
He looked at the schedule, then at her.
"We start tomorrow," he said. "Today, we go find that vault."