The mission board had not changed significantly since his last visit, but his read of it had.
He scanned through the listings with the same indexing attention as always, and this time what registered differently was not the missions themselves but the gap between what was on offer and what the group he was working with actually needed. Tier 1 tasks were finished as a training medium — they had confirmed foundations, not built them. What the group needed now was consequence: missions where an incorrect decision had a cost, where elemental synergies between members mattered because the alternative to synergy was getting hurt.
He selected two Tier 2 tasks and added the team.
[Team Leader: Markus Blackwell][Team Members: Mika Ross, Jessica Johnson, Donna Michaelson, Rosanne Vance]
He went to the exchange counter before leaving the mission hall.
The meteorite ore had been on his list since the day he'd seen it in the catalogue. He had understood, intellectually, what a fragment of a dead star containing dense spatial laws meant. He understood it differently now, after the temple, after the Space Core, after the slow accumulation of law comprehension that had given him a finer sense of what spatial density felt like from the inside. The ore was a cultivation resource calibrated specifically for what he was.
He purchased it alongside the Adaptive Cloak — a practical acquisition after the volcanic dungeon's demonstration that the spatial bubble was a finite resource and the environment had opinions about what happened when it thinned.
[Contribution Points: 510 remaining.]
The automated delivery bot arrived at his room within the hour, left two parcels by the desk, and departed with the unhurried efficiency of a system that had processed this particular task several thousand times and had no feelings about it. He stored the cloak and picked up the ore.
It was small — the size of a closed fist, dense enough that the weight didn't match the volume, the surface dark and rough in the way of things that had not been processed by anything except the void. He held it in both palms and felt the spatial laws in it register against his own — not a flood, not an overwhelm, more the way a tuning fork feels when it encounters a matching frequency. The ore had been a star once. The laws of space that were embedded in it had been there since before the star had collapsed, since before whatever geological cascade had produced the fragment he was holding.
He sat on the prayer cushion.
The meditation was different with the ore.
The prayer cushion's faith-energy and the ore's spatial law density were not the same substance, and they didn't interact the same way — the cushion worked through accumulated intention, the ore through raw elemental concentration. Together they created a gradient that his spatial sense moved through the way water moved through a gradient of pressure: without effort, in the direction of the differential.
[Law of Space: 11%]
He was not aware of time passing in any meaningful sense. The Space Core vibrated. The spatial laws organised themselves around it in new configurations with each increment of comprehension, each one unlocking a slightly more precise understanding of what the previous increment had meant. At 12% he understood something about the relationship between spatial domain and spatial barrier that he had been applying correctly without fully understanding. At 13% the understanding became the kind that reorganised prior knowledge — he looked back at the temple staircase from this vantage and understood, retroactively, what the pressure had been teaching him that he had not had sufficient comprehension to read in the moment.
At 15%, the ore was cold in his hands.
Not temperature-cold — emptied. The spatial laws that had saturated it had transferred completely, absorbed by the Core with the patient thoroughness of a system that took what it needed and stopped. What remained was a fragment of metal with no particular properties.
He opened his eyes.
The room was dark.
He looked at the clock. 11:32 PM.
He had entered meditation at approximately four in the afternoon.
He looked at the news feed on the room's display, which had been running in idle — a habit he'd developed at Cedar Grove, where NOVUS maintained ambient information flow through the estate's systems. The Vane enterprise coverage was still cycling, the political and commercial fallout working its way through the capital's reporting infrastructure with the thoroughness of any story involving significant money and a sudden power vacuum.
The date in the corner of the screen was five days after the date he had entered meditation.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he looked at the clock again, in case the clock and the date were in disagreement and this was a system error rather than a personal one. They were not in disagreement. Five days had passed while he sat on the prayer cushion and moved through spatial law comprehension from 10% to 15%, and his perception of mortal time had apparently decided this was a rounding error not worth registering.
He filed this under consequences of the Space Core that require monitoring and checked his mission badge.
[Team mission departure: 8 hours.]
He had time. Not much, but enough.
Chef Ramsay was the kind of professional who had been in commercial kitchens long enough to have opinions about everything, delivered them freely, and was almost always correct. He had the build of someone who had spent thirty years tasting sauces and carrying equipment, and the particular authority of a person who knew, better than anyone in the building, which students actually showed up and which ones only remembered the dining hall existed when they were hungry.
Markus was one of the ones who showed up.
"You've been gone five days," Ramsay said, when Markus came through the kitchen entrance. Not an accusation — a notation, the way a person who keeps mental tabs made notations.
"Meditation," Markus said. "I lost track of time."
Ramsay looked at him with the evaluative gaze of someone assessing a piece of protein for readiness. "You look like you haven't eaten in five days."
"I haven't."
"Sit down."
He handed over his spare Tier 1 storage ring before sitting — the beasts from the dungeon runs, the overflow he'd collected but not used. Ramsay took it with the practiced motion of someone who has received payment in non-standard forms before and has made his peace with this. He checked the contents, nodded once with the expression of a professional acknowledging quality, and went to work.
What arrived on the plate twelve minutes later was Floridian lobster — the meat tender and plump in the way of something that had been handled correctly at every stage, folded into a five-cheese sauce with the depth of a roux that had been built slowly rather than rushed, topped with a panko crust that was doing what breadcrumb toppings were supposed to do rather than simply existing. Mac and cheese alongside, the pasta proportion correct relative to the sauce density.
Markus ate with the focused attention of someone who has not eaten in five days and is also, genuinely, interested in what he is eating. The flavour was complex in the specific way of things that required patience to produce. He noted the technique — the layering, the way each component was finished independently before the combination — with the automatic cataloguing that his grandmother had, over ten years of shared meals and laboratory sessions, made into a reflex.
"Stay safe out there," Ramsay said, when he finished. He transferred ninety contribution points to Markus's badge with the matter-of-fact generosity of someone who had decided this was fair and was not going to discuss it. "And come back before five days next time. You'll waste away."
"I'll try," Markus said.
He went to draw a bath.
The botanicals were from the estate's greenhouse — Isolde had packed them into a small alchemical case the last time he'd been home, the blend specific to post-mission recovery: muscle relief, skin detoxification, the particular combination of compounds that addressed the cellular debris from sustained high-intensity mana use. He added them to the water and submerged to the neck.
The impurities came out slowly. Not dramatically — not the theatrical purging of a cultivation breakthrough, more the quiet accumulation of days of sweat and dungeon environments and five days of metabolic suspension leaving through the most efficient available route. The water turned dark before he was finished, which was information about what his body had been doing while his mind was elsewhere.
He watched the ceiling and thought about time.
Five days. He had not eaten, had not moved, had not registered the passage of a hundred and twenty hours of ordinary life. The Space Core's operation apparently included modifications to how his consciousness related to mortal time — not a bug, he suspected, but a design feature of an entity that was built to operate at timescales that ordinary human physiology found inconvenient. He would need to account for this. He would need either external monitoring or internal timekeeping that wasn't subject to the same drift.
He made a note to ask NOVUS to ping his student badge at twelve-hour intervals if no activity was logged.
He got out of the bath, let the water drain, and went to bed.
The alarm was set for four hours. He was, this time, not late.
[Contribution Points: 600.]
He was at the exchange counter before the morning hour reached six. Twelve Tier 1 health potions, twelve mana potions — not for himself, for the group. Provisioning, the way Sloane had provisioned before border missions: not assuming the mission would go wrong, but ensuring that if it did, the margin between a difficult situation and a catastrophic one was stocked appropriately.
[Contribution Points: 576.]
He found a private briefing room in the mission hall and set up the projector.
The girls arrived together.
Rosanne and Jessica were arm in arm with the easy physical comfort of people who have become genuine friends without quite noticing the transition happening. Donna had the composed energy of someone who wakes up ready to work. Mika was carrying a notebook, which was either habit or anxiety, and both were reasonable responses to being told they were moving to Tier 2.
"BIG BROTHER!" Rosanne's voice carried across the hall with the penetrating capability of someone who had been practising elemental projection and had not yet learned to apply the skill selectively.
Several heads turned.
"Private room," Markus said, and gestured.
He clicked the projector. The mission details resolved on the wall.
[Tier 2 Portal Maintenance — Academy Grounds][Portal Type: Dungeon — Flying Beast classification][Objective: Full dungeon sweep and portal stabilisation]
He looked at the four of them in the blue light of the projection. Rosanne was watching him with the specific attention she used when she understood that something was about to be different from what it had been. Donna was reading the mission details with professional focus. Jessica had her arms folded and her weight shifted forward, the posture of someone ready. Mika had the notebook open.
He let the silence run for a moment.
"Tier 1 tasks confirmed your foundations," he said. "This confirms whether the foundations are load-bearing." He looked at each of them in turn. "A flying beast dungeon removes most of the combat assumptions you've been operating under. Ground positioning, cover, physical retreat — all of it becomes complicated or impossible once the engagement is three-dimensional. If you lose your footing or your awareness of the vertical axis, you lose the fight."
He pulled up a rough sketch of the dungeon's expected spatial structure on the projector.
"Formation: Donna on point. Your wind affinity gives you the best command of the vertical — you set the engagement zone, control the approach altitude, and keep the group from being split. Mika and Jessica at the core. Mika, your ice immobilises — use it to fix targets that Donna pushes into the group's range, not as a general area effect. Jessica, your lightning reflexes make you the intercept layer — anything that gets through Donna's zone, you catch before it reaches the group."
He paused.
"Rosanne, rear. Your healing becomes the mission's limiting factor today — if it runs dry, we leave. Don't spend it on manageable damage. Spend it on damage that would otherwise compound."
Rosanne nodded. She had the look of someone who has been told something she already half-knew and is now committing it from principle to practice.
"Where will you be?" Mika asked.
"Observing," he said. "You won't see me unless something exceeds your collective capacity to manage. If I step in, that's information — about what the gap is, about what you need to work on. It's not a rescue." He looked at them. "I'm not your shield today. Show me what the group is worth without one."
He closed the projector.
"Potions." He distributed the supply from his inventory — three to each person, health and mana both. "These are insurance, not strategy. If you're using them regularly, the formation has broken down and we regroup before continuing."
Jessica looked at the potions in her hand and then at Markus with the evaluative expression she used for things she was deciding whether to trust. "You've done this before," she said. "Taken a group into a dungeon and watched them work."
"No," he said. "But I've been trained by people who have. The principle is the same." He picked up his bag. "Let's go."
He was two steps into the corridor when Rosanne caught his sleeve.
He looked back.
"Don't let us actually die," she said. Quiet, specific, the request of someone who trusts a person's judgment and is also stating clearly where the limits of that trust are.
"I won't," he said.
She held his gaze for one moment, checking whether the answer was real. Then she let go and fell into step with the others, and Markus followed them toward the basement lift and the blue glow of the portal below.