The clearance came through within the hour, as Rosalind had predicted.
[Imperial Training Grounds Access: Granted.]
"Before we start the physical regimen," Markus said, "there's something I need to address first, and it requires privacy."
Rosalind looked at him.
"What I'm about to do is a spatial technique that reads your meridians directly," he said. "It's the same category of capability behind the Ghost Sense classification — Elena's office has it filed Top Secret pending verification. Your father's office approved my residency with the understanding that some of what I do here falls under that same protocol. I'd like Nagini to create a contained space for this specific procedure. Not because anyone's being kept in the dark — your father knows this kind of work happens during these sessions. It's because the technique itself isn't something I want picked up on a standard monitoring feed before the verification process is complete."
"You want me to brief the security detail in advance," Rosalind said. "So there's no panic."
"Yes."
She was already composing the message — short, direct, routed to the captain of her detail rather than the general security channel. Brief isolation technique, authorized under the existing classification protocol. Approximately two minutes. No response required unless the duration exceeds five.
The confirmation came back within a minute.
"They're aware," she said. "Go ahead."
Nagini's domain folded around them without drama — the Annex's cedar ceiling softening into the velvet dark of her spatial pocket, the room's ordinary boundaries replaced by the close, attentive quiet of a space that existed because she had decided it should.
"This will feel strange," Markus said. "I'm going to read your mana channels directly and apply a correction. It shouldn't hurt, but you'll feel the energy moving, which is unfamiliar the first time."
"I trust you," Rosalind said. Then, with the precision she brought to most statements: "I trust the methodology. Explain it to me while you work, if you can. I'd rather understand what's happening to my own body than just experience it."
"Fair," he said. "Sit. I'll work from beside you rather than behind — easier for you to see what I'm doing if you want to watch the channel readout."
She sat. He knelt at her side, one hand resting lightly at her shoulder rather than her back, the position closer to how Rosanne administered a diagnostic scan than anything more invasive.
"Your void affinity has been active since before your standard Awakening age," he said, while he worked. "Void elements are inherently corrosive to untrained mana pathways — it's the nature of an affinity defined by absence rather than presence. The technique requires something to push against, and your channels haven't had anything stable to push against yet. The result is micro-erosion. Like acid wearing at silk, except the silk is your meridian lining."
He extended a thread of spatial-attuned mana through the contact point — not warm, not cold, the specific neutral quality of a technique built from coordinate reorganisation rather than elemental output.
"I can feel it," Rosalind said. Her voice was steady. "It's — cold isn't the right word."
"It's not an element," he said. "It's structure. You're feeling the absence of resistance, which your body doesn't have a category for yet."
The thread moved through her channels with the precision his spatial sense provided — reading the erosion pattern as it went, the obsidian-dark residue where her void affinity had been wearing at unprepared pathways, and applying correction at each point: not healing in the conventional sense, closer to structural reinforcement, knitting the channel lining back toward integrity and leaving it more resilient than before the damage had occurred.
"You're not just fixing what's wrong," Rosalind said, watching the readout projected faintly in the domain's ambient light. "You're reinforcing it past where it started."
"The correction has to outpace the rate of future erosion," he said, "or we're just delaying the same problem. Once your physical foundation catches up — which is what the Tier 1 pills and the training schedule are for — your channels won't need this kind of intervention. You'll have enough structural integrity to manage the void affinity's corrosive property on your own."
"How long does this take."
"A few minutes. We're nearly done."
He completed the pass, withdrew the thread, and sat back.
"Nagini," he said. "Bring us back."
The domain folded away as smoothly as it had arrived, the Annex's cedar ceiling resolving back into ordinary space, the palace's distant ambient hum returning.
Rosalind's communication device pulsed once — the captain's office confirming receipt of the duration log, nothing more.
"No panic," she said, checking it.
"Good," Markus said. "That's the version of this I want to keep using."
She flexed her hand, looking at it with the specific attention of someone checking whether something felt different.
"It feels — quieter," she said. "Inside. I didn't realize how much noise there was until it stopped."
"That's the erosion settling," he said. "It'll stay quiet as long as the structural work holds, which depends on the physical training keeping pace. That's why the schedule matters as much as the correction does."
She nodded, filing this the way she filed everything that mattered.
The training hall was three levels below the Annex, accessible through a private stone stair that Rosalind navigated without needing to think about the route. The walls down here were reinforced granite, thick enough to contain serious output without the structural failures that lighter construction would risk.
"The recording system here is standard," Markus said, as they entered. "Nothing hidden about this part. I want a record of the baseline demonstration so we can track your progress against it."
He stepped onto the practice floor.
"Watch the whole sequence before you try to break it down," he said. "I'll go through it once at speed, then we'll slow it down and look at the components."
What followed was not theatre. It was a demonstration of body control at the specific level his Tier 4 refinement and years of physical training had produced — full-range movement through stances that required the kind of joint mobility and muscular coordination that took most practitioners years to develop, executed cleanly enough that Rosalind could track the sequence even at speed.
She watched with the focused attention she gave anything she intended to learn.
"That's what 'Total Body Synchronization' looks like in practice," he said, when he finished. "Every muscle group working in the correct sequence rather than in isolation. It's not about individual strength. It's about coordination efficiency — getting more output from the same input by removing the waste in how the body moves."
"I can see the difference," she said. "Even without understanding the mechanics yet."
"You will," he said. "That's most of what the next six months is."
He retrieved the first pill from the dimensional inventory — the same Tier 1 compound he'd shown her earlier, dense and faintly luminous in the practice hall's lighting.
"This is supervised the first time," he said. "I want to see how your system responds before you take these unsupervised on the weekly schedule."
She took it without hesitation, which he noted — not recklessness, the specific trust of someone who had decided, over the course of the morning, that his judgment about her own body was worth deferring to.
The effect arrived within seconds: the compound's energy moving into her skeletal structure, the density-building process beginning at the cellular level. She sank into a more grounded stance without being told to, her body's instinct correctly identifying that stability mattered more than posture right now.
She did not make a sound, which was its own kind of information — the specific discipline of someone who had decided, independently, that managing the discomfort silently was within her capability and chose to demonstrate it.
He sat beside her and matched the moment by taking one of his own — a Tier 4 compound, considerably stronger, the kind of dose that would have been genuinely dangerous to her current foundation but which his own body processed as a routine cultivation input.
"You don't have to do that," Rosalind said, through the effort of managing her own dose. "Match my pace for my benefit."
"I'm not matching your pace," he said. "I'm doing my own cultivation work while I supervise yours. Two separate things happening in the same room."
She considered this through the discomfort and, apparently, decided it checked out.
"How does it feel for you," she said. "At your level."
"Manageable," he said. "Different foundation. Different threshold." He looked at her, steady through whatever her own compound was doing. "Yours will get there. Today is the first step, not the whole distance."
She nodded, breathing through it, and the training hall settled into the specific quiet of two practitioners doing necessary, uncomfortable work in parallel — which was, he thought, probably the most honest description of what the next two years were going to be.