CHAPTER 71: MODULATION

The man grimaced, like he was processing the fact that he now had a ward to teach all over again. He rubbed a palm over his face and sighed deeply, muttering to himself, "I don’t have the energy for this..."

"Look... Zephyr—" he made to lay some ground rules but gave up midway. "You know what, just follow me," he stood, walking out of the room with Zephyr in tow and stepping into the hallway of the quiet third floor of the school— Vanguard Arcana.

As they walked, Zephyr noticed a few students in classes he had previously been empty when he arrived. They were very composed and quiet, unlike the lower floors which were more rowdy.

"Does this floor belong to the senior students?" Zephyr asked Jon who was walking ahead of him.

The man hummed in response, confirming Zephyr’s deduction.

They walked back to the lower floors, which had become relatively quiet now that classes were in session. The council meeting had taken more time than he had thought. It was already into the latter hours of the morning, nearing mid-day.

Stepping out of the school, Jon and Zephyr headed from platform to platform, even crossing those of other schools, until they reached a platform at the furthest end of the Freehold Sanctuary. They had walked so much that Zephyr wondered how the whole place was ever built in the first place. The stacked and interconnected nature, while still big, gave one a feeling of compactness, but crossing the distance from the school to this platform had been a very long walk. ’There has to be a better form of transportation here,’ Zephyr thought to himself, but so far, he hadn’t seen anything of the sort. Aside from small carts used to carry goods and supplies, everyone walked.

Zephyr looked at Jon who had stopped in front of a high-walled property. It stood out sharply against the other buildings on this platform. It was a residential district, and you could tell that everyone here had something in common— they loved their privacy.

The platform itself was right next to the inner walls of the mountain— which Zephyr felt should never have been able contain a city of this size. The whole district was very quiet, with similar-looking houses arranged in rows. The surroundings were immaculately well-kept. Each house had a decently high fence to add another layer of privacy, but Jon took it a step further, making his even higher.

As Zephyr stepped into the compound, aside from the extra-high fence, he noticed that right above, a thin veil covered the compound. It let light through with nearly zero loss, and if Zephyr’s assumption was correct, prevented anyone on a higher platform from peering into the compound from above, even though there weren’t many platforms right above theirs this far out.

’He really loves his privacy,’ Zephyr thought. He liked that. Even he could see himself doing the same if he lived here full-time.

"That would be your quarters," Jon pointed to a small building at a corner of the compound.

"My quarters?" Zephyr asked in surprise. He hadn’t been told anything about this.

Jon turned back and looked at Zephyr. Well, we wouldn’t want your identity to be revealed to anyone who shouldn’t know, right?" the man said. "That necklace can fool a lot of people, but not everyone," he pointed at the necklace embedded with an illusion spell around Zephyr’s neck.

"But I have an apartment already," he thought about Rita who had accompanied him here.

"Forget that. This is necessary," he waved lazily. "You can still go there every now and then if you like, but this is where you’ll stay regularly," he said. "I thought of laying down a bunch of rules earlier, but I’d have to think about it for some time. For now I have only one rule: Do not pester me outside of specified hours, Do not invade my private space, Do not touch anything I don’t permit you to, Do not bring anyone into this compound, No excess loud noises..." he prattled then paused to think of more. "That’s all for now, we’ll add some more as issues arise."

"Well... that’s more than one rule though." Zephyr pointed out.

"You get the point." Jon said blandly.

Zephyr nodded. "Noted. So what are the specified hours?" he asked.

"I prefer to do my personal work in the evenings, so I guess you can find me earlier in the day... say between the hours of ten to one."

"We’re still within the hours you specified..." Zephyr said.

Jon looked at Zephyr, unamused, but still replied, "What’s your mana node count?"

Zephyr grimaced lightly, "I’m a single node awakened." He watched Jon’s face for the expected look of surprise, but there wasn’t a trace of it on his face.

"You knew?" Zephyr asked in surprise.

"We had reason to believe you were. Veronica’s reports had given us a brief overview of what to expect. But you only just confirmed it," Jon said.

"It would prove a problem. At least for now..." Jon tilted his head in thought. "No, we’ll still go about it the usual way," he muttered to himself before his eyes refocused on Zephyr.

"You’ll have to focus on comprehending words for now. It is the only way you can enable your single node the ability to process spells more effectively," Jon said. "You’re a full Exalted. So I’ll bank on the fact that you have a greater access to origin than I do."

"And how do I go about comprehending words?" Zephyr asked, thinking back to his futile efforts to make something happen in his mana core space.

"It’s in two parts," Jon said, walking to a small Gazebo as he explained. "On one hand is your access to origin. How effectively you can picture the process you hope to embed into your mana core. And on the other hand is your understanding of the process. One cannot work without the other—in the case of very specific concepts," he sat on a bench in the small Gazebo, explaining further. "An awakened can still stumble on various words due to their talent, but they are usually basic words, and they end up being unstructured and inefficient due to having a vague understanding, leading to waste of resources down the line," he shook his head. "This is why structured learning is vital. Without it, the processes that can be handled with less mana nodes would be spread out among multiple nodes because of inefficiencies."

"Take for example, modulation," he slowly conjured a glowing orb of light within a few seconds. "Modulation of mana requires arithmetic operations within your mana core to effect the change required to the spell," he explained to Zephyr who watched with rapt attention.

"What happens within your mana core when you visualize a spell with the effect of an ’increased intensity,’ is multiplication," he slowly started to make the floating orb of light glow with increasing intensity. "Your mana nodes, if sufficiently plentiful, default to using their direct connection to origin as a clutch for this kind of process. It would never be inherent, almost as if there’s something you are connected to that does that part of the processing without you having to think about it..." Jon trailed off, losing focus.

His last words struck a chord with Zephyr as he remembered the threads that connected his mana core to something he dared not gaze at back in his mana core space. He nearly raised a question about it instinctively, but held his tongue on second thought. He didn’t know how common what he had experienced was... and the way Jon had described it: ’...almost as if.’

The man was simply hypothesizing... He had never experienced it in person.