The Arcanum did not smell like a classroom. It smelled like the inside of a thunderstorm that had been bottled, sterilized, and left to ferment in a vacuum.
The atmosphere was a sanctuary of absolute, crushing silence. It stood in stark contrast to the violent, ozone-heavy air of the Body-aspect training halls where Vane and Valerica were currently breaking their bones. The walls here were made of polished white marble. They were etched with millions of microscopic silver runes that hummed at a frequency designed to enhance mental clarity. The sound was not audible to the ear. It was a vibration that pressed directly against the frontal lobe.
In this wing of the Academy, power was not measured by the strength of a strike. It was not measured by the speed of a flicker or the weight of a punch. It was measured by the stability of a decimal point within a thousand-element mana-lattice.
