Chapter 21
Hunger
By the end of the first week, Cyan had a problem.
The problem wasn't the classes, though those were difficult in ways he was still mapping. The problem wasn't the social architecture of the Academy, though that was also difficult. The problem was simpler and more immediate: he was absorbing too much.
The Academy campus was saturated with mana. He'd known that from the first day -- felt it on the approach road, felt it intensify as he crossed the threshold. What he hadn't fully understood was that it wouldn't plateau. The mana in this place wasn't static. It was constantly generated, constantly cycling, constantly refreshed by three hundred ranked students going about their days.
His mark pulled at all of it.
Not aggressively. Not the way it had pulled from the mugger -- that had been focused, direct, like a hand reaching out. This was more like standing in a current. The mana moved toward him naturally, the way water moved toward a drain, and the drain was always open.
By the end of the first week he was holding more mana than he'd ever held. More than the entire collapsed dungeon had given him. More than he knew what to do with.
It didn't feel good. It felt like pressure. Like a container being filled past its designed capacity, the seams not quite straining but aware of the strain. He could feel it especially at night, when the dormitory was quiet and there was nothing to focus on except the slow, constant feed from the enchantments in the walls.
He started going outside.
After lights-out, when the corridors were empty, he'd leave the dormitory and find the least-mana-dense location he could -- the eastern corner of the Academy grounds, near the outer wall, where there was a stretch of ordinary garden that had fewer enchantments than anywhere else on campus. He'd sit there for an hour or two and let the relative quiet slow the intake.
It helped, somewhat. The mana he'd absorbed didn't go anywhere -- the Mark held it, dense and pressurized inside him -- but the rate of addition slowed.
He was sitting in the garden on the fifth night when he realized he could feel the difference between stored mana and fresh intake. The stored mana was compressed, changed in quality by passing through him, different from what it had been when he absorbed it. The fresh intake was bright and sharp by comparison.
He sat with that for a while.
On the sixth night, without planning to, he tried to release some of what he was holding.
It didn't work the way he expected. He'd imagined it like exhaling -- a controlled release, reducing the pressure. What happened instead was a burst: a rough, unfocused discharge that scorched the grass around him in a rough circle about two meters across and made the Mark burn hot for a few seconds before settling.
He looked at the scorched grass.
Then he looked at his hand.
The seven lines were faintly visible even through his glove. Warmer than usual. Like they'd enjoyed themselves.
He went back inside before anyone came to investigate the scorched circle.
In the morning the groundskeeping construct had smoothed over the patch. He wasn't sure if that meant no one had noticed or that someone had noticed and decided not to make it an issue.
He started keeping a mental log of his absorption rate. How much the dormitory alone added in a night. How much a full day of classes added. How much the practice halls added when he walked past them.
He was, he estimated, accumulating roughly the mana equivalent of a mid-Bronze mage's full reserves every three days. It was going somewhere -- stored, compressed, altered -- but it wasn't going away.
He needed to understand how to use it. Or how to release it. Or both.
He thought about the Warden's open door again.
Still not yet. But soon.