Marcus was waiting when Wei Xuan returned to the dormitory.
He sat on the edge of his bed, arms crossed, expression carefully neutral. Watching. He'd been watching a lot lately—ever since the sparring sessions, ever since Wei Xuan started showing results that didn't add up. Marcus was good at watching. He was less good at hiding the fact that he was doing it.
"I heard about the training grounds," Marcus said without preamble. "Derek."
Wei Xuan set down his bag and sat at his desk. "Word travels fast."
"In this dormitory, yes." Marcus uncrossed his arms. "You knocked down a Tier 2 Mage with a Spark spell."
"I told him I got lucky."
"You told me that too. About the combat drills. About dodging Sarah's spells." Marcus leaned forward. "How many lucky days in a row before it stops being luck?"
Wei Xuan was quiet for a moment. The afternoon light came through their narrow window, casting long shadows across the worn floorboards. In the corridor outside, someone was practicing incantations, the words precise and rhythmic. Normal academy sounds. Normal life, continuing without any idea of what was happening in this small room.
The question wasn't whether to trust Marcus. He'd already decided that.
The question was how much to reveal.
"Close the door," Wei Xuan said.
Marcus stood immediately, crossed to the door, and closed it. When he turned back, his expression had changed. Less guarded. More open—the face of someone who'd been waiting to hear something real for a long time.
"I'm not using standard magic," Wei Xuan said.
"I know that."
"Not just using it differently. The underlying method is completely different. The energy is the same—mana, qi, whatever you want to call it—but the cultivation technique, the circulation path, the way I gather and refine it, none of it matches what the academy teaches."
Marcus sat back down slowly. "Where did you learn it?"
"I... came across it. Before coming to the academy." Not a complete lie. "It's from a different tradition. Older. The academy doesn't know it exists."
"Doesn't know?" Marcus frowned. "Or doesn't want to know?"
Wei Xuan met his eyes. That was a sharper question than he'd expected. "Both, probably."
A long silence. Marcus stared at the floor, processing. When he looked up, his expression was decided. "Can you teach me?"
"I was going to whether you asked or not." Wei Xuan pulled out a blank sheet of paper. "But I need you to understand something first."
"What?"
"If this ever gets out—what I'm doing, what I'm teaching you—we're both in trouble. Not 'failed assessment' trouble. Real trouble. The kind that ends careers and starts investigations." Wei Xuan held Marcus's gaze. "Are you sure?"
Marcus didn't hesitate. "Yes."
They started that evening, when the corridor was quiet and the rest of Building C had settled into study routines.
Wei Xuan sat cross-legged on his bed. Marcus sat on his, mirroring the posture. Between them, Wei Xuan had drawn a simple diagram—not the complicated spell matrices they used in class, but a basic meridian map. Rough lines indicating the major energy pathways through the body.
"The academy teaches you to gather mana from the environment," Wei Xuan began, "process it through a standard conversion formula, and channel it into a spell structure."
"Yes," Marcus said. "That's the basic—"
"The conversion formula is the problem." Wei Xuan tapped the diagram. "It's inefficient. You lose about sixty percent of the energy in the conversion step alone. The remaining forty percent goes into the spell, and that's what determines your power output."
Marcus blinked. "Sixty percent? That seems..."
"Too high? Think about it. You practice all day. You feel exhausted by evening. You sleep, recover overnight, and start again. That's not because magic is hard. It's because the standard method is wasteful. You're working sixty percent harder than you have to."
Marcus stared at the diagram for a long moment. "If that's true, why does the academy teach it?"
"Because it's what they know. And what they know works. It's not wrong—it's just... incomplete." Wei Xuan set down his pen. "The method I'm teaching doesn't convert mana. It refines it. You take raw environmental energy, run it through your body's natural pathways, and it comes out purified. Denser. More efficient. No conversion loss."
"That sounds too simple."
"It's not simple. It takes time to develop the sensitivity to feel the pathways. But once you can feel them—once you understand how energy naturally wants to move—the technique follows from there." Wei Xuan paused. "Show me your standard circulation pattern. The one you use in morning exercises."
Marcus closed his eyes, and Wei Xuan watched the slight shift in his breathing, the almost imperceptible tension in his shoulders as he ran mana through the academy's prescribed pattern. Standard. Methodical. Like watching someone drive an efficient but uninspired route when a better road existed thirty feet to the left.
"Stop." Wei Xuan reached out and placed two fingers lightly on Marcus's wrist. "Can you feel it? Right there, at the junction point—the energy hesitates."
Marcus opened his eyes. "I... maybe? It's always felt like that."
"That's the conversion step. Energy arriving from one pathway in one form, trying to match the output structure of another pathway. Natural friction." Wei Xuan withdrew his hand. "Now close your eyes again, and don't try to follow the pattern. Just breathe. Feel the energy in the room, in the air, in the floor under you. Don't gather it. Just feel it."
Marcus closed his eyes again. His breathing slowed. The lamplight flickered slightly as the evening breeze found the gap under the door.
One minute passed. Two.
"It's..." Marcus's voice was quiet. "It's moving. The energy in the room. I can feel it, like... like water flowing downhill."
"Yes." Wei Xuan kept his own voice low. "That's not your mana. That's the room's ambient energy following natural paths. The building has been here for a hundred years. The energy has worn grooves, the same way water wears grooves in stone. Now feel those grooves."
Another long silence.
"I feel..." Marcus opened his eyes, and his expression was strange. Wondering and uncertain at the same time. "I've practiced for two years and I've never felt that before."
"Because the academy teaches you to impose a structure on the energy. You never learned to feel what structure was already there." Wei Xuan allowed himself a small smile. "That's the difference."
They practiced for two hours before Marcus's concentration began to slip. Wei Xuan called a halt—pushing too hard on the first day built bad habits. Better to stop with the student wanting more than to push until they were frustrated and exhausted.
"Same time tomorrow?" Marcus asked.
"Yes." Wei Xuan glanced at the window. Full dark outside now. He'd need to do his own cultivation session soon. "And Marcus—"
"I know." Marcus touched his collar, a small unconscious gesture. "I won't say anything."
After Marcus fell asleep, Wei Xuan settled into his own practice. The familiar pathways, the flow of energy through his meridians, the quiet satisfaction of a system working as it was designed to work. He'd improved steadily since arriving. Qi Gathering Layer 2, solid now, the foundation stable.
He pushed a little deeper tonight, testing the boundaries. The energy moved cleanly through his channels. Clean and strong and getting stronger.
[Ding. Host has completed daily cultivation session.]
[Progress: Qi Gathering Layer 2, 72% complete. Estimated time to Layer 3: 4-6 days at current rate.]
Wei Xuan considered that estimate. Four to six days. That was faster than he'd expected. The teaching session with Marcus had, counter-intuitively, sharpened his own understanding. Explaining the technique required him to analyze it more carefully. He'd noticed three things while watching Marcus that he'd never consciously registered about his own practice.
Teaching, he reflected, was its own form of cultivation.
[Also, host should be aware.]
Wei Xuan blinked. The system rarely volunteered information.
[You have company. Not tonight. But soon.]
He sat with that for a moment, turning it over. "Derek?"
[No notification on specifics. Just awareness.]
Not helpful. Wei Xuan filed it away and returned to his practice. Whatever was coming, he'd face it when it arrived. Worrying in advance was wasted energy, and energy was not something he could afford to waste.
The next morning, Wei Xuan arrived at the training grounds fifteen minutes early.
He wasn't the first one there. Professor Elena stood near the equipment shed, clipboard in hand, studying a list of names. She was exactly as he'd imagined her from the students' descriptions—tall, composed, dark hair pulled back severely, the kind of stillness that came from absolute confidence in one's own power. She wore an instructor's robe with four silver stripes on the collar. Archmage.
She didn't look up as he approached. "Wei Xuan."
"Professor."
"I hear you had an interesting encounter yesterday." She wrote something on her clipboard. Her handwriting, from this angle, was very precise. "With a Tier 2 student."
"A sparring match." Wei Xuan kept his tone neutral. "Standard rules. Clean hit decided it."
"Clean hit with a Spark spell." She looked up then, and her eyes were very sharp. Assessing. The eyes of someone who'd seen a great deal and wasn't impressed by most of it. "A Spark spell that apparently hit with Tier 2 force."
"I was told I got lucky."
"Were you." It wasn't a question. The ghost of something—amusement, maybe—crossed her face, there and gone. "I'll be personally overseeing this month's assessments," she said. "I'll be particularly interested in your results."
She turned back to her clipboard, dismissing him.
Wei Xuan walked to his practice area, her words following him. Particularly interested in your results. That could mean many things. In his experience, particular interest from powerful authority figures was rarely purely benign.
He began his morning forms, tracking the ambient mana flow out of habit. The training grounds were average. Normal mana density. Nothing unusual. He'd felt something odd yesterday, briefly, but had attributed it to nerves.
Today he felt it again. A low, steady current running beneath the ground. Not on the surface. Much deeper. Like a river flowing far underground, heard only when the surface noise went quiet.
He kept his expression neutral and continued his forms.
The underground ley line. He'd sensed it once before, faint and distant. Now it felt stronger, or maybe he was more sensitive. He filed the information away.
One problem at a time.
The weekly assessment results posted at midday, and Wei Xuan found Marcus staring at the notice board with an expression somewhere between frustration and determination.
"Bottom third," Marcus said without looking at Wei Xuan. "Same as last month. Same as every month."
"Not for long." Wei Xuan scanned the board. His own position had improved—mid-table, where he'd deliberately aimed. Not conspicuous. Not enough to draw sharp scrutiny. "Give it two weeks."
Marcus finally looked at him. "Two weeks."
"If you practice what I showed you. Every morning, twenty minutes, before you do anything else." Wei Xuan glanced around, confirming they were out of earshot. "The sensitivity comes first. Everything else follows from that."
Marcus nodded, jaw set. That stubborn expression, Wei Xuan had learned, meant he'd taken something to heart.
"Assessment is in ten days," Wei Xuan said. "Professor Elena will be overseeing it personally."
Marcus winced. "She's terrifying."
"She's thorough." Wei Xuan turned away from the board. "Different thing."
As he left, he felt, briefly, the sensation of eyes on his back. He glanced over his shoulder. The training grounds were crowded. Students everywhere, practicing, chatting, complaining about the assessment notice. No one obviously watching.
But the feeling persisted, like a pressure between his shoulder blades.
He kept walking. Unhurried. Relaxed.
Inside, he was already calculating.
Ten days. That's enough time to reach Layer 3.
He'd need it.