Chapter 60: Orientation
Orientation was held in the main hall on the morning of the third day.
One hundred and twelve first-years in rows, the faculty along the front, the Dean at the center.
The Dean was a compact man in his late sixties with the posture of someone who had maintained a specific physical standard for decades. He wore the academy’s formal robes in the dark blue of the exterior banners with the founding-seal crest rather than the current dynasty’s variant.
He welcomed us to Aurelian.
He did not tell us to be proud to be here. He told us that the academy did not produce pride, it produced competence. He said it as if stating a manufacturing specification.
He covered the examination structure first. Written, practical, interview. Three days, spaced across the week. Results posted at the end of the third day. Classification into tracks based on combined assessment.
Then the conduct code, delivered at a pace suggesting he expected attention. Access restrictions: three of them. The northern archive, closed by administrative order, no exceptions stated, no reason given. The upper arena platforms, restricted by classification level. The mana lake’s training platforms, timed and supervised access only.
The student beside me shifted slightly.
The Dean moved on.
He covered the academy’s history in broad terms. The founding. The three major restructurings. The events during the War of Catastrophe that had changed the curriculum permanently, and the reason the daemon biology section appeared in a written examination.
Then a professor came forward for the class division.
General track, spirit track, sword track, mana engineering track, research track. The tracks shared core curriculum for the first two years and diverged in the third. Top placement across tracks was ranked on a unified scale.
"The unified scale creates competition across disciplines," the professor said. "That is intentional. The academy’s position is that a ranked student who has only competed within their own track has not been adequately tested."
A student in the second row raised his hand.
The professor looked at him.
The student lowered his hand.
The professor continued.
I spent the second half of orientation watching the faculty line.
Seven visible. Two I recognized from the written materials, the combat director and the head of the mana theory department. The other five I had not been able to place.
One of them had been in the covered balcony above the training courtyard yesterday morning during the free practice session.
She was standing at the far end of the faculty line now. The academy’s formal robes, but with a secondary pin I had not seen on any of the others: a narrow crest, small, sitting below the academy crest on the lapel.
She was watching the room.
When the orientation ended and the students began moving toward the exits, she did not move with the other faculty. She stayed there and watched the first-years file out.
I did not look directly at her.
When I reached the corridor she was gone.
The second half of orientation day was campus integration. The administration’s term for finding your way around before the examinations began.
Tessira had annotated the campus map.
Not the standard one from the intake document. She had obtained a more detailed version from the administrative office and spent the previous evening marking routes, access points, times of highest foot traffic through key corridors, and which areas were technically accessible but effectively off-limits by social convention.
"The western stairs," she said, when I asked.
"The intake document says they are accessible."
"They are accessible," she said. "The third-years use them between the sixth and seventh bell. First-years who do not know this discover the convention when they arrive at the top to find four third-years standing there saying nothing."
"How do you know this."
"The third-year in the room across from yours," she said. "He was more talkative this morning."
I looked at her.
She looked at the map.
"He said something about breakfast," she said. "I asked questions."
The western stairs convention, the statue ritual, the secondary cafeteria entrance, the schedule for the east reading room. Tessira was building an operational map of the academy out of ordinary conversations.
I had been doing the same thing with the training ground.
We looked at the map and said nothing about that.
"The orientation mentioned the spirit garden," she said. "East of the mana lake, between the first and second residential towers. It is not on this map."
"It is on the more detailed one," Anastasia said.
We both looked at her.
She was reading, and did not look up.
"The detailed map was also in the administrative office," she said. "I obtained one this morning while Tessira was talking to the third-year."
She reached into her sleeve and produced a folded page.
Tessira looked at it.
"That is the staff access map," Tessira said.
"Yes," Anastasia said.
"How did you get a staff access map."
"The woman at the administrative desk gave it to me," Anastasia said. "She asked what I needed it for. I told her I needed to understand the full campus before I could decide where to spend my attention. She considered this and gave me the map."
Tessira looked at the map.
"The spirit garden has restricted access during the examination week," she said. "Faculty and advanced students only."
"Yes," Anastasia said. "But it is on the route between the outer library and the mana lake, so the gate is visible from the path. I looked through it this morning."
"And," I said.
"Large trees," she said. "Very old. The ambient mana density is higher than the rest of the campus. There is a student sitting under one of the trees."
"Restricted access," I said.
"Yes," she said. "She did not appear to be on the staff or advanced student list. She was reading."
"She did not appear to care about the restricted access," I said.
"She did not notice it," Anastasia said.
She went back to her book.
***
The written examination was held in the main hall, a room built for this purpose and nothing else. High windows that let in light but no view, rows of desks spaced to eliminate proximity, the acoustics arranged so that any sound from one end arrived at the other with a delay long enough to be distracting.
Two hundred seats. The proctor read the rules at a pace suggesting he had read them several hundred times and was doing so one more time under protest.
I turned the paper over.
Seven areas: mana theory, historical frameworks, elemental classification, institutional law, tactical theory, dungeon methodology, and daemon biology. Questions ordered by difficulty within each section. Most of the room would work through the middle tier and stop.
I worked in order.
Mana theory took twelve minutes. Eleven of them were straightforward.
The twelfth question asked for the theoretical upper boundary of the Infinity Mana Breathing technique under ideal ambient conditions, which the textbook treated as a settled question. The textbook was wrong. I had been practicing the technique under non-ideal conditions for three months.
I wrote the textbook answer. In the margin, small: Practical output under active cultivation exceeds theoretical boundary by an observed factor of approximately 1.4. Framework requires revision.
Historical frameworks were fine until the final question, which asked about the calendar discrepancy between the Imperial Third Era and the Eastern Trade Compact dating system. The Keeper’s volumes had covered this. The academy’s materials had not.
I answered it and moved on.
Dungeon methodology had a question about daemon containment protocols in active dungeons that had a standard answer and a more accurate one. I wrote the standard answer and in the margin noted that the protocol had been superseded twice since the textbook’s last revision.
Daemon biology.
In the 3rd Classification, which entity is attributed as the originating source of the Sanguine Compact?
The textbook said the Archmage Veritas. I knew this was wrong because Anastasia had told me that the Compact predated Veritas by two centuries and had an author whose name the academy’s records did not contain.
I wrote Veritas.
Then, in the margin: cf. pre-classification records, Keeper’s documentation. Attribution requires revision. Original authorship predates Veritas by approximately two centuries.
I set the pen down with forty minutes remaining.
Around me the hall was still working. The rustle of papers. A pause somewhere to my left, then the scratch of a pen starting again.
The student two desks ahead had not moved their pen in four minutes.
I waited for the proctor to announce time.
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