Aether Engineering

Chapter 10

Maston Academy

The Town of Maston in the Candis East District

“When I left home to come here, my Dad told me to be careful. He told me that if I left, I would find an ugly world, but I didn’t think I would start seeing its scope on day one.” Silas collapsed on his bed. His face was slightly pale, but he seemed better than he had when he had walked into the apartment a moment ago.

Myles took a seat beside Silas. Just like everyone else here, Myles had only just met him. That said, Silas had been the person he had connected with the most. Leading up to classes, he had provided friendly conversation and just that morning, he had helped Myles as he struggled with his first delving session. If Silas wanted to share whatever he had learned, Myles was all ears.

When it was clear that Myles was staying, Silas jumped into an explanation. “How much do you know about the Rork province’s government?”

“Not much, in Verith, it was the most influential businesses that made the decisions. There was a committee of representatives called the conglomerate of faces. They handled all of the day-to-day laws and such.”

Silas looked at Myles. “I think I already told you this, but the town I grew up in was relatively close to Rord, the supposed capital of the province. In that area, there is a strict hierarchy of nobles that govern the people.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

“How do you suppose the three major cities of the province interacted with each other before the railroads that connected them were built six years ago?”

“I suppose people had to walk between them.”

A frown settled over Silas’ face. “Actually, they didn’t even do much of that. There was the occasional caravan between Rord and Candis, protected by hired shikari, but even those were rare. Back then, none of the military bases along the railroads, the same bases that keep the most dangerous monsters from entering the heart of the province, existed. It was an even more dangerous journey back then.”

Myles remembered the mystery the odd noble, Joshua, had left him and Jane with a few hours earlier. “Does this happen to have anything to do with the three factions in the province?”

Silas looked up in confusion. “Where did you hear that from?”

Myles explained about the encounter with Joshua.

After he finished listening and generally stressing about how Myles had already met a noble from the town’s governing family, Silas shook his head. “I still don’t quite understand. We were told that the province was split into two factions: the nobles from Rord and Candis, and Verith’s Conglomerate of Faces. Six years ago, they worked together to fight a war against a group of other provinces who aimed to destroy the existing railways and the means to create more. Despite that, the province is still at the brink of a civil war between the two factions. There was no mention of any third faction.” Silas paused for a moment. “Actually, Instructor Habe was very specific that there were only two factions.”

Somehow, Myles doubted that the Instructor Habe Silas mentioned was a different person from the one who had unleashed monsters on him as a test. Myles was starting to understand why Silas and Mercy were looking so pale. It was hard to imagine that man using normal teaching methods.

After talking for a little longer, Silas promised he would bring up the question of a third faction the next day. In the meantime, they both decided to keep their eyes open to the differences they could find between the other two curriculums and theirs.

Myles returned to his room and began the assignment he had been most nervous about, delving. Primrose had told them they needed to form a habit of delving for a few hours every day so that their mana wells could grow at a sufficient rate.

Sitting down on his bed, Myles once again visualized his aether space. That morning, he had borrowed Silas’ technique for envisioning the mana as water, but that still felt extremely awkward and not just because it was new to him. It felt somehow off.

Myles thought back to something he had seen in the aether index. There had been six mana types that were mentioned frequently. For each material, they were the types that had stated mana ratios. Myles opened his eyes again to check the entry for Basium.

Just as he remembered. Pure mana was self-explanatory and not all that useful for him right now. The others were more interesting though. If he considered water as a fluid, then his technique from earlier had relied on visualizing a fluid to make it easier to interpret the formless pure mana. Myles suspected that he would be able to accomplish the same thing with other mana types.

Myles decided to go down the list. Surprisingly, Myles found that it was a little easier to use force than water as his visualization, but it still felt awkward. It was an odd sensation to visualize force as a substance, but it was easy to move in his aether space. Myles decided to move on.

Using energy as his visualization was even easier than force. He was able to move it just as fast while avoiding the odd sensation of moving something that shouldn’t have form. Myles decided to make a note of that one before moving on.

Earth was the worst one yet. It was extremely easy to visualize as having form, but Myles didn’t even know where to start when he tried moving it around.

Myles skipped over fluid since it sounded similar to water. The last mana type was air. Moving his pure mana while visualizing it as air was easy although somewhat hard to visualize. The real problem was that Myles couldn’t seem to create any kind of impact with air. He figured he would have a lot of difficulty making any progress on eroding the sides of his well away with that.

Myles settled down fully into the trance this time. He used his energy visualization. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a lot more comfortable than the water visualization was.

Myles spent two more hours like that, slowly grinding away at the walls of his aether well. The energy he envisioned was a pure sort of energy. It gently pulsed against the walls. Myles gradually moved the focus of the energy around the walls of his well and then to the bottom where he slowly ground away, widening, and deepening his aether well.

The process was painstakingly slow and constantly required focus. After two hours though, Myles felt like he had made much more progress. If he had to guess, Myles would say he had somewhere around 15 mana now. It was extremely hard to tell when his only reference was what he had seen when he had first gained mana though.

That raised another question. The aether index was extremely specific in the number of mana units that would need to be supplied to achieve an effect. Some runes he had run across had demanded a multiple of a certain amount of mana, and the materials had specific mana point thresholds that needed to be kept in mind.

Myles decided he would bring up the question to Primrose during their mana training session the next morning.