The Well, as Tercius understood it from the explanation he received from The Mistress, was a kind of a mana channel that operated on a much larger scale.

Just like regular mana channels, the Well existed both physically and metaphysically. Physically, every Well was formed at the moment when enough of these new mana channels grew into a single mass— fusing into each other to make something greater than the sum of the parts used in the making. In that moment of physical fusion of channels, the metaphysical part of the Well would start its development from zero.

To provide aid to the physical growth of these channels, Tercius could do two things. Eat regularly— the food prepared at the House was made with consideration of both pleasant taste and the necessary materials, and then saturate the new growth with concentrated mana to any degree he felt comfortable with. The best results, in terms of development speed, were achieved by doing this concentrated effort in ten-minute sessions followed by pauses of half an hour. Then rinse and repeat until the work is done, usually two to four weeks later.

In theory, The Mistress explained, every mage should use all of the growing mana channels to form a Well, but this proved difficult to accomplish in practice. Most mages sped through this phase, using only the bare minimum of channels for the initial formation of the Well. There were two schools of thought concerning this, the 'Naturalists' and 'Perfectionists'.

Naturalists looked up to wild Wells, called by that name for their spontaneous growth, natural formations that never use every mana channel for the initial making. After the Well was formed, every remaining mana channel that was not used for the initial development of a Well, would simply stop growing— left forever in the state it was in at the moment of Well formation.

The Mistress was a pioneer of 'Perfectionists', a school of thought where a mage was supposed to regulate the growth of new mana channels by focusing on speeding up the lagging new channels. Only when all mana channels were at the same physical distance from the spot where they would naturally meet, would a mage accelerate the growth of every single one and let all of the channels meet in that spot— simultaneously.

This effort would lead to what The Mistress called ‘a physically optimal Well’.

Of course, the downside was that he had to endure the pain for much longer— which to Tercius wasn’t much of a downside.

The main reason that the ‘Naturalists’ were mainstream— other than the lack of prolonged pain, of course— was that there was no proof of any difference in function between a wild Well and a perfect Well. Physically, the perfect Well was only a tiny bit larger than the wild Well, but mages only cared for the metaphysical part of the Well.

The repository for mana.

Theoretically, the repository was infinite for both types of the Well— so most questioned the necessity of doing something the hard way when both the hard and the easy way ended up in the same spot, eventually.

To Tercius's eyes, what a heart was to the cardiovascular system, the Well was in the mana system— but not by their function. A heart was a pump while a Well was a repository, by nature, but what equated them was that both were the center of a system. A fetus grows a heart while still in its mother's womb, but a Well was an organ grown in a matter of weeks or months, something that strongly reminded Tercius of a liver. The liver had the capability for relatively rapid regeneration, capable of repairing damage and even regrowth from as little as a third of its full size. But even a liver, the miracle that it was, somehow paled when compared to an organ that had spontaneous generation from other parts of a body.

Bigger wasn't always better but in the case of a repository? If a marble-sized organ had theoretically infinite capacity for storage, how bigger was the capacity of the ten percent bigger marble? Was there some hidden bonus for the extra work done? For the small price of a few additional weeks of work— he would take it and find out for himself.

In the days that followed his arrival at the House, Tercius saw that the masked, nameless Mistress was utterly fascinated by this magical organ and had dedicated her life to the study and research of its functions. Under the careful daily guidance of the expert, Tercius focused only on speeding up the growth of the slower mana channels and the Mistress went wild when she heard of his decision.

“You have my utter admiration, Pinky. If only more mages were like you…” The Mistress sighed wistfully, as she looked at Tercius with longing eyes.

Tercius had made a hasty retreat to his room that day, afraid yet oddly aroused by the woman's piercing eyes and sensual voice. He knew, logically, that no one would touch him sexually— not even the Mistress. He was under fifteen years of age and the laws were very clear about what happened to someone who broke it.

And that was the main problem, no matter how messed up it sounded.

He was living in the equivalent of a hippy commune that was run by a sadomasochistic Mistress, surrounded by good food, pleasant music, saunas, and sex at all times, and he was only allowed to observe for learning purposes. Seeing everything that he saw and hearing all the moaning and collisions of naked flesh that went on around him, left him with fevered dreams created by an inflamed imagination and anatomy parts that partially resumed work after a decade of strike.

Other than Tercius, the House had other mages who were in the process of developing a Well, the number of guests rising and falling by the day as old ones went away and new ones came to stay. When the Mistress started treating Tercius like the favorite one of the bunch, boasting to other mages, most of whom were fifteen to twenty years of age, that a child of eleven was enduring a much more vicious pain with barely a grunt, things started to get a bit competitive.

***

"You are my lucky charm," The Mistress leaned over the table, and whispered the words to Tercius. "Just this morning, two more opted for the optimal Well…"

Sitting at the head of the long table was Mistress and Tercius sat to her right while the chair to her left was purposefully left empty. Twenty-seven masked mages who were opening their Wells sat down the length of the long table, and Tercius smiled wryly as he observed the narrowed eyes that looked back at him.

"That makes it what? Nine?" Tercius whispered back.

"Yes!" The woman said, her voice dripping with honey. "Yes! I've never had this turnout! I'm entertaining the idea of keeping you here, permanently, my lucky charm. Think about all the data I will collect now… Oh… When you get to year six, you have to apply for an assistant post here, Pinky. You simply must!"

"I will think about it, Mistress," Tercius said.

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"What's there to think about? Groundbreaking work is done here!" The woman started laughing. "We are breaking ground in multiple fields at once…"

"Quite…" Tercius smiled at the joke and excused himself from the breakfast. The medicine he took the night before was starting to wear off and that meant that the daily grind was about to begin.

He went to his room and collected Amber in his arms, only to stop dead on his way out.

Standing like statues in front of his door were two masked figures in white clothes, one a rather tall, slim yet muscular male and the other a female of average height and like her colleague, slim and while not exactly muscular, certainly athletic looking.

Tercius' designated servants.

He sighed in defeat.

"Come on," Tercius said sullenly as he started his journey to the pond of the estate, acutely aware of the two humans following after him. It was difficult in ways that he could not describe, the sensation of having servants. People who took care of his every need, while he focused on a single goal of developing a Well.

Millie and Sior, presently twenty-two-year-olds, were previous students of the Academy. They were not locals, the pale-skinned Millie hailing from a village near Lissea while Sior hailed from one of the jungle islands of Isgea. Both had gotten into the Academy on the promise of later payment, and both stayed until the end of the second year, and never developed the required skills for further studies. The two extra years went by, and while both managed to get Mana Manipulation, neither acquired Mana Metamorphosis. This exact situation occurred to around half of all enrolled students.

Both were sixteen and skill-less when someone from the administration of the Academy offered them a list to choose how to repay the debt. Each year cost a certain amount of money, and each job on that list had a certain salary. They repaid their debt by the age of twenty— which both thought as ludicrous, considering the circumstances of the Empire where they would have toiled for over a decade, maybe even longer, to do the same— and suddenly free, they had no idea what to do.

Neither wanted to go back to their old lives and yet they were not mages. Neither had money saved so they found a new job through the same man who offered them the job previously.

And so they chose and came to work for The Mistress.

The pay was good, Millie had claimed, when Tercius inquired about the circumstances of their employment after they were practically thrust at him, with no option of denial.

The sex was better, Tercius observed in the days that followed. The young man and woman were something of a couple, holding hands and kissing when they thought that no one was looking; doing even more when they thought that Tercius was asleep.

They were with Tercius every day from when he rose to when he fell asleep. They could bring him his meals to his room, if he wanted to, take care of Amber, they could take care of his dirty clothes and tidy his room. Anything and everything he requested.

If he had let them, they would have washed him every day before dinner when he came all sweaty from enduring pain. If he was fifteen or older, both would have gone to bed with him because their work description required it.

The mages cared little for sexuality, he noted quite early in his stay at the House. This did not come as a large surprise to him when he considered everything he saw since he came to the Pyramid. It was something that he attributed to a few reasons, the most notable one being the lack of any religion of note.

Just in Nurium, a small town of Sogea, there were temples and shrines to at least a dozen of Gods and Goddesses, yet the Pyramid had none and Tercius guessed that Chameos was probably similar. The priests of different religions followed different dogmas, and most were like the religion of his grandmother, simple teachings often based on the 'Live and let live' principle. There were a few of these religions that seemed neither here nor there and then, of course, there were darker ones, but they were a minority and they mostly practiced their dogma in hiding.

The mages were skeptics by nurture and any talk of 'divine' or 'rules of divine' only made mages want to make a few experiments on samples of whatever this divine was, or so Master Lazarus had claimed, with a smile and a snort, in one of his lectures.

He could only imagine how a conversation between a priest and a mage would go. Tercius laughed when he thought about his grandmother and how she would go about convincing a mage like Master Lazarus to believe in her Deity. To say nothing of Mistress Helfira...

Somewhat paradoxically, much to Tercius' repeated amusement, most mages followed the words of their idol, Grand-Master Tergaron, with a fervor that seemed religious at first glance. There were records where the man had repeatedly stated that a family was too precious an affair to be left to second place and that those who can't place family ahead of everything else shouldn't even think about forming one. The Grand-Master himself never had a family, his life was his work.

The 'Grand-Master never did it' argument, Tercius chuckled as he shook his head in amusement. The closest to a family that Grand-Master had been his Disciples, personal students of sorts. They could count as children, I guess.

As time in life was scarce, the culture of mages revolved around their personal craft, a solitary and focused way of life. If they found someone suitable, mages would follow in the Grand-Master's footsteps and take that person as a Disciple. It was something similar to what happened to his brother-in-stonecraft, Neiran. He was sort of adopted into their family, without any actual adoption taking place.

Still, Tercius agreed to a point with the man after whom the Pyramid was named. Anyone who couldn't put his desires and agendas aside easily should think thrice before having children. The world would be a much more pleasant place with only selfless parents in it.

The majority of mages had either one or, the more likely case, no biological children of their own. Out of two hundred students in the first year, only half a dozen were children of mages of the Pyramid, Penelope had claimed confidently a month back. Most of the students were children of non-magi from the city atop the Pyramid and Chameos, and the minority of students were children that arrived from all over the Empire.

Then, finally, there was the matter of inheritance.

Most mages had houses atop the Pyramid or to the north of the Pyramid, but neither of these was a personal belonging of a mage, but a stone-clad loan of sorts that would be in the personal possession of a mage for as long as they lived. Any knowledge acquired from the Repository was also non-inheritable, but anything self-made, be it from scratch or something derived enough to be considered separate, was fair game— as long as it was not sold to the Repository for points.

While the people of the Empire struggled to make an additional coin or buy a plot of land to pass it onto the next generation, the mages simply did not worry about either of those things. If you prove capable, you have it.

This was a generalization of the majority of mages, as Tercius saw it, and he knew that exceptions exist. They must, he firmly knew.

Mages were a very tolerant bunch, he would admit that, but even they had flaws.

Anyone without a craft was not directly discriminated against, the laws prohibited that, but there was a gulf nonetheless. A very 'us and them' attitude. It wasn't as if the teachers at the Academy were shouting that to be without a magical craft somehow made people inferior, no. Individuals derived that message themselves, simply by looking at how most non-mages lived.

Mages either pitied those without magical craft, others yet felt superior for the craft they possessed, and then a third group dismissively ignored those without it.

Perfect doesn't exist, Tercius noted absentmindedly, as he made his way to his favorite spot in the woodland park. Nor will it ever exist— except for my perfect Well… he smiled as his hand scratched Amber vigorously. A pleased purr only made his smile wider, even as the furnace in his chest sizzled and popped.

When he came to a spot a few meters away from the pond, where a large bough of a tree provided a large shade for him to rest under, Tercius slowly let Amber on the grassy surface and she immediately ran to the cold water only to jump in with a giant splash— one much larger than her small body merited.

He tried to set up the blanket he carried with him, but Millie and Sior sprang to help him. They basically ripped the blanket from his hands and went on to set it about the grass perfectly.

With clenched teeth, a result of pain and the two forceful servants, Tercius sat on the blanket and removed his shirt. It was a bit chilly, but as soon as he started the targeted development he knew that he would heat up. The pain always spiked while he concentrated mana and the coolness of the outside was a great help.

He laid flat on his back and closed his eyes. The hologram of the progress he did yesterday came to mind, his Visualization giving him a perfect memory of it. He slowly moved his fingers to where the Well was supposed to be, their passage leaving gooseflesh. He checked and rechecked the position of the fingers, repeatedly. Finally satisfied with it, he started pouring every drop of mana through his index fingers to two lagging mana channels.

"Fuck!" Tercius cursed through clenched teeth. The initial spike is always the worst!

Upping the mana that flowed through his fingers, made his eyes and ears turn red. Slowly, breathing in and out, he endured the stabs and continued until Sior called for him to stop.

"Thirty minutes start now," Sior stated and Tercius could imagine him flipping over the small hourglass that he carried.

The first ten minutes of the day are up. Thirteen more to go, today. Tercius thought as he got up with a pounding headache. Millie handed him a cup of water and he drank deeply, nodding with gratefulness. The worst part about having these two around is that I could get used to this pampering … but what do I do when I return back to the real world?