Mira finally stopped quizzing them when the lunch bell rang. “I expect the three of you to stay safe this weekend, and I’ll see you next week. Just as a reminder, next week continues this class’s extended period setup to help you catchup on everything. After that, it will go back to the normal style of being a single-period-long class.” She waved to them while gathering up the various books from her desk.

“Ugh,” Nate muttered as he cracked his back with a quick twist once they were out the door and into the noisy hallway. “She really went at us today.”

“Yeah, she really did. I get the feeling that she was serious about wanting us to be prepared for this weekend,” Lindsay said as they pushed through the crowd toward the lunchroom.

“Speaking of which, my parents will be picking me up after school today. So, I won’t be needing a ride home. We are going to get me some new kukris along with all the other equipment they haven’t managed to scrounge together by that point for the expedition.”

“I wish we were going with your parents again,” Angie complained. A pout crinkled the space between her brows as she pursed her lips. “I just know this weekend is going to turn out to be an utterly standard affair. They are going to take us to a strictly regulated area. Maybe let us get a couple of hits on one of the beasts, and that will be it for the entire time. The entire experience will be nothing more than a glorified camping trip.”

“You could bring your phones or radios, and give me a call,” Nate suggested casually as they moved through the line and began picking out their food and placing it on their platters. “I promise to make you as jealous as I possibly can by how much more fun I am having. You know, as I slog through the forest, and get covered in slime, and who knows what else?”

A couple of the closest groups of kids were clearly listening in, as they had stopped eating entirely and were leaning toward their table. None of them were even bothering to try and hide what they were doing.

One of the good things that had come from the girls forming their cores was suddenly everyone had stopped bothering them. All the fake friends that had surrounded them for years -the ones they despised- had suddenly vanished. No longer were they being constantly accosted by sycophants who just wanted to climb the social ladder through borrowed connections. For once, they were being left blessedly alone, and although strange, they were enjoying it for the most part.

Unfortunately, even now, there was the sense that everyone was just waiting for them to show some sort of weakness. An undercurrent of unease was rippling through the cafeteria as each student sensed the balance had been disrupted.

Not that the three responsible for that disruption particularly cared. They were just going about their business, talking, and making plans.

The rest of the students were left with a conundrum. Did they let those three exist outside the balance of power, or did they try to drag them back into the fold? Strictly speaking, could they even do anything against them? They were proper cultivators now, with cores.

Even Nate, with his low-quality core, could take on all the students there and win.

So, where did that leave them? It was a matter that they would have to think about later.

Nate stood up after finishing his lunch. “I’ll see you both in Brick’s class. Have fun until then.”

Unlike Lindsay and Angie, he was not as clueless to what the other students had been feeling. The various emotions and thoughts each had were easily read on their faces. He had been dragged into enough messes since coming to this school, and this was one he did not want to be a part of.

He would hang around outside the cafeteria doors and listen to what was being said. But he didn’t want to be a part of it. The location would let him be close enough to step in if the situation called for it. However, he seriously doubted it would. These kids all attended this school for a reason. Money was a major factor, but brains were also a requirement. None of them were stupid, and attacking the girls would be stupid.

In the end, nothing happened. Lindsay and Angie had always existed outside the power structure of the school, so this was nothing new for them all. It was annoying that they could no longer suck up to the girls, but that was about it.

The real problem was Nate, but he was also something of a conundrum for the student body. Until recently, he had always been an unobtrusive nonentity. Someone who had floated around outside all of their radars. No one really knew him, except by reputation, or because they had been in class with him. Yet, somehow, a boy like that had managed to do what all of them had been trying for so long.

Worse, it hadn’t even been him who had made the first move, but Angelica.

When they all thought about it properly, they realized that they couldn’t approach him lightly, either. It didn’t matter who his parents were or how much money the boy had. It was becoming clear to them that he had backing from another source, one that could influence Angie and Lindsay. And that made him untouchable as well.

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A few minutes after Nate stood up from the lunch table, a lone girl approached them and carefully took his vacated seat. She sat with them for a little over a minute before quickly excusing herself and hurrying back to her previous table.

Lindsay’s brows were furrowed in thought, while Angie was tapping away at the table in front of her. Whatever the girl had said to them was obviously causing them to think about something in turn.

Shrugging his shoulders, Nate turned and headed to his next class. He still had several minutes before it would begin, but there were several items he could do to occupy his time with until then. There was always working on the dungeons as a viable and seemingly never-ending time waster. Or also of a more immediate concern, he could work on the meditation art.

There was something that he wanted to try though. It was an idea that had come to him the night before while he was working his way through the second dungeon, practicing his energy skills. There might be a way to make basic ties useful toward his meditation art research right away.

At least, that was his hope. It was also entirely possible that he was completely wrong with his idea, in which case all he was about to do was waste some time.

Pulling out his school notebook, Nate began writing out the shadow mediation art he had been working on. Each stroke of his pen filled the ink with a slight amount of qi as he wrote the words onto the paper. Basic ties needed qi to work with, so he was giving it exactly that. At the same time, ink and paper couldn’t handle much, so he had to be careful not to give them anything more than a trickle of energy.

As soon as he finished writing out the first stanza of the art, he dropped his pen and activated the skill.

Due to how little qi, he had been able to use the information he received back was minor. There was no flood of feelings that he needed to work his way through. Instead, it simply showed him the entire stanza in a variety of colors. Green where it tied together well. Yellow, where the connection was shaky, and red, where it was broken entirely. The colors intermixed at times to show him words that sort of worked but also didn’t. The meaning of the words in those spots was a little shaky.

Even before he thought about combining multiple mediation arts, it looked as though he had a lot of work cut out for him in just making the first one better.

He would need to work his way through each of the sentences, slowly replacing words with ones that he thought would fit better. Then he would need to use the skill again, each time. In other words, it would become a giant, exhausting, and very annoying game of mix and match. One where he could potentially change the meaning of every stanza in the meditation art if he wasn’t careful.

Nate quickly noted which words were yellow and which were red as the rest of the class trickled in around him.

***

When Nate reached Brick Jone’s class, he found the man already sitting at his desk. The teacher was leaning over something with a look of incredible focus on his face.

Walking up to the side of his desk, he had a feeling he knew what the man was so absorbed in reading. Taking a quick peek, he grinned and leaned closer.

“It came in then?”

Brick started in surprise, the crown of his head nearly bumping into Nate’s nose. “You startled me! What was that? Oh, uh yes. Last night, actually. They managed to finish copying it early and were able to get it delivered right to my house. You still won’t get it till Monday though.”

“That’s fine. I’m still working on properly incorporating the shadow meditation art. I’m making progress on it and my overall cultivation speed has improved, but I still have a long way to go on it. Speaking of which, check out what I discovered earlier today.” Nate quickly told him about how he had written out the first part of the meditation art, and what it had shown him.

“That is incredible!” Brick immediately grabbed a pen and paper and wrote out the first stanza of one of his own meditation arts. “Tell me what you see.”

Nate activated his energy skill and saw the now familiar mix of colors.

The teacher frowned as Nate told him what he was seeing. “Interesting. I have a twice-evolved version of the basic tie’s skill myself, that is part of the reason I knew about it in the first place. I admit that I never experimented with it much when I was younger, something that I regretted when I learned what it was truly capable of. This though… this is odd. What I see is completely different from what you see.”

“Is it trying to modify the ties to make them more appropriate for the wielder?” Nate asked.

Brick shook his head. “That isn’t how the skill works, or at least it shouldn’t be. That would be a possible evolution, but you have only had the skill for a day. You are months at the earliest, away from the first skill evolution. It is interesting though, I admit. What you are seeing is personalized to you. What I am seeing, isn’t. There is far more yellow than yours, and next to no red. Which means this stanza only needs a few modifications to become better.”

“Couldn’t it just mean that meditation art is already suited for you? It is one of yours, right?”

The teacher shook his head. “No, this isn’t for one of my affinities. This is actually Lindsay’s meditation art.”

Nate pulled back and tapped his lip. “Hmm, well, mine will help me, but yours will help others. Definitely suited for a teacher. I’m kind of sad that I can’t help them as well, but maybe in the future I’ll be able to personalize their meditation arts in the same way I can mine.”

“It’ll be interesting to see for sure. Still, this really is an incredible discovery. How did you even think to try this?”

“I noticed that basic ties only works with items that have qi inside them. I don’t know, it just made sense to me that this would work. I mean, assuming that I had been able to control my qi while writing it out, that is. The words making up the stanza would have qi and the skill should still be able to tell what it was supposed to do from my existing knowledge of the art.

“That last part is where I really became unsure if it would work or not. Just because I know something doesn’t mean the energy skill does. However, during my experiments with it last night, I saw enough examples where it used my own knowledge for certain things that I felt confident it would work.”

“Just how late did you stay up last night practicing?”

“Hmm, not very- Oh look, the girls are here, time to start class,” Nate told him with a grin, abruptly changing the subject.