"Kryonium," I said calmly. "The metal that can hold the most Chi within itself and is the most resistant to high Chi damage."
"Exactly," said Alex, raising his eyebrows as if a little surprised. "So you're not completely uninterested, good. But of course not all of the wall is Kryonium; if it were, the school's budget would run out in a day. There are only nine academies at this level in the world, one in every great city. Even if humanity invests all its power here, let's be honest; the world isn't that rich. Kryonium is an unbelievably rare and expensive ore."
We walked right up close to the wall. Alex went on, looking at the gray metal:
"Only the outermost layer of these thirty-meter ramparts, the one that meets the blow first, consists of a thin Kryonium coating. The inner part and main body of the wall are reinforced with the strongest, most durable metals humanity can produce. Even that much is an unimaginable fortune."
"In the end it's built so those mutated creatures outside can't get in," I said, remembering the purplish veins of the badger I had seen in the laboratory a short while ago. "It's obvious where the money goes."
"You're thinking right," said Alex, but then his voice dropped another notch, as if he didn't want everyone to hear what he was about to say. "But there's something else, and hardly anyone knows this. Apparently they could actually build these walls on the 4th Wall at the city's outer edge too, if they wanted, but they don't because extra resources would have extra costs. Of course these are nothing more than rumors; since the academy was also designed as a shelter in the event of an attack, I think it's normal for all the power to go into these walls. Besides, there's an enormous difference between the 4th Wall that encircles the city and the academy's walls; they probably couldn't cover even a fiftieth of it, but they don't explain this information that clearly. Generally they brush it off by saying the city's walls are incompatible with Kryonium."
"Why isn't it explained?" I asked; my interest had genuinely woken up by now.
"So it doesn't cause panic, I suppose; after all, nobody wants to know that the city's outermost wall is actually weak, right?" said Alex, shrugging, but the hesitation in his voice showed that he didn't fully believe this answer himself. "Or maybe there's another reason. I don't know, I'm only saying what I've heard."
We walked in silence for a while. The shadow of the wall fell over us, and the last lights of the evening gleamed in strange harmony with those hair-thin blue lines.
"Kai," Alex said suddenly, in a serious tone, stopping his steps. "Can I ask you something?"
"Ask," I said, a little surprised. It wasn't usual for Alex to speak this seriously.
"Do you think something's really happening outside the 4th Wall? I mean, more than what they tell us in class. My father sometimes, when he comes home, after meetings... he looks very tired. Not just from work. As if he's afraid of something."
This confession surprised me. Alex — Alex who always seemed so sure of himself, so proud — was now speaking in front of me with real worry.
"I don't know," I said honestly. "But lately I've been feeling similar things too. Small details, things that aren't explained. Maybe it's all coincidence."
"Maybe," said Alex, but there was an unconvinced tone in his voice. Then he pulled himself together and went back to his old arrogant manner, as if he wanted to hide the weakness he'd just shown. "Anyway, never mind all that. It's about to get dark. And since you've learned the school in general now, let's head back to the dormitory; we'll be getting up early again tomorrow."
"Works for me," I said, sticking my hands even deeper into my pockets, but inwardly I couldn't set that conversation aside.
Together we went along the wide walkway to Block C, and from there toward the dormitories. As Academy's enormous Kryonium-clad walls rose proudly behind us, the sky was surrendering completely to darkness. When I got back to my room I stretched out on the bed, but sleep wouldn't come at all. Alex's father's unexplained fear, Master Ren's mysterious disappearances, the symbol in that old book, the "unofficial" reinforcement of the walls — all of them clues that looked unimportant separately, kept tangling with one another in my mind.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
This time I felt that my philosophy of "I know my ceiling, I don't need to hurry" wasn't enough to explain everything in this world.
Since I couldn't fall asleep, I finally got up and opened my panel and looked at the "City News" tab — a section I usually paid no attention to at all. I ran my eye over the last week's headlines: a new trade agreement, the results of a sports competition, the academies' start-of-period statistics. There wasn't a single line about the thirty children who died in the southern forests. People really do busy themselves with very unimportant things. After that I dropped everything and went out for a short walk; the corridors were wide, and since this was the section with the best rooms anyway, it looked all the more prestigious.
I went out onto the balcony at the corner; I was on the top floor of the five-story dormitory, and the whole facility could be seen from here. As the wind gently stroked my hair, a very relaxing coolness settled over me. Along with the day's tiredness I sank into thought, about everything. My sister suddenly came to mind and I smiled; it would sadden me if something happened to her. Sorrow, feeling sad for someone else — feelings like this were always things I looked at in Master Ren and couldn't make sense of. I think I've started to push that door open a little.
Then I noticed sleep coming and went back to my bed, closed the panel and lay down, looking at the ceiling. There were thoughts turning over in my mind all that night: Alex's worry, the interesting information about the walls, Master Ren's disappearances, Ms. Laura's "cage" comparison, that unusual notification the System sent me. Alone, none of them meant anything. But lined up one after another, they looked like the small pieces of a large picture — a picture whose whole I couldn't see yet.
I decided to myself that when I went home at the weekend I had to talk to Master Ren. This time I wasn't going to be brushed off.
Late that night I woke to a message from Elisa. The notification on the phone was blinking as it vibrated:
"Brother, the Master still hasn't come back. He said Sunday evening, and now it's Monday night. I'm worried."
I looked at the clock — it was long past midnight. Master Ren sometimes came back later than he planned, but being a day late wasn't usual. The worry in Elisa's message turned into a restlessness that grew rapidly inside me too.
I got up out of bed, opened my panel and looked at the permissions system. Leaving the dormitory on weekdays after twelve o'clock was normally forbidden, but my scholarship level allowed certain flexibilities. I told the system the lie that I had something I needed to check, and got dressed quickly. It was our class teacher who checked this anyway, and he liked me, I suppose.
The real issue wasn't leaving the dormitory, it was leaving the campus after eleven o'clock. Even there, if you did it once or twice every three or four weeks and made a note in the system, they didn't make an issue of it, on condition that you didn't push the limit. Though from what I'd heard, this seemed to be a privilege granted to badge-holding students and the elite class; it wasn't in the rulebook, but I'd heard of a few students being punished in the corridor because of these incidents.
When I got outside the night was cold by now, the sky cloudless and starless — because of the city's light pollution, a real star was never visible here anyway. As I stepped onto the walkway, I noticed in the distance a faint light leaking from a little-used service door at the back of Block C. Normally that door would be locked; students had no access there.
Curiosity won out. I approached silently and saw that the door was ajar — someone had either forgotten it or deliberately left it open. When I looked inside, a narrow staircase descended toward the laboratories on the −2nd floor. But the light I had seen wasn't coming from there; it came from much further down the stairs, from below even the -3rd floor where the arenas were — from a level that officially shouldn't exist.
At exactly that moment, I heard a familiar voice from below — muffled, tired, but clear: it was Master Ren's voice. "...if that boy really is what he seems, we can't hide it any longer," he was saying, his voice serious and tense. "He needs to know before the System notices him."
Another voice answered, a woman's voice, someone I didn't know: "What do you think happens if it notices? No one has been found in five hundred years, Ren. Maybe that boy's ceiling really is just a coincidence."
"It isn't coincidence. That control ability of his is like something out of the legends; he can even perceive anti-Chi." It was Master Ren's voice.
My breath knotted in my throat. My heart had started to beat fast.
Who was the "boy" they were talking about? For a moment Elisa came to mind, but then I realized — I remembered that moment when Master Ren touched my shoulder and locked my Chi flow in a way even the System couldn't see.
Could they be talking about me?
I took one more step, onto the first stair, to hear the voices more clearly. But the old metal step under my foot let out a faint creak — a small, almost inaudible sound, but the conversation below stopped abruptly.