That same afternoon, the Hollow Ecology lecture.
It took place in the building called the Grand Lecture Hall, which occupied the northern side of the Plaza. Grey stone, tall arched windows, and fifteen tiers of seating curving down around a low stage. It could hold three hundred students at once.
Grey light came through the windows and didn't reach the back rows. The lamps on the stone ribs were lit but dim.
On the stage, the instructor turned a page without looking up. He appeared to be in his late sixties.
They said he had been teaching Hollow Ecology at Aegis for forty-one years.
Once behind the lectern, the old man glanced at the surrounding seats. "Good afternoon."
No answer, as expected, though it wasn't as if he cared much. "Hollow Ecology. Chapter nine. Deep-strata adaptation."
He turned the page and went on teaching as if the students weren't worth addressing, or waiting for any response from them, though he quietly looked up all the same.
And as expected, nobody was listening. The small hope in his eyes dimmed.
In the fourth tier, a boy was asleep with his mouth open. In the third, someone was sketching. In the front row, three students were whispering about a girl from the Weaver division.
Young people, he sighed.
Forty-one years, and it was the same every year. The bottom-ranked class in the academy: the failed vessels, the bankrupt houses, the ones who'd scraped in on a scholarship or a family debt, and not one of them was even trying.
Why would they even show up, when their families had sacrificed so much hoping they would turn things around?
But just as he shook his head, the instructor's eyes narrowed slightly, because he noticed.
Of all the idle bodies in that hall, one boy was writing. Head down, one hand braced against the desk, pencil moving fast and steady. Dark charcoal hair had fallen forward over his brow and he hadn't pushed it back.
That student glanced up once, pale ash-gray eyes, half-lidded, unhurried and then looked down again, and the corner of his mouth moved.
...Ah. Looking at this student, the dim hope in his eyes rose again. But he tilted his head slightly to one side, puzzled, turning something over in his memory.
Hadn't there been talk about that one recently?
...
Of course that student no one other than Lucian.
But contrary to what the instructor thought, he was not writing down anything the instructor said.
His pencil was moving, yes, fast enough that the paper made a soft continuous rasp under his hand.
But his mind was somewhere else entirely. It had been buzzing since the basket, two streams running at once, tangled together and pulling in opposite directions.
One was the instructor's flat voice, droning on about strata depths and ambient temperatures.
The other was four hundred and fifty chapters of a novel he had read in one night, four days before he died.
"The Frost-Borer Slug-"
Lucian's pencil was already moving.
Frost-Borer Slug.
He ran both streams side by side.
Lecture: Rank One. Deep strata. Kingdom-wide. Common pest.
Novel: Same.
Lecture: Endothermic core sac in the lower body. Permits brief proximity to magma vents for mineral feeding.
Novel: Same.
Lecture: The sac is the basis of all refrigeration rune manufacture in Veridia.
Novel: Same, but the novel had never said that out loud. It had just mentioned that alchemists wanted them.
Hmm. His brows furrowed, the faint crease between them that appeared whenever something didn't line up. He looked at the two lines he'd written, then at the lectern, then back down.
So the book was right about the anatomy and wrong about the economy. Good to know which half to trust.
He tapped the pencil against the page once, twice, and then kept writing.
Then his pencil moved again. Not everything, of course, he started from what mattered:
Name: Frost-Borer Slug.
Rank 1.
Threat: low - individually.
Length 60–80 cm. Body translucent, pale blue.
He skipped the ecology. Skipped the migration patterns. Skipped the strata depths, which he already knew, and the alchemical history, which didn't matter to him who was going to eat the thing raw.
Then, on the next line:
STRENGTHS:
He paused. That was the part where he had to decide which strengths were real. The novel had described things the instructor hadn't. The instructor was describing things the novel had glossed over.
So in the end, he needed to sort them.
Near-liquid-nitrogen bile, he wrote. Spray, maybe three meters. Armored shell. Steel slides off.
That was what Arthur had said, or what the narrator had described in the original story.
He underlined Arthur once, to remember where that knowledge had come from.
Two sources. One was the story. One was this room.
WEAKNESSES:
Armor is back only. Belly soft. A memory surfaced: the scene where Arthur had flipped one over with the flat of a blade, then a boot heel.
He finished the line and drew a short horizontal rule beneath the entry, he'd started doing that without meaning to, some habit from the warehouse.
At that moment, the instructor's voice cut in.
"The first contact with humanity dates to the first decades after the Great Cataclysm, when early mining expeditions began descending into the Hollows. They found entire cavern floors coated in pale blue slugs."
The instructor paused and scanned the room before continuing.
"The first miners died of frostbite. The second wave worked out that the creatures could be flipped with poles."
That was all. This time, Lucian, who had been leaning forward with excitement, finally let his shoulders slump.
His neck loosened, and he raised his head, settling back to half-listen to the explanations and extra details he probably wouldn't need anytime soon.
Then.
After a long explanation, the entry was finished. Then:
"Next."
Lucian's mind snapped back.
"Dismantler Hounds. Rank Two. Mid-depth strata. Uncommon."
…
Two days passed since then. In those two days, Lucian had spent them training the Three Pillars, getting familiar with his skills, and sorting through his memories from the original story.
Ahh, that was a relief. He yawned.
Of course it was because he had been holding all that information from the story in his head for days, terrified of forgetting it.
Now it was all down on paper. How could he not feel relieved?
When he finally walked out of the Grand Lecture Hall after his usual session, his phone vibrated.
A text notification flashed.
"Tomorrow night. The weather reports say the quarry will freeze over. We move or we lose the slugs."
It came from Karin, of course.
It's time.
He read the message twice. Then he typed back a single word, pocketed the slate, and let the corner of his mouth curled up.
"Ready." He replied easily.