A sudden shadow passing the glass partition snapped Victor out of his reverie.
He looked up to see Mrs. Bates walking down the row of cubicles, her digital clipboard glowing as she monitored the students’ active data fields.
Realizing he couldn’t afford to just daydream and waste his mental stamina staring at abstract colors, Victor immediately shifted his focus back to the task at hand.
It was time to actually start executing the strict parameters of the technical scale.
Like every other high schooler in the Federation, Victor had the precise technical requirements of the Three Static Foundation Scales deeply drilled into his memory.
He didn’t need a sheet to know what to do next.
He closed his eyes for a brief second to center his baseline, then reopened them, locking his gaze entirely on the terminal monitor as he initiated his efforts.
To successfully complete the Scale of the Field, Victor had to consciously manipulate his bio-acoustic energy, channeling a steady stream of Bloom from the center of his palm outward toward his fingertips.
He felt the micro-gel beneath his skin instantly thicken, pushing back against his hand with an erratic, mechanical resistance as it measured his force distribution.
The digital waveform graph on the console spiked sharply, flashing an unsteady warning peak that indicated his frequency was beginning to bleed unevenly.
Victor didn’t panic.
Working with focus, he methodically adjusted the weight of his knuckles millimeter by millimeter, consciously smoothing out his adolescent half-tier static.
He forced his mind to control the pressure, holding the exact five-pound tactile compression required by the sensor array.
It was a grueling, tedious effort that made the muscles in his forearm ache, but he pushed through the physical strain.
Slowly but surely, under his concentrated guidance, the jagged, chaotic spikes on the diagnostic monitor began to round out, gradually flattening into the flawless, uniform horizontal line of a perfectly balanced scale.
After holding his posture tightly for the full duration of the drill, Victor finally pulled his palm away from the micro-gel.
He heaved a deep breath and immediately began using his left hand to massage his right, trying to restore circulation.
From maintaining the absolute, unyielding pressure for several minutes straight, his fingers and wrist had grown stiff and locked.
“Good work, Mr. Winterborne,” Mrs. Bates’s voice suddenly resonated clearly inside the small space.
Victor looked toward the partition wall.
The assistant instructor hadn’t physically opened the glass door.
In the Federation’s modern facilities, teachers could seamlessly use their resonance to connect directly with a room’s central technical interface.
By feeding their vocal frequencies straight into the specialized Sound-Imagery networks running through the architecture, they could completely bypass the thick, soundproofing materials and project their voices crisply into an isolated cubicle without causing any external noise. Find the original chapter at novelping.com.
“Your stability values on the sensor log were remarkably consistent for the final stretch,” she continued, her voice projecting softly from the console’s internal filters.
“Your wave correction was clean, and although you have a very solid baseline technique, you still have some minor points to improve regarding your finger distribution during the initial kinetic shift. Take a short two-minute break to rest your joints, and then I want you to cycle back and repeat the timeline parameters for a second trial.”
“Understood, Mrs. Bates,” Victor replied politely toward the console interface, his tone carrying smoothly into the transmitter.
He dropped his hands back onto his lap, leaning back against the plastic chair to let his aching forearm muscles fully relax before the countdown could start all over again.
The two-minute rest window closed quickly, and Victor positioned his right hand over the micro-gel once more.
He focused entirely on the diagnostic monitor, keeping Mrs. Bates’s specific feedback in mind.
To fix the uneven distribution during the initial kinetic shift, he slightly adjusted the angle of his knuckles, applying a more deliberate, isolated pressure through his outer fingers the exact moment his palm made contact with the sensor grid.
The viscoelastic pad hummed, but this time, the aggressive, erratic vibration beneath his pinky was noticeably weaker.
On the screen, the initial spike in the audio signal energy didn’t plunge as sharply as before, flattening out into a smooth, controlled horizontal line with far less effort.
Victor spent the next hour locked inside the quiet glass cubicle, systematically running through identical three-minute trials.
It was tedious, repetitive work, but he maintained a stubborn focus, adjusting his physical stance millimeter by millimeter with each pass.
By the end of the hour, his forearm muscles were burning with a deep, dull ache, and the skin of his palm was completely warm from the constant friction against the high-density gel.
But he felt excited at the thought that this practice would help him control his ability better.
Satisfied that he had logged a solid block of technical data for his Scale of the Field requirements, Victor finally disconnected his terminal interface and lifted his hand from the device.
He checked the digital countdown timer on the wall console.
He still had a good chunk of the afternoon remaining, so he decided to take a fifteen-minute rest break to let his locked joints fully recover before switching gears to train with a completely different instrument and scale.
Victor walked over to the cooling unit near the back of the hall, grabbed a small bottle of water, and downed half of it to soothe his dry throat.
Leaving his empty pressure pad on the tech bench, he navigated toward the designated rest area of the resonance hall, sinking comfortably into a plush, ergonomic armchair.
With his fifteen-minute timer now ticking away, Victor leaned his head back, allowing his aching right forearm and his heavy mental battery to completely recharge.
He spent the quiet downtime simply observing his classmates work.
Because the rest area sat on a slightly elevated platform, he had a clear, unobstructed view across the entire room.
Even though the acoustic isolation technology kept the actual sound levels completely muted in his sector, the visual imagery generated by his peers was fully active.
Over in the musical section, he watched Susie gently plucking the strings of an acoustic guitar; beneath her fingers, the Scale of the Silhouette wove a shifting tableau of flat, semi-transparent indigo gears turning in midair around her instrument.
A few rows down, another student was executing a vocal pitch drill, causing a vibrant, high-definition pane of deep crimson light—perfectly smooth and solid—to hover like a pane of stained glass directly in front of his face.
Even Dylan was visible through a nearby booth window, his face squeezed into an expression of intense concentration as a loose, slightly flickering, blurry emerald form fluctuated unsteadily over his palms.
No matter where Victor looked, every single student was actively translating their inner biological frequencies into physical light anomalies.
It was a completely normal Friday routine for a high school class in the Federation, but to Victor, sitting back with his water bottle in hand, watching the colorful shapes dance silently across the room was a highly fascinating, peaceful way to pass the time.
Once his fifteen-minute rest timer chimed, Victor stood up from the armchair and walked over to the technical supply racks.
He selected a Shear-Track Stylus and navigated straight back to his glass cubicle to begin his next practice.
This specific apparatus was engineered to train the first foundation scale—the Scale of the Perimeter—which demanded razor-sharp edge precision by combining Shear to cut clean lines and Convergence to securely lock the endpoints together.
The device consisted of a heavily weighted, fountain-pen-like stylus attached via an articulated arm to a dense magnetic baseplate.
The plate itself housed an array of dynamic electromagnetic tracks that could shift to form basic geometric boundaries, such as squares, triangles, or stars.
Victor settled back into his chair, set the baseplate to a standard square layout, and firmly gripped the stylus .
The tactile mechanism required him to physically glide the tip along the magnetic track to trace a continuous, uninterrupted 2D boundary.
The moment he initiated the motion, the physics of the device engaged, applying a heavy, dynamic lateral drag against his hand.
To successfully complete the shape, Victor had to exert a highly precise, unchanging amount of Shear force—steadily pushing against the magnetic tension without letting his grip slip or waver for a single millimeter.
Because he was still locked in the Tier 1.5 adolescent half-tier, the visual light anomaly manifesting above the plate was just a loose, blurry trail of blue mist tracing his path, completely lacking the razor-sharp sharpness of an adult’s pulse.
He didn’t focus on the fuzzy, adolescent light drifting over the baseplate.
Instead, Victor kept his eyes fixed firmly on the terminal monitor, watching the real-time data readings to ensure his frequency and pressure were following the exact parameters of the scale correctly.
He knew that if he diligently maintained this technical discipline now, his foundation would be perfectly primed; once he officially hit his eighteenth birthday and transitioned into the Tier 2 Adult stage, his stabilized frequency would allow him to easily manifest sharp, clear geometric forms like squares, circles, and triangles using this precise scale technique.
And just like his other classmates, Victor spent the whole afternoon training his ability.
And he was so focused on it that he didn’t even feel time passing.
So, when the bell rang announcing the end of the afternoon practice, he was taken by surprise.