The hallway outside Sylas's room was narrow and poorly lit, with the same water-stained walls and cracked stone that characterized his quarters. Students moved through it with the practiced efficiency of people who'd learned to navigate obstacles without conscious thought—stepping over the broken floor tiles, ducking under the beam that had sagged three inches below where it should have been, avoiding the spot where water pooled from some unseen leak above. It was the kind of navigational competence that only developed through daily repetition, the body memorizing workarounds that the institution had never bothered to fix.

  Sylas joined the flow, keeping to the edge, moving slowly. His body protested every step—the cracked ribs especially made breathing an exercise in careful negotiation—but he forced himself forward. Information gathering required actually being present, and he'd learned nothing useful hiding in his room.

  No one looked at him. Students passed within arm's reach, but their eyes slid past him as if he were part of the architecture. Not hostile—that would have required acknowledgment—just utterly indifferent. He was scenery. Background detail. The human equivalent of a cracked wall, familiar enough to stop registering.

  Perfect.

  The hallway opened onto a wider corridor, and then into what might generously be called a courtyard. Sylas emerged into gray morning light and got his first proper look at the Azure Silt Academy.

  "Oh," he said quietly. "Oh, this is worse than I thought."

  The Academy wasn't just poor. It wasn't just underfunded. It was actively, aggressively falling apart—the kind of institutional decay that happened when no one in charge considered maintenance a priority, when the budget had been cut so many times there was nothing left to cut, when the people responsible for upkeep had either given up or left, and been replaced by nobody.

  The buildings were arranged in a rough square around a central courtyard, but 'arranged' implied a level of planning that clearly hadn't occurred. They looked like they'd been placed randomly and then left to sink at different rates into the ground beneath them. Because the ground was, as the name suggested, a mudflat. Actual mud. The kind that squelched when you walked on it and left brown stains on everything and slowly swallowed whatever was placed on it unless something was done about it, and nothing had apparently been done about it in decades.

  Wooden walkways crisscrossed the courtyard, raised a few inches above the mud. Many of them were rotting. Some had planks missing entirely, forcing students to jump gaps or take longer routes. Sylas watched a girl in faded blue robes navigate a particularly treacherous section with the weary expertise of someone who'd done it a thousand times—weight on the left plank, skip entirely the right one that was only attached at one end, step directly on the support beam when the next section of planking had given way.

  The buildings themselves were in various stages of decay. The dormitory he'd just left—a three-story structure that leaned noticeably to the left—was actually one of the better-maintained ones. Across the courtyard, what appeared to be a lecture hall had visible gaps in its roof where the tiles had slipped and not been replaced, letting in light in thin diagonal shafts that illuminated columns of floating dust. Next to it, a storage building had simply given up on one corner, the walls having subsided into the mud at such an angle that the whole structure looked like it was bowing in apology for its own existence.

  In the center of the courtyard, someone had attempted to create a proper plaza. There was a raised stone platform, cracked and listing, with what had probably once been an impressive statue—the base was carved with what looked like formal inscription, nearly illegible now from weathering. The statue had lost its head at some point, and someone had balanced a wooden training dummy on the stump of its neck in what Sylas assumed was meant to be humor. Given the overall atmosphere of the Academy, he wasn't entirely sure it wasn't simply resourcefulness.

  The sky above was the color of tarnished copper—that strange metallic sheen that suggested this world's atmosphere operated on principles his old one hadn't. In the distance, beyond the Academy's crumbling outer walls, Sylas could see other floating islands. Some were close enough to make out details: buildings, trees, terraced cultivation grounds where green mana crystals caught the light, the occasional flash of what might have been cultivation techniques being practiced by people with enough energy and resources to practice them visibly. Others were distant specks on the horizon, visible only as dark shapes against the copper sky, their altitude and distance marking their status as clearly as any signboard.

  The Shattered Spheres. Thousands of islands floating in a sea of mana, arranged in rough hierarchies of power and prestige. And the Azure Silt Academy was so far down that hierarchy it might as well have been underground. The mud it was built on was a physical metaphor that felt almost too deliberate—this was where things sank to, eventually, if nobody caught them.

  Sylas made his way carefully along one of the walkways, testing each plank before putting his full weight on it. His goal was the large open space on the eastern side of the courtyard—based on Original-Sylas's fragmentary memories, that was the main training yard.

  As he walked, he catalogued the Academy's failures with the automatic precision of someone who'd spent years writing incident reports. Inadequate drainage: check. Structural subsidence requiring urgent attention: check. Deferred maintenance escalated to the point of critical failure risk: check. No visible safety measures of any kind: check. Inadequate lighting in the covered walkways: check. Evidence of water infiltration through at least four separate roof structures: check. The Academy was a liability report waiting to be written, and the only reason it probably hadn't collapsed entirely was that the mana saturation of the island's foundation was doing the structural work that proper engineering should have been doing.

  They probably didn't have building codes. Personal power likely superseded legal recourse when you could reinforce a wall by punching it with cultivated mana.

  The training yard was, predictably, also built on mud. Someone had spread gravel over it in a half-hearted attempt at creating a stable surface, but the gravel had long since been pressed into the mud by years of students' feet, creating a surface that was somehow both slippery and sticky. Wooden posts had been driven into the ground at intervals, and targets—straw-stuffed dummies, wooden boards, cloth banners with painted circles—hung from them at various heights, weathered to the same gray-brown as everything else at the Academy.

  About thirty students were present, arranged in rough clusters that made their social and academic hierarchies immediately legible. Most wore the same faded robes Sylas had seen throughout the Academy—gray-blue cloth that had probably started as a proper uniform color but had been washed and worn into anonymity, the kind of garments that communicated their wearer's circumstances at a glance. A few students wore better-quality robes, dyed in brighter colors, the cloth still holding its shape in a way that suggested recent tailoring rather than inherited hand-me-downs. These students occupied the center of the yard while the others worked at the edges, not because anyone had explicitly arranged it that way, but because the arrangement had evolved organically and nobody had disrupted it.

  Hierarchy made visible through clothing and spatial arrangement. Sylas filed that observation away. It was exactly the kind of informal power structure that operated below the level of official policy—unwritten, unacknowledged, and consequently impossible to challenge through official channels.

  He found a spot at the very edge of the training yard, near a section of fence that had partially collapsed, and settled into a position where he could observe without being in anyone's way. A few students glanced at him—he was standing in what was probably considered the 'failure section,' the geographic expression of academic standing—but no one commented. He was beneath notice.

  An instructor stood on a slightly raised platform of wooden planks. He was a thin man, middle-aged, with the kind of face that suggested he'd given up on enthusiasm years ago and was now running purely on institutional momentum. His robes were better quality than the students' but still showed signs of wear—the hem fraying, the cuffs slightly discolored. A man who cared about appearances enough to maintain them but whose budget for doing so had clearly been declining. His expression as he surveyed the training yard was the specific blankness of someone completing a required task they found neither satisfying nor offensive. Just necessary.

  "Standard circulation drill," the instructor called out, his voice carrying the particular flatness of someone who'd said the same words a thousand times and expected to say them a thousand more. "First-rank pattern. Focus on consistency, not speed. Begin."

  The students shifted into meditation postures. Some sat cross-legged on the muddy gravel. Others stood in a specific stance that Original-Sylas's memories identified as the "Foundation Breathing Position"—feet shoulder-width apart, spine straight, hands resting palm-up on the thighs, chin slightly lowered. All of them closed their eyes and began to circulate mana.

  Sylas watched.

  He couldn't see mana with his physical eyes—he wasn't advanced enough for that, and his cultivation base was destroyed besides. But something was happening that shouldn't have been possible. When he focused on a particular student, let his mind settle into that analytical state he'd spent fourteen years cultivating, he could sense something.

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  Not visually. Not exactly. It was more like data visualization. The kind of thing he'd done with network traffic analysis at Celestial Logistics, where you couldn't see the actual packets moving through the system, but you could see representations of them—graphs, flow diagrams, heat maps showing where bottlenecks occurred, color gradients indicating energy density. The underlying system made visible through the patterns it created, rather than the system itself.

  He was seeing the students' mana circulation patterns as flow diagrams.

  The closest student—a boy about sixteen, sitting cross-legged with the slightly forced stillness of recent learning—was circulating mana through the standard first-rank pattern. Sylas could trace the flow: in through the crown, down through the central channel, out through the seventeen meridian points specified in the manual, gathering in the dantian, then back up to complete the cycle. Exactly as described. Exactly as practiced.

  And he could see the waste.

  "That mana circulation pattern has a sixty percent waste coefficient," Sylas muttered, not quite believing what he was seeing. He blinked, refocused, ran the numbers again. The figure held.

  The student was drawing in mana—that part was fine, the intake functioning adequately. But as the energy moved through his meridian system, it was leaking at every junction. Dissipating into his body tissue instead of being directed to his core. Getting caught in eddy currents created by the unnecessarily complex pathway, spinning in small useless circles at the bends and junctions where the route changed direction without need. Losing coherence and degrading into waste heat that the student's body would simply absorb and lose.

  Of the mana the student drew in, maybe forty percent actually made it to his dantian for storage. The rest just leaked away. Wasted effort. Energy spent for no gain, like running a pipeline at full pressure and finding sixty percent of what you pumped simply gone by the time it reached the destination.

  Sylas looked at the next student. Same pattern. Different waste coefficient—this one was maybe fifty-five percent efficient, slightly better, the pathways slightly cleaner—but still absurdly wasteful by any reasonable engineering standard.

  He scanned the training yard. Every student he focused on showed the same basic problem. They were all following the standard technique from the manual, and they were all haemorrhaging energy at a rate that would have triggered an emergency audit and immediate remediation if this had been a mana distribution network in the Celestial Logistics system. He would have been on the phone with his supervisor within ten minutes. By afternoon, three engineers would have been on site. The waste alone was a financial disaster in any commercial context.

  The students in the better robes—the ones occupying the center of the yard—were more efficient, he noted. Their waste coefficients ranged from forty to fifty percent. Better than the average students, but still terrible by any objective standard.

  The difference, Sylas realized, wasn't that they knew better techniques. They were using the exact same standard pattern, the same seventeen-point circuit, the same inefficient route. They were just healthier, better-fed, more practiced, their bodies maintained at the level of consistent nourishment and rest that allowed meridians to function cleanly. Their channels were in better condition, so the mana flowed more smoothly even through the poorly designed pathways. They could draw in more ambient energy, so even with the same waste percentage, they ended up with more net gain.

  It was a system that rewarded existing advantage. The strong got stronger not because they were more skilled, but because they had the resources to afford inefficiency. They could waste sixty percent of their intake and still accumulate enough to advance, because they had so much more to begin with.

  Meanwhile, students like Original-Sylas—malnourished, poorly prepared, starting from nothing—were expected to use the same technique while operating at a massive structural disadvantage. And when they failed because they couldn't afford to waste sixty percent of the energy they struggled to gather in the first place, the system labelled them as trash and sent them to Reclamation. Their failure was treated as evidence of personal inadequacy rather than systemic design.

  "This is criminal," Sylas said quietly. "This entire system is criminal negligence dressed up as meritocracy."

  A student nearby opened one eye, glanced at Sylas with mild curiosity, then closed it again and returned to his practice. Apparently talking to yourself in the failure section of the training yard wasn't even noteworthy. Either it happened frequently enough to be unremarkable, or the failure section's inhabitants were so thoroughly written off that their behavior required no response.

  Sylas forced himself to think methodically. Getting angry was unproductive. He had spent enough of his first life being angry about systems that didn't care whether he was angry or not. The system was broken—fine. That was valuable information. Now, what could he do with it?

  He couldn't fix the system. He had no power, no authority, no platform from which to even articulate a complaint. Even if he somehow convinced someone to listen—which he wouldn't, because he was a bottom-ranked student one exam away from Reclamation, and people in that position did not get listened to—they wouldn't care. The system worked perfectly for the people in charge. It was supposed to filter out the weak. That was the product, not a flaw in the product.

  But he could optimize his own position within it.

  If everyone was using a technique with a sixty percent waste coefficient, and that was considered normal, then Sylas didn't need to achieve perfect efficiency. He just needed to do better than sixty percent. Even reaching seventy percent efficiency would put him ahead of the average student, and he wouldn't look like he was doing anything unusual at all—he'd just look like someone who was slightly less terrible than expected.

  And if he could strip the unnecessary steps from the standard technique—reduce the number of meridian points, straighten the energy pathways, eliminate the redundant loops that served tradition rather than function—he might be able to create something that actually worked for his current condition. Lower total output than a healthy student, but genuinely executable without destroying his already-damaged channels.

  Weaker total output. But alive.

  The instructor called out something Sylas didn't catch. The students opened their eyes, stood, and began what appeared to be the next phase of training: physical techniques combined with mana projection.

  Sylas watched as a student stepped up to one of the wooden dummies. The boy—maybe fifteen, wearing decent-quality robes, moving with the easy confidence of someone who expected to succeed—took a stance, circulated mana to his right hand with visible effort, and struck the dummy with a palm strike that left a faint scorch mark on the wood. Clean technique, adequate output, no hesitation.

  "Acceptable," the instructor said without enthusiasm. "Next."

  Another student tried. This one, wearing worn robes similar to Sylas's, struggled visibly to gather enough mana. His face was tight with concentration that tipped into strain. His palm strike barely made contact with the dummy, producing no visible effect—no scorch, no impact mark, barely enough force to shift the dummy on its hanging rope.

  "Inadequate," the instructor said. "Again."

  The student tried three more times. Each attempt was weaker than the last—he was exhausting himself, burning through what little mana he'd managed to cultivate on the earlier drill, leaving himself with progressively less to work with. By the end, his face was gray and he was swaying slightly on his feet, the particular unsteadiness of mana depletion combined with physical fatigue. Sylas could see his circulation pattern fraying, the flow growing ragged and uneven as his reserves dropped toward nothing.

  "Still inadequate," the instructor said. "Step aside. You're on report."

  On report. One step closer to academic probation, according to Original-Sylas's memories. One step closer to Reclamation.

  The student stumbled to the edge of the training yard and sat down heavily in the mud—not on the gravel, just directly in the mud—his head in his hands, shoulders drawn up around his ears in the particular posture of someone who wanted to be smaller and invisible and elsewhere. No one went to help him. No one even looked at him. He'd failed publicly, and that failure had rendered him invisible, beneath the notice even of people who were themselves near the bottom of the hierarchy.

  Sylas recognized that posture. He recognized the quality of the silence around that boy. He'd seen it in break rooms, in open-plan offices, in meeting rooms where someone had just presented and been dismissed. The silence of people who were relieved it wasn't them, and therefore had a strong motivation to not look too closely at the person it was.

  He turned away. The training continued. More students demonstrating techniques. More visible gaps in competence. More casual cruelty disguised as evaluation, delivered in the flat tone of institutional process rather than personal malice, which somehow made it worse.

  Sylas watched it all, his mind cataloguing patterns and inefficiencies with the automatic precision of fourteen years' practice. By the time the instructor called an end to the session, he had a rough model of how the Academy operated.

  It was a sorting mechanism, not an educational institution. The point wasn't to teach all students to succeed—the point was to identify which students would succeed regardless, and filter out everyone else as efficiently as possible. The strong survived. The weak were processed. And the system itself never changed, because it was working exactly as intended.

  The students began to disperse. Most headed toward another building—the dining hall, based on the flow of traffic and Original-Sylas's memories placing it on the western side of the courtyard. A few went back to the dormitories. The failing student still sat at the edge of the yard, his head in his hands, no longer swaying but very still.

  Sylas considered approaching him. Considered offering something—acknowledgment, at least, that the boy existed and had been seen. In his previous life he had been the person at the corner table eating alone, and he had occasionally wished someone had simply nodded.

  No. Getting involved meant being noticed. It meant potentially having expectations placed on him. It meant human connection, and human connection meant vulnerability, and vulnerability meant the possibility of being used or manipulated or simply distracted from the core objective of survival. He had learned, across two lives, not to underestimate how much a single act of acknowledged connection could complicate an otherwise simple situation.

  He turned away and headed back toward the dormitory, moving slowly to accommodate his injured body, testing each plank on the walkways with the careful patience of someone who'd learned not to trust load-bearing structures in this place. He had information now. He understood the system. And he had the beginnings of a plan.

  Step one: Optimize the standard circulation technique into something he could actually perform with his current damaged channels.

  Step two: Pass the next examination with the minimum acceptable score—not a zero, not a hundred, but the specific number that meant 'still here, not worth further attention.'

  Step three: Continue to be so unremarkable that no one in this institution ever had a reason to think about him.

  It wasn't heroic. It wouldn't save anyone. It wouldn't fix the system that had killed Original-Sylas and doubtless countless others before him, wouldn't change the waste coefficients that the entire Academy treated as natural law, wouldn't do anything about the boy sitting in the mud at the edge of the training yard.

  But it might keep Current-Sylas alive long enough to find the exit from this narrative. To locate the point in this world where a man could have a small house and a reliable income and a complete and permanent absence of dramatic destiny.

  And that, for now, would have to be enough.