Devourer Of Destiny - Chapter 138

The next day, Ebon Dirge decided against continuing with sitting in his office waiting for another Theo to arrive. The prior days of sitting around had not yielded any benefit, and with the project he had given his pupil he didn’t expect another visit from him in the near term.

Dirge decided that a bit of investigation of the campus grounds was in order. Something fishy was going on with the management of this school, and since he could not indulge in a psychic investigation of the premises in his current state he would have to do it the old-fashioned way: by walking around and seeing things in person. There was no set plan or pattern to his wandering this time, as it was an initial expedition. Memorizing a physical layout was not a problem for him and wasn’t the purpose of the tour; he was more interested in the students and teachers and how they were operating.

The more he had investigated what was publicly known about the school’s history, and the more he had cross-referenced it against other information, the more he was convinced that the Celestial Ascendance Academy was this plane’s keystone school. Every Mortal Realm had an institution like this, a school founded through the influence of immortals who would make contact with a flourishing new plane.

Unlike the disconnected Mortal Realms, the Immortal Realms had a network of connections between them. Many influences spanned several of the planes, but some had tendrils laid out across all of them. One of these groups were known as the Missionaries.

Having achieved immortality and the endlessness of time that came with it, the journey of cultivation ended for many there. These individuals would whole-heartedly charge after other pursuits. They sought regional hegemony, happiness, wealth, and power. And some went after more esoteric things.

The Missionaries were the best known such eccentrics. Their “mission” was two things: preserving as much knowledge — especially the history of bygone planes — as possible, and sharing enough of that knowledge with newly born worlds to ensure that they didn’t wallow in the darkness of ignorance overlong. Due to the quirks of transit from immortal to mortal planes, they wouldn’t arrive straightaway at a new plane, but they’d only be a few millennia behind at best.

The powers of the Immortal Realms that came from those who ascended would jealously stand guard over their home planes, and those same powers would move to restrict downward expansion from their rivals into new planes, but nobody restricted the Missionaries in this way. Far too many had benefited from the leap forward provided freely by these eccentrics: the fundamentals of cultivation, understanding of the sciences, even the common tongue that everybody spoke all came from their teaching.

The Missionaries were constant in their methods, and one thing they always arranged for in each Mortal Realm was the establishment of their keystone school, a place where their repository of bequeathed knowledge — adequately sanitized and limited to not overwhelm or divert their intended beneficiaries — would be held. Dirge assumed that the Academy held this status, but it appeared to him as though it had gone a bit off mission.

Keystone schools had the same fundamental charter: open to students from all paths, an appreciation for the natural hierarchy of cultivation, and the promotion of excellence through rewards structures. Celestial Ascendance Academy fit this to a tee, except… it seemed to be all distorted from its very foundation.

The neglect Dirge had been met with to date was an uncharacteristic callousness for a keystone school. Almost everything had been left to automation to handle. It was all intricately and wonderfully designed, but the whole setup was too… decadent. Decayed. Left to rot and fester. On his arrival he should have, at the very least, been drilled on his practical knowledge and then assigned a caseload. Not thrown into an office and expected to hang out his shingle to get students.

This was entirely against the principles of the school’s foundation, as far as the Missionaries were concerned. Others on this plane might be completely unaware of this, but Dirge knew this because he had once read their manual on the foundation of keystone schools; they didn’t keep that information secretly, and he had been running out of reading material at the time — all thanks to a certain partner-in-crime getting them stranded in a pocket realm for a decade — but he had never imagined at the time that the knowledge would ever be terribly relevant.

Dirge didn’t have a personal stake in the proper functioning of the Academy — that should have been the concern of whoever had descended as the school’s custodian — but after a week of this abnormality, he was concerned enough that he was operating on other faulty assumptions that he needed to look around. It was inside the realm of possibility, after all, that his strange situation was due to his employer having messed something up when meddling with reality to insert Harmony Sable into it.

As a token-bearing teacher of the school, Dirge was entitled to freedom of movement on the current tier of the Academy he was assigned to. His lack of merit points would keep him from certain facilities that required them, but his purpose in this excursion wasn’t about those anyway. He wanted the proximity to students and other teachers with more experience of the school than those he could peek in on back at the Remedial Institute.

Today’s garb was one of the modified dresses that Martin had made per Dirge’s specification for something more modest. The deep blue cloth was eye-catching but not in the same way as the plunging necklines and high hems of the dresses Amelia had provided. He didn’t mind being a bit conspicuous, but he decided it might be a good idea to limit his exposure among the school’s population until he at least had a reputation to offset the initial impression.

Dirge’s first stop was the large cluster of structures that was the General Institute, the primary center for wide-ranging learning on this tier. Even arriving as early as he did, he could see several students and faculty making their way through the campus with determination. Others were sitting on the edges of planters or on benches, breaking their fast or doing some reading before their sessions. Some of the students were having spirited discussions as they gathered in couples or groups on the grassy knolls and beside arches and entrances. This was already a marked improvement over the near-desolate status of the Remedial Institute in the morning.

It was gently and with great care that Dirge lightly brushed against the minds of those he passed by, skimming over their surface thoughts and compiling them for points of similarity and disparity. There was noise to separate from it all, as the usual concerns of the students — scores on their most recent test, what would they do in their next practicum, did the instructor like/hate them, did a fellow student like/hate them — were the majority of the data.

There was also a decent percentage of the male students noticing his outfit. Perhaps Dirge hadn’t gone modest enough after all. His frame of reference was terribly inadequate.

But in the midst of all the concerns, academic and less than academic, Dirge was able to piece together some bits of information. Among the students and teachers alike, there was a definite stratification outside of that dictated by the arrangement of the Academy.

The concentration of people using the walkways increased as the sun climbed, but by that time Dirge was already putting together a general image of the issue. Stepping outside of the General Institute, he made his way towards another one that was nearby in the direction he was headed: the Forging Institute. The population was sparser here, but still not as dead as at the Remedial Institute; this would be an excellent place to skim a few more thoughts from another perspective and see how it meshed.

The major violation of the keystone school charter was evident to Dirge now: the school’s management, either through indifference, neglect, or corruption, was not maintaining the impartiality towards students and staff of all paths. There didn’t seem to be a conscious cabal at work, at least not at the level these teachers were operating, but preferential treatment was indeed getting in the way of how things should function.

Students who came from the greater powers of this plane were receiving much more leeway in their education. Even if they failed repeatedly, their teachers would often do whatever they could to keep those students from being referred to the Remedial Institute. They might have their studies slowed or they might be shuffled over to a friend, but the well-connected were kept well away from that bottommost part of the bottom tier.

The teachers were also networking among themselves on those lines. There were a goodly number who did rise above the circumstances in the Remedial Institute, but it was more common that another, better-connected teacher would receive orders from the powers they hailed from or were beholden to and would work to elevate their fellows.

This was why Dirge had been virtually abandoned: Harmony Sable was, for all intents and purposes, a vagabond. The sect she hailed from didn’t exist except as an implanted figment of memory for some talent scout. There was no support network to drag her along into the upper echelons.

There were paths other than the overt connections, of course, but those primarily consisted of buying their way into the system one way or another. Theo, the scion of a relatively minor clan, used this method for as long as he could. Some of the teachers paid with rainbowgold, or essence stones, or with promises of distributing their merit points that amounted to indentured servitude. Dirge saw another possible path he could take here, but he reserved that option; playing with being a honey trap was one thing, but actually delivering was a line he wasn’t prepared to cross just yet.

Dirge would instead need to become more aggressive with his recruitment plans. His idea with Theo would go forward, of course, but he needed to acquire new students sooner rather than later. He would likely get into some hot water for disrupting the usual flow within the echelon of “official” teachers outside the Remedial Institute, but he wasn’t here to make friends anyway. Since the system had devolved this far, he would exploit it just as well as any others could.

As he considered where he should head to best headhunt these new potentials, a loud clatter disrupted his thoughts. Turning around to its source, he saw a figure being shoved out of a doorway, a heap of scrap dumped in front of her with more noise.

The woman who had been ejected was dark of skin and hair, wearing a thick leather apron over her clothing. She kneeled to the ground, trying to scoop together the pile of scrap that had been hurled in front of her.

“And don’t come back until you can manage to quench something without blowing up my forge, Eloise!” a man’s voice from beyond the doorway bellowed before the door slammed shut.

Looking at the softly weeping woman kneeling in the walkway caressing bits of broken metal, Dirge inwardly smiled. It seemed like he wouldn’t have to go far to hunt.