Devourer Of Destiny - Chapter 152
“Enter.” Ebon Dirge opened the door with a casual flick of power, revealing the individual waiting on the other side of the threshold.
The new arrival was a young man who was skinny to the point of emaciation. Tall, gaunt, and pale, it wouldn’t be a stretch if the fellow were to be mistaken for a skeleton in the dark, but in the warm light of the glowcrystals he wasn’t quite that monstrous. The ill-fitting white robes he wore did little to dissuade one from seeing something spectral about him, though.
Dirge had to resist a laugh of pleasure at seeing him. This quaint individual reminded him of an old acquaintance he hadn’t seen in a very long time, and those memories threatened to overwhelm him if he let them out just now.
“Albus, I presume?” Dirge asked the new arrival. The youth only nodded in reply. “Come on in. These two are Theo and Eloise, my other students.” He introduced the pair, who had turned around in their chairs to see the newest addition to their ranks. Their eyes widened as they got their fill of the strange young man, but neither commented.
“Theo, Eloise, I think we shall adjourn for now while I handle Albus’ orientation,” Dirge announced, holding back a sigh. “Theo, I will see you tomorrow. Be prepared to be worked hard. Eloise, I’ll have a set of slips regarding material properties prepared and will inform you when you can pick them up. Your first task will be to learn those intimately.”
The pair nodded in unison before standing and taking their chairs to the side of the room.
“Nice to meet you, seeya soon,” Theo greeted the still-silent youth and flashed a grin before waving at Dirge and leaving. Eloise merely inclined her head as she took her leave, closing the door behind her.
Dirge smiled. “I take it you’re less than impressed with the arrangements,” he said flatly. “It must be annoying, having to descend back down to this lowest of tiers in the Academy.”
Albus shrugged. His listless gaze was fixed on the wall behind Dirge. He complied with the command, grabbing one of the chairs from the side of the room — one of the ones not just recently sat in — and pulled it up in front of the desk and sat.
“I have an inkling of what your issue is already, Albus, but I’d like to hear it from your own mouth, if you wouldn’t mind,” Dirge announced.
Albus mumbled something incoherent in response.
Dirge suppressed a chuckle. “I didn’t quite catch that, could you say it louder?”
“I do mind,” the skinny youth said with his surprisingly deep voice.
“I imagine you probably do, at that,” Dirge replied with a grin, ignoring the impertinence. “You’ve been banished down here to deal with some lowly newbie with only a couple students to her name, after all. Very well, I think I can explain your issue: your foundation keeps shattering, doesn’t it?”
Albus’s eyes widened momentarily before he gave a sullen nod.
Dirge’s smile widened. As soon as he saw this lad he decided he wanted him for the collection, but the kid was doing his best to play the tough nut to crack. The immortal manslayer wondered if Albus understood his problem at some level of his subconscious and was avoiding it, or if he was utterly oblivious. Such a deeply buried thing wouldn’t crop up under a simple surface scan, and the youth’s thoughts were relatively still when he did peek.
“I can offer a way past your current difficulties, but there is some information I would like first,” Dirge confided. “It’s an understandably painful subject and you don’t really trust me, but someone very important in the Academy thinks you’re a good fit with me and I find myself agreeing if we can get past this stage of things.”
Dirge was resorting to being candid here; there were a few different ways Albus could have ended up in his current condition, and depending on how it turned out, he would have to explore some different measures to fully resolve the problem. Getting the kid to talk about the subject would at least dredge up some thoughts for him to sieve off to help make his determination from.
“What do you need?” Albus asked a bit grumpily.
“The treatment history of your problem,” Dirge replied directly. “Who all have looked at it and when. I’m not going to hunt them down and grill them, don’t worry about that, but I’d like to know what has been tried before. Given I can barely get a sentence out of you, I imagine that teachers from the Fourth Tier wouldn’t be rushing to answer if I did ask anyway.”
Albus sighed. “It’s not that many. My teacher brought me up with him to the Fourth Tier when he was elevated, even though it was a bit early for me. Ever since I’ve been a disappointment. He’s tried to keep the issue quiet, tried to spare me the humiliation, but…” he broke off with a small choking sob.
“So it’s only been your teacher and couple of his friends,” Dirge noted, even as he drew up the mental image constructed from the memories leaking up to the surface of Albus’ thoughts.
Albus was a golden child, a prodigy, the feather in his teacher’s cap that, along with the rest of his accumulations, opened the doorway to his advancement to the Fourth Tier. But his teacher had acquired new students once he arrived there, and his problems with maintaining a foundation were becoming a blemish on the record, one that had to be carefully and quietly shuttled away.
“So they plied you with a few different techniques and methods, and each worked for a bit but then you were sent right back Meridian Circulation when they, too, collapsed,” Dirge picked up on the logical train of thought.
Albus nodded. “They all tried, putting me through different methods, painful ones… then someone I thought was a friend reported it.”
“And now you’re here, stuck with someone you think is beneath qualification to deal with the problem since even those vaunted experts at the Fourth Tier couldn’t resolve it,” Dirge finished for him. “Well, I have good news and bad news for you, Albus. The bad news is, you’re wrong. The good news is, I can do something to help you advance.”
Albus frowned. “You can solve my problem with forming a foundation?”
“Did I say that, Albus?” Dirge replied. “I said I could do something to help you advance. Building a foundation obviously isn’t working for you because it’s an incompatible system. You could build a foundation a thousand times using a thousand different cultivation manuals and not one of them would work for you, my dear.”
“Then how can I advance without a foundation?” Albus retorted, an edge of frustration lending some real volume to his voice.
Dirge chuckled. “By dropping the essence system entirely, Albus. That’s not where your talents are anyway.”
Albus’ eyes widened. “You can’t mean–”
“I absolutely do mean physique tempering, Albus,” Dirge cut in. “You were a prodigy because of how quickly you ascended to shatter your Earthly shackles, right? That’s not because of some in-born attunement to the cosmos or some crap like that, you realize; you advanced rapidly in your body refinement because that’s your nature. A great-grandparent, I’m guessing, on the maternal side.”
“Are you suggesting I have some kind of special bloodline power?” Albus asked, incredulous.
Dirge shrugged and sighed. “I’m not suggesting it, and it’s not really a bloodline power so much as a lineal hop, skip, and jump away from something else. You’re not human, not wholly at least. You should be continuing with physique tempering, not with essence refinement.”
Albus looked down at himself and laughed. “Miss Sable, look at me, you can’t be serious about that!”
“What, do you think that all physique tempering experts are strongmen with enormous shoulders and biceps?” Dirge asked.
“Well… yeah…”
“And if I informed you that I have a Sky Realm physique myself?” Dirge said with a grin, arching one of his eyebrows.
The youth’s jaw dropped as he gave Dirge a good looking over. Then he blushed.
Dirge laughed. “Hard to believe?”
“Well, it’s just… your limbs, your, uh…” Albus’ face was blotchy as he continued.
“Physique tempering isn’t about lifting heavy things, although you can clearly do that,” Dirge continued, granting the youth a reprieve from his embarrassment. If it were another time, he would have perhaps played cat and mouse a while longer, but this was time for the sales pitch.
“Isn’t it awfully expensive, though? And that’s the same as saying I’m done,” Albus replied, his deep voice growing quieter with each word.
“For others, yes,” Dirge conceded, “but in your case it evens out, although there is the waste in your false start. Having a Meridian Circulation basis for essence is still useful enough, so it isn’t entirely bad, it’s just that your means of affecting the world requires something other than a foundation.”
“What am I, then?” Albus asked.
Dirge took a deep breath and blew it out. “Let’s not dig into the exact details of that just now. The most important thing for you at the moment is to get some confirmation of what I’m saying, so you don’t think I’m just trying to pull one over on you; going into the specifics of obscure trivia won’t do that.”
Albus shrugged. “It’s something different this time, at least.”
There was an explanation for that, of course, one that managed to annoy Dirge a decent bit. Albus’ esteemed teacher would need to be dealt with; there was no way the man didn’t know what the situation was here, and that could only mean that he was railroading the youth out now that he had been of use.
Perhaps it was a growing sense of professionalism in the office of the teacher, or a twinge of that humorous recall of his old friend, or maybe it was just sheer bloodthirstiness rearing its head under the suppression he had been enforcing outside of his trips to the arena, but Dirge felt somehow obligated to do something nasty to the fellow. That would have to wait, though.
“Yes, that it is,” Dirge agreed. “Another piece of good news for you, though, is that you’ve injected enough energy into your system that we can do something with it, instead of having to rush immediately to the medicine cabinet. Of course, I’m not saying this will be easy for you either, although it’ll be plenty easy for me.” He gave a nice big grin at the last bit.
“Uh… why do I have a bad feeling about this, Miss Sable?” Albus’s hands were suddenly trembling after he saw that wicked grin.
“Oh, nothing much, I’m just going to have to beat you up a bit to get it all going, though.” Dirge cracked his knuckles and stood up. “You’ll want to put the chair back against the wall for this, we won’t be needing it for a while. I’m trying to not make a habit of smashing the furniture when helping my students out.”