Sitting alone in his room, Cyrus was in the midst of formulating a nightly schedule that suited his needs the most.
"There are only so many hours in the day, yet I have several things that I can do at all times Using this time wisely and efficiently is a must, now, the question is how should I divide the time up?"
Pulling out something to write on Cyrus wrote down everything on his plate at the moment.
"Meditation to train focus, sense strengthening, research and practice of my two magical domains, non magic scholarly pursuits, and investigation into the Empire and its policies. There is no way I can do all of these at once, but if I were to work efficiently enough I can make time for some while focusing on others in the now…hmm, let's move all avenues of study up as priority as those require daily work. Things like investigation and forming connections with various factions can be a long term goal that only requires my attention for a day or two at a time. Time can be made for these by getting ahead of my studies and instead of devoting it to personal research I use a piece of that gained time instead for events like meeting up with the underground" thought Cyrus as he crossed out a few things on the list and circled others.
"Every night I should alternate with focus training and sense strengthening and doubling up on expanding my will capacity as well. Although I think doing that may increase the difficulty of sense strengthening, I do have an advantage over others in that regard" thought Cyrus, whilst tapping on his mask.
"For tonight…I shall sleep"
Thus he laid down to rest, weary from Caligo's special training session, instantly falling asleep.
...
Up went the sun and with it morning had come, although for those sleeping underground it was only a clock that alerted to them of this fact. Morning routines were gone through and each and every student scrambled to their classes for today was the first of domain specific lectures.
Waiting contently was Cyrus, once again sitting in the center of the hall whilst still unmasked.
"I still do not feel any kind of side effect from not wearing the mask which is something I am unsure of how I feel about. If I experience something awful then that could prove that the mask is necessary thus absolving Cato of blame, but I am sure my counterpart will still find a way to spin it otherwise…" were such thoughts that were flying by Cyrus' mind while he waited, all the way up until Caligo finally entered the room.
Taking center position at the head of the hall, Caligo had a look of contemplation for a moment before he snapped his fingers thrice. With each action something in the room would seemingly be swallowed up by its own shadow and disappear. First it was the professor's desk in the corner of the room, next it was the chair behind it and finally it was Caligo himself.
"The Mors domain has authority over two main essence types, death and shadow. Due to me not having the slightest iota of faith in most of you we will start with the one where failure to control a complex spell will not end in you dying horribly. Thus, I will instruct you in the art of shadow manipulation which will allow you to not only hide yourself but other objects as well. Not only that, but also how to do it in a way that the location of whatever is being hidden is not discovered with but a single glance from both normal vision and magical sense" lectured Caligo.
Snapping his fingers once more, everything that was hidden was revealed simultaneously.
"While I can already use such a spell, I definitely require the method to hide my meddling with the worlds essence as complete as Caligo did. It did not even appear that he cast a spell, but truly felt like whatever was covered in shadow simply popped out of existence" remarked Cyrus within.
"Look carefully at how I manipulate the essence, I will do it as slow as I possibly can this time" began Caligo as he pointed towards the desk next to him.
Each and every student paid rapt attention to the desk, focusing on it entirely with their sense. Bit by bit they saw the shadow essence creep over all the other of its brethren that was in the environment where the desk was, like a bunch of ants crawling on top of leaves and hiding it with their numerous bodies. Or perhaps a better descriptor would be like slowly filling in the lines of a circle with ink, one line at a time until the entire drawing was filled.
Eventually all the students were able to see was the shadow essence, with all other types hidden, as it now entirely covered that which lay below it. Just as if someone was blocking the line of sight of something small in the distance, you know it is there because you saw it before but now it can no longer be seen.
"The key to this is to memorize what the structure of the shadow was before you began to alter it, and then to reassemble it perfectly as it was before. Of course, this is an extremely tall task especially for maggots like you so do not expect to do it so easily. To practice this just take any old object that has a natural shadow and repeat the process of covering it just like I did. If you cannot already do the spell then just practice actually performing it first, slowly building up speed until you can do it instantly like I can. Then start all over again but this time try to match the essence formation of the before and after to match perfectly" explained Caligo, repeating the process of the spell on a loop for a few moments more.
Hence all the students did as they were told, many finding varying levels of success but most of them failing horribly.
"This is a lot harder than it looks due to the structure being complicated enough to make for difficult memorization. Perhaps I should first work on my memory in general before I waste my time with something so laborious" thought Cyrus.
In line with his thinking, he pulled out writing materials and attempted to draw what he saw in the world of essence. Not having any artistic talent whatsoever, it looked akin to a bunch of squiggles and not exactly what he saw but he was only frustrated with his ineptitude for a moment before inspiration came to him.
"Wait a second, I have just the thing for this!"
He then pulled out a deck of cards for a game known only as "memory", where instead of the familiar numbers and shapes on the cards there was instead a variety of crystalline pictures of varying colors and shapes. Every card was unique except for a single copy which was also the main goal of the game, to find as many pairs as possible.
"It seems Unas and his brothers' love for all things games has served me well in a rather unexpected way. Not only will this help me with memorization, but it is also very similar to what I see with my essence vision. Its like the crystals on a mosaic, each of a different size shape and color but always grouped up with others like it amidst the unending chorus of essence" thought Cyrus as he shuffled the deck and began to lay them out on his desk face down.
"Hey my moody counterpart, help me out here so we can quickly learn this. The faster we finish the faster we can stock our laboratory up and get down to some real experimentation…"
Perhaps his persuasion worked or that the dark half was going to assist all along but soon the same icy feeling filled Cyrus' veins making the entire world seem so much clearer than ever before. It was as if he had been blinded all this time, noticing details never before noticed and being able to think crystalline clear.
His hands moved extremely quickly, choosing cards at complete random at first but slowly discovering the location through trial and error. The first go around took him several minutes, where quite a few pairs took more than one try to guess correctly.
The second time was better but only just that, nothing amazing.
The third time…the fourth…fifth and sixth go passed by as well yet with each completion the accuracy increased each and every time until eventually he only needed one or two tries to guess correctly. Even this impressive display eventually turned into just needing a single look at a pair before instantly making the connection.
"Good…but not good enough" thought Cyrus.
Cyrus then laid all of them face up next time, giving them a quick look over before closing his eyes and flipping them all to their face down state once more.
Now the goal was not just to pair them, but to try to pair as many as he could on the first go.
Similar to before, first his hit rate was quite abysmal with him relying more on trial and error than anything else but eventually he got so good that he was near perfection.
"The world of essence is not stagnant; it is constantly in flux in reaction to changes in the environment…but I do not think I can replicate that with just these cards. I do recall there being a certain method of gambling that may assist with this, I had overlooked it before due to how uninteresting it was but now it looks much more appealing. To completely master the technique that professor Caligo showed off I will most likely need to take a visit to a casino…. once I am allowed to leave the Academy grounds that is."
Either way, he continued his unique method of practicing the technique until he was satisfied with his level of mastery, before finally attempting to memorize the shadow essence of the pen sitting on his desk and hiding it completely while not leaving any obvious traces.
He did it once, making only a few mistakes, then twice and thrice making even fewer and fewer with each attempt. By the twenty third time it could be considered perfect, but his will reserves were fast dwindling so he resolved to try it on a larger and more complex shadows at a later date.
"Not bad kid, that was quite the unique method of handling the problem. Outside the box thinking, exactly what the saplings of this region truly need" remarked a cold voice from behind Cyrus, that belonged to none other than Caligo.
Flinching slightly upon being snuck up upon, not that he could have prevented it if Caligo truly wished to do so, Cyrus turned towards the professor and asked,
"What is 'outside the box'?"
To that Caligo gave a smirk as he explained,
"The box is what is known, what you see and the world around you. It is story that you tell yourself about how the world is and how it works, arrogantly assuming that everything is as you believe it to be with no doubts whatsoever. It's a trap, a cause of stagnation, a pitfall for otherwise great minds and innovators. The proof of this is simple as well, just think of this: It was not so long ago that we thought the world was flat but once we created a system of mathematics we easily proved this wrong by looking above to the stars, not only that but when we proved it practically with our use long of distance spells. They always fail if we try to connect each link in the receiver chain completely straight but work perfectly fine if we account for the curvature of Mundus. If someone had not thought that perhaps, just maybe, the world was not as we thought it was…how would humanity have discovered that which was once such a common belief was actually completely false?" lectured Caligo, revealing a rather surprising level of philosophical and intellectual insight.
Such words humbled whoever was smart enough to understand their meaning, especially so Cyrus who had before taken such basic information for granted.
"Indeed…the lesson to be taken from the example is to doubt that which is not doubted and to imagine that which was once unimaginable…" thought Cyrus as he went into a trance like lull, letting the wisdom wash into his very soul.
At once several lights went off in Cyrus' brain in regard to several theoretical pursuits that he had been long thinking upon for over a month now.
Pulling out a fresh sheet of paper and a new pen to write on said paper, he quickly jotted down the basics of his thoughts before the sudden inspiration blew away like dust in the wind.
Caligo took note of this, actually nodding happily for once which caused more than one student to rub their eyes to make sure that what they saw was not an illusion. Alas, the moment they did the moment had already passed as their professor quickly controlled his expression in one third the blink of an eye.
He was still pleased inside, but even this pleasing thought soon turned into surprise then shock…then eventually terror as he waved his hand and covered the paper that Cyrus had just finished writing on in its entirety.
"Mundus above boy, when I said to think outside the box…I didn't mean THAT…you are downright insane and could very well get us all killed" whispered Caligo in an urgent voice, leaning towards Cyrus and speaking into his ear.
The one who had such words directed towards him, Cyrus, had his heart drop like a rock and his nerves began tingling in both anticipation and fear. Even his other half was agitated as the full force of his assistance from the world within began to churn, pouring an ancient power into the bright Cyrus.
Yet, this turned out to be a gross overreaction as illustrated by Caligo's next words:
"So insane....I like it! Hah, I barely understood what you thought of but I can get the big picture. Keep this close to your heart until you fully flesh out the idea and if you succeed, hell will freeze over. Not only that but you could submit just the most basic form of the technique and immediately be accepted into the core of the Tower itself" praised Caligo as he clapped Cyrus on the back and walked back toward the front of the room.
"All right failures, you have had long enough to squirm on your own like the worms that you are. Here is your saving grace , although it would be best if you did not have to resort to this… not everyone is meant to succeed in life" said Caligo as he snapped his fingers, causing a stream of lackeys to come forth and pass out a sheet of paper and some small object to each of the students.
"Here is a drawing done by me personally, of the essence structure of the object that you are now holding. You will notice that there are three distinct sections as these are the most common ways that mages have reported to view essence with their magical sense. Now, use the drawing to guide you to what the final product of the spell should look like so as to remain inconspicuous to the fact that a spell was used to hide the object. For those of you who happen to have a different way to view essence than the three most common ones, well, you can either teach yourself artistic ability or pay up in Fidem to get me to draw a custom one for you" explained Caligo.
He then ordered everyone to work on this for the rest of class, before sitting down behind his desk and leaning back with his eyes closed. Without even so much as a gesture from Caligo, he and the entire space around him disappeared into the shadows beneath.