Nick followed Thomas to the dean's building. Just like before when he was escorted by Ray Menzes, after entering the dean's building, they used the elevator to get to the floor of the dean's office. When Nick and Thomas entered the office, the only person that they saw was the receptionist that Nick had met before. She raised her head from her documents in response to their arrival and got up to greet them:
"Welcome, the dean has already given instructions. Nick Capitol, please enter the dean's room, he is waiting for you."
Thomas nodded his head and motioned Nick to go along with what the receptionist said. Nick walked towards the dean's inner room with an uncharacteristic smile on his face.
(Even in this situation, I can't help but notice how fine miss receptionist is.)
When he got to the door his smile collapsed into a plain expression.
(Alright, what happened in the cafeteria was probably caused by my mindscape so it's likely that the dean and the enforcement office will only do some slight probes to make sure I wasn't planning to do anything to the other students. Come to think of it, why would a relatively minor disturbance like that attract the dean's attention?)
Nick had realized earlier that ever since he had let the dean use his magic on him, he has been having strange visions making him concerned that the dean had done something to him. Nick knew that now was the time to inquire about the cause of his visions. Nick entered the dean's room and saw Xavier Gecko sitting at his desk with a plain expression, looking at Nick as he made his entrance.
"Please take a seat."
The dean spoke while pointing at the chair in front of his desk. Nick sat on the chair and waited for the dean to speak further.
"You were brought here because I received an alert that your magic power was causing a ruckus in your dorm's cafeteria. Apparently you were withdrawing the magic energy from the surroundings and doing that, as you should now from the rule book that the academy has given you, is a big no, no. Do you know why that is not allowed?"
Based on his current understanding of magic Nick could make pretty good guesses for why gathering so much magic energy in a public place wasn't allowed in the academy.
"Is it to protect against the use of powerful, large area of effect spells on the students or to prevent someone from depleting the surrounding magic energy, leaving the other students at a disadvantage if a battle was to take place for any reason."
CLAP CLAP
The dean clapped his hands and spoke:
"All those are good reasons to keep people from just sucking up too much magic energy but those are not the crux of the issue here because the academy has measures to prevent magical battles from occurring on campus and anyone stupid enough to try to launch an area of effect spell on campus without permission would find himself dead before putting the final law in place. The enforcement office is not full of salted fish. Do you know that magic energy is the most concentrated where there are may Magicians and the more Magicians there are, the more concentrated the Magic energy?"
This was new information to Nick.
"I didn't know that but what does that have to do with the reason that students aren't allowed to withdraw large amounts of magic energy in public places?"
The dean looked at Nick with a slight smile and spoke:
"The rule is in place because if a student absorbs too much magic energy, worse if the magic energy is highly concentrated, there is a very big chance that they will explode into a million tiny pieces from an abundance of unprocessed magic energy being within their body."
Nick's plain expression froze into one of shock, thinking back to the head splitting headache that he had felt when the whirlpool of magic energy was above his head and how the headache eased when the whirlpool was dispersed.
(Did I almost die?)
Nick looked at the dean with a questioning gaze.
"So you realized, huh? You were a about a minute or so from exploding, considering all the magic energy that you were absorbing in such a small amount of time. You now have your mindscape and you've clearly carved your foundation laws into your mindscape; I can the feel magic power emanating from you. Remember that there is only so much magic energy that the mindscape can store and your foundation laws allow you to process a certain amount of magic energy at a time. From what the enforcement office had recorded, it seems that your mindscape has an above average capacity, for an Apprentice Magician you are impressive in that regard and your foundation laws seem to give your mindscape fairly decent processing capabilities but you should be more wary because if you absorb too much magic energy passively, the unprocessed magic energy becomes extremely toxic and volatile once it remains within your body for too long. You can process the magic energy faster if you use your meditation while you absorb the energy."
Nick listened and took every word the dean said to heart. He didn't know why but it seemed that the dean was teaching him information that one would typically have from experience in cultivating magic energy. The dean continued to talk:
"You should have a fair amount of magic energy that is still unprocessed lingering inside your body. I want you to process it here using your meditation so that you know the feeling that doing so gives you."
Nick understood what the dean was saying and since it was probably in his best interest to do what the dean said, he closed his eyes and internally chanted his meditation, trying to process the magic energy inside his body. The dean looked on with an expectant gaze. He knew that Nick had not been going to classes so he should be lacking some common sense that most Apprentice Magicians have. He was instructing him right now because, based on Nick's results and progress so far, dean Gecko felt that Nick was a promising student and didn't want to see possible talent go to waste.
(Not to mention that the soul tag that I had placed on his soul in order to monitor his magic power had been stimulated a few times since our last meeting. The tag is only supposed to feed me information about his magical power every time it is raised past a certain threshold but since he did not even have a mindscape at the time I did not expect to receive an alert for a while but considering that he had clearly only just recently even carved his foundation laws into his mindscape, how did he trigger the soul tag, sending me useless data in the process twice before today; the only time that the soul tag activated because of an actual increase in magic power was today? Does he have an affinity with soul magic that made the laws in his soul harmonize with the laws in my soul tag? Or is it that my soul tag stimulated his soul's laws causing some kind of unexpected reaction? Him absorbing the magic energy in his body should give me some useful information.)
Nick sat in front of the dean absorbing the magic energy within his body. While he was meditating, his consciousness entered his mindscape, it being the first time since carving his foundation laws into it.
(This...)
Nick was shocked at the changes. From there being around twenty stars in the sky, there were now thousands of stars shining brightly with a white light and the star that had previously been the biggest was now far bigger than the others, still shining a reddish blue light and so much so that unlike before, his mindscape was no longer dark and gloomy but appeared to be having a daytime with a sun like heavenly body above. The crumbling road from before was no longer crumbling and no cracks could be seen. It still hovered in midair and extended when the golden figure of light walking on it seemingly reached its end. Wherever the golden figure walked, there was always a road to step on. The figure of golden light was the same as before with no distinct features, being only a human shaped body of light. Major changes happened to the sea below the road. The water was no longer dark and now had a bluish, clean color with waves undulating continuously. Nick looked at the sea and felt as if there was a very close connection between it and him. His consciousness moved closer to the sea and at that point he could truly appreciate its vast size, it seemed almost endless. Nick's consciousness tried to interact with the sea and when he did the waters seemed to move and undulate according to his will giving of a feeling of extreme closeness; Nick also felt that this water felt very similar to the whirlpool of magic energy that he had seen in the cafeteria but different somehow. Nick continued to interact with the waters for a seemingly long time, then a thought came to his mind:
(Is this water the magic energy that is stored in my mindscape?)
Nick looked around at the seemingly endless sea and had a hard time believing that that was the case.
"There's so much water."
....
Back in reality, the dean looked at Nick with surprise. Not only had Nick absorbed all the unprocessed magic within his body in less than a minute, more magic energy was being attracted to Nick, but that wasn't the part that surprised the dean. What surprised the dean was that the more magic energy that Nick absorbed, the greater the magic power the dean could feel from him but also the greater the amount of magic energy that he was attracting became; usually as the mindscape became saturated with magic energy, the surrounding magic would be repelled slightly until the mindscape needed to be filled again, never would it gather so violently the more the mindscape was filled. The magic energy that Nick was attracting was so concentrated and flowing so quickly that it was on the verge of forming a whirlpool.
(Hmmm...it seems that this young man's magic energy has a quality that attracts raw magic energy and the greater his store of magic energy the greater the amount of magic energy that he attracts and absorbs. How is his mindscape processing the magic energy so quickly and at such a high capacity. I had already investigated him, he does not have a background that includes a Magician and the only way for him to have gotten his hands on a set of foundation laws was to get the Laws of Syracuse from the magical archives office. The Laws of Syracuse is mediocre at best, only letting you process 40 magical units per second; that is far less than the average foundation laws on the market that let you process at least 120 magical units per second. Nick is processing at least 700 magical units per second. Did he modify the Laws of Syracuse? If so, that's nothing special but to modify it to such an extent...that's not normal.)
(It looks like he may not have been in as much danger as we might of thought. He clearly has a large capacity for storing and processing magic energy, maybe just as much as a rank four Apprentice Magician. This boy is full of surprises, should I remove my soul tag? No, it's too soon, as long as his understanding of soul magic doesn't progress too much, there should be no danger in him noticing it for a long time. I'll keep monitoring him until I have a full understanding of his potential.)
"First, I should do something about the whirlpool of magic that is forming. Hmmm...the safest way would be to get him to stop his meditation."
The dean raised his right index finger with it glowing with a purple light and waved it towards Nick.
(Soul message.)
Soul message is a spell that injects information into the soul. The soul and the mind are very closely connected so that the information will also be transmitted to the conscious mind. Dean Gecko wanted Nick to end his meditation on his own.
( It seems that the reason for so much magic energy gathering around him in the cafeteria was that his mindscape was using his foundation laws to passively process magic energy and with the strange characteristic of his own magic energy, the more that was processed the more magic energy he attracted to himself. His magic energy seems very 'special'.)
........
Within Nick's mindscape.
"Huh? The dean wants me to stop the meditation."
The dean's magic sent instructions into Nick's soul which alerted his consciousness. The soul message also contained scenes of what was happening in reality so Nick partly understood the situation.
"Alright, it's time to stop."
Nick looked at his blue sea of magic energy and felt proud. He willed and his consciousness returned to reality.
Nick's eyes opened, seeing the dean sitting behind his desk with a plain expression; the room was quiet as the whirling magic energy had dispersed as soon as Nick stopped his meditation. Nick didn't want to waste any of his time since he just had a taste of the results from all his hard work; before the dean said anything else he decided to speak about his visions.
"Dean Gecko, I wanted to ask you about something that has been bothering me for a while. The last time I came here you did something to my soul that made me have a strange experience. Was that effect supposed to linger, causing me to have similar experiences like the one I had when I first came here?"
Dean Gecko's eyes slightly widened at hearing that Nick was still experiencing soul states without his intervention.
(Nick Capitol...you are a very interesting specimen.)