The tour didn’t start with words. It started with noise.

  Coria breathed in pistons and exhaled in sootless steam. Hammers struck in measured cadence, valves hissed and sealed, and somewhere a chorus of apprentices chanted timing sigils under their breath the way soldiers count steps on a forced march. Linne and Dalan slipped into the rhythm like fish returning to a river; they greeted foremen, tapped inspection plates with practiced knuckles, and fielded quick questions about tolerance drift and heat-loss curves. People kept asking about “the Empire business,” and Dalan kept giving the same sly half-grin that said both more and less than his words.

  “Contracts signed,” he told a machinist polishing a rune-etched chuck. “And the carrier is… unusually efficient.”

  Ludger let that one pass. He was busy listening. Stone carried sound, and sound carried truth. Beneath the surface hums and pleasant tour-guide patter, the ground told him a different story, moving weight, rotating mass, the crawl of liquid through buried arteries. He flexed the tiniest thread of mana into the soles of his boots and felt the layout bloom in his head.

  Pipes. Lots of them. Not just heat and water. Coolant, mana, exhaust. The Academy city had buried a second city under the first.

  They crossed a gantry over a courtyard ringed by furnaces. The golems below moved like a well-oiled phalanx: load, lift, rotate, deposit. The core runework was clean, no sloppy redundancies, no desperate stabilizers. Someone here understood the difference between power and control.

  “Your constructs are tidy,” Ludger said, eyes tracking a trio as they repositioned a crucible. “No bleed. Good isolation.”

  Dalan’s brows rose a fraction. “You see isolation from fifty paces?”

  “I feel it,” Ludger said.

  Kharnek grunted. “I feel boredom. Where are the men who can talk while they work? These rocks do not banter.”

  “They don’t unionize either,” Dalan murmured.

  Kaela drifted at the railing, fingers spread, testing the air. “Still stiff,” she said. “Like the wind’s wearing heavy boots.”

  Linne led them into a long hall whose walls were glass on one side, an observation corridor. Behind the panes, an assembly floor unfolded like a diagram: tables on rails slid from station to station while handlers snapped in rune-plates and set clamps with quick, precise knocks. No shouting. No panic. Problems here were strangled at birth.

  A bell chimed. The line halted. In the same breath, every handler stepped back and every golem froze with tongs still midair. A square of floor irised open, and a platform lifted through, bearing a short, thin man with a shaved scalp and a neck ring of brass. Not a collar. A badge. He looked like a clerk who had won some cosmic lottery for authority.

  He bowed to Linne and Dalan, then flicked Ludger a glance like a thrown pin.

  “Quartermaster Paro,” Linne said, all pleasant edges. “Line three flagged a tolerance anomaly?”

  “Resolved,” Paro said. His voice had the clipped cadence of someone timing his own syllables. “But we have a security memo. External observers are to remain in marked corridors. No floor access, no pit access, no core-handling. Standard.”

  Dalan produced an easy smile. “They’re guests, Paro. Partners.”

  “Partners go through induction,” Paro said, and tapped the brass ring. Runes flared, then died. “There are no exceptions to safe procedures.”

  Ludger met the pin-glance and let it slide off. “I enjoy marked corridors,” he said dryly. “They save time.”

  Paro left the platform with the same neat economy with which he’d arrived. The floor sealed. The line resumed. The world pretended nothing had happened.

  “Friendly,” Kaela said.

  “Charming,” Maurien said.

  “Territorial,” Ludger thought, and filed the name.

  The road curved toward the heart of Coria Academy City, where the mist thinned and light turned silver against polished metal.

  Ahead, the skyline split in two.

  On the left rose the Main Academy, a fortress of intellect and steam. Its fa?ade was all iron lattice and rune-etched glass, layers of plates interlocked like armor. Pillars of blackened brass framed archways wide enough to march a construct through, and from every level, vent-pipes exhaled thin white plumes that vanished into the gray sky. Sigil conduits ran like veins across the surface—lines of blue light crawling up the walls, feeding the entire city’s grid from within. The sound wasn’t silence but a controlled hum, a heartbeat of invention.

  To its right, almost dwarfed but no less proud, stood Linne and Dalan’s workshop—a cluster of adjoining halls half fused to the Academy’s flank. Its roof was plated with copper that had long since greened, and narrow chimneys breathed faintly warm air. The building looked older than the Academy, stone and iron stitched together with runic welds, but its walls bore the clean geometry of practical genius. Overhead, mechanical cranes moved on rails fixed to the exterior, hauling crates of components up and down with clockwork precision.

  “This is where we work,” Linne said, her voice half-muffled by the hiss of nearby vents. “And where most of our headaches start.”

  Kaela tilted her head, taking in the towering brass arches. “I thought you two ran a factory.”

  “We do,” Dalan said with a small grin. “But around here, factories and academies are the same thing.”

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  He gestured toward the academy’s great entrance as they approached—a pair of massive bronze doors carved with interlocking sigils, each humming faintly in sync with the city grid. Above the archway, an inscription gleamed: “Innovation is duty.”

  Inside, the corridor widened into an atrium lined with spiraling walkways. Floating rune-plates drifted between levels, carrying apprentices and supplies alike. Every floor hosted its own small theater—raised platforms surrounded by benches where scholars lectured or performed demonstrations for gathered sponsors.

  Linne’s voice took on that familiar pride of someone who’d earned her place here.

  “The Academy’s built on a shared system,” she explained. “Anyone can teach, anyone can learn. When you make a discovery, you’re expected to present it. Sometimes it’s theory, sometimes it’s a live test. People come from other cities to watch, invest, or compete.”

  “So every floor is… a market of ideas,” Maurien said dryly.

  “Exactly,” Dalan said. “Funding doesn’t fall from the sky here. You prove your work’s worth in front of your peers—and the merchants who like to pretend they understand it. The better your results, the better your backing.”

  They passed one of the open halls where a young woman in soot-stained gloves adjusted a glowing lattice of crystal rods. The rods hummed, then pulsed outward with a shimmer of compressed air strong enough to ripple everyone’s coats. The small audience burst into applause, and a man in formal robes leaned forward to speak to her, already calculating potential investment.

  Ludger watched the exchange with quiet interest. “So you trade knowledge like the Empire trades grain.”

  Dalan smiled faintly. “Knowledge feeds more mouths.”

  Kaela snorted. “And costs a lot more coin.”

  “True,” Linne admitted, “but that’s the balance. The more funding you gain, the more experiments you can afford. And if your theories fail, your sponsors pull their gold and give it to someone hungrier.”

  Kharnek eyed the ornate walls. “Sounds less like a school and more like a battlefield.”

  Linne gave him a thin smile. “We prefer the term competition. But you’re not wrong.”

  They turned down a side corridor into the adjoining workshop. Compared to the grand halls, it was quieter, almost monastic, only the rhythmic tapping of tools and the low murmur of runic analysis tables. Shelves overflowed with etched plates, incomplete constructs, and carefully labeled components: mana converters, stabilizers, and blank runic cores waiting to be inscribed.

  Dalan ran his hand across a table strewn with crystal shards. “This is our latest project. Adaptive control matrices for industrial golems. Smarter cores, fewer accidents.”

  “Fewer accidents,” Kaela repeated, smirking. “Always reassuring.”

  Linne ignored her tone, stepping toward a wall of glass that overlooked the city’s central spire. “Coria has seven academies,” she said. “Each one focuses on a different field—mechanics, rune theory, mana synthesis, alchemy, combat enchantment, architecture, and cross-discipline studies like ours.”

  Ludger followed her gaze to the spire. It pulsed faintly, a blue line of light that climbed skyward before branching into the mist. It was beautiful, ordered… and eerily alive.

  He didn’t say it aloud, but the thought settled heavy in his mind. A nation that built its future on invention, and treated genius as its only law. He had to admit, it was working. But like every perfect system, he wondered how deep the cracks ran.

  Ludger stood by a loading platform as he watched some ore crates settle into the storage ward, their runes dimming to confirm stable containment. The rhythmic pulse of the golems slowed, shifting from labor to idle, like soldiers standing down after a drill.

  He dusted his gloves and turned toward Dalan and Linne. “Well,” he said, tone crisp and businesslike, “the trip is complete, the paperwork’s signed, and now I know where the cores need to be. That means our job here is done. We can return home and start working on the next phase.”

  Dalan froze mid-step, expression flickering between disbelief and mild horror. “Return—? Now?”

  Linne nearly dropped her clipboard. “You can’t be serious!” she said, voice sharp with panic. “You’ve barely seen anything yet. The League’s coreworks alone could keep you occupied for weeks.”

  Ludger shrugged lightly. “We came here to know where to deliver the goods and confirm the contract. That’s handled. The rest sounds like sightseeing.”

  Kaela’s lips twitched. She knew that tone, flat, disinterested, and designed to get a reaction.

  Dalan scrambled closer, gesturing animatedly toward the academy spire. “Sightseeing? Vice Guildmaster, we have inventors here who’ve rewritten the structure of spell theory! You could sit in on a lecture and watch live rune stabilization in motion! It’s practically a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  “Twice, if you fail the class,” Kaela murmured.

  Linne ignored her. “There’s an entire department on mana-channel harmonics! They even have foreign mages demonstrating adaptive attunement. You might learn something to bring back to your Lionsguard, methods the Empire hasn’t even heard of!”

  Ludger tilted his head, pretending to think it over. “Lectures, demonstrations…” His tone was skeptical, almost dismissive. “I’m not sure we have time to sit through academic exhibitions when there’s work waiting in Lionfang. Besides, why would you share your knowledge with the empire?”

  Dalan looked like he might actually combust. “Work will wait! Knowledge doesn’t! Do you know how hard it is to get clearance to observe the central academy sessions? The waiting list for outside visitors is measured in years!”

  Maurien folded his arms, watching the two engineers plead with mild amusement. Kharnek just grunted. “If the boy wants to go home, let him go. You don’t want to pick a fight with his mother.”

  But Ludger’s gaze stayed on Dalan, unreadable except for the faint gleam in his eyes. He hid it well, but the truth sat comfortably beneath the surface.

  Exactly as planned.

  He’d seen enough of the League’s methods to know that every lesson here was infused with controlled mana, structured, codified, and measurable. To him, that meant one thing: a system trigger waiting to happen.

  If he could witness their lessons firsthand, perhaps even take part in one, he might unlock something, a class. The League built professions out of knowledge; he could practically feel the experience radiating from the walls.

  Still, he kept the mask on. He crossed his arms, as if weighing the pros and cons of indulging them. “I suppose,” he said slowly, “if it’ll help future trade cooperation… I could attend one or two of these sessions. For formality’s sake.”

  Dalan immediately brightened. “Excellent! I’ll arrange passes for the mechanics wing and the enchantment halls, oh, and the harmonics labs—”

  “Not all at once,” Linne cut in quickly, grinning. “He’ll faint from overstimulation.”

  Ludger met her smirk with a deadpan stare. “I’ll survive.”

  Kaela chuckled. “You always do.”

  Ludger nodded once, turning toward the academy’s gleaming archways. “All right then. Show me how your scholars teach.”

  Inside, he felt the faint hum of excitement stir beneath his calm. He’d play the curious visitor for now, but in truth, he was already hunting. For lessons worth more than gold. For knowledge sharp enough to cut.