Novel Full Chapter 968: Mentor
Chapter 968: Mentor
Among the many things Michael had anticipated finding on the other side of Director Lin’s door, Teacher Brian had not appeared on any version of that list.
The moment recognition landed, Michael felt two things in quick succession. The first was something close to excitement. The second was an awkwardness that settled almost immediately behind it, because Michael was not entirely sure how to calibrate his reaction.
Teacher Brian had known him when he was a newly awakened student barely finding his footing. The distance between that version of him and the current one was not a small gap, and he had not had time to think about how to bridge it naturally.
Across the room, Teacher Brian’s expression told a similar story.
"It seems the two of you know each other."
Director Lin’s voice pulled both of their attentions back to the room.
It was at that moment Michael registered that Rynne was also present. He had been so focused on Brian the moment he entered that she had simply not registered in the first sweep of his attention.
He nodded to her in acknowledgment.
She returned it with her usual expression, which conveyed approximately nothing.
Teacher Brian recovered first. He turned to Director Lin and nodded.
"We became acquainted not long after he first awakened," he said.
Michael confirmed his words with a nod of his own toward Director Lin.
Teacher Brian turned to look at Michael.
"Though I knew this was the academy you enrolled in," he said, "I had thought it would be a while longer before our paths crossed here. This is a surprise."
"How are you doing?" Brian asked.
"Well," Michael said with a slight smile. "And you, sir?"
Their exchange was simple.
Across the room Rynne was watching with a slightly odd look on her face.
This was the first time she had seen Michael interact with someone and look genuinely present in the conversation rather than professionally engaged with it. The Michael she had spent time with gave the impression of treating everyone like air if they had no business or conversation to conduct with each other.
She had assumed that was simply how he was.
But watching him now he looked different.
Then it occurred to her that she had heard him say Teacher Brian.
Was it because he saw Brian as a mentor?
Rynne’s guess was quite close to the mark.
Teacher Brian had been present at several points in Michael’s early days that, individually, might not have looked like much from the outside. Taken together they formed something more substantial.
He had been the one to introduce Michael to the spear. Brian had also sold him his first pair of monsters that later became the foundation of everything that came after.
Then there was the matter of his family.
When Michael had evolved to High Human and the transformation had threatened to spiral beyond what he could control, it had been Teacher Brian who had acted and kept his family safe, even if the matter had been done out of convenience at the time.
And before all of that, during the demonic supernatural attack on Woodstone City, Brian had acted as a guardian for the people.
The current Michael could look at a near-demigod creature and make rational calculations about whether to engage it. The Michael of that period could only protect himself and his family and not much beyond that.
All of this had left an impression that strength and time had not erased, even if their actual interaction with each other had not been particularly extensive.
Some things settled into a person and stayed there regardless of how much else changed around them.
Teacher Brian was one of those things for Michael.
On the other side, Brian was quietly filled with a wave of emotions.
To think the naive boy he remembered from Woodstone City, who went around carelessly using his detection skill on people without stopping to consider whether that was appropriate, would have grown so much in under a year.
To Brian, who was above a hundred years old, one year was an extremely short period of time.
It was not only the appearance that had changed. Brian felt a sense of threat from Michael, which alarmed him.
Brian was a proud man who was confident in his own strength, so to him anyone who could give him a sense of threat had to be at the same level as him. This was not arrogance. It was the mindset of the genius who had swept the Federation a hundred years ago.
This meant the naive boy from Woodstone City now stood on the same level as him.
All of this in under a year.
Brian kept his expression steady, but the wave of emotion that moved through him was heavy.
He thought of his daughter. She had become a King Rank cultivator at fifteen, which in the whole universe he dared to say was virtually unknown. She had still spent years reaching that level. In terms of cultivation talent even Michael could not compare to her, but going from an ordinary person to King Rank cultivation in under a year was just as rare an achievement as his daughter’s.
Brian did not dare imagine what Michael would look like a hundred years from now.
The thought was genuinely difficult to hold.
Michael’s change was the first thing that contributed to his heavy emotions. The second was the connection he felt between himself and Michael.
The moment the two saw each other they understood the nature of the connection immediately.
Seeing Brian, who had turned back to continue his conversation with Director Lin after leaving a quiet suggestion to talk privately sometime when Michael was free, the title of a new gift he had received after his Advancement came to mind.
"Aurora’s Child."
Muttering the words quietly, Michael called up his panel and scrolled down to the gift section.
[Gift]: Aurora’s Child
[Description]: Ever since Aurora awakened, she has been searching for a partner to her will. Unfortunately, she has yet to find one. Still, Aurora has not given up. At certain points, she chooses individuals born within her realm as candidates to inherit her will.
[Effect]: Law effectiveness is increased by 200% within Aurora.
[Note]: You are the fifth live candidate.
"To think Teacher Brian is actually a candidate."
The surprise of the revelation was not small.
Michael did not quite know what to think about it.
As for the gift itself, his feelings were considerably more straightforward than the revelation about Brian.
The effect was genuinely good. A two hundred percent increase to law effectiveness was not something to dismiss.
But the inheritance itself held no appeal for him.
He had no intention of pursuing Aurora’s will. The path that gift was pointing toward was not one he was interested in walking, and he was self-aware enough to recognize that attachment to a world’s will, however powerful, came with its own set of constraints he had no particular desire to take on.
If he lost the gift as a consequence of that disinterest, it would be unfortunate. The effect would be missed. But it would not be a crisis.
Besides, he had something in hand that carried similar effects and operated without the geographic limitation. Unlike the gift, which only activated within Aurora’s boundaries, what he had could be carried anywhere.
However Michael’s mind was not particularly focused on the gift’s effect at that moment, but on why Teacher Brian was a candidate.
To be honest, he did not know why he himself had been chosen in the first place.
Talent seemed like the obvious answer, but Michael dismissed it almost immediately. He had no natural talents. Everything he had accumulated had been built on a foundation he had not been born with. He had essentially cheated his way to where he stood.
If talent was the requirement, Rynne standing not far from him was a considerably more intuitive candidate.
But Rynne was giving off no pulling sensation whatsoever. She was evidently not a candidate. So talent, at least in the conventional sense, was not the criterion.
Power was the next possibility, but Michael was not the first young Rank 3 to exist in Aurora’s history. The world had been around long enough that exceptional young awakeners were not unprecedented. If power alone were sufficient, the candidate pool would be considerably larger than five live individuals.
Which left the third possibility.
His greatest secret. Infinite evolution.
Michael turned that over carefully.
The more he examined it however, the more the edges blurred, and after a few more seconds of increasingly circular thinking he stopped and set the question aside.
He would likely not find a satisfying answer through speculation alone.
He turned his attention back to the connection between himself and Brian that had led him to this office in the first place. It was clearly a product of the Aurora’s Child gift, but what was the practical use of it?
Was it simply identification, a way for candidates to find each other? Or did the connection carry something more functional once it was acknowledged?
As Michael sank deeper into his thoughts, Director Lin’s voice recaptured his attention.
"Michael."
Michael refocused. Though he had not been following the conversation between her and Teacher Brian, from the brief impressions he had caught they appeared to have been discussing something unrelated to him or the recent chaos entirely.
So why was he being called?