Chapter 218: Guest Lecture

Chapter 218: Chapter 218: Guest Lecture

The dust from the emergency shipment had barely settled. The last wagon, loaded with casks of primordial spring water, had rattled down the estate road toward the capital, and the drivers’ shouts were still fading when a rider appeared at the gate. He wasn’t a merchant’s courier. His horse was too well groomed, and the letter case at his hip bore a crest Rowan hadn’t seen in over a year: the twin suns of Sol Aethel Academy.

Rowan took the letter out in the yard, still in his work clothes, still smelling faintly of soil and spring water. The wax seal was deep gold and pressed with a precision only the Headmistress’s office could manage. He broke it with his thumb.

Rowan,

I will not pretend this is a social call, though I would be glad if it became one. The advanced herbology students have reached the unit on mana-infused flora, and they are failing it. They can recite the classifications. They cannot grow, tend, or harvest a single specimen without killing it or being killed by it. I have run out of ways to explain what the textbooks cannot.

You are, as far as I can tell, the only person in the empire who can.

The academy would be honored to host you as a guest lecturer. Name your terms.

— Elena, Headmistress of Sol Aethel

Rowan read it twice. By the second pass, a faint, wry smile had settled on his face.

The irony was not lost on him. He had never completed his final graduation terms. The Tower had taken those months, and after it came the cult, the politics, and a continent’s worth of problems that no syllabus had planned for. By the academy’s own rules, he was still a student with unfinished coursework. And now the Headmistress was asking him to teach.

But the rules had stopped fitting him a long time ago. His cultivation methods had overturned half of what the old texts taught. He held botanical domains the faculty could only theorize about, and he had found elemental flora that existed in the academy’s archives only as faded sketches and cautious footnotes. Whatever the registrar’s ledger said, there were professors in that building who had been quietly citing his work for months.

They can recite the classifications. He understood the problem. High-tier mana-infused plants didn’t respond to technique alone. They responded to intent, to patience, to whether the cultivator actually understood what the plant wanted. That was not a lesson you could write on a chalkboard. You had to put a seedling in a student’s hands and let them feel it push back.

He folded the parchment and tapped it against his palm, already running the numbers he didn’t want to run.

Princess Lyra was still recovering in the capital. Her condition was stable, but "stable" had a way of changing without warning, and he wanted to be within reach when it did. His parents were still adjusting to fifty acres of farmland that had doubled almost overnight. His mother had the ledgers, but only Rowan could bless the fields at the pace the contracts demanded. And beyond all of that, the Tower waited. Floor 30 was not going to climb itself, and every week he spent away from it was a week the cult spent getting stronger.

His schedule was packed so tightly that adding even a single afternoon would cost him something.

And yet.

He looked past the gate, toward the dark green line of the new fields, and thought about a classroom of frustrated students staring at a dying seedling. He remembered what that felt like. Someone had once taken the time to show him. Shaping the next generation of herbologists wasn’t a distraction from the war ahead. If the cult’s shadow was truly coming, the empire would need more people who could do what he did, and he could not be everywhere at once.

There was a practical side to it as well, one he wasn’t too proud to admit. The academy’s greenhouse archives held specimens he had only ever read about, seeds and cuttings preserved for generations behind locked glass. A guest lecturer with the Headmistress’s blessing might find those doors open to him. And a room full of talented, hungry students was exactly where he might spot the few worth bringing into his orbit.

Rowan adjusted his straw hat against the late sun and let out a slow breath. Any other noble might have answered with a stiff formal acceptance, but Elena wasn’t just any correspondent. She had taken a risk on him once, and she deserved a reply that matched.

He turned back toward the house, the letter still in his hand, and began composing the first line in his head.

***

Rowan didn’t hesitate. He sat down at the desk in his study, pulled a fresh sheet of parchment toward him, and dipped his pen.

Elena had written Name your terms, and he intended to take her at her word.

Headmistress,

I accept. One week from today, two hours, advanced herbology, on the condition that the class is small enough for me to put a living specimen in every student’s hands. I will bring the materials. Please have a lecture hall prepared that can survive some mess.

In return, I ask only for an afternoon in the greenhouse archives, at your discretion.

— Rowan

He read it over, decided it was formal enough to satisfy the academy’s customs and plain enough to sound like him, and pressed his seal into the wax. A courier left with it before the ink had fully dried.

Then he looked at the blank sheet of paper beside it, and the real work began.

Two hours were both too long and far too short. Long enough that a dull lecture would lose the room by the first bell, and short enough that he couldn’t afford a single wasted minute. Rowan paced the study with his hands behind his back, straw hat hanging from the corner of a chair, working through the problem the way he had once worked through the Tower’s early floors.

The students didn’t lack knowledge. Elena’s letter had made that plain. They could recite classifications, and they could name every property of every mana-infused plant in the textbooks. What they couldn’t do was feel a plant, and that gap was where people got hurt. Nothing the Tower had grown in its middle tiers cared about a student’s marks. A cutting would either accept a cultivator’s mana or lash out at it, and the difference came down to attunement.

So he threw out the idea of a lecture and built a demonstration.

The spine of it would be crystal mana-slides, thin plates of cut quartz etched with projection runes, which he could slot into a lectern lens to throw images and living diagrams across the hall. He had commissioned a set from a capital artisan years ago for an entirely different purpose. Now he hauled them out, dusted them off, and began arranging them. The first slides would break down how a mana signature interacts with soil. The next would show, in motion, what happened when a cultivator pushed too hard, and the plant pushed back. He would not soften that second one. A student who had seen it on a wall was less likely to learn it by losing a finger.

The slides were only half the lesson. The other half was in the planters.

Over the next several days he turned the back of his study into something between a greenhouse and an armory. From the fields he cut healthy stalks still bright with Level 8 vitality, so the students could feel what a thoroughly blessed plant was like. From the vault of Tower specimens he pulled a handful of seed packets sealed in wax, a jar of mutated elemental spores that shifted color with the light, and three live cuttings from the Tower’s middle tiers. Each rested in its own shielded pot with its own warning tag in his cramped handwriting. Do not water. Do not touch with bare skin. Ask first.

Between the preparation, his days filled up in a way that was becoming familiar.

At dawn he walked the fifty acres with his mother, who carried the new ledgers under one arm and rattled off yields before he’d finished his tea. The harvests were coming in heavier than any projection she’d drawn up, and warehouse space had started to become a concern. Martha grumbled about the problem with obvious delight. Rowan blessed the fields, signed what needed signing, and tried not to think about how much of the enterprise leaned on a single pair of hands.

Mid-morning, a palace messenger brought news from the capital. Princess Lyra’s recovery was steady. The court physicians used the words encouraging and continued rest in the same sentence, and Rowan read the report twice each time, as though a third reading might reveal something the first two had missed. He wrote back a short note to be passed along to her. It said very little. He had learned that she preferred it that way.

In the evenings, after the estate had gone quiet, he returned to the study and the tall window that looked out over the dark fields. The map of the Tower lay open on the desk, with Floor 28 circled in red ink. He didn’t need a map to remember what was waiting there. Each night he looked at it for a minute, then turned back to his slides.

By the sixth day, the outline was finished. The slides were sorted, the specimens labeled, and the lesson ordered so that every demonstration built on the last: first listening, then touching, then offering mana, and only after that, the dangerous part. Rowan stood in the middle of his cluttered study, surrounded by pots and crystal plates and the faint green hum of living things, and felt something he hadn’t expected.

He was nervous.

It was a small, absurd feeling. He had faced the Tower’s guardians and stood in front of emperors, and here he was, worried about a room of students. But those students were the point. Whatever happened on Floor 28, whatever the cult brought across the border, the empire would need people who knew how to listen to the land. He couldn’t train all of them. He could only show them where to begin.

He packed the last cutting into its case, latched it, and set it beside the door with the rest. Tomorrow he would leave for Sol Aethel.