Chapter 71: Modulation
The man grimaced, like he was processing the fact that he now had a ward to teach all over again. He rubbed a palm over his face and sighed deeply, muttering to himself, "I don’t have the energy for this..."
"Look... Zephyr—" he made to lay some ground rules but gave up midway. "You know what, just follow me," he stood, walking out of the room with Zephyr in tow and stepping into the hallway of the quiet third floor of the school— Vanguard Arcana.
As they walked, Zephyr noticed a few students in classes he had previously been empty when he arrived. They were very composed and quiet, unlike the lower floors which were more rowdy.
"Does this floor belong to the senior students?" Zephyr asked Jon who was walking ahead of him.
The man hummed in response, confirming Zephyr’s deduction.
They walked back to the lower floors, which had become relatively quiet now that classes were in session. The council meeting had taken more time than he had thought. It was already into the latter hours of the morning, nearing mid-day.
Stepping out of the school, Jon and Zephyr headed from platform to platform, even crossing those of other schools, until they reached a platform at the furthest end of the Freehold Sanctuary. They had walked so much that Zephyr wondered how the whole place was ever built in the first place. The stacked and interconnected nature, while still big, gave one a feeling of compactness, but crossing the distance from the school to this platform had been a very long walk. ’There has to be a better form of transportation here,’ Zephyr thought to himself, but so far, he hadn’t seen anything of the sort. Aside from small carts used to carry goods and supplies, everyone walked.
Zephyr looked at Jon who had stopped in front of a high-walled property. It stood out sharply against the other buildings on this platform. It was a residential district, and you could tell that everyone here had something in common— they loved their privacy.
The platform itself was right next to the inner walls of the mountain— which Zephyr felt should never have been able contain a city of this size. The whole district was very quiet, with similar-looking houses arranged in rows. The surroundings were immaculately well-kept. Each house had a decently high fence to add another layer of privacy, but Jon took it a step further, making his even higher.
As Zephyr stepped into the compound, aside from the extra-high fence, he noticed that right above, a thin veil covered the compound. It let light through with nearly zero loss, and if Zephyr’s assumption was correct, prevented anyone on a higher platform from peering into the compound from above, even though there weren’t many platforms right above theirs this far out.