The next time I met up with Master Jaduk I had a rather odd request for him: To tell me if there was anywhere nearby that I could use to practice my cultivation. I had reasoned that in a society such as this, where ‘superpowers’ existed, there must be something setup somewhere… especially if one considers that this compound is hundreds of years old.

He was initially rather surprised, as I had expected, but then again he was a smart man: He most likely believed that I was indeed the ‘Apprentice of Merrik’ that rumors (which were starting to die down) had spoken of.

Master Jaduk reached up and started tapping one of his horns, silently studying me for a few moments. I could see that he was preparing to shut me down gently, so I started building my case about it being very important that I be able to practice my cultivation, and even mildly threatened that I would begin practicing out in the open if I wasn’t provided with somewhere else. I even hinted that it might be important for the very survival of North Stone Village itself. Nothing I said was directly a lie, but I had been planning this conversation for the last few days and had mapped out exactly what points I wanted to get across. I felt slightly guilty, but I was willing to live with that.

He was very reluctant at first, as I had expected, but as I continued his protests died down as he started taking his time to mull it over.

“Heller, what I am about to tell you is known to few, and I wish for it to remain that way.” He paused, waiting for me to nod. “In truth, there are a series of underground rooms and tunnels, under both Academy and the Garrison, that have seen little or no use for centuries.” He leaned towards me, causing me to move back in my seat. “Some of the tunnels have partly collapsed, while others have been deemed unsafe for further use.”

His gaze held me immobile for a moment, his posture betraying the tense seriousness behind his calmly spoken words.

I started to get excited. I had half expected that there would be nothing he could do, even if he fully understood my plight. My soul-rope explorations hadn’t met with any success except for finding a few dusty storerooms.

“Is there any iron down there?” I asked hopefully, and I was pleased when he told me that steel beams were often used to add additional support to the wooden framing – and were in fact used exclusively in several rooms where fire abilities had been practiced!

“I will take you to see the rooms, Heller, but you must swear to me to use all possible caution!” He said.

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The next evening I decided to take my first solo-journey into the tunnels underneath Academy. I considered bringing Wulfric along just to be safe (buddy system and all that), but I decided that I didn’t want to risk him getting hurt. Instead, I brought along a backpack full of iron bars that I had forged for myself at the Smithy – I figured that if there is a small cave-in I could rely on my Ion Shield to protect me from minor injuries and use the iron bars to dig myself out. If there was a major cave-in… well, let’s just hope there isn’t one.

The entryway that Master Jaduk showed me was in one of the storerooms used for masonry supplies – little used tools and goods to maintain and repair structure of Academy itself. The unobtrusive reinforced wooden doorway was set behind a shelf in a dark corner of the room, hard to see even with the extra-large lantern he had lent me.

I had assured the Master of Earth that I could indeed open the door on my own, though I had to set a pair of iron bars on the other side of the shelf in order to create a strong enough attraction to scrape the door open. We had previously ventured down the tunnel together, with Master Jaduk pointing out some of the more dangerous areas for me to avoid. I didn’t bother to try and explain what I had planned.

I made my way into the dusty tunnel, relying on my Ion Shield to filter the air around me (which was a very handy side-effect) as fine particles of stone and rusted iron billowed up around me. I knew that certain types of dust could be explosive if they contacted fire, so I made sure to keep the lantern within my shield even though I was pretty certain that rock-dust wasn’t one of the combustible types.

It felt a lot different being here on my own, especially after I closed the door behind me, which seemed to amplify the sound of my steps echoing back to me as I made my way further into the tunnel. I had never been bothered by enclosed spaces or the dark (sort of a requirement if you want to be an Electrician), but I did feel a sense of awe being in such an ancient feeling place.

Nearly five hundred years ago, according to Master Jaduk, this tunnel would have been open to older students of Academy as well as the staff… though he wouldn’t tell me more than that. I wondered if cultivation rules used to be a lot laxer in the past, or if there was a time before the Great Houses controlled everything? It was food for thought, at the very least.

The walls showed inlayed carvings, patterned designs that were much more intricate than anything that could be seen in the rest of Academy. There was a set of stairs not far into the tunnel itself, coiling back around themselves and leading back in the direction that I had come from after descending five or ten times my height (it was hard to judge). The dust was thicker down here, with the signs of our passage yesterday clearly visible in the trail of settled debris we had left in our wake.

The first thing I did was to take inventory of what I had to work with down here. The rooms directly below Academy itself were the sturdiest and best maintained (for obvious reasons), but the most interesting training rooms were off to my far right. According to my mental map they would be somewhere under the field that separated us from the Garrison. I slipped into my soul-form again to take a look, confirming my suspicion about where I was… although there was quite a lot more dirt and stone separating me from the field aboveground than I had expected.

There wasn’t much moisture down here so most of the steel and iron I could see was not in terrible shape, though there were clearly patches where rust had destroyed a number of supports. Mostly along the celling, strangely, which is likely what had led to the collapse quite a few tunnels and rooms after centuries of neglect.

I took a deep breath and got to work. My goal was to salvage as much of the metal supports as I could from the collapsed sections and bring them into a large central chamber for later use. The first thing I decided to do was to build a thick steel ‘safe box’ that I could take along with me just in case I did bring the celling crashing down.

Placing my iron bars around the room, behind doorways and pillars, I created a strong anchor for myself as I made my way towards the first collapsed section. I closed my eyes, reaching out with my magnetic sense to get an idea of what was buried among the rubble… and success! I could tell there were a number of metal supports somewhere in that mess, so I started creating an attraction between myself and one in the middle of the pile without any luck. I didn’t want to risk ramping up the attraction too high, just in case a piece broke free and suddenly flew out and struck me.

I figured I might have an easier time going for pieces closer to the edge, so I honed in on one and set up an attraction. I heard something start to scrape along the floor so I braced myself, ready to reverse the magnetic field if anything sudden shot out of the room. Debris shifted loudly, stone clattering onto the floor as the support came free and sped into the room, dragging heavily along the floor in a trail of dust and small sparks.

I felt better after having collected my first piece, and after a few more hours I had a decent pile of metal… but nowhere near enough. This was obviously going to take a lot longer than I had thought. A lot of the metal was covered in rust, but I had practiced arc welding (using an electric current to weld metal together) in the Smithy and knew that I could still weld through a light layer of rust if I had too. There was nothing I could do about the heavily rusted sections, however. I would just have to discard those.

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By the end of the next month I had cleared out the old ventilation shafts, gathered several huge piles of scrap steel and iron, and managed to arc weld myself a strong network of supports in one of the rooms under the training field.

Using magnetism to hold the metal in place made it an easy one-man-job, but I had a lot of trouble finding thin enough pieces of steel to use as welding rods. In the end I just used the Smithy to make up a whole bunch over the course of a few freedays, even asking some of the other apprentices for help just to make sure I wouldn’t run out.

Holding one of the thin lengths of rolled steel in my right hand, I adjusted the tinted goggles covering my eyes as I built up a strong electric charge across my hands. With my left hand resting on the iron beam in front of me, I brought the steel rod close to the joint I was trying to weld, carefully getting a steady arc going so that I could complete this final joint.

I was currently working on reinforcing a tunnel I had mostly cleared, which surprisingly enough seemed to lead up to a completely different area of Academy! I hadn’t finished getting all the rubble out yet, mostly because I wanted to support the tunnel solidly before I risked death via suffocation (or worse) by haphazardly shifting things around.

After an hour or so later I had cleared out enough that I could navigate my soul-rope without getting turned around (it was incredibly hard to orient myself in the complete darkness of a solid object), so I set up a lantern (I had about a dozen now, as well as a store of oil I had ‘borrowed’ from one of the supply rooms) and prepared to explore.

I had uncovered a reinforced stone door at the end of the tunnel, and I was incredibly excited to find out what was on the other side… but after poking my soul-rope through the door I was immediately disappointed – more darkness. But I could sense it was a void space, a place between walls, and there was even a small amount of air movement.

I relaxed and let myself return to my body. Thinking about it for a moment, I decided to try moving through the door at several different angles. Solid stone, void, stone… hallway! I sensed all around me, recognizing this as a hallway that leads to the kitchens… so, that means there was a sealed off passageway around here. Wait… or maybe a secret door, holy crap! Secret doors are awesome!!

Moving the other way led me directly outside Academy itself, facing west and just outside the training field. Straight was just a void space for quite a while, probably a sealed hallway, and then suddenly directly into a storeroom that I didn’t recognize, and then the kitchen. I would have to investigate this later, but for now it was too risky.

Taking a deep breath, I left my new discovery behind and went over my plan for my roommates, Wulfric and Tetra, who had been patiently covering for me the entire time I was busy my little project. Then I did a quick soul-rope-scout of the route back to my room, shut the giant iron door I had installed in the ‘secret’ tunnel, and made my way back upstairs with a smile on my face. I was really looking forward to this next part.