Christie didn’t go directly searching for Sandra after leaving the infirmary. Patience was a virtue, and it wasn’t like she was in any kind of rush. If anything, she preferred to do things slowly and rest a bit. Her ladylove loved to push herself to her limit all the time, but Christie knew better and was aware of the need to take a break. So she waited a week before addressing the issue.

  “Looks like everyone is here,” Sandra said as she appeared on the training grounds.

  Apparently, the military engineer always flew to the same site every day to place the relays for her Gate command rather than leave them in place, as it was better to do so than take the mental tax to sustain the Range relay for a whole week. And due to the recent events, Christie was inclined to agree now that she was physically aware of the concept of mental tax that had eluded her for a while now.

  By nature, the First Stratum wasn’t that exhaustive. Perhaps after an hour of usage it could get problematic with an active command, but not that much. And considering Christie was technically only using a single command that just happened to spread to the rest of her agates, it meant her mental load was proportionally minuscule. Only with the Listen command that had a foreign – or rather, added – expenditure beyond the command itself was she able to experience having her mind taxed.

  Like a well-oiled machine, the teacher opened her massive Gate and the students flocked across to reach the field at firm ground. Even though Christie had used many Gates now, she still couldn’t get used to the lack of feedback that each provided. Her knowledge of physics told her that there should be more movement and dissonance, and yet, that wasn’t what happened. It was unsettling to say the least, and not because of the slight possibility that a Gate might close suddenly and bisect her.

  A type of more… natural horror. One that predated on the very foundation of the logic of the world.

  But she quickly ignored those thoughts and focused on the lesson.

  “In the previous class, we learned to get more information out of the substrate than we were previously capable of,” Sandra created a seat out of stone and the rest of the class reciprocated. Well, all except Shayla, who also used lithorica and padded her lithic throne with agates too, for some reason. “It, unfortunately, took longer than expected – and there was a hiccup or two – so we could not delve into the effects and consequences, so we will do that now. Engage the same state as before for the first five minutes and we will continue from there.”

  Christie was about to do as commanded, yet Sandra walked up to her before she could do so.

  “Are you fine, Christina?” The brunette teacher asked with a hand on the tall girl’s shoulder. Even sitting down, Christie was taller than her. Though, to be fair, Sandra was standing on a slight depression provoked by the displacement of rock to create the seat.

  Not Miss Valasela? The redhead instead chose to fixate on the woman’s words. But acting on them was bound only to make some awkward banter, so she chose to ignore it.

  “Yes, I am,” Christie nodded. “Though I would like to talk about the prior lesson.”

  “Did you manage to achieve the task?” It irked the girl a bit that was the first thing the teacher went to instead of checking again on her student’s health, but she didn’t hound Sandra as she technically already did so. Health is one of the few things people should be insistent on…

  “I… believe so,” the myriad-colored-eyed girl proselytized her doubts.

  “How come?” The woman with the brownish-red, almost agatiferous, eyes frowned at her. “You either did it or you did not. I am afraid it is a binary type of completion.”

  “Well…” Christie blushed at the harsh tone. “I was able to hear something, but… I do not think it could be classified as getting the information you talked about.”

  Sandra squinted, but her expression relaxed. “Explain yourself.”

  “I do not know how to say this, but before I collapsed due to the Listen overload, I heard sounds coming from the ground. Not just the tremors you induced deep in the earth, but something else. Some sort of… chant?”

  Christie couldn’t help but think that she had imagined all of those events; after all, she did collapse and the whole ordeal was pretty weird. Nothing confirmed to her that this was a hallucination or a dream that she had whilst she was passed out.

  “Huh.” That was the soldier’s reaction. A dry hum.

  “And what does that may entail?” The redhead pressed for information as her teacher simply remained silent in thought, leaving her confused.

  “No, nothing. It is just that I did not expect you to reach that level just yet. I mean, I expected that you all would reach that point at some moment, but you skipped quite some steps.”

  “Yes, that much I can guess, but… what was all of that? Was what I heard even real?” The tall girl looked at her teacher with a sliver of distress.

  “Oh, definitely,” Sandra nodded. “As for what you have heard… I do not know how to put it into words. You reached this point too fast; most experienced military engineers are not even there, or perhaps will never be.”

  “Alright, alright. Whatever I reached was weird yet feasible; I understand that much. But what was it?” It would be an understatement to say that the suspense was killing her.

  “There are many names for it, as there is no official term and everyone gives it a name, but what you have heard is the voice of the earth,” the military engineer stated with absolute confidence. The confidence of a teacher.

  “I thought as much…” Christie musitated in ponderation. “But how?”

  “I am not quite qualified to say that-“ Christie instantly squinted at her without any of the prior hesitation, “-because no one really knows what it may be.” Sandra squinted back at her in annoyance.

  “No one?”

  “No one,” the teacher affirmed with a nod.

  “But this sounds like it is too important for someone not to know what it might be!” The redhead exclaimed with a hint of indignation. Not having answers to a question was one of the things that infuriated her the most. She was studying for a reason!

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  “There are many things that we do not know,” Sandra shrugged. “Why is the sun a circumference whilst the stars in the night sky are dots, full circles? No one knows. Some say they are also circumferences but that they are too far away to appreciate it, whilst the religious at Secto say that because their god placed them in the center of the universe so of course the sun had to be different from the stars. This thing about the voice of the earth is a bit of the same, Christina. There are just many things that we do not know. At least not just yet.”

  Instead of indignant, Christie now felt a bit of unease with a tinge of hope. Perhaps because the last sentence was hopeful. Not knowing about the world was scary, especially if the world itself was singing, or even worse, screaming – it was hard to tell what that sound actually was or how it was, even less why – but it was true that knowledge was a thing that grew and developed. And at risk of sounding like a scholarite, Christie had to admit that the ever-important calculus for subjects like the very Military Engineering were recent developments.

  “Do you at least have a personal theory?” Still, Christie didn’t want to leave such an important subject as an unknown.

  It deserved a thought at minimum.

  “Well…” Sandra twirled a curl of her short hair around her finger as she pondered. “This might sound crazy, but as you have asked, this is my personal theory.” The redhead nodded, inviting her teacher to answer. “I believe that everything – or at the utmost minimum, stones – in this world is cognizant.”

  “Uh…” That she didn’t expect. “Hmm?” But that didn’t stop the nouveau riche from thinking. “Agatha did mention something similar about agates after her first Agatecrafting class, about agates being sentient. Is your theory related to this?”

  “Partially,” the black-uniformed teacher nodded. “I may not be an agatecrafter, but the theory resonated with my personal experience. Especially with the depths. The chant of the stones that we hear is too… living.” The word didn’t seem to convince Sandra as she grimaced, but she continued talking, nonetheless. “This is certainly not the act of brainless stones. But I cannot say at what level that cognition starts. Is a pebble cognizant? Most likely not. But what about a mountain? Or even better, the whole land of a country? That is a lot of stone, and it is not like living stone or thinking stone is anything new.”

  Christie’s mind instantly went to monsters and agates as soon as Sandra said that. If what Agatha’s teacher said about agates being sentient was even remotely true, that was. But monsters were definitely sapient. At least Fran?ois is more mocking than the average person. That accounts for some sapience.

  “So…” The redhead took a deep breath. “To summarize, what I heard was the attempt of communication – primitive or emotional – from the world itself?”

  “Eh,” Sandra swayed her hands and head around. “It is all theories, but I guess that would be about right. Though I must admit calling it communication might be a bit of a stretch. But we must stop with wild guesses now, we have had your classmates waiting for a while now. If you want to investigate all about this on your own, feel free to do so. Once you graduate from the elective, you will be more informed than most military engineers, if not outright an eminence in the field. For the time being, however, follow what your classmates are doing. Must I remind you that you skipped some steps and you are not able to get information from the earth at the present?”

  “No, you do not need to,” Christie deflated.

  “Perfect,” her teacher clapped, which gave the student a visceral déjà vu accompanied by a whiplash. “Now, when you use the Listen command again, do not use as many agates. Slowly increment the agates you use until you reach the soft spot between hearing and not collapsing. Once you get prospecting right, you will no longer need these crutches.”

  Christie didn’t even have time to retort as Sandra then addressed the rest of the class and continued with her lessons on the prospecting of the ground. The redhead tuned out a bit – with an ear to the lesson – as she focused on achieving the step that would allow her to prospect the substrate in the first place.

  She did as commanded and slowly let her sea of stones out of her body. A gradual process where she liberated more and more agate with the Listen command. Taking advantage of the depression on the ground due to the generation of her lithic seat, Christie drove her pillars of green and red agate to the ground deep enough that her Listen command wouldn’t be affected by the surface’s noise.

  Noise pollution was very much real, especially when you had thousands of ears.

  That was, partially, the virtue of her sea of stone. Perhaps the quality of each individual agate was so pathetic and negligible that it was risible, but when accumulated together to the point that more agates than the whole class could accrue together, suddenly those abilities weren’t as pathetic.

  She was still limited to a single command, though.

  Christie chose not to linger in those thoughts – they normally ended in pity and depression – so instead she moved her efforts to the task at hand.

  Because this wasn’t her first time doing this practice and Sandra had readied them for weeks now leading up to this, she got ahold of the prospecting skill only after an hour. A bit of time, but not that much. The rest of the class was still practicing with said skill when she had grasped it.

  I wish falling unconscious would only put you an hour behind in homework every single time. Life would be so easy if that were the case… And unhealthy. But hey, it would be at least interesting. As someone who had fallen unconscious twice in half a year, Christie actually didn’t look forward to a third time, but if each time it was followed by colossal growth and advancements, she couldn’t deny it had a tinge of attraction.

  It didn’t take a bright mind to understand the fallacy of that thought.

  Nevertheless, the nouveau riche now followed alongside the class on their training, which was based on spotting acts of remote lapiloquia induced by their teacher. Each one far more surprising than the last.

  Was that one kilometer underground? Christie frowned at the last act of lapiloquia from Sandra. Does lapiloquia have that much range compared to lithorica? That was a badly formed question, for range was a highly subjective metric. Christie herself could only manage thirty meters – and that was with Range – but her ladylove could manage hundreds of meters. Perhaps kilometers with Amplify Range, but neither the petite lithorist nor her girlfriend had tried to check so.

  The tremors did get fainter the further away from the class they were, and whilst Christie initially attributed it to her diminishing capability to prospect the ground with her inexpert senses, she soon realized that the same was true with Sandra’s lapiloquia.

  Is this like the range command falloff? That type of range was one that Christie wasn’t very familiar with, as her command range was equal to her recall range, but all lithorists had increasing difficulty commanding agates based on the distance between the two. It wasn’t a binary range like with the recalling or summoning range, but a gradual curve – and, apparently, a steep one on the edge – that slowly difficulted giving commands to an agate.

  Whilst the range command falloff didn’t affect the potency of the commands, just the difficulty to give them and an increase in the mental tax when assigning them, it did not seem to be the case with lapiloquia as both the difficulty and the potency proportionally increased and decreased, respectively.

  Hmm, I should check that, just to have it set in stone. Knowing better than basing her knowledge on suppositions, Christie actually tried to put into practice her hypothesis. She commanded a tremor deep on the ground – only about one hundred meters away as that was her current range – and found herself awfully fatigued. The tremor was negligible, judging from the looks of the students, only the teacher seemed to realize it had even happened. It was negligible, yet her exhaustion was not.

  Lapiloquia wasn’t a mental discipline, but with a single tremor that could only be called a one in the tremor scale – only even detected because lapiloquist were living seismographs – it still exhausted Christie’s whole being. She was left panting and wheezing, which raised the glances of some of her classmates.

  De-definitely an increase in difficulty and exhaustion with distance. Fractures! She wanted to laugh badly; such was her exhaustion. Only a deep and guttural laugh could relieve her of this self-afflicted stress. But she didn’t do so. Not only because it would’ve been un-ladylike, but because she would rather not be stared at as if she was crazy.

  And exhausted as she was and as badly as she held her laugh, Christie still smiled. She now had many tools at her disposal, not only her unruly sea of stones. She was tired to the bone, but she was still conscious and breathing. I need to train more. Her smile intensified as her mind ran with thoughts on how to make lapiloquia even more effective.

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