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"Do you think it's possible?" Shuri asked, finally breaking the elongated silence that hung between the three people. Marie, Shuri and Markus were currently in the recreation room modifying their lesson plans to implement the new Socratic seminars.

"If Master says it's possible, it should be possible," Markus affirmed with a kind of resolve that stood on shaky ground. Shuri didn't know where he got that confidence from.

"I wasn't asking you, Senior Brother," Shuri mumbled while maintaining a respectful tone. In fact, her gaze was focused intensely on Marie.

"Don't look at me," Marie spoke up with a shrug.

"You're the only one here who can see the future," Markus chimed in supportively.

"I don't know if your just deaf or wilfully ignorant," Marie snapped back. "I told you that I cannot use the Heavenly Eye."

Markus ignored that jab and reiterated, "But you still have that other method, don't you?"

Marie returned a blank stare, which was retaliated with an equally blank stare from Markus.

"..."

"You forgot about it... Didn't you?" Markus said with a tired exhalation.

Marie closed her eyes, accepting defeat and bathing in the shame. "You win this round..."

After saying that, she didn't open her eyes for some time - Shuri and Markus waited patiently for the girl to finish doing... whatever she was doing at the moment. A few seconds later, Marie's eyes opened, and she let out an impressed hum.

"So?" Markus nudged. "Does it work?"

"Umm..." Marie continued humming.

"Stop doing this, please," Shuri grumbled. "Just get to the point!"

"So according to my predictions, we will be able to meet the deadline," Marie confirmed.

"What else?" Markus egged.

"What do you mean 'what else'?" Marie responded while furrowing her brows. "I'm not a fortune dispenser"

"If you looked that far, you could have checked out more," Markus argued. "Whether the method works? Or if there's something we need to avoid? Maybe we can hit the deadline earlier."

Marie exchanged glances between the two expecting faces before frowning and shaking her head. "I'm going to go now. It's clear that you two aren't interested in planning the lessons."

"What are you talking about?" Markus shrieked immediately before grabbing the girl's hand as she was leaving.

"I've done my part," Marie declared. "I have confirmed that this isn't a wild goose chase and that there is light at the end of the tunnel. You should feel more confident and more motivated to work. But all I see here is greed and hypocrisy."

After dropping those stinging words, Marie extricated herself from Markus' grasp and walked away in a huff.

"She does have a point," Shuri spoke up, causing Markus to jolt in place. "I mean, we hate it when she steers our lives. And here we are asking her to do something equivalent. It is hypocrisy, isn't it?"

"I guess," Markus admitted with a flustered fidget.

Shuri ejected a gust of air through her nose, massaged the back of her head and said, "Are you planning to implement the seminar for the topic on thermodynamics?"

Markus whistled while in contemplation and reasoned, "Not everyone has reached that far. We've talked about thermal physics, and done a few experiments, but do you think introducing thermodynamics concepts is appropriate for the first-ever seminar?"

"Why not? It offers a large breadth of discussion topics," Shuri said. "Why don't you try it with a smaller class size, kind of like an experiment, and see how it works? Besides, according to the booklet, a Socratic seminar is meant to be implemented with few participants, eight to fifteen individuals at best."

"To begin, I will need to come up with a reading list-"

"Don't put 'A Beginner's Guide to Thermodynamics' on that list," Shuri interrupted immediately. "I've read it. It is not a guide for 'beginners'. They make far too many assumptions about prerequisite knowledge."

"You've read it already?" Markus slapped his forehead and said, "Of course you did. Nonetheless, I wasn't planning on including it. 'Principles of Thermodynamics' is more accessible for newbies in my opinion. It contains a lot of examples and questions to support each concept."

"I agree on that point," Shuri affirmed. "What about the questions to keep the discussion rolling?"

"They can't be close-ended questions that end with just the definition," Markus narrated straight out of the booklet. "And according to Master, it will be beneficial if we can somehow tie it in with magic..."

Shuri scratched her chin in thought before an idea struck her, "'Can the laws of thermodynamics be violated or circumvented? Why or why not? And if so, then how?'"

Markus pondered over the question before jotting it down. "If the laws of motion can be circumvented with magic, so can the laws of thermodynamics. The beauty comes in figuring out the right kind of 'lie' you want to tell the world."

Just like that, the duo continued their brainstorming for a decent half an hour. After Markus had an outline drafted, they moved on to Shuri's seminar which was decided to be on "ergonomics and its importance in design" as well as "function-over-form or form-over-function". As this topic was more open-ended, the session went on for over an hour as the duo planned out the questions and even anticipated the direction the seminar could go, devising ways to curtail irrelevant discussion avenues.

____

After concluding their productive discussion, Shuri and Markus went their separate ways to attend to their respective tasks. Interestingly enough, they coincidentally found themselves heading in the same direction - the library. Choosing to disregard the awkwardness of their encounter, the two ascended the steps in silence.

Upon entering the library, they were greeted by the pleasant sounds of pages being turned and intermittent whispers that echoed through the generally quiet atmosphere. They glanced at the long study tables strategically placed throughout the library and noticed the presence of several members.

However, among the members present, Shuri's attention was immediately drawn to a boy wearing eye patches, delicately tracing his fingers over a page filled with raised dots. Not all the texts in the library were translated into Braille; one had to request translations, a process that often took at least a week.

Yohn, like Shuri, was an avid reader. Whenever she went on her reading sprees, she would often see him in the library. In the past, before she joined this Sect, Shuri would have scoffed and laughed at the idea of a blind boy reading. Yet, among the many things the Sect had compelled her to reconsider, this was something she simply accepted without much resistance.

A peculiar sensation began to stir within her. It wasn't pity, that much was certain. Shuri had witnessed people enduring far worse afflictions while still leading fulfilling lives in the Palace. People experience pain, people pass away—there was little one could do other than try to alleviate suffering.

After contemplating for a while, she grasped the true nature of this feeling. It originated deep within her, a flicker of frustration whispering, "Hey! You were supposed to remedy that! Yet you haven't!"

Shuri recollected her initial assignment from the Sect Leader, which was to devise a way to assist Yohn in his cultivation journey. Although she fought to keep the assignment, she made little headway and thus registered it as a personal failure in her books. It shouldn't have annoyed her so much, really. Failures were common in the Palace, you just had to learn to ignore them and eke out small victories. But Shuri could feel her cultivation grinding away from within in anger. Luckily, unlike in the Palace where she had to squash away her emotions, likes and dislikes, Shuri was afforded the freedom here to pursue them to her limits.

'Why am I even here?' Shuri asked rhetorically while slapping her forehead. 'All the information I need is already in here.'

She decided to ditch Markus and returned to her dormitory; this itch just had to go!

Upon entering her room, she dropped her satchel and collapsed onto her chair, exhausted. The planning had unknowingly drained her of a lot of energy, and it was only just catching up to her. Deciding to clear her mind and distract herself, Shuri picked up the solved Rubik's cube on her desk and started to shuffle it.

One of the annoying parts about having an eidetic memory was that she remembered her exact moves that caused the cube to shuffle. She had to always fight the urge to go backwards and reverse her moves to get the solved cube again. She snuffed the urge and proceeded to solve the cube. She had already devised three different methods to solve the thing, one which was easy and could be taught that solved the puzzle one layer at a time, another which was harder and could be taught that solved it face by face, and the third which was her own - a secret strategy.

Her hands blurred, and within seconds the solved cube dropped from her hand onto the table.

"Six seconds, this time," she mumbled. Shuri could go faster, but she noticed that the toy could not handle those speeds - she'd nearly broken it one time.

She picked up the cube once again and shuffled it. After a satisfactory set of moves, she solved it... again. And once again it was shuffled, and solved. Shuffled. Solved.

The process repeated endlessly, Shuri's mind was serene and truly clear, like a still pond.

But just like a still pond, a drop of inspiration unsettled its surface causing a ripple to spread outwards.

Shuri's hands paused, her brows furrowed, and her gaze narrowed. An old conversation she had with the Sect Leader started to echo from the recesses of her mind.

"Did you know? There are approximately 43 quintillion unique possible arrangements of this cube?"

Shuri's lips started to move as inaudible words started to roll off of them.

"Arrangements. Tactility. Modularity."

Shuri's mind churned violently, and so did the mana from her core. Something was brewing in both places, and Shuri was eager to see what.