The Good Teacher

The force field exerted a membranous resistance as Marie went past it. As her face passed the thin film, her sight warped and grew brighter by a significant order of magnitude. It was a jarring change in visuals, as from outside the field all she saw was a cavern shrouded in darkness.

A few more steps in and Marie was forced to witness a sight that made her question her sense and understanding of scale and spatial positioning.

Imagine a mountain, and then hollow it out from within. "Is it me or is the interior far bigger than the exterior of the mountain? This has to be some sort of optical illusion, you cannot just hollow out a mountain like this and not expect the damn thing to collapse unto itself."

"The interior is, as you predicted, enchanted to increase its spatial capacity," Mage Maddi responded with a proud smirk on her lips. "It is the result of the hard work of our previous Sect Leader."

"But this is MASSIVE!" Marie paused and was surprised to not hear an echo. Her eyes travelled up the sloping walls and found that she could not physically see the tip of the mountain from her current position. "Just how many enchantments are in this thing? So extravagant!"

"You say that, but take a look around you," Mage Maddi countered as she spread her hands. And suddenly, Marie noticed the nigh endlessness of the tower of shelves lining the interior walls of the mountain as it continued to the top.

"What in the world?"

"Stored in here are the celestial records collected and collated by the sect since its inception. What you see are the exact details of the celestial state for every day since that time."

Marie released a long whistle as that fact settled in her mind. "I couldn't help but notice the change in your records over there."

Marie pointed her finger some hundred rows (a distance where her eyes could barely register and decipher the visuals) up where the shelves suddenly shifted from storing books to some type of thin, rectangular obsidian plate. They were all uniform with a gold-coloured etching on their outward-facing side labelling the date.

"This is how we record the celestial states," Mage Maddi answered as she walked forward. She stopped in front of a levitating basin smack dab at the centre of the room, above which an obsidian plate was hovering and rotating with a steady velocity. A high-intensity and thin beam of light was colliding against the surface of the rotating plate, the source of which was another hovering object that was a massive convex lens with a pinkish-gold frame inlaid with a veritable mine of mana gems. A faint mist of white rained down upon this convex lens from way up, where Marie predicted the mountain's tip to be.

"Where did this come from? I swear I feel like I'm going blind! How did I not notice this earlier?" Marie waved her hands frantically.

"It's the mind playing tricks on you," Mage Maddi admitted. "When you see a vast scenery, your eyes do not focus on the minutiae that make it up. What you absorb in the big picture. If you enter a closed space, though, your sense of perception narrows down since there is only a limited set of data the eyes need to record at a time and it can group up certain data sets; you can lump together the walls into one bucket since their colour remains the same, unlike the sky whose colour can be a spectrum. This room is closed, but it doesn't feel that way. The room is totally illuminated, but there aren't any visible artificial sources of light - so it feels like you are outside but you actually aren't. The walls are supposedly closing in as they rise but they don't appear so, as from your perspective there is no end or ceiling in sight."

"It's... magical," Marie agreed with a chuckle, which was supported in turn by Mage Maddi. "Anyways, I know your time is limited. So please continue - does this thing do what I think it does?"

Mage Maddi nodded and moved towards the nearest shelf. Her fingers slid over the backs of the obsidian plates and stopped over one with a date from last week. She removed it carefully and transported it to one of the quadropods (which Marie also apparently missed) placed in each cardinal direction of the central basin. The plate slotted into the quadropod snugly, and as the last latch snapped and held it in place, a thin beam of light collided against the plate from beneath it which passed through the lustrous black plate and dispersed into a beautiful burst of colours and visuals. Right above the plate, an exact yet scaled recreation of the sky took form in three-dimensional space.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Mage Maddi commented as she raised one palm and swiped it sideways causing the projected sky to skip forward through a time-lapse moving from day to night.

"It's amazing!" Marie exclaimed as she hopped forward to join Mage Maddi. She followed the woman's gestures and controlled her "personal" sky. A rotation clockwise moved the time forward and a rotation counterclockwise moved it backwards.

"Our current Sect Leader came up with this new method to store celestial states after he found the archaic brush-and-paper method inefficient and prone to erroneous interpretation," Mage Maddi elaborated. Noticing Marie's inquisitive gaze, she obliged with a continuation, "Basically, before this new method was conceptualised, the sect assigned individuals called Observers whose sole purpose was to gaze into the sky and jot down the states and movements of celestial bodies. It is inarguable that there are an incalculable number of celestial bodies in the sky, thus the Observers used a special note-taking strategy that shorthanded the details to cover only the major points. While this method worked for a very long time, in the recent millennium our Sect Leader noted that a lot of inherent bias had eked into the notes causing certain details that may hold importance to be omitted."

"Second-hand sources often suffer from that issue," Marie affirmed.

"Exactly! Thus our Sect Leader resolved to cut the middle man altogether. If the recorder has a bias and the reader has their own bias, the result will be the culmination of two biases. If we remove the recorder from the equation, although the bias isn't wholly eliminated, it is limited and is purely the result of the reader's inadequacy," Mage Maddi narrated.

"You wouldn't expand on the magical technology in play here, would you?" Marie probed.

"No," Mage Maddi denied. "Even if I knew how this worked, and I can honestly say that I don't, I don't think I can share our Sect's most prided secret. This device effectively captures and stores the state of the world all by itself!"

"Can you at least tell me how the information about the sky is transported to such a secluded place deep underground?" Marie redirected.

"The old observatory was rehauled after the Sect Leader developed the Celestial Recording Platform. There is a triad of pylons at the peak of the mountain that channel the ambient mana, imprint the visuals of the sky into it and direct it towards the Inscribing Lens. The Lens is enchanted to extract the visual image from the torrent of mana and etch it into the Obsidian Plate. In the Deciphering Platform, a concentrated stream of mana is fired onto the Obsidian Plate which is naturally directed through the inscription channels, converting it back into the visual image. The underlying details that govern the way these whole setups functions are well beyond my level of understanding. You must understand that this was at least half a century in the making, one cannot expect to understand it over a cup of tea!" Mage Maddi responded.

"How do you get access to so much obsidian?"

"There is an underwater volcano not too far from here. Though this won't work with just any ordinary obsidian, mind you," Mage Maddi added with a smirk.

"There must be a rich mithril deposit in this area," Marie blurted out matter-of-factly. "The obsidian must have a reasonable concentration of mithril in it."

"W-What? How did you know?"

"Lucky guess," Marie shrugged. "I can see the faint silver lines forming on the obsidian as the mana beam activates the mithril molecules locked inside it. Honestly, mithril as a metal makes zero sense to me."

"What are molecules?"

"Never mind, please continue," Marie hurriedly waved her hands.

Mage Maddi scratched the side of her head for a moment and said, "Well, that's about it."

"How am I supposed to get the plates out of my reach?" Marie groaned. "I don't know if you noticed, but I can't fly."

Mage Maddi chuckled and said, "If you need to access any of the records inscribed in obsidian, you can either retrieve them manually or place both your hands on the quadropod and call out the date three times."

Marie did as instructed and placed her hand over the currently active quadropod. She loudly called out a random date off the top of her head, and after the third call out, the image projected around her dissipated and the plate levitated away from the quadropod. In its place, another one with the date Marie called out inscribed on its side landed on the quadropod. The concentrated stream of mana restarted and a three-dimensional image of the sky was projected around her.

"That's amazing!"

Before she could complete her exclamation, the ground beneath her started to shake. Her surge of anxiousness at the sudden earthquake was reduced slightly upon noticing the nonchalant expression on Mage Maddi's face. Evidently, this was a common thing, which made sense if there was an active underwater volcano close by. However, her assumptions were proven incorrect as the surrounding shelves started to rise higher. Incrementally with every rumble, the cubbies crept higher until a new and empty row of shelves was revealed at the very base. Then, from the Celestial Recording Platform, the current levitating obsidian plate turned along a perpendicular axis. The lens inscribed the current date on the plate's thin side, following which the plate flew towards the new row and found its new home. A new obsidian plate descended from a stack near the Platform and replaced the old one.

Marie yanked up her agape jaw and swallowed a tense mouthful of saliva. "Did the ground go lower or did the walls move higher?"

Mage Maddi turned to face her and, with an unwaveringly serious expression, answered, "Yes."