Chapter 56: Ten Years [Volume 5]
Volume 5: The Infinite Teacher
Ten years as a professor. Jake could hardly believe it.
He was, by any measurable standard, the Academy’s most popular teacher. His classes had waiting lists. His office hours required appointments booked weeks in advance. His end-of-year fireworks display (powered by infinite mana and Pi’s mathematical choreography) was the most anticipated event on the Academy calendar.
He was also, by any measurable standard, the Academy’s most chaotic teacher. Three training grounds had been rebuilt since he started. The insurance premiums for his classes were the highest in the school’s thousand-year history. And his teaching philosophy—”panic, improvise, care deeply”—had been formally criticized by the Accreditation Committee and informally adopted by every student who’d ever taken his class.
Sol, now the Academy’s Head of Student Wellness, had become his closest colleague. The powerless human and the infinitely powerful mana user made an unlikely pair, but their partnership worked because they complemented each other perfectly: Jake taught students how to use power responsibly; Sol taught them how to be people when the power wasn’t enough.
“You’re going gray,” Sol observed during a faculty meeting.
“I’m distinguished.”
“You’re thirty-five and you have gray hairs. That’s not distinguished. That’s stress.”
“I prefer ‘wisdom highlights.'”
Vex, who ran the Synthesis Studies department with the calm efficiency of someone who had long since mastered the art of not accidentally absorbing the Academy’s power grid, snorted. “Wisdom. Sure. Tell that to the training ground you demolished last Tuesday.”
“That was a teaching moment.”
“For the training ground?”
Kael, the former Eraser turned Dimensional Ethics professor, tended his garden and mentored students with a patience that only someone who had spent four thousand years destroying things could develop. His tomatoes had won the Interdimensional Agricultural Prize three years running.
Pi, now the size of a large dog and holding three honorary doctorates, had become the Academy’s de facto mascot. It attended every class, solved every equation that stumped the mathematics department, and maintained a running correspondence with the Architect (who, it turned out, was an enthusiastic amateur mathematician).
Lyra led the Academy’s Expeditionary Corps. Her teams had mapped forty new dimensions, established diplomatic relations with twelve civilizations, and discovered a species of interdimensional whale that communicated through gravitational waves. She visited the Academy once a month, always bringing souvenirs from impossible places.
And Null—the Weaver, the sky, the friend who was everywhere—held it all together. Her messages were less frequent now, but more profound. Once a week, a single line would appear in Jake’s classroom:
You’re doing well. Keep going.
Or: Pi ate another theorem. Please talk to him.
Or, on quiet Sunday evenings: Your mother made japchae tonight. It smelled wonderful. I miss eating.
Jake’s mother was seventy-three. She still cooked Sunday dinner. She still saved a bowl for “the invisible friend.” She still told Jake to eat his vegetables with the absolute authority of someone who had raised a cosmic hero and refused to be impressed by it.
Ten years. The Academy was thriving. His students were out in the world—across all thirteen dimensions—doing extraordinary things. And Jake was exactly where he wanted to be: teaching, mentoring, and proving, one class at a time, that the most powerful thing in the universe wasn’t mana.
It was showing up.