Valentine continues to be shit at meditation, according to Morgan. He still can’t feel the magic. He’s asked Morgan dozens of times now what it’s supposed to feel like but all the man will say is when it happens he’ll just know.

In the meantime Valentine gets saddled with an oppressive amount of reading material. Morgan has to fill out all sorts of requisition forms to get access to them on Valentine’s behalf. For his part, Valentine has to sign and initial an ominous sounding contract. It promises all sorts of non specific but incredibly dire consequences should he share the content of the restricted documents (deliberately or otherwise) with his classmates.

The restricted material is everything and anything to do with cores, including unredacted versions of historical texts Valentine’s already read. Morgan explains that while they’re not exactly made available to the general public they normally aren’t so restricted to practitioners. But within the context of how the program is being run having these materials made widely available to all participants would confuse things at best and cause outright chaos at worst.

Knowledge regarding cores is something that’s not normally shared with non practitioners at all. Not only are cores very personal and highly individualized but there’s lots of ways to interfere with them that would be very bad for spiritualists if they widely known.

It’s also an extremely bad idea for people to try and develop cores without proper instruction and supervision. That’s how monsters get made — people have cores that get corrupted by evil influences and in the process become unbalanced and uncontrollable.

And of course the earliest spiritualists didn’t have a system of training or guidance and there were many casualties as they learned how to best channel magic. Now such incidents are something that is fairly rare.

A large portion of Valentine’s assigned reading is personal journals which is really cool. They’re very informal in tone and style and one in particular has some super creative swears and insults that he takes notes on. The author, Tiago Lu, was an itinerant mage that specialized in neutralizing supernatural creatures. Apparently he was very good at his job and in fairly high demand. His journal is full of descriptions of all the different creatures he’d encountered and what it took to take them down. But he was also low key annoyed with everyone all the time so his journal’s also full of rants on how unbearably stupid city officials are. Valentine often finds himself laughing out loud as he reads.

There’s one section where Tiago Lu gets brought in to save this place out in fuck of the middle nowhere and the town council are all fighting each other over who is going to get to marry their daughter off to him. He’s already completely done with all of their shit because the job had been a complete disaster from the start.

He’d been hired on to take care of this river spirit that was drowning people and as it turned out the spirit was one seriously pissed off ghost of this guy that had died during the recent construction of a bridge. It had collapsed halfway through being built due to a miscalculation precipitated by budget cuts and a rushed timeline and he and three others had been caught underneath. It was a tough exorcism to perform; Lu couldn’t really blame the guy for being upset over his preventable and senseless death but he was also indiscriminately attacking anyone trying to use the bridge so he had to go.

Then the council tried to haggle over his price after he’d taken care of the spirit and if he didn’t already regret taking the job before he definitely did then.

The account abruptly cuts off right in the middle of Lu gearing up to tell the council where they could go and what they could do when they get there. There’s some missing pages then the narrative picks up a few months later and half a continent away. Valentine’s dismayed and disappointed because he really wants to know how that particular misadventure had ended. He skims through the remaining pages in the journal and notices that it’s been pretty heavily edited, to the point of being unreadable given how much it skips around. It’s strange because Morgan had made such a big fuss over getting the unedited versions of things and this journal clearly has large sections that have gone missing.

Valentine mentions the journal to Morgan after their next meditation session which is just as successful as all the ones before it which is to say not at all.

Morgan, who is already filling out his weekly report on Valentine’s progress, pauses his typing mid-sentence and frowns. “Which journal is this?” he asks, faux casually.

“Tiago Lu.”

Morgan’s eyebrows practically disappear into his hairline. “That journal was not one of the ones I requested.”

“It’s really good though! All the other ones have been boring as hell.”

An odd expression crosses Morgan’s face as he pales, then flushes. “What ah, what parts have you read. So far.”

Valentine gives him a quick summary, making sure to emphasize how much he’s learned about the identification and dispatching of different types of supernatural pests. “And then it starts skipping huge chunks. Like there’s this one part where he gets rid of this water spirit that’s not a water spirit then it just cuts to him getting hired to investigate this forest where people keep disappearing. Then it skips to the end of that where he’s getting paid and I thought you said the whole point of all the paperwork was that I’d get the unedited versions of things?”

Morgan looks relieved. “Yes, but that journal shouldn’t have been included. It’s not going to help with developing a core.”

“The guy seems like he was really good at magic though, his journal can’t be a total waste of time.”

Morgan just huffs out a laugh and shakes his head. “Trust me, the edited version has everything related to magic. There’s a reason most of the whole back half of it is gone.”

“So you’ve read it then,” Valentine says excitedly. He doesn’t have to read it, he just wants to know what happened after the whole water spirit thing. He half expected Lu to end up punching some officials in the face and having to make a run for it.

Morgan flushes and looks down and away, embarrassed.

Holy shit, Valentine thinks. It must be something good if it’s got Morgan acting all weird about it. “Come on, you gotta tell me what happened.”

“Out,” Morgan says, exasperated but also still flushed with embarrassment. He makes a shooing motion at Valentine, urging him out the door. “Go read a book that’s actually useful since you’re still terrible at meditation.”

Valentine does continue to read through the seemingly endless pile of texts he’s been given but nothing catches his attention the way that Tiago Lu’s journal has. He keeps working on his meditation and trying to get a sense for magic but he’s still really terrible at it. He can’t help but wonder if part of his problem at this point is just the way his mind keeps circling back to that journal, unable to let it go.

So he tries to negotiate because what does he have to lose and it’s already worked out once in his favor before.

“Hey Morgan, if I finally figure out this meditation thing can you get me the unedited version of that journal?”

Morgan doesn’t quite bang his head against his desk in frustration, but he comes pretty close. “No! Please tell me you’re not still reading that thing. You have a lot more to learn and not much time to do it in, it’s just a distraction that you don’t need.”

“Not knowing what happens is distracting! What if that’s what’s messing up my meditation?”

Morgan gives him a dirty look. “You were having problems long before that journal found its way into your hands.”

“Hey!”

“Have you forgotten what the point of all this is? Are you not sufficiently motivated?”

Valentine knows exactly what’s at stake. It’s always there lurking in the corner of his mind but he does his best to just leave it be, otherwise it’s all too easy to get overwhelmed by the anxiety and the fear that he’s not going to make it. It must show on his face because Morgan shifts from exasperation to concern in an instant.

“Once you get a feel for it, everything else will fall into place, I promise. Normally you’d be able to take your time with it, go at your own speed. Unfortunately…” Morgan looks exhausted, mentally and physically. Valentine often forgets that he also has to oversee the older students, the ones like Gee that are in the last stages of the program.

Those students have cores that are at least functional but they are essentially receiving a whirlwind of a crash course in how to utilize them as the window of time between full core activation and shipping out is incredibly small.

Or so he understands at any rate. Morgan doesn’t say much about it and Gee has been unhelpfully vague although that’s probably partly due to being sworn to confidentiality. Valentine would be hurt that Gee doesn’t share the information with him regardless but considering how much he’s not telling Gee these days, well.

“It’s just hard to focus,” Valentine says for what feels like the hundredth time that day. “I know I’m supposed to be trying to feel the magic or whatever but I can’t sense anything and I’m just sitting there not feeling anything and I really, really want to know how that journal ends!”

Morgan briefly closes his eyes, a pained look crossing his face. “Fine,” he says. “I give up. If anyone catches you reading that thing, you certainly didn’t get it from me.”