The transport had barely finished lowering them from the mountain's peak before Ren understood, with a sinking certainty, that his body had not actually been given ninety minutes to recover. It had been given ninety minutes to be moved somewhere worse.
The second training ground sat in a shallow basin roughly a kilometer from the mountain's base, and even from a distance, Ren felt something wrong about it before he could see why.
The air itself seemed to thicken as they approached, the pleasant, mineral-cool freshness of the academy grounds curdling into something heavier, faintly acrid, that clung to the back of his throat in a way that had nothing to do with the day's exhaustion.
"This is a controlled fragment," Instructor Grael said, standing at the edge of a massive warded perimeter, "cultivated from a genuine curse zone cluster. Twenty-three separate curse nests, contained and stabilized within these boundaries specifically for training purposes."
Ren's stomach dropped.
