The academy looked different from above.
Not architecturally — the floating islands held their impossible constellation the same way they'd held it when I left. The spires still gleamed. The waterfalls still fell upward in places where the Aether currents played tricks with gravity. The Eastern Spires still painted the horizon in violet and silver.
But the energy was different. The leyline stabilization that the containment's restoration had produced — the founding-era-quality Aether that the concert had returned to the Eastern Spires' infrastructure — had been working for weeks now. Through Nihil's amplification, I could feel the change from kilometers away. The academy pulsed with vitality that it hadn't possessed since before I'd arrived. Cultivation gardens that had been under-performing were blooming. Training exercises that had been calibrated for depleted Aether density were suddenly over-calibrated, producing results that surprised instructors and students alike.
