6:55 AM at Class A Dormitory — Communal Kitchen, First Floor.
The dormitory's first-floor kitchen was not a formal dining space.
It was a narrow room beside the main common area with a cold-storage cabinet, a heating plate, and a kettle that ran on the building's mana-infrastructure supply.
Most students used it for tea between meals or for storing personal food items they had brought from the city.
It smelled perpetually of the grain cereal that someone on the second floor heated every morning and of the dried herbs that a third-year student kept in a labeled container on the top shelf with a note that read: PLEASE DO NOT USE.
I used the kitchen because it was the only place in the dormitory with a kettle that was always on.
At 6:55 I came up from the sub-level with my notebook full of observations from the 5:30 session, my mana channels warm from ninety minutes of ambient-draw cultivation, and a specific hunger for something hot.
