"I think he was trying to offer to be your broker? You're pretty obviously not going into the 'canny liquidator or buyer of exotic resources on the open market' specialisation, which is what Market kids love to do, so he was, if not making an explicit offer, making it known that he wants to do that and that we can consider him as possible source for those services. He'd probably be better at it than Garnet. There are a bunch of little specialisations like that - alchemists and smiths and healers and archivists and such, and everyone going into those specialisations are going to want to build up an audience with their peers pretty fast, because they can't buy cultivation resources if they can't get paid."

"Huh, okay."

She smiles. "I guess we're making progress on the contact-acquiring, then."

"Hopefully!"

The noble will start interrogating the spider further about its world while she eats, and in particular about financial regulations - the Celestial Order seems to have a very complicated system for insurance and rights-fees and licensing and so forth that's very easy for an outsider to fail to interact with lethally, if they're not paying the absurd fees to get someone to handle it for them.

...well, if it's very easy to get yourself killed in the process without a lifetime's experience, maybe the extremely high fees aren't so absurd. "Keeping you alive" is a very valuable service!

(...as long as the service provider is not also the source of the threat.)

If there seems like a good moment to chime in at some point, she will ask the spider how their food is. It might make for a refreshing break from the financial-system interrogation, and she is curious about the paperwork thing.

(From what she can tell the spider does seem to be physically digesting the paperwork and not just reading it, which suggests that it really is more like human food than like making a story offering to the fae. Maybe not much more, though.)

Its meal, is, apparently, rustic to its tastes, but - possessed of a depth and organic complexity the food it could get back home didn't have, of financial instruments allowed to grow and sprawl in a relatively unregulated environment. It is, you see, indirectly eating the actual derivatives that the paperwork represents, as well as the actual paper (which it can't really digest and will have to excrete later). Highly levered derivatives like this are sort of unhealthy, it says defensively, but it does deserve a treat now and again.

The multiverse is truly full of wonders.

(It's unfortunate that she'll (...presumably?) never know what a derivative tastes like; on the bright side, there are other alien senses that are obtainable.)

(She wonders if there are convergents who can taste derivatives (it's not like it's that much weirder than those people for whom the winter solstice is located between their feet), but in any case it wouldn't be the same.)

"That's very fair."

A thought strikes her.

"How was the feast yesterday?"

("Leveraging food-magic to become really good at crafting financial derivatives" sounds like exactly the kind of clever loophole that teaches students subtlety. If that's even how it works. She might be getting too far ahead of herself.)

"Very strange. You humans like your elixirs and pills much too much." The spider gestures in the direction of the food they're currently eating. "Proceeds from hunting expeditions are very exotic cuisine, back home. Not much wilderness to hunt in."

Kedri wonders what her future selves who are more knowledgeable about elixirs and pills, and especially the ones who have no access to elixirs or pills and are funding all of their cultivation off of Void-Soul Meditation Scripture, think of that statement. As it stands, she thinks she's missing a lot of the meaning here.

She laughs a little.

"I haven't really had a chance to figure out yet how much I like my elixirs and pills, personally.

I don't think the food is normally magically active? I get the impression that's a special-occasion thing. Although I'm not yet in a very good position to notice enchantments on this," she gestures at the bits remaining on her plate, "to be fair. I was assuming this was just, like, the normal kind of human sustenance, where you break the food down with acid and do something not unlike burning to the resulting stuff not unlike fuel.

...I guess that sounds really weird if you're not used to it."

"I don't really know much about why humans are always eating bits of plant and animal so I'll take your word for it." 

(Jasmine will confirm that this is ordinary food prepared probably by other random sect members rather than specialised immortal chefs. Maybe the kitchen has a few, but ones low-level enough that they can't do more than make the food really tasty, at least when working with ingredients of this quality and this level of demand.)

Kedri passes along the confirmation.

"That's so weird. But this world is so unregulated. So I guess it makes some sort of sense." The spider trails off into thoughtful silence.

In the thing that is currently more of a vague collection of desires and not yet a proper text-file (maybe she should start making a list in her notebook for the time being, even if it's harder to make organised edits that way), Kedri adds a subsection "worldsoul natives" next to "tongwan" in the "alien psychology" section of things she wants to read up on, with further sub-sub-sections to be added once she learns more about which worldsouls have available books about them.

And so they will fall into silence and eating for what time remains to them in their breakfast break, until it is time to go to the second of their three compulsory classes - Ethics and History.

They sure did put the "you're allowed to cultivate after this" class last. Well, fair enough, especially with a class on ethics.

(...she hopes the history lessons will not require too much in the way of prerequisite background knowledge, at least not before she's had a chance to flip through some children's history books.)

She thinks it over a bit and decides not to offer to switch before class, though she'll do it if Jasmine asks her to. Kedri's still faster at switching for now, and being able to switch on the spot did come in handy yesterday.

Then she can head to class! They are being taught in another auditorium, one which leaves them a little more crowded - more like a university lecture theater than box seats at a play, and which is richly upholstered in red and gold silk covered in abstract patterns. At the center, on the podium, a man is meditating - the first truly old person Kedri has seen since arriving, long white beard pooling on the floor, skin wrinkled and worn and weathered by what is presumably a very very long life. He sits in silence, his eyes closed, as people trickle in, waiting for the time to start.

"Studying alongside a hundred other people" is still kind of weirding her out. She hopes it won't be too distracting.

Kedri wonders to what extent stains interfere with automating cloth production, and whether there's magic for cloth-making. She's not sure what implications she's expected to take from all the upholstery, whether it represents vast quantities of labour or magical prowess or the ability to import cloth from places where the laws of physics permit cloth factories or if actually this is all pretty easy to come by and they just thought it looked and felt nice.

She's also not sure what implications she's expected to take from the teacher looking much older than everyone else, but that feels easier to form into a question.

"What does it...convey, appearing old in a context where...people can live for many centuries, and usually die of things other than old age, and where your magic eventually ends up taking precedence over your mortal needs? Is it implying that he's most of the way through what lifespan he's obtained, and maybe deliberately chosen *not* to attempt advancement to the next realm given that he's here teaching and not scrambling for more? Is it an aesthetic preference? Something else altogether?"