Toby accepted the benefits Dangros had offered, so it was hard for him to keep scowling. Still, he remained largely indifferent to Dangros's fawning, only chirping a few replies now and then.
Yet even those few chirps left Dangros thrilled.
Dangros actually could not understand what Toby's chirps meant, but every chirp from Toby prompted an even more torrential flood of praise from Dangros.
And so, without any translation whatsoever, a severed hand and a seabird conversed for a full ten minutes.
Only when they arrived before a red archway did Dangros finally stop chattering.
"This is the classroom where Teacher gives lessons." Dangros pointed ahead.
Angel stopped and looked toward the archway. The door stood open, revealing several rows of desks and chairs made from black stone.
"It really is a classroom." Angel looked mildly surprised. Earlier, he had thought he had misunderstood. He had assumed the classroom was some small room where Ma Gu taught Dangros one-on-one, called a classroom merely because knowledge was imparted there. Yet this classroom truly resembled those in human academies.
So Ma Gu's body did not merely incorporate a residential district—it also served as a school?
Was Ma Gu transforming his own body into a city for elemental life?
With those doubts in mind, Angel followed Dangros into the classroom.
Angel had already taken in most of the classroom from outside, but after entering, he noticed two details he had not seen before.
The first was the classroom's lamp.
The classroom was spacious, roughly the size of an ordinary church's prayer hall. What was noteworthy, however, was the height of its ceiling—at least thirty meters high. At the very top hung an enormous orange fireball, serving as the classroom's lamp.
Angel noticed this "lamp" first because he could sense the intense elemental fluctuations