Chương 16: Golden Goose

Ch 16: Golden Goose It was hard to watch as the Grey staff carried what little remained of Sahirah's belongings out of our rooms. She had been allowed inside for no more than a minute, just long enough to point out what belonged to her, while security made sure we couldn't exchange so much as a single word.

Now that she was gone, and the last of the Grey staff had walked away with her belongings like exhausted workers finishing a particularly unpleasant task, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a copy of the system.

"Can you give this to her?" The two Greys, a male and a female, paused to glance at the paper sphere in my hand, but they showed little to no interest.

"No contact allowed, human. Principal Zorik's orders." They disappeared from my sight with her belongings, while another pair of guards took their place outside Sahirah's old room, now reassigned to me after she had been moved to another building. I'd already scanned both guards with my own copy of the system. Their status windows were nearly identical: around sixty mana each, with every other attribute below thirty.

Satisfied enough with the fact they were not Mimics, and without another word, I stepped into the room. My belongings had already been piled neatly on top of the bed: stacks of spell copies, my mana-conductive ink, the borrowed copy of Magica Principia from the library, and the Fire Moon book that no one had dared so much as scratch, knowing full well who had entrusted it to me. I sighed.

Yeah, as unreasonable as it was, just two days of sharing a room with her had been enough to leave me feeling strangely empty in her absence. Well, that, and the very real concern for my life. Sahirah and the Fuck Everything into Oblivion spell were at least a tested combination, whereas the two guards outside my room were little more than an empty promise of protection. With another sigh, I sat on the bed. Several minutes passed before I found the motivation to do anything.

Eventually, a thread of determination surfaced. Organizing my belongings and moving my ink, paper, and supplies to the new writing desk seemed like a good place to start putting my life back in order. As I reached for the Fire Moon book, however, a slip of paper sticking out between the pages like a bookmark caught my attention. I opened the book immediately, and a smile spread across my face.

On chapter eight, right beside the illustration of the second stage of the dual cultivation technique, there was a note waiting for me. It read: A girl can wait. Just four words, probably written in a rush in less than a minute, yet they were enough to renew my determination. I quickly finished sorting my belongings before opening Magica Principia to the page where I had left off. Yeah... who the fuck did the Greys think they were? Our parents? The villains of some Shakespearean tragedy? No.

They were just a bunch of sadistic bureaucrats whose lives were probably as gray as their skin, people who took pleasure in making everyone else just as miserable as they were. But despite all their rules, taboos, and codes of conduct, they would not have the last laugh. Not as long as Eric Nevermore was still breathing.

Two days had passed without another Mimic incident, and the school had begun to regain a sense of normalcy. I hadn't attended a single class during those two days obviously. Instead, I'd spent most of my time locked in my room, reading the big book and crafting new spheres. They weren't a new version of the system yet, just copies needed to fulfill the orders my sales representatives had made over the past two days. To my surprise, there had been quite a few sales.

And now, I sat at a corner table in the food court for dinner, with all my representatives gathered around me to discuss business while we ate. The problem, however, was that neither the food nor the conversation could hold my attention. Every couple of minutes, I found myself glancing over at Sahirah. She was eating alone. Completely alone. Unlike me, she hadn't built bridges with the other species, even though she knew far more about their cultures than I did.

Yeah, if anyone deserved to be sitting alone, it was probably me. And yet here we were.

"Are you even listening to me, Eric?" Niko spoke from the seat across from me, his mouth half full of a roasted rib, leading me to conclude that the Zufi didn't care much about talking while they chewed.

"Sorry, Niko. I was just checking on Sahirah." Before he could reply, the scaled brothers interrupted.

"Rumor hasss it..." Kap began.

"... that the two of you sssplit apart," Kip finished. They sat side by side to Niko's left. Their trays held far more vegetables and fruit than meat; unlike Sahirah, they seemed to be omnivores.

"We didn't split apart." The words escaped before I could think.

"Well... it's not like we were together together, but our relationship is exactly the same as it was before. We just aren't allowed to be near each other right now." It was strange that I couldn't even define what Sahirah and I were to each other. Still, I knew one thing with absolute certainty. Nothing had changed between us. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. If the Grey guards vanished right now, she'd probably be back in my room within a few hours.

"Our people say you two are a couple by convenience." For some reason, Zira, who sat beside me with a tray full of strange fruit and leafy vegetables, chose that exact moment to join the conversation. Why was she so shy whenever we talked business, yet so eager to bring up this topic? The more I thought about her words, though, the more they unsettled me. Were Sahirah and I really just a couple by convenience? What if we weren't rare species? What if we'd both arrived with our own people?

What if I hadn't shared a table with her on the first day, and we had never gotten into trouble together? I shook my head, as if I could physically throw those thoughts away. What if the sun were square? What if bacon tasted like cotton candy? Questions like that had no value, and only the present mattered. Well... the present, and the future it would shape. I looked Zira in the eyes and answered more honestly than I probably should have.

"Convenience definitely played a part in whatever relationship we have." I sighed.

"And I freaking miss that convenience. It's convenient not to worry about dying every night. It's convenient to have someone who always carries mana-conductive ink in her purse. And it's convenient to have a partner for–" I caught myself before saying dual cultivation. Some things didn't need to be shared with everyone. Despite my abrupt stop, Niko either figured out what I had been about to say or imagined something even worse. He slammed a hand on the table and burst into booming laughter.

Several other Zufi looked over from their own table, while one of the elves shouted for him to keep it down. Niko ignored them completely. When he finally stopped laughing, he wiped a tear from his eye.

"My apologies." He wasn't apologizing to me, but to everyone at the table, all of whom were staring at him as though he'd lost his mind. Unfortunately, his outburst had attracted attention.

"A table with mixed species? Who are those weirdos?" Several elves turned to look at us. Then their expressions sharpened the moment they noticed Zira sitting among us. The tall female who had given me trouble during combat class rose from her seat without taking her eyes off Zira.

"Come here where you belong, Zira." For a moment, I thought I was about to lose one of my sales representatives. Instead, Zira surprised me. Keeping her eyes fixed on her shoes, she replied quietly, "I'm sorry, Lili. I still have business to discuss with the human."

"Business?" the tall elf repeated. She let the word press heavy on the silence, saying nothing else for several long seconds, as if testing whether Zira could withstand the pressure. When Zira swallowed but still didn't move, Lili's voice hardened.

"Come here. Your business with the human ended the moment you bought his sphere. You don't belong with them." Zira looked painfully uncomfortable, and everyone at my table looked at me. It took me a few seconds to understand what they expected, but given that we were technically coworkers now, I figured I owed her some support. I stood.

"We're discussing business," I said.

"And you're in the way. So unless you want a second round of what happened during combat class, I'd leave Zira alone." Lili happened to be the elf I'd dropped into the pool with the Pain-Inducing spell, so my words weren't entirely empty. She glared at me with a gaze hot enough to burn. And then she slowly sat back down.

"Do what you want," she said.

"The human will become Mimic food soon enough." A brief silence took over the food court after she uttered those words, but Niko soon broke it by laughing again, and the usual chatter gradually returned. When he finally stopped, he lowered his voice so only the people at our table could hear.

"I wouldn't call us a pack," he said, his gaze settling on Zira.

"So why did you choose to stay here instead of returning to your own people, Driari girl?" The words friendship and gratitude briefly crossed my mind. But I was wrong.

"The human is by far my best source of credits," Zira replied quietly. I laughed. Yeah, I had to admire her honesty. Even if Niko was the only one at the table I considered a friend, that could change with time, as long as we respected one another and stayed honest. Since I knew Kip and Kap weren't likely to keep the conversation going, I steered it back to the reason I'd called everyone together.

"So, how many copies of the system has each of you sold?" That had been the whole point of this meeting, and now that everyone had stopped prying into my relationship with Sahirah, it was the perfect opportunity to get my little sales team back on track. Holding up his credit crystal, Niko said, "One sale to the seniors. Delivered and paid." I smirked and placed my own crystal on the table. A moment later, the transfer completed, already accounting for his commission. +150.

"What about you two?" The scaled brothers exchanged a brief glance.

"Two..."

"... salesss." They offered no further details, simply holding their crystal next to mine. +300. If they wanted to be mysterious, that was fine with me. Profit was profit.

"Ah..." Zira said hesitantly.

"Go ahead."

"Five sales." Every eye at the table turned toward her.

"Two delivered, but three are waiting for the new supply. They already paid to secure priority."

"Five?" I repeated, making sure I'd heard correctly.

"Who the hell are you selling them to?" Zira looked down before answering.

"My people can be... difficult to do business with." Then she looked back at me.

"So I started selling to the Grey staff instead. They don't live on an allowance like we do, so they don't think twice about spending two hundred and fifty credits for extra safety." I wasn't going to lie. Hearing that made me feel like an idiot. Why hadn't I thought of that myself? Apparently, I wasn't the only one. Niko, and even Kip and Kap, stared at her as though she'd just revealed some profound business secret. Yeah, it suddenly made perfect sense why she hadn't gone back to her own people.

Shy or not, five hundred credits in commissions, with the prospect of earning much more, was more than enough incentive to stay at this table. And on top of that... She hadn't kept the idea to herself. She'd shared her sales strategy with everyone. That was an employee worth keeping. That was someone who deserved a promotion. I slid my credit crystal toward hers.

"I only want payment for four of those sales," I said.

"You can keep the profit from the fifth one entirely for yourself. Consider it a bonus for sharing that strategy with the team." Her eyes lit up. With an unmistakably happy smile, she completed the transfer. +600. Excluding Zira, there were four of us at that table, three of us from different species. Yet, for one brief moment, as our gazes met, species barriers stopped mattering. I recognized two emotions shared by everyone there. One was greed. The healthy kind. The other...

an unspoken desire to protect our golden goose of an elf. Because whether she realized it or not, Zira had just gained four allies that day.

That same night, I was alone in my room. I'd just bought a vial of high-grade mana ink, an entire tier above the kind I'd been using before for the Fuck Everything into Oblivion spell and the magic circles I inscribed in my body. The best part? It had cost 280 credits, and I hadn't even flinched at the price. I'd even paid one of the Zufi thirty credits to deliver a letter to Sahirah with a few things I wanted to tell her.

I hadn't even bothered rereading it to make sure I'd said everything, because if I forgot something, I'd just send another letter tomorrow. Still, even though credits were no longer a problem, a few obstacles still stood between me and the future I wanted. First came the Mimics. It was hard to enjoy the future if I wasn't alive to see it. Then there was my freedom, or rather, the lack of it. Watching Sahirah eat alone every day without even being allowed to invite her to our table made my blood boil.

For those two reasons, I decided it was finally time to increase my own power and stop neglecting the things I'd been putting off. I opened Magica Principia to a page I'd read before and focused on a passage I'd always dismissed.

'Become one with your inner energy and commune with the mana within.' Closing my eyes, I reached for the mana flowing through my body. Then I recalled the exact sensation of the first stage of dual cultivation I'd completed with Sahirah. As that familiar feeling returned, I focused, shaping runes directly from mana above the palm of my hand. One. Two. Three. That was my limit. Pathetic. Not even close to the seven runes needed to cast a simple, low-powered fireball.

I opened my eyes again and watched the three glowing runes hovering above my palm.

"Not enough." I picked up my quill and began sketching a spell across my upper arm. It was heavily inspired by the illusion spell I'd become so familiar with. My goal was to create a casting assistant for inkless magic. A illusion spell that targeted myself. It would work like a magical augmented-reality assistant, projecting the image of runes directly into my mind.

Instead of constructing every rune from scratch, I'd simply trace over the projected pattern with my mana, the same way an unskilled artist could speed up the process by painting over a printed sketch instead of drawing the entire thing freehand. Yeah. Some people would probably call it cheating. I didn't care. Anything that helped me grow my company, stay alive, and reclaim my freedom was worth doing. And tomorrow... Tomorrow I was going to do something completely shameless.

I'd ask Professor Lathara for a private meeting. I'd show her the spell I'd outlined on my arm and ask her to verify that the rune syntax was correct. And if she found no mistakes... I'd permanently inscribe the spell onto my skin with that high-grade ink. Then I'd shamelessly rush my way ahead, taking my first step toward joining the ranks of true inkless casters. Well, assuming Lathara didn't report me to Principal Dickhead the moment I rolled up my sleeve.