Chương 18: Advice

Ch 18: Advice After that forced trip with the archmage, during which I learned the Greys were planning to build a portal to Earth, it felt incredibly strange to be somewhere as mundane as the faculty wing. I hadn't even attended a single class taught by most of the professors whose offices lined the corridor. Stranger still, I found myself standing in front of Professor Lathara's office, the Grey woman who had suggested forcibly separating Sahirah and me.

And yet, there I was, about to knock on her door and ask for advice about runes. Sometimes I thought of myself as brave. Other times, I thought of myself as shameless. But with a smile on my face, I knocked anyway, keeping my rune-covered arm hidden beneath my sleeve so no one would suspect what I was about to show her.

"Come in!" Her voice came through the door, just loud enough for me to hear. I stepped inside without hesitation and quietly locked the door behind me. My reasoning was simple. She had argued that Sahirah and I had exceptional potential as casters the day she'd proposed separating us. If that was truly what she believed, then she would probably be willing to review my work and offer advice, even if I'd skipped nearly all of her classes. To my surprise, she didn't even look up.

She continued inscribing runes into a large magic circle spread across her desk. Curiosity got the better of me. Besides her beautiful calligraphy, I couldn't immediately tell what the spell was meant to do. Mana resonance? No... It was more than that. One section was clearly dedicated to sound detection and amplification, though I wasn't familiar with that branch of spellcraft.

"Long-distance communication?" I asked. Only then did her deep-blue eyes lift to meet mine.

"Of every student in this school, you're the one I expected to see the least." She glanced at the spell before looking back atme.

"But your assessment is correct. My fiancé teaches at another academy, and we save credits by making our own long-distance communication spell." My first thought was that someone in a long-distance relationship had condemned Sahirah and me to the same fate. Was it spite? No. Lathara was far too methodical to act out of emotion. She was simply another Grey bureaucrat, blindly following regulations, though at least she seemed to let logic, not petty malice like that old hag Niori, guide her decisions.

"I'm here because I want you to check two of my spells for mistakes," I said.

"I need the opinion of someone with years of experience." She set her quill aside and interlaced her fingers, resting her chin on them as she studied me.

"Take a seat," she said.

"I admit I'm curious about your work, considering you aced my exam without attending a single class." A smirk spread across my face as I sat down, positioning myself so it would be easy to reveal my arm, though I resisted the urge to rush.

"Where's the paper?" she asked.

"There isn't any," I replied.

"Just skin." I rolled up my sleeve, folding it several times until my entire arm was exposed. Her eyes widened. And then they stopped moving altogether. I hadn't counted, but there had to be around three thousand tiny runes covering my arm. Yeah... I'd gotten a little carried away, spending hours and more hours in this project. The casting assistant wasn't the only spell I'd inscribed, and I'd also added a second one.

A spell designed to place me under a dreamlike illusion, a mental library where I planned to store spells for quick casting, editing, and version control. Perhaps even automating spell copying by using mana as a stamp for theink, though that would require some testing. After all, Navar lacked more than a system and coffee. It also lacked printers and Git. And as much as I enjoyed writing runes with ink, I couldn't deny that I missed the convenience of having a virtual workspace.

"This..." Lathara fell completely silent. Without asking permission, she reached for my arm and inspected one small section. She froze. A few seconds later, she moved to another module. She froze again. The process repeated over and over. After several minutes, I started wondering whether she actually understood what she was looking at. After all, my design choices were anything but conventional considering Navar standards. Eventually, she abandoned her own communication spell entirely.

She just set it aside and began copying one section of my arm onto a fresh sheet of paper.

"This sub-circle is atrocious," she muttered.

"You're not supposed to build an illusion like this. It'll never work." She began rewriting it in a more traditional configuration. Then she stopped.

"... No." She frowned.

"It might work." She grabbed another blank sheet and copied a different module.

"The rune layout here is a mess." She wasn't wrong. That section was probably the sloppiest part of the entire design. Still, ugly didn't mean nonfunctional. I understood every rune in it, and I was confident it would work once supplied with mana. The cycle continued for several more minutes. At one point, someone knocked on the office door. Lathara didn't even acknowledge it, and whoever it was eventually assumed the room was empty and walked away.

Finally, after examining every module, she leaned back in her chair.

"Three major problems." I leaned forward immediately. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. This was exactly why I'd come. A free code review from someone I didn't particularly like... but trusted to be more than competent enough for the job.

"First," she said, "the spell on your upper arm is by far the most worrying. You're creating an illusory space inside your own mind. You can use it to create mental copies of spells, yet when you interact with that environment, you won't be storing information in the runes themselves, but in your own brain. Have you considered the mental strain you'll be placing on yourself if this spell remains active all the time?" No. That hadn't even crossed my mind.

But the moment she mentioned the mental strain, a solution was already taking shape in my head. A limiter. The illusion could remain faint most of the time, lingering in my subconscious like a dream, only becoming fully vivid when I deliberately increased the mana flow, such as during combat or spell editing. Luckily, among the countless edge cases covered in the pages Elitha had given me, there was documentation for something similar.

"I can work around that," I said.

"But you mentioned two problems with the spell on my upper arm. What's the second?" She looked at me as though I were insane for immediately looking for a workaround instead of abandoning the idea. Still, she answered.

"Mana," she said, pointing directly at the Mana Drain module near my shoulder.

"This spell will remain active continuously, and it will drain mana faster than you can naturally recover it. It's even worse than you think, human. Every time your mana pool reaches zero, you'll lose everything you've stored inside the illusion." Damn. I'd forgotten I wasn't Sahirah. Mana consumption was a real limitation for me. And yet, it wasn't an impossible problem to solve. Just as I'd learned how to make my spells Sahirah-proof, I could learn to make them more mana-efficient.

Losing the stored information was the harder issue to solve. But as long as I kept paper backups of anything important, I could always rebuild my mental library if I ever exhausted my mana. Not ideal, but manageable enough to be useful.

"So..." I asked, "what's the last problem?" Lathara stood up from her chair, apparently realizing that I wasn't the sort of person who abandoned insane ideas.

"I couldn't fully decipher that second spell," she admitted.

"But I know enough to say this: if you use it..." She folded her arms, staring at my forearm.

"... you can kiss any chance of joining the academy goodbye." She met my eyes.

"You'll be branded a cheater. Someone too impatient to let their skill with mana catch up to their skill with runes. People who permanently mark their bodies with ink for casting advantages far smaller than the ones you're giving yourself are rejected by the academy. They'll never be taken seriously." So I wouldn't be allowed into their little club. And... What exactly was the downside? Smiling, I couldn't resist asking a question.

"I know someone whose entire body is covered in runes," I said.

"I'm pretty sure she could kill you in half a second while doing a backflip if she felt like it." I deliberately avoided saying Elitha Hearthstrong's name. I'd already noticed how everyone in this school bent over backward to avoid speaking it aloud. Lathara froze. She even glanced nervously over her shoulder, as though afraid the archmage herself had materialized behind her. Finding nothing, she sighed in relief before looking back at me.

"You may think... a certain someone is a role model simply because she's powerful." She stole another cautious glance behind herself before continuing.

"But I assure you, the dream job for someone at the very top isn't serving as a translation caster in a school for Rift arrivals. If she's stationed here, it's because she was rejected everywhere else... or exiled." Then, in a surprisingly sincere tone, she asked, "You don't want that for yourself, do you, human?" Now that... That was unexpected. Until now, everyone I'd met seemed to respect the archmage unconditionally. Apparently, I'd misunderstood.

Principal Dickhead and the rest of the faculty didn't respect Elitha Hearthstrong. They feared her. That was one hell of a revelation to stumble upon during what was supposed to be a simple rune review. Still, I'd gotten everything I'd come for. Now that I knew the problems, I could solve them however I saw fit. I stood up.

"Thank you, Professor Lathara. You've been very helpful today." Yeah, I thanked her. I didn't think this somehow made up for separating Sahirah and me. It really didn't. But I also understood that Lathara herself was less at fault than the bureaucracy surrounding her. At the end of the day, she was just another cog in the vast machine that was Grey society. And Sahirah and I were simply foreign objects that machine was desperately trying to force into one of its predefined slots.

"Wait," she said as my hand reached the doorknob.

"What?"

"Despite everything I just told you..." She studied me for a long moment.

"You're still going to mark your body with permanent ink, aren't you?"

"The future you see for me isn't the future I see for myself, Miss Lathara," I replied.

"In fact, even the present your people want for me isn't the one I want to live." I smiled.

"But I'm going to change that. And there's nothing you, or Principal Dickhead, can do to stop me." I opened the door and walked out. Lathara didn't say another word.

I was on my way back to my room from Lathara's office when I spotted a Granar mopping the hallway, and I thought nothing of it. Students doing odd jobs around the school was common, just like Sahirah babysitting the younger children. So I simply stepped aside to let him pass, though I never stopped paying attention to my surroundings. The moment I walked past him, however, I heard his voice.

"Hissssss."

"What the hell?" The curse escaped me as I jumped back, my hand already diving into my pocket for an illusion spell.

"Lower your voice, human. I'm just trying to get your attention." He'd tried to get my attention with a snake hiss? Only after activating the system and scanning him did I lower my guard slightly. Yeah, I didn't particularly care that he hadn't consented to being scanned, and I apologized afterward anyway, blaming my overreaction on the Mimics that had been oddly quiet the past two days.

"So... what's this about? Why you need my attention?" He glanced both ways down the corridor. Once he was satisfied my Grey escort wasn't nearby, he reached into his janitor's cart and pulled out a folded piece of paper.

"The Nadiri girl asked me to deliver this. Be quick. One of my buddies is distracting your escort." A reply from Sahirah? As happy as I was, I immediately hid the letter beneath my clothes. I knew exactly how rare these brief moments without Grey supervision were, and the distraction wouldn't last long.

"Thank you," I said.

"That'll be thirty creditssss. She said you were paying." I laughed awkwardly as I pulled out my credit crystal and paid him. This was the first time Sahirah had asked me to pay for anything. Hopefully, the letter would explain why. Only after returning to my room and locking the door did I finally unfold it. A chuckle escaped my lips before I'd even finished the first paragraph.

"I heard that the leaf-licking Driari you protected in the food court made you a lot of credits. Good for you, human. But you're paying for the delivery of this message, because a girl still has to babysit children every day just to make sure there's enough meat on her plate while you have credits to spare..." I slowly walked toward my bed as I kept reading. For the first few paragraphs, I genuinely couldn't tell whether Sahirah was jealous of Zira... or simply jealous of my growing pile of credits.

The smile faded from my face when I reached the fifth paragraph.

"... the room they gave me is awful. The Zufi seniors on the floors above and below never stop making noise at night, and they keep knocking on my door every day because my poor mana control keeps burning out their light crystals, forcing them to use candles just like I do..." She spent several more paragraphs complaining about her new room. One particular Zufi female appeared over and over in her complaints, described as the nosy type... Both figuratively and literally.

Eventually, she reached the real reason she'd written.

"... I was thinking, Eric. Your mastery of runes might be enough to design a spell similar to the one you made to hide my surname from your system. Maybe it could help us see each other again and continue the second stage of dual cultivation. I just hope you haven't gotten lost in some side project and forgotten about me." I glanced at my rune-covered arms and smirked. Yeah. She knew me well. Just not well enough. As deep as I was into the realm of runes, there wasn't a chance in the world I'd forget about her.

As I continued reading, I finally understood where she was going.

"... I don't know if this is possible or just another one of my crazy ideas, but what if you created an illusion that erased our presence from people's perception? Then we could sneak out of our rooms at night and meet somewhere in the school. Is a girl onto something, or is she just entertaining childish dreams?" I set the letter down and buried my face in my hands. Damn. Why did Sahirah have to come up with such a brilliant idea all by herself? It should have been me who thought of that! Well...

I'd benefit from it too. If becoming her personal spell developer meant we could secretly meet again, and gain another boost in mana and control, I was more than willing to take the job. With my heart pounding with anticipation, I sat at my writing desk and immediately began outlining the Presence Erasure spell. The fixes for the Casting Assistant and the Mind Library could wait; they were too important to rush.

In fact, solving those problems might become much easier after another round of healthy nighttime training with Sahirah if my mana reserves increased enough. After all... The best kind of taboo training happened at night. In secret. And perhaps... If the Presence Erasure spell turned out as well as Sahirah imagined, it could happen on top of Principal Dickhead's own desk.