Measuring instruments whirred, puffed, and hummed, producing a cacophony that should have been distracting but somehow wasn’t.

  Crystal lamps hung around the walls, casting light on bookshelves brimming with both hand-bound notes and books. A heavy ironwood table stoically bore the weight of hundreds of scattered rolls of parchment and various odds and ends, from seemingly innocuous potted plants to glass ampoules filled with bubbling liquids.

  “Gah, why is this so hard? Light magic was much easier to figure out!” Orion groaned, breaking the atmosphere. He set down his experimental piece and ran a hand through his messy white hair in annoyance.

  “The principle is solid. I can get it to interact with the Mana Field, but the feedback is unintelligible.” Staring at the pair of silver-framed, rounded glasses he had been working on, he tried to understand where he had gone wrong.

  “I feel like I’ve already wasted too much time on this, but I’m so close! I just need to figure out how to clean up the feedback from the static I’m getting, and I’ll have a working prototype!”

  Pushing himself off his chair, he began to pace around the room, casually sidestepping the piles of unsorted junk he found interesting enough to bring back to his lab. He would get to it one day, just… not when he was so close to solving his biggest problem.

  The Class Ceremony is just weeks away now. I need to get the System Inspection Glasses working, or I’ll be just as subject to the whims of “fate” as everyone else.

  Not to mention the opportunity he would be missing. He could summon his System interface with a mere thought, yes, but witnessing it in action and observing how it distributed Classes was something he sincerely doubted he’d experience again.

  At least not so many magical classes. I’m sure I can push my way into a village class ceremony, but while it will allow me to see the system at work, I won’t get to observe how it influences the way children interact with the mana field.

  And that was the most interesting part of all. Over the past three years, there had been many discoveries and developments, but the one thing Orion was most proud of was his budding General Mana Field Theory.

  It was still in development, but he had been able to rely on the Minkowski space models—the mathematical description of spacetime without gravity— to develop an understanding of what the locals called “magic.”

  Well, I call it magic, too. I’ve learned that it’s better to bide my time regarding the big stuff. I don’t want a repeat of the incident of 1117. Morliana has been satisfied with just the occasional probe to ensure I haven’t pushed past the orthodoxy, but that doesn’t mean I should provoke her before I’m ready.

  Describing the causality of a spell mathematically was still beyond him, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t get there one day. At the very least, he had managed to map out the effects of most of the ones he had mastered.

  “Is it a matter of Attunement? I thought I had overcome the final obstacle after reaching the maximum allowed for an E-rank class, but perhaps that was too early. Delegating most of the effort to a complex rune string should have kept the spell within the first tier..."

  It was either that, or he had failed to keep the ingot pure once again. To be thwarted by such a ridiculous issue was more than he could bear.

  Damn it. That might be it. I was so sure I had protected it this time…

  Bringing up the status screen, Orion hummed as he took in just how much he had progressed—and how far he still needed to go to gain a full understanding of the System.

  It was a significant improvement over where he had been during his last run-in with his “enemy,” but Orion was aware that didn’t mean much.

  Nevertheless, his efforts had allowed him to surpass the typical expectations for an Initiate. In fact, he would go so far as to say he was on par with most first-year students at the end of their lesson cycle.

  His level had been stuck at twenty-five for weeks, confirming his mother’s words from all those years ago. As an E-rank, the Initiate Class could only advance so far. However, that didn’t mean he had stopped growing and developing his skills in other areas.

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  Unfortunately, that didn’t mean much when Morliana was a Veil Priestess, said to be firmly in the fourth tier. The only person known to be stronger within the Sanctum was High Priestess Seraphina herself, and rumors about that woman’s power were as plentiful as the fish in the sea.

  Some reasonably said she was about in the middle of the fifth tier, around level two hundred twenty-five. This would place her at the pinnacle of the Cyril Magocracy, far exceeding what any regular mage could ever aspire to.

  Others whispered that she had long since ascended to the sixth tier, and that this was the only reason the Sanctum had been only lightly touched by the chaos gripping the nation. A witch above level two hundred was unheard of, and any above two hundred fifty belonged to the realm of legends, but every faction within Cyril respected Seraphina. That was something very few could claim—perhaps three or four people, depending on whether some rumors were true.

  Orion didn’t know, and personally, he didn’t think it mattered much. Even at the fifth tier, Seraphina would be capable of leveling cities to the ground. That firepower wasn’t something anyone wanted directed at them.

  This made the ghoul attack three years ago all the more strange. The incident was eventually deemed publicly to be the result of a foolish guardsman’s desire for greater strength, after his quarters were searched and a necromantic tonic was found inside.

  The man would have bought it in hopes of increasing his physique, and in a way, that had occurred. His power had reached new heights, allowing him to punch above his tier, but it had also led to him losing his senses and attacking some of his peers. After being transformed, they unleashed their deadly fury on the nearest valuable target: the Pantry.

  Orion didn’t buy it. First, it was nearly impossible for the guardsman to have gotten his hands on such a rare and dangerous brew in the Sanctum’s territory.

  An elixir powerful enough to turn someone would have to be brewed by an actual necromancer, not just an amateur experimenting with a new branch of magic. Since the closest known concentration of such individuals was on the other side of Cyril and was currently caught in a worsening territorial dispute with the Greenwood Enclave, this could only indicate a deliberate action.

  But that much, anyone with enough brains to tie their shoes could understand. Who was behind it was the real question. The Ebony Gauntlet itself was, of course, the top suspect, but there was no motive. While it was true that Light magic and Necromancy were opposites, this mostly led to a very rigid separation between them and the Coven.

  They interacted only to the necessary extent as members of the same confederation, and nothing more. The last official conflict between a necromancer and a witch was recorded to have occurred two hundred years ago, and that was solely due to a misunderstanding caused by an elf.

  Which led to the second suspect. The Greenwood Enclave would face greater difficulty acquiring such an elixir, but given how bloody Orion had heard the conflict had become, he suspected they had received their fair share. Their motive was less clear, but they might have tried to repeat history.

  Drawing the witches of the coven to their side against the Ebony Gauntlet would have been a coup that could have secured their control over the eastern reaches of the Greenwood. However, it felt far too obvious.

  The unfortunate reason the incident was set aside, despite all the righteous anger it sparked, was that too many factions could have been behind it, not to mention the possibility of internal machinations within the Sanctum itself.

  Everything it had led to resulted in much tighter security on all incoming and outgoing activities, along with a more intense focus on defensive and purification magic from the teachers.

  This led to Orion’s failed prototype. Although he had grown enough that his mother no longer monitored him—and had even gotten used to him coming and going from their apartments at odd hours—he couldn’t simply drop by Silverpeak to buy all the materials he needed.

  Every time he tried, he was forced to spend hours unnecessarily arguing with the new inspectors assigned to ensure that everything brought inside was free of contamination. That wouldn’t normally be a problem, but Orion was working on a very sensitive instrument that would detect the oscillation caused by the System within the Mana Field.

  For that, he needed untainted materials—something that, while expensive, was readily available in Silverpeak. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get them through the Inspectors without them poking and prodding at his ingots with their dirty fingers, which always left residues behind.

  This last prototype should have performed better. He had taken great care to coat the ingot with a thin layer of his mother’s Obscuring Concoction, which should have safeguarded it from the Inspectors’ mana.

  “Of course, I didn’t account for the potion’s mana well enough. I thought that by using such a small amount for such a short duration and having the potion made by a master of the art, I could avoid contamination. I certainly didn’t notice anything going wrong. But evidently, it’s not enough.”

  As he sat back down with a thump, Orion decided he would need to come back to the problem with fresh eyes. Working himself in circles—literally—was unlikely to lead to inspiration.

  “What else do I have on the docket?” he murmured, keenly feeling the absence of his virtual log. Given his prolific nature, keeping track of all his journals had almost become impossible.

  Grabbing some loose sheets of paper he vaguely remembered placing in the “important” pile, he started leafing through them. “No, the Torchlight V7 isn’t urgent enough to work on now, and honestly, the projected efficiency increase isn’t enough for me to bother with. What else, what else?”

  Finally, a roll of parchment with bright red ink caught his attention. “Hm, what’s this?” Unrolling it, he felt his eyebrows rise. He had been putting this off for a bit too long…

  “Yes, I think it’s time I increased the protections on the lab. The current Attention Deficit spells were working well enough, but he was worried that with the upcoming Class Ceremony, he might face increased scrutiny.

  While he was fine in class, having long outgrown what Magistra Eire and her lecturers were teaching his age mates, everything he knew about Morliana suggested that she wouldn’t be satisfied with just reading his grade report.

  The old crow is not someone I can confront just yet, but that doesn’t mean I can’t outsmart her agents.

  It was fortunate that, amidst the current chaos outside the Sanctum, all Veil Priestesses were quite busy, so he doubted Morliana could spare a day to check on him. However, she had people to do her dirty work, and it was those individuals whom Orion needed to deal with.

  “Yes, Schr?dinger’s Defense is a worthy project while I try to come up with a way to get untainted ingots through the Inspectors.” He finally decided, placing some paperweights on either end of the parchment.

  The spell wasn’t exactly recognizable as part of the Sanctum’s canon, but he had slowly been moving away from merely recreating familiar magic and toward forging his own unique school.

  The System Inspection Glasses would have been perfect as his first true, unique piece of magic, but he believed an absolute stealth field would work just as well.

  Snapping his fingers, Orion plunged the room into shadow, disrupting the Torchlight spell he had become accustomed to maintaining in the background at all times. A dozen crystal lamps flickered out simultaneously, and the only light that filtered in came from the solitary window to the outside world.

  There was still much he needed to convert in the Light magic catalog. Most second-tier spells remained beyond his grasp, and everything above that was something he had barely found references to so far. But it was just a matter of time before he got there. As long as his new class granted him a better Mana Manipulation trait, he would face no problems.

  Schr?dinger’s Defense was something different. He couldn’t simply rehash the same old formulas this time.

  “This is the start of something new.”