Iris snorted, not entirely convinced, but seemed to decide not to pursue it further for the time being. She closed her notebook with a slapping sound. "All right. You give me valuable field observation data points. I do not have the resources or permission to go to Ashvale myself—the Academy considers my theory to be 'unfounded speculation'."

  There was a faint bitter note in her voice, which was quickly suppressed. "In exchange, I can offer you this."

  She reached into her frayed leather bag and pulled out a bundle of parchment tied with a ribbon. She handed it to Kieran. "That is a copy of my paper on 'Dynamic Mana Theory: Wave and Interference Models in Regional Mana Fields.' Rejected by the Academy Review Council for 'insufficient empirical evidence and deviation from classical element dogma'."

  This time, her bitter tone was clearer. "But within it are principles that may explain what you have seen. And a methodology for detecting and recording mana fluctuations more accurately."

  Kieran took the bundle. It was thick. "[Quick Scan: Detection of Hidden Magic or Trackers]," he murmured inwardly as his fingers touched the parchment. Clean. Only ink and paper. A sincere offer. Or deeper bait.

  "What do you want in return?" asked Kieran, placing the paper in his lap.

  Iris looked at him, and her expression changed—from an enthusiastic scholar to someone conducting a negotiation. "Periodic reports," she said, coming straight to the point. "You return to your region. You observe. If there are new disturbances, strange patterns, unusual discoveries—you record them and send a report to me. Observation details, not interpretation. I will be the one to process them."

  She paused, choosing her words carefully. "In exchange, I will redirect my research efforts away from physical investigation to Ashvale. I will assume that whatever happened there has already ended, or is too risky to approach without proper resources. I will not recommend an Academy expedition there."

  Kieran processed the offer. It was an almost perfect limited information-exchange agreement. Iris would get the field data she needed to prove her theory, without having to leave Frostpeak or resist Academy authority. They would get a reason to continue their activities in Ashvale without a competent scholar investigating directly, plus access to academic knowledge that could be useful. And most importantly, they would get oversight over Iris—by controlling the information she received, they could shape her understanding of the anomaly.

  But there was a risk. Every report was a thread connecting them back to her. Every detail could become a clue if she was smart enough to piece it together.

  "Periodic reports," repeated Kieran. "Monthly. Through a trusted courier, not through official Academy channels. And the contents limited to environmental observations and minor magical effects. We are not your field agents."

  "Agreed," answered Iris quickly, almost hurriedly. As though she was afraid Kieran would change his mind. "Monthly. Through 'Straw Cushion Inn,' I know you are staying there. I will leave instructions on where to leave reports."

  She fell silent for a moment, and for the first time, her usually focused and isolated expression cracked, showing something more human: a lonely relief. "You… you don't think I am crazy. Or consider my theory nonsense."

  That was not a question. It was an acknowledgment. A gap in her intellectual armor that revealed years of ridicule and dismissal.

  Mira, who had been silent throughout, suddenly spoke. Her voice was soft, but clear. "We saw what we saw, Ms. Valmont. The patterns are there. Rejecting them simply because they don't fit the textbooks… that seems unwise."

  Iris looked at Mira, and a small, almost awkward smile touched her lips. "Precisely," she said. "Simple observational logic."

  She gathered her parchments, suddenly aware of the time and place. "Our agreement is formed. Do not betray my trust by providing false data. I will know."

  Kieran nodded. He stood, Mira following. "We will send the first report within one month."

  Iris nodded back, already half-returned to her diagrams. But as Kieran and Mira turned to leave, her voice was heard again, this time softer, more like a thought being spoken aloud than a part of the negotiation.

  "Be careful of the Academy, if you decide to approach," she murmured, her eyes looking toward the tall towers in the distance. "The Heartstone in their basement… is becoming unstable. Its pulse has been increasingly irregular this week. I suspect it may be related to the anomaly outside. But that is only a hypothesis."

  She did not see their reaction. She had already sunk back into her sea of diagrams and equations.

  Kieran and Mira walked away, their steps remaining measured until they exited the garden and entered the busy city street. Only then did Kieran feel the tension in his shoulders, the tension he had held since seeing the name card glow.

  Heartstone unstable. Related to the anomaly outside.

  That seemingly casual statement hung in the air between them, a hook just cast into already murky waters. It was not part of the agreement. It was voluntary information. A warning. Or perhaps, bait of a different kind.

  Mira looked at him, her eyes questioning. Kieran said nothing. He only gazed toward the Academy towers, where the heartbeat of the stone, the source of all the vibrations they had felt, beat with a sick rhythm.

  And for the first time since arriving in Frostpeak, Kieran felt that he was not the only architect on this chessboard. There was another player holding their own pieces, staring at the same pattern, and perhaps—only perhaps—seeing several moves ahead.

  Iris's words still hung in the air that had suddenly felt thinner.

  The Heartstone in their basement… is becoming unstable.

  Kieran did not change his expression. Not a single muscle in his face moved. But inside, something locked—a hook that caught that information and immediately pulled it down into the depths of his mind, where thousands of variables began to shift, reconstructing the chessboard he had only just thought he understood well enough.

  Its pulse has been increasingly irregular this week.

  Mira walked beside him, her shorter steps working to keep up without appearing to hurry. But Kieran could feel it—[Mana Sense: Passive Teammate Monitoring] Tier 2.7—her energy flow fluctuating in an anxious rhythm. The girl was not asking. She had already learned that on the public streets of Frostpeak, sound was a trace that could not be erased.

  They passed through the garden gate, leaving behind the stone bench and Iris's scattered diagrams. The young oak leaves that had shaded the meeting earlier now rustled softly, as if discussing what they had just witnessed.

  Kieran waited until the market crowds swallowed them—the aroma of warm wheat bread, the shouts of cloth merchants, the creaking of cart wheels on wet stone—before finally speaking.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  "She was not lying."

  Not a question. A statement. His voice was low, nearly drowned by the commotion.

  Mira turned quickly. "Because of your spell analysis?"

  "[Residual Psycho-Magical Resonance Scan]," Kieran confirmed. "Not a lie detector. But the mana fluctuation pattern when she mentioned the Heartstone—"

  He paused for a moment, searching for the right word. "—synchronized. Emotion and information aligned. She is certain of what she said."

  And that was what made everything more complicated.

  They turned into a narrow alley between a bakery and a tool vendor. The smell of yeast and hot iron mingled, creating an odd aroma that tickled the nose. This alley was a shortcut to the Straw Cushion Inn, but Kieran did not intend to return to the room.

  Not yet.

  "We need to verify," he said. "Not whether she is right or wrong. But how right."

  Mira waited. Three steps. Four.

  "You are going to teach me something," she guessed. Not a question.

  Kieran nodded once, briefly. "[Long-Range Sense]. Basic version."

  He glanced at Mira—her posture immediately changed, the shoulders that had been slightly hunched from travel fatigue now straight, alert. "Frostpeak Academy has a security perimeter. Not a physical wall we need to worry about, but a [Intruder Detection] Tier 3.5 network embedded in the building's foundations. Ordinary scholars won't notice it because they don't look for it. But we will approach the boundary—and stop just outside of it."

  "We are not going in."

  "We cannot go in," Kieran corrected. "Not now. Not with the resources we have. But we can listen."

  They needed two hours for preparation.

  Not physical preparation—Kieran already had most of the components in the hidden pockets of his robe, organized with a micro-spatial coordinate system that only he understood. What he needed was a location.

  Right at the southern boundary of the Academy, there was a flea market that operated from sunrise to dusk. Among the worn-out tents and merchants who preferred to transact in whispers rather than shouts, there was a small tea stall whose customers were mostly low-level laboratory assistants—those too tired to walk back to the dormitory, too poor to drink at the official stall, and too unimportant to be suspected.

  Kieran chose a bench in the corner, facing toward the academic complex. From here, only the peak of the main tower was visible—white stone fading to gray under the cloudy sky. But that was enough.

  "[Long-Range Sense: Formation of Sensory Resonance]," he murmured, Tier 3.2.

  He did not pronounce the spell aloud—only lip movement, almost invisible behind the steaming teacup. Mira, sitting across from him, mimicked the posture. On the table between them, a small gray pebble—one of Mira's ordinary stone collection—began to emit a faint light pulse, synchronized with both their heartbeats.

  "Concentrate on this stone," instructed Kieran, his voice as even as the surface of a frozen lake. "Not as an object, but as an extension. It is your eye. Your ear. Your mana sense. What it feels, you feel."

  Mira closed her eyes. Her brows furrowed.

  The light pulse in the stone flickered unstably—twice quickly, once slowly, then nearly extinguished. "Don't force it," Kieran reminded her. "Long-Range Sense is not about power. It is about trust. You must trust that this stone is part of you, even though it is a hundred meters away. If you doubt it, the connection breaks."

  "I am not doubting the stone," murmured Mira. Her eyes were still closed. "I am doubting myself."

  Kieran did not answer. In another timeline, he would have given encouragement—You are capable, Trust in your potential, a string of words designed to build confidence. But that was not his way. It never had been.

  Instead, he said: "Doubt is a natural defense mechanism. It protects against failure by preventing the attempt."

  He paused for a moment. "Unfortunately, it also protects against success."

  Mira opened her eyes. Looked at him.

  "So what should I do?" she asked. "Stop doubting?"

  "No." Kieran sipped his tea. It tasted bitter, steeped too long. "Doubt after you have succeeded. That is far more productive."

  For the first time since the morning, the corner of Mira's lip lifted—not a full smile, but a small gap in the fortress of her anxiety. She closed her eyes again.

  The light pulse in the stone stabilized. Then, slowly, it began to extend—not physically, but in perception. Kieran felt it: a fragile connection reaching outward, past the boundary of the stall, past the cobblestone walkway, past the low iron fence that marked the boundary of Academy territory.

  Enough, he thought. Stop here. No further.

  But Mira had already gone beyond his instructions.

  The stone—the extension—touched the perimeter wall. Not a physical wall, but a thin structured mana membrane that vibrated at a frequency that was almost inaudible. [Intruder Detection] Tier 3.5. Kieran recognized it from thousands of previous experiences; a standard defensive network for a second-class academic institution, designed by a competent but not brilliant systems architect.

  No alarm, he whispered in that connection. You are not touching it. You are only... approaching. Close enough to hear.

  Mira understood. And then they heard.

  A pulse.

  Not sound. Not a physical vibration. But something below the threshold of normal perception—an energy pulse that traveled through the city's mana network, from the center below the Academy outward in all directions.

  Thum.

  Kieran felt it in his canine teeth. A strange resonance that made the silver filling in his left molar—a remnant from a battle on Floor 89—hum softly.

  Thum.

  Mira winced. Her hands, wrapped around the teacup, tightened until her knuckles whitened.

  Thum.

  Irregular. The interval between the first and second pulse was 3.7 seconds. Second and third: 5.2 seconds. Third and fourth: 2.1 seconds. Like a heart beating in the rhythm of a fever—sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow, never quite right.

  Thum.

  "[Record Pattern: Temporal Data Storage]," Kieran activated the Tier 3.0 spell. In his mind, a new file opened—empty, ready to be filled. He began to map that pulse, converting intervals and intensities into a graph, then a spectrum, then a code.

  Thum. Thum. Thum—thum.

  3.7. 5.2. 2.1. 4.8. 3.3. 6.7. 2.9.

  Not normal. A sick heart does not beat like this. This was interference.

  Kieran drew a shallow breath, forcing himself out of automatic analysis mode. He glanced at Mira. The girl was still maintaining the connection, but sweat was beginning to dampen her temples—not from physical fatigue, but from the burden of information that could not be processed by a normal human perception system.

  "Sever it," Kieran commanded.

  Mira did not move.

  "Mira."

  She opened her eyes. The connection severed—not gently, but forced, like a rope being wrenched. The pebble on the table suddenly grew cold, dew condensing on its surface.

  "I—" Mira gasped, as though she had just run a mile. "That felt... painful. Not physical pain. But the stone—I felt it hurting."

  Kieran observed her. Not regret. Not excessive empathy. But calculation.

  "[Vessel Scan: Peripheral Nervous System Integrity]," Tier 2.9. No permanent damage. Only temporary sensory overload.

  "The Heartstone," he said, shifting focus from Mira's condition to the data they had just obtained. "Not merely unstable. It is being interfered with."

  Mira wiped her forehead with her robe sleeve. "You mean... like the symbols in Ashvale? The ice spiral field? Memory Spring?"

  "The rhythmic pattern is identical." Kieran took out a small piece of parchment from his inner robe pocket—not for writing, but for composing. His index finger traced the surface of the paper, leaving trails of pale blue mana that held like ink.

  A point. A wave. An inverted triangle. A circle with a center dot. Below it, he wrote a series of numbers—the Heartstone pulse intervals he had just recorded.

  "Look," he said, pushing the parchment toward Mira. "Not a coincidence."

  Mira bent down. Her eyes moved quickly, reading the pattern, trying—as Kieran had taught her—to see rather than merely look. "The pulse..."

  She stopped. "The pulse slows every time it reaches the number 6.7. Then breaks into smaller fragments. Like..."

  "Like someone trying to absorb something that refuses to be absorbed," Kieran finished. "Then stops, gives the target time to recover, then tries again with a different method."

  Silence.

  The tea stall around them continued to operate in its sluggish routine—drowsy laboratory assistants sipping ginger tea, flea market merchants counting copper coins with dirty fingers, an old woman sewing cloth in the corner with faded red thread. None of them knew that a few meters away, an ancient entity was undergoing a process that the archmages of the original timeline called Atrophi Cordis—Cardiac Atrophy.

  A slow process in which a large mana resource loses its essence, eroded by repeated interference, until it finally becomes an empty shell of its former glory.

  Kieran had seen it happen. Three times. Two of them he had witnessed from inside the Tower. One—the most haunting—he had seen at the Arcanum research tower, when the crystal heart that powered the entire southern district slowly went out, not with an explosion, but with a sigh.

  It took three weeks for that Heartstone to die. In those three weeks, Kieran studied every phase of its death. The irregular pulse pattern. The resonance growing steadily weaker. And at the end—

  Total silence.

  "We need to do something." Mira. Her voice did not sound like a request. Nor like a protest. It was a statement—words spoken not because she expected Kieran to agree, but because she needed to hear his reason why not.?