Premiere

Helan's attention finally shifted away from Tennis for Two after yet another crushing defeat, and she looked toward White Thorn Flower Jazz and Joshua as they emerged from the room.

"Mr. Joshua, has your meeting ended? Then Ciri... it's time for you to return to the Academy with me."

Helan had still underestimated Ciri's "affection" for Joshua. Before entering the room, Joshua had already warned Helan that the negotiation might take a long time.

So Helan had planned to drag Ciri back to school and salvage her enrollment, but Ciri stubbornly lingered by the door and refused to leave.

From the way Ciri looked, it was as if she would die if she got too far away from Joshua.

Yet... that was the truth, a truth known only to Ciri and Joshua. Ciri had yet to find a good opportunity to explain her relationship with Joshua to Helan.

Fortunately, the theater treated its guests exceptionally well, and the appeal of Tennis for Two successfully diverted Helan's attention.

"Big sister, it's already evening."

Ciri pointed to the clock mounted on one side of the corridor wall. It was one of the Magic Mechanical Devices born from the patent revolution thirty years ago. Since rune-powered clocks had appeared, humanity had been able to measure time precisely down to the second for the first time.

"Evening? It's only been a dozen minutes or so..."

Helan's words abruptly stopped when she saw the clock on the wall. Its hour hand pointed precisely at seven.

Before Helan had arrived, it had been pointing at five. In other words, she and Ciri had sat here for a full two hours!

Yet Helan felt those two hours had passed in the blink of an eye. All she had done that afternoon was play a few rounds of that game called Tennis for Two with Ciri.

How... terrifying!

As Helan looked at the white Tennis for Two window in her vision, a chill ran down her spine.

Helan had always believed wasting time was a grave sin, yet this game had made her squander two hours.

She hesitated over whether to use magic to erase Tennis for Two from her mind.

The reason for her hesitation was her unwillingness to accept defeat. She had just lost three consecutive rounds to Ciri, and every time, she felt she could have beaten Ciri if she had just held on a little longer.

After thinking it over, Helan gave up on the idea.

"Sorry to have kept you waiting. We still need to prepare for the premiere, and I'm afraid Ciri won't be willing to go back so early," Joshua said.

Joshua's words struck right at Ciri's little hidden desire.

When someone truly liked a movie, they would not grow tired of watching it dozens of times over. And unlike Bone Duke, Ciri had not received such favorable treatment—she had yet to see the final portion that had been completed.

That was why Ciri had waited so long for this day!

"But, Mr. Joshua..."

Helan looked troubled. The Advanced Magic Academy she attended stopped holding classes at eight in the evening. If they hurried over now, they might still make it in time for one of the instructors' lessons.

Ciri had not shown up for nearly half a year. If her talent for magic had not been even more terrifying than Helan's, she might have long since been expelled from the Advanced Magic Academy. In fact, the Academy's instructors had already become quite dissatisfied with that crazy girl who had not attended a single class in half a year.

In Nolan, being a mage was a true symbol of status. Helan still hoped Ciri could continue her studies at the Advanced Magic Academy.

"Since I haven't attended class for half a year anyway, waiting one more day won't matter. Big sister, I choose to stay and watch the premiere. If I miss it, I'll regret it for the rest of my life," Ciri said.

"..."

Helan had always considered stage plays a way to pass the time. Her classmates had dragged her to see them before, but she had never taken any interest in them.

Even if Helan took Ciri back to the Academy as her older sister now, it would be useless, because... she could not beat Ciri.

Despite possessing a third-level mage certificate, she was no match at all for a second-level magic apprentice.

Ciri's magic leaned more toward practical combat, while Helan's leaned more toward academic study.

"Fine..." Helan finally agreed.

Thus, led by White Thorn Flower Jazz, Joshua made his way into the theater's performance hall.

White Thorn Flower Theater had two performance halls in total. The first was used for formal performances, with seating divided into upper, middle, and lower levels, enough to accommodate two thousand people for a single show.

Even though no one had visited the theater for a long time, the seats remained spotless. Delicate pale-gold patterns were inscribed across the ceiling, giving the entire theater a splendid, magnificent feel.

This theater had indeed once been glorious...

"My lord, what do you think?"

White Thorn Flower Jazz came to Joshua's side. He no longer wore his earlier humble manner, because everything around him where he stood was something he could be proud of, enough to let him hold his head high before outsiders.

"The stage is too small."

Joshua walked to the side of the stage and glanced toward the rear of the audience seating. It was quite suitable as an opera house, but for a stage play, audience members seated on the third level or higher would need to use the Eagle Eye Technique just to see what was happening onstage.

"My lord, I swear this is the largest stage in Nolan. Even that despicable theater cannot compare."

"But it's still too small."

This theater was much larger than a cinema. If White Thorn Flower Jazz could accept it, Joshua would definitely tear down the entire theater and rebuild it.

But Joshua did not have the time for that now, and this jazz, who valued the theater more than his own life, certainly would not agree.

"Take down the curtain above."

Joshua pointed to the curtain hanging above the theater. When changing scenes during a stage play, they generally used this method of drawing the curtain.

After hesitating for a moment, White Thorn Flower Jazz still had someone take down the red curtain that had hung above the stage for decades.

Once the curtain was removed, the stage was fully revealed before every audience member. What Joshua cared about was not the stage itself, but the massive white board behind it, which occupied nearly the entire plane of the theater.

"My lord, that is the white wall used to arrange the backdrop..." White Thorn Flower Jazz explained.

"Can it be moved?"

Joshua did not expect to achieve a wraparound cinema in this world, but a giant screen was the bare minimum... The convenient thing about a Source Crystal Stone was that no matter how large its projection became, it would not affect the image quality.

The white board behind the stage was undoubtedly an excellent projection surface.

"Of course."

"Push it to the very front of the stage."

At Joshua's command, White Thorn Flower Jazz had the enormous white board slowly moved to the foremost edge of the stage.

"Perfect. Jazz, turn off all those glowing stones."

Joshua felt that this white board could indeed serve as a projection surface... He walked straight down the steps to around the tenth row of the first-level seating. After pouring magic into the Source Crystal Stone, the movie image was magnified countless times and projected onto the white board.

The result... was not bad.

Joshua sat down in a seat with soft cushions and watched the image projected onto the giant white screen, finally recapturing the feeling of watching a movie in a cinema.

"It's starting." Ciri sat down beside Joshua without the slightest politeness, then whispered to Helan.

"This is... a stage play?"

Unlike Ciri, who cared about the movie's plot, Helan was more concerned with what exactly the image on the white board was. No matter how she looked at it, it resembled none of the performances Helan knew.