Magic

Magic

"Ivette."

"Ivette."

"Ivette!"

Li You felt someone speaking beside him in an unfamiliar language, yet somehow he could understand it.

He opened his eyes and found himself lying on a bed. A slightly hazy figure stood at the doorway, looking at her as she said, "Mm, you're finally awake. How did you sleep last night? Was the bed comfortable?"

"...Me?" Li You looked at the vaguely translucent figure before him and realized she was an unfamiliar woman in a white lab coat.

"That's right. Who else could be in this room?" the woman asked with a smile.

"Mm... It was comfortable..." As Li You spoke, he looked around. The room's layout felt familiar. Though the fluorescent vines were gone, it was exactly like the room where he had awakened on the ninth underground level. Combined with the phantom conversing with him, the answer seemed obvious.

He had returned to the past in the form of a hallucination or dream!

Was it because of the mist on the minus tenth floor?

He had fallen asleep in the mist and somehow connected with this underwater facility's past?

It did not sound very scientific, but it seemed like the only possible explanation!

"That's good, then." The woman said, "It'll be breakfast soon. Hurry and change clothes, then get ready to wash up."

"Oh, okay..." Li You obediently nodded like an ordinary little girl. He had answered in Chinese, while the hazy woman had spoken in an unfamiliar otherworldly language, yet they could understand each other perfectly. That was undoubtedly further proof that this was a dream.

Seeing Li You get out of bed, the woman left. Li You went to the doorway and peeked around for a while. Soon, he heard her talking to other children from the neighboring room. That gave him a rough idea of her identity—she was either a dorm supervisor or a teacher...

So this was actually a boarding school?

Perhaps because it was a dream, everyone was slightly translucent and hazy, like NPCs in a game, so Li You did not feel particularly nervous.

He found a blue children's uniform, underwear, shoes, and socks in the room's cabinet. Then, in the half-length mirror on the inside of the cabinet door, he saw a little girl with long silver hair and dark red eyes quietly looking back at him.

The girl's features were delicate and beautiful, her figure slender. Wearing children's clothes completely at odds with her temperament, she looked like a beauty who had stepped out of a painting. Slowly, she gave Li You a faint smile. It looked a little stiff, yet was endearingly pitiful.

After awkwardly staring down the little girl in the mirror for more than ten seconds, Li You dropped his forced smile. Looking at the silver-haired, red-eyed girl in the mirror as her expression returned to normal, he thought, So this is what I look like now?

She was too beautiful. He had not reacted at first and had thought he was seeing a ghost... And how should he put it? Though he was very dissatisfied with waking up in the wrong sex, at least the original owner was not unattractive. It was not completely unacceptable...

Forget it. Now was not the time to think about such trivial matters!

Shaking his head, Li You changed clothes and left the room. He followed the group of children to wash up, eat breakfast, and finally arrive at a small classroom to wait for morning lessons.

During roll call for the morning class, Li You finally learned his own—or rather, the original owner's—full name.

"Ivette Lochvia."

"Here."

Raising her hand, she told herself, From now on, I am Ivette Lochvia.

After morning roll call, the first class was language. They were taught an otherworldly language called Black Tide Language, but the teaching method was quite unusual—all the children had to enter the computer room, lie in specially made metal chairs, put on helmet-like devices, and follow a guided program to study on their own in a virtual world.

Unable to determine when the dream would end, Ivette studied especially seriously. She was also amazed by the world's headsets; they were practically the virtual reality devices of science fiction novels.

However, to keep students from getting distracted, the teaching mode restricted usage permissions and locked most functions. This prevented Ivette from looking up other information, so she learned only that it was a "head-mounted Vision Terminal" produced by a company called Gravity Group, along with its accompanying educational software, and that it used an unfamiliar technology called Rune Array.

"Rune... Array?"

Turning the term over in her mind, Ivette guessed that this world's technological path might be quite different from what she had imagined.

After class, before lunch, all the children had to undergo a physical examination. The infirmary was in the room next to the classroom.

While waiting in line, Ivette gathered some definite information by asking the other children.

"You're saying this isn't a school?" Ivette asked in surprise.

"You didn't know?" The speaker was a little girl standing ahead of her in line, also a translucent phantom. "This is the Mount Ish Black Tower Research Center... Didn't you come here because you have a genetic disease?"

"A genetic disease? What's that?"

"I don't know. Before sending me here, Grandpa Director said I had this illness. It would flare up when I grew older, so I had to come here for long-term treatment," the little girl said.

"Grandpa Director?"

"The director of the orphanage where I used to live."

"Oh..."

Soon, after asking around in several places, Ivette finally pieced together a relatively clear picture of the place—

This was a research center under the giant pharmaceutical corporation Black Tower Pharmaceuticals. Because it had been built beneath dark waters, it was also often called Abyss Base.

While answering the government's call to provide free welfare checkups for children from many orphanages, they had discovered that quite a few orphans suffered from a particular genetic defect. To research and overcome these rare incurable diseases, the company had reached agreements with various orphanages and brought the afflicted children here for long-term observation and treatment.

The lake outside was a massive crater lake. The entire Abyss Base had been built atop the dormant volcano called Mount Ish—according to the staff here, Mount Ish had last erupted tens of thousands of years ago. The magma chamber below had completely solidified, so there was no risk of eruption.

But what had happened afterward, causing everyone here to die, leaving countless monsters outside, while only the original owner seemed to have survived...

Scenes from countless classic works flashed through Ivette's mind.

Could they have been researching some terrifying biological weapon here, using orphanage children as test subjects, only for the virus to leak and contaminate the entire base along with the crater lake outside?

Was the reason no one from outside had come to clean up the base or collect the bodies because the virus was everywhere, leaving no one daring to come?

Then what about the original owner?

Perhaps the original owner had awakened in the base unharmed not because she had transmigrated, but because she had mutated and become the only one capable of adapting to the virus?

Perhaps she was even the virus's host body?

All right, that was getting far too carried away. This was not Resident Evil or Prototype... Ivette stopped letting her imagination run wild and followed the other children into the examination room one by one.

The physical examination was not complicated, and she did not even need to lift her clothes. She only had to stand on a scanning device for a while and have some blood drawn.

After leaving the room, Ivette saw the woman watching over them at the entrance and said, "Dr. Tabitha, may I ask you a question?"

Tabitha was the woman who had woken her that morning and then led them to the computer room for class. She appeared to have originally been a researcher here before being temporarily assigned as the children's caretaker. Her full name was Tebesa Clovelan.

Upon hearing Ivette's question, she said gently, "Of course. What is it, Ivette?"

"What are runes?" Ivette asked.

"Oh, that." Tabitha said, "They are the foundation of magical research and the cornerstone of human civilization. Put simply, they are like tiny points. When combined, they become you, me, all kinds of matter, all kinds of magical elements, and everything in the universe."

"...Magic?!"

"Yes, magic. You should not be unfamiliar with that word, right? From what I've seen, many children nowadays want to become great mages when they grow up."

"Then can I learn magic right now?" Ivette hurriedly asked.

"Right now? Don't rush. First, learn your language lessons properly. Once you're older, you'll naturally encounter courses like Rune Compilation, though by then, you might not even like them." Tabitha smiled.