What was up with that Allen?!
People like him were the worst!
He might not have meant any harm, but he would deliberately let things spiral out of control just because he found them "interesting"! People who did whatever they pleased were even more detestable than those consumed by greed. At least the latter might back down after weighing the costs and benefits, while there was almost no one who could stop a thrill-seeker like Allen!
Why had Mr. Angell put someone like him in the dormitory?
Was it a test?
Silverleaf frowned as he pondered.
Silverleaf always overthought things.
He knew it was a bad habit, but his circumstances had taught him to think things through instead of going straight to a teacher whenever things seemed off, like other top students did.
Take this situation. Silverleaf knew perfectly well that the Workshop needed a large number of Rune Cores and everyone was too busy working overtime every day. Mr. Angell should be the last person who wanted anything to happen to them, the Rune Masters. Even so, Silverleaf still felt uneasy.
After all, Mr. Angell was a Black Robe!
Who knew whether Allen was conducting some sort of human-nature test at his behest?
Silverleaf was lost in all sorts of pointless speculation when someone knocked on his dormitory door three times, evenly spaced.
"Who is it?!"
Silverleaf asked cautiously.
He knew none of his classmates knocked like that.
So it could only be Allen.
What did he want at this hour?
Silverleaf instinctively glanced at the clock on the wall. It was almost one in the morning.
He didn't want to deal with that suspicious person so late, so he deliberately answered in a sleepy voice, "It's very late. Can whatever it is wait until tomorrow?"
"...It's me, Angell."
The unexpected voice came from outside the door.
Silverleaf sat up at once. "Mr. Angell?"
But he still had no intention of opening the door. If anything, he stared at it more warily. "What is it?"
"You're the Chief Student at the academy, right? How are you at math?"
"Math?" Silverleaf froze, then answered reflexively, "I'm pretty good, I guess!" More precisely, aside from subjects like math and the other sciences, which he couldn't compete in, he was among the top students in the City of Academies.
"How far has math advanced here?... Have you studied calculus?"
"We've covered derivatives. I think only the Math Academy is researching integrals."
"Researching... That should be enough," Angell said with a strange sigh for some reason. He knocked on the door again. "I need your help with something. Come out for a moment."
"Sure, just a moment." This time, Silverleaf climbed out of bed without hesitation.
In the face of math, all his wild speculation and schemes vanished.
Silverleaf quickly changed out of his pajamas and into his usual clothes. But just as he was about to open the door, he hesitated and glanced up at the night sky outside the window.
Thankfully, it was a waning crescent.
Silverleaf first touched his tailbone, then felt both sides of his head. He found a hooded cloak and draped it over himself before opening the door.
Angell was indeed standing outside.
He anxiously checked the time on his pocket watch, but wasn't annoyed by how long Silverleaf had taken.
In fact, Angell thought he understood how Silverleaf felt. If he'd received a late-night call from his company in his previous life saying the server was down, he would've wanted to beat the caller's head in too.
"Tonight's pay will be five times the usual rate, and you can take tomorrow off," Angell said, trying to reassure Silverleaf.
He didn't realize that the unusually high pay had made the Incubus boy, whose nerves had started to settle, tense up all over again.
There was only one situation in which Silverleaf had ever been offered a bafflingly inflated price:
when he himself was the merchandise.
Silverleaf glanced at Angell uneasily, only to see him hurrying downstairs.
Silverleaf hesitated for a moment, then followed.
But as they walked down the corridor, Silverleaf felt more and more that something was wrong.
It was too quiet.
It was late at night, of course, but that only made sounds that went unnoticed during the day more apparent: the wind, the creaks in the old building's walls, and the other students (or coworkers) turning over in their rooms or even talking in their sleep. Yet all those little sounds seemed to have disappeared.
Thinking it over, Silverleaf realized that it was strange they'd been talking through the door for so long without waking anyone in such an old building.
He felt as if he and Mr. Angell were the only two people in the entire space. He even had the sense that he could kick the neighboring door as hard as he liked without disturbing anyone.
And it wasn't just the sound. The sense of space was strange too.
The whole world had turned black and white. As they moved through what seemed like a flat space, the world felt unreal, and even up and down, left and right had become indistinct.
Silverleaf distinctly remembered walking downstairs, but now they were going upstairs.
The surroundings had changed too. At some point, he had stopped being in the staff dormitory and ended up above the Workshop's storefront, somewhere even higher than Angell's bedroom on the third floor.
"Mr. Angell, where are we going?" Silverleaf couldn't help asking.
"To the brain of the Sky Spring... or, you could say, the Cloud Data Center."
Angell replied in terms Silverleaf didn't understand.
*
But it didn't matter if he didn't understand. Taking the words literally was actually correct.
Silverleaf had no idea how long he'd followed Angell. At the very top of the black-and-white staircase, a small opening represented by a square finally appeared.
Angell crawled out through the square without hesitation, and Silverleaf followed numbly.
In fact, Silverleaf had been walking through that distorted space for so long that his sense of time and space had become warped. He even wondered if he was dreaming.
A cold breeze brought him back to his senses.
Silverleaf blinked and looked around in confusion, realizing that sound and color had returned.
But what shocked him more was that he seemed to be above the clouds. When he looked up, he saw a brilliant, unobstructed starry sky. Below lay the dark outline of the city, with streets in the center dotted by kerosene lamps.
The strangest thing was the soft sensation beneath his feet. Silverleaf realized that he and Angell were standing on a small white cloud. It was hard to keep his balance, and he wanted to take off his shoes and feel its softness with his bare feet more than he wanted to stand steady.
This felt even more like a dream than before.
But he was pretty sure he wouldn't dream up such a beautiful sight. He could hardly even imagine it.
Silverleaf thought with a clear sense of reality.
Just then, something suddenly leaped onto Angell's head.
"You finally made it, meow!"
The Black Cat complained. It blended so completely into the darkness that it was hard to see unless you looked closely.
"Sorry I'm late." Angell stroked Mithril's head. "How bad is the Mana overflow now?"
"It's worse than before, meow!" Mithril raised a paw. "If we don't expand things soon, part of it might collapse."
"Tsk! Why did it suddenly get so bad?" Angell grumbled.
While they talked, Silverleaf felt the cloud beneath his feet begin to move.
Silverleaf curiously watched the city below. Though it looked blurry in the dark, that was no problem for an Incubus half-blood with some degree of night vision. He also noticed that the cloud was heading in a direction that seemed familiar.
That was rare for Silverleaf. He wasn't a native of Cecilia; he'd come to the city for work and hadn't had time to learn his way around.
The only time Silverleaf had gone far was when he visited the Charity School for Angell's "Education Pilot Project."
The trip hadn't been organized by the Workshop, and Silverleaf hadn't gone on the day the Mana Base Station was inaugurated. He simply had a habit of gathering information, so after reading about it in a newspaper, he'd visited the Charity School during his day off.
It was an ordinary Charity School, no different from the ones Silverleaf had attended.
Silverleaf had taken a quick look around and figured that even Angell's "Education Pilot Project" probably wouldn't show results in the short term, so he'd planned to check again after six months or so.
Now the cloud beneath his feet was heading toward that very school, and Silverleaf could already see its outline.
There were naturally no teachers or students at the school in the middle of the night. It looked perfectly peaceful.
The problem was above it.
Silverleaf saw a huge mass of clouds piled overhead, with flashes of lightning deep inside. It looked as terrifying as an impending storm.
Mithril, however, clapped its paws and steered the cloud toward the middle of the storm cloud, where the lightning was flashing.
The storm cloud had looked terrifying from outside, and it was even worse inside.
Silverleaf felt clammy, and the lightning was frighteningly close. Sparks burst beside his face several times, making his already curly ash-gray hair spring up even more like sheep's wool!
Worse still, the lightning seemed to contain an immense amount of Mana, making his body feel strangely restless.
Silverleaf hurriedly pulled his cloak tight, put on the hood, and glanced nervously at Angell.
Angell was completely unaffected by the lightning and didn't notice Silverleaf's gaze.
It was Mithril who glanced at Silverleaf and tapped Angell's face with a paw. Only then did Angell turn around in confusion and notice Silverleaf's sorry state.
"Sorry."
Angell waved his hand, and a Mana barrier enveloped Silverleaf. It effectively shut out the lightning and the surging Mana, letting Silverleaf breathe a sigh of relief.
By then, though, they had reached the center of the storm cloud.
An upside-down platform hung there, and a huge Crystal Ball floated beneath it.
Enlise sat on the upside-down platform. Against the enormous Crystal Ball, she looked like a tiny snowflake. When she saw Angell and the others approach, she cried out in delight.
"Mr. Angell!"
"Sorry I'm late!" Angell said for the second time.
Mithril guided the cloud over to the platform. Silverleaf immediately felt his center of gravity flip upside down. By the time he realized what had happened, he was already standing on the upside-down platform.
But with the space still so distorted amid the lightning-filled clouds, Silverleaf barely noticed.
Instead, as soon as Silverleaf steadied himself on the platform, its surface area expanded more than threefold.
"Wow, Mr. White Sheep is amazing!" Enlise said, gazing at Silverleaf in admiration.
White Sheep? Was she talking about him?
"Indeed," Angell said, giving Silverleaf an approving look. "I thought all Incubi were hopeless romantics. Seems that was just my prejudice; some of them are perfectly normal!"
Incubi...?!
Silverleaf's hair stood on end.
He couldn't let these Mages discover that he was an Incubus half-blood. Back in his Ritual Magic class, a kindly teacher had changed his attitude the moment he learned Silverleaf's heritage and tried to capture him as a magical ingredient. Silverleaf had only "luckily" escaped after something happened to that teacher, and then he'd managed to switch to the Rune Major, which didn't require him to cast spells directly and was harder to expose him in.
He was even more afraid of a Black Robe like Angell, who was rumored to eat people, finding out the truth.
"...When did you find out?" Silverleaf asked nervously.
"When did I find out what?" Angell replied in confusion.
He walked over to Enlise and patted her little head. "Thanks for all your hard work!"
"It was nothing." Enlise smiled sweetly. She was delighted that Angell had asked her to work overtime. "I think this is really fun!"
As she spoke, Enlise picked up the tube in her hand.
The tube was made of crystal, yet was soft like rubber, and very long. One end was connected to the base beneath the Crystal Ball, while the other had a silver filter tip. It looked like the tube of a water pipe.
It was used in much the same way.
Enlise took the tube and sucked hard, then blew a puff of white smoke upward.
The smoke congealed in midair into tiny Sprites. They had dragonfly wings and bee-like tails. They flew into the surrounding clouds and knocked down the newly formed lightning and clouds as if breaking bricks loose from a wall, then brought them to the platform to be fashioned into square bricks.
Other Sprites busily stacked the bricks high, apparently building a house.
But it was a huge project for the tiny Sprites. So far, they'd only managed to lay a foundation.
"Let's switch. You can help the Sprites build the house now," Angell told Enlise.
Enlise obediently nodded.
Angell pulled out another "smoking pipe" and handed it to Silverleaf. "Enlise has a good talent, but she's a little short on processing power. I'll leave the next part to you."
Clearly, Angell didn't care about Silverleaf's Incubus heritage at all.
Silverleaf stared blankly at the pipe, then suddenly relaxed.
It seemed there was no point in asking.
Silverleaf took the pipe and inhaled deeply. A vast number of figures seemed to flash through his mind, but when he exhaled them, his thoughts became clear, as if he'd just finished a math problem. He felt wonderfully refreshed.
In the face of math, all his wild speculation and schemes vanished (repeating for emphasis).
What's more, the cloud of smoke Silverleaf exhaled was much bigger than Enlise's, and it produced many more Sprites. Thanks to their efforts, the amount of lightning in the storm cloud quickly dwindled, while the pile of bricks on the platform grew rapidly.
Angell watched Silverleaf at work and nodded with satisfaction.
He walked over to the Crystal Ball with Mithril.
"Come to think of it, why has such an absurd amount of Mana built up in just a few days?"
Angell complained as he raised a hand and pressed it against the Crystal Ball.
As the Black Robe Mage moved, a faint white light blossomed inside the Crystal Ball, and images appeared within it.
*
These past few days, Little Bolo had been very dissatisfied!
Extremely dissatisfied!
There were far too few Meditation Classes!
There were only two lessons a day, and even counting the time between classes, they didn't amount to three hours!
The magic textbook clearly said that a Mage needed to meditate for at least three hours to meet their daily Mana expenditure. Little Bolo, who thought this way, obviously hadn't realized that he wasn't a Mage at all.
But Little Bolo couldn't exactly meditate in secret during his other classes.
The main problem was that the Block Meditation Method was too conspicuous!
First, you had to draw Runes. Then the summoned squares floated in the air, and there was even music! It was only natural that the other teachers would notice!
And Little Bolo was hardly the only child who thought this way. Over the past few days, the teachers in other subjects had caught who knew how many students trying to meditate in secret during class.
"If you like magic so much, go practice at home!" the language teacher scolded angrily.
"But once we get home, we're outside the Mana Base Station's coverage, so we can't use the Block Meditation Method!" Little Bolo protested.
He'd seen it himself!
The language teacher meditated after class every day!
Besides, the teachers' dormitory was close to the school and within range of the Mana Base Station. They could play... meditate all night without a problem! Ms. Yara from the Meditation Class had even shown up with dark circles under her eyes several days in a row!
At that thought, Little Bolo suddenly had a bold idea.
"Let's secretly stay after school and meditate!" he said to his deskmate.
"But the old man on gate duty checks every classroom to make sure all the students have left!" His deskmate had clearly done something like this before. "If he catches us, we'll get kicked out of school."
"It's fine. We can pretend to leave school first, then wait until he's finished checking and come back in through the back door!"
"Isn't the back door always locked?" The student behind them joined the discussion.
"There's a hole beside the back door. I once forgot my textbook at school and tried it out. I can squeeze right through!"
"You really thought of everything!"
And so they came to an agreement.
The children were certainly quick to act. After school, they pretended to head home, then turned around and climbed back into the school through the back door. But their rather half-baked plan ended there. Before the children had even had time to draw their Meditation Runes, the old man on gate duty appeared before them as if sent down by the heavens.
"It's so late! Why are you still here?"
"Eek! He's here!"
The children shrieked as though they'd seen a ghost. Little Bolo cleverly tried to go back the way they'd come, only to find that the hole they'd crawled through had been blocked up!
"Let's split up and run! Don't let him catch you!" Little Bolo immediately told the others.
The children exchanged glances, then nodded solemnly.
What followed was utter chaos at the Charity School.
What the children didn't know was that not only had their way in been blocked, but the school's front gate had also been locked. Even the old man on gate duty would likely have a hard time leaving the school now.
Outside the school gate, several older students giggled as they took the key out of the lock.
"Good thing the little brats lured the watchdog away."
"Yeah, that old man's such a pain! What's the harm in us staying at school a little longer?"
"Last time, I wasn't even inside the school. I just stayed outside the wall a little longer, and he chased me away."
"It's not like we were doing anything bad!"
"Yeah, we just wanted to 'study'!"
The older students complained back and forth, feeling not the slightest guilt about using their younger schoolmates as bait.
"All right, stop wasting time! Let's hurry!" the one in charge finally said.
The other students grew serious, then all held out their hands and drew a symbol.
Some of them saw the frame for the Block Meditation Method appear before them, while others saw red warning text:
[Your data allowance is insufficient. Unable to connect to the network.]
[Would you like to take a magic class now to replenish your mana?]
"Ahh, why is my data allowance insufficient?!" those students wailed.
"You haven't meditated lately. You've been playing Rune Link and Match the whole time, haven't you?" someone said, unsurprised. "Of course your data allowance is insufficient if you haven't stored any mana."
"But I like Rune Class more than Meditation Class!"
"Give it up. Use the Meditation Method to build up some mana first."
"Mmm..." The students who wanted to "study" Runes still seemed reluctant. "But I could use it during Rune Class, and it said I didn't have enough mana even then!"
"I think when there are enough people, it temporarily doesn't count each person's data allowance."
"Yeah, I tried it once. You need at least nine people to start the Rune Class tutorial."
Hearing that, the students who wanted to play Rune Link and Match counted themselves and realized they were short. They looked at the classmates who were starting the Block Meditation Method. "Why don't you join Rune Class too?"
"No, I want to build up more mana!"
"I think meditation is more fun!"
"That one's too hard on the eyes."
"You can't seriously be that disloyal!"
As the two groups argued back and forth, and their "after-school self-study group" looked about to fall apart, one student noticed several newspaper boys passing on the other side of the street.
"Hey, you guys, come over here!" he called, waving to the newspaper boys.
The newspaper boys eyed them warily. "What do you want? You're not buying newspapers, are you?"
"Heh heh, do you want to learn magic?" The student wore a sly grin.
The other students caught on and chimed in. "It's really fun!"
The newspaper boys stared at the students as though they were crazy, then turned to leave.
The students panicked. "Fine! We'll buy your newspapers!"
"You're buying newspapers so we'll learn magic?" The newspaper boys seemed to think the students were even crazier now.
But the students didn't care. They pulled out what little pocket money they had, pooled it together, then implored the newspaper boys without hesitation: "Please, we're begging you! Come learn magic with us!"