A month passed.
A month in this world was an eternity. In that month, the snows began to fall on the high, distant peaks of the Ironspine Mountains, and a cold, sharp stillness settled over the academy. The "Leonidas Incident" was now just a dark, uncomfortable memory, a piece of academy history that polite students didn't discuss.
My life had bifurcated into two distinct, parallel existences.
By day, I was Lucian Greyfall, the Prodigal Scholar. My arm was healed, but I wore the sling for an extra week, a silent, visual reminder of my "victimhood." I was a constant presence in the Verdant Archive, my silver medallion a glaring symbol of my new status. I was quiet, I was cold, and I was ruthlessly efficient. I sat at the heavy oak tables, surrounded by ancient, crumbling texts on architecture, warding-theory, and cartography.
The other nobles in Damien's circle, led by Marcus, now treated me as a de facto second-in-command. I was the "brain" to Damien's "will." They would approach me with their own petty problems, and I would give them a single, cold, logical sentence of advice before turning back to my work. They had mistaken my profound, hollowed-out trauma for an intimidating, brilliant mind. I let them. My reputation was a shield, and I kept it polished.
My second, and only, true companion in that silent, green-lit labyrinth was her. Seraphina.
She was there almost as often as I was. We were two opposing poles in a vast, cold room. We never spoke. We never acknowledged each other. But we were aware. I would be poring over a map of the academy's foundations—a prop for my fabricated research—and I would feel her gaze from three aisles over. A cold, constant, and silent judgment. She was my warden, my witness, and the living embodiment of my conscience. Her presence was a constant, low-grade torture, and a constant, sharp reminder of my true purpose.
My days were a performance for my two-person audience: Damien and Seraphina.
To Damien, I provided a steady, meticulous stream of "progress." I gave him a report, complete with fabricated citations, suggesting that Alastair had ties to a long-defunct dwarven smithing clan in the Ironspine Mountains. "It's possible, Damien," I had told him, my voice the perfect instrument of a careful scholar, "that the 'Warden's Sigil' was not a magical item, but a unique, master-forged physical key, entrusted to this clan."
His eyes had lit up. He had immediately dispatched two letters to Lady Vesper, diverting the Syndicate's resources on a massive, expensive, and completely fictional quest into the northern mountains. I had bought myself months.
My nights, however, belonged to me. They belonged to the real work.
My room, my cell, was my true laboratory. My sword remained in its sheath, untouched. The war I was fighting was no longer physical. It was internal, and it had two fronts.
The first front was my Mana Core. The Mana Breathing had become a reflexive, constant state. I no longer had to fight for the rhythm. I could sink into it in seconds. My Core, once a murky, Awakened (Low-Tier) thing, had quietly, without any fanfare, crossed a threshold. The energy within me was no longer a pool; it was a condensed, crystalline heart, pulsing with a slow, deep, and quiet power. I had reached the "Condensed Core" rank. I had done in weeks, through pure, agonizing discipline, what took most students years of "adventure" to achieve. I told no one. It was a weapon I kept hidden in the dark.
The second front was the true, terrifying work. Mastering the Scribe's Path. Mastering the "mind of pure, cold, and logical intent."
For the first week, it was impossible. To be "free of emotion," I first had to confront the emotions I was trying to purge. And my mind was a cesspit of them. The moment I tried to find "emptiness," my mind would be flooded.
Thomas's face, pale and broken in the Tower of Healing.Mara's scream in the dining hall, a sound of a soul shattering.Leonidas's eyes, the cold, dead hatred before he struck.Seraphina's whisper: "Coward."
The guilt, the self-loathing, the rage... they were a tidal wave. I was trying to build a castle of ice in the middle of a volcano.
On the eighth night, I changed my tactic. I was an architect, was I not? I would not try to destroy the volcano. I would build a containment for it. I would not purge the emotion; I would bury it.
I sat in my meditative pose. The wave of guilt came, as it always did. Thomas...
Stop.
I took a book from my desk. An advanced Runic Theory textbook. I opened it to a random page. It was a dense, complex chapter on "Sympathetic Resonance and Ward Decay."
I began to recite the theory in my mind. 'A ward is not a wall of stone,' the text read. 'It is a song of mana, sung constantly. The song fades not from a lack of power, but from a loss of tune.'
I focused on the concept. Loss of tune. I poured my entire consciousness into that single, abstract idea. What did it mean? How was the "tune" set? The text described the precise, geometric angles of the anchor-runes, the way they had to harmonize with the sub-runes, the way the entire structure vibrated at a specific, magical frequency.
The guilt tried to surface again. His face...
Irrelevant. I shoved it down and focused harder. The sympathetic vibration of the mana. The integrity of the runic lines. The precise, mathematical relationship between the primary anchor and the secondary harmonics. I began to visualize the weave of the spell, not as a source of power, but as a pure, logical system. A beautiful, cold, and complex piece of engineering.
I went deeper. My own name began to feel distant. The memory of my old life as "Aiden" became a faint, nonsensical story. The faces of my victims blurred, their emotional weight overridden by the cold, hard, beautiful logic of the theory.
My heart rate slowed. My breathing, already deep from the Mana Breathing, became almost imperceptible.
I was no longer a person. I was not Aiden. I was not Lucian. I was not a prisoner or a monster or a coward.
I was a mind. A calculator. A pure, cold, and logical thing that was observing a problem.
And in the silent, dark, and absolute center of my being, I felt a faint, cold, and unfamiliar click.
It was the sound of a key turning in a lock that was a thousand miles away.
I held the state for only a second before the sheer, alien terror of the emptiness made me recoil, my emotions rushing back in a painful, chaotic flood.
I collapsed onto my side, gasping, my heart hammering against my ribs. I was shaking. What I had just done... it was a form of self-mutilation. I had deliberately, for a single, terrifying moment, killed the person I was.
But I had also done it. I had found the Scribe's Path.
I had the key. And I knew, with an absolute, chilling certainty, that the next time I used it, it would be to open the most dangerous door in the world.
.
.
.
[ Author's Note-
This chapter was uploaded a few hours ago, but I had to delete and rewrite it due to some mistakes. This is the rewritten version.
Please support my work with your power stones. Thank you! ]