Chapter 71

Chapter 71

The magic academy’s architectural design had obviously taken some level of inspiration from castles. Even though it clearly wasn’t actually a castle, each corner of the building was a turret tower made of stone instead of a more traditional building design. There were even crenels at the top of each tower, to allow defenders to shoot arrows or miscellaneous objects at invaders if need be. The sides of the building also had small slits in them near the top, giving defenders even more options to attack invaders without being attacked themselves. Every single stone of the building was enchanted with Kinetic Magic – Alice had a hard time figuring out exactly what the enchantments were doing, but it looked like it made the building sturdier, as well as... something else? Alice couldn’t figure out the second function at all. It was too far removed from other Kinetic Enchantments she had seen before, but she assumed it was related to defense somehow.

The building was located right next to one of the four gates that allowed entry to the noble quarter at the center of the city, and could clearly double as a military outpost to control traffic and lock down the city if need be. Alice wondered if all of the magic schools in the capital were built like small fortresses. If so, were the buildings structured for defensive ability, or teaching first?

Perhaps both, she mused as she walked up to the school gates.

“Student ID?” A handsome teenager was standing just inside of the gate with a bored expression. Alice wordlessly produced the ID she had been given after registering for the school. Rainbow mana activated near the gatekeeper’s eyes, before he turned towards her. “Please repeat this statement. My name is Alice Verianna. I am the person who signed up for this ID last week. I hold no intent to inflict violence upon any other people in this institution, no intent to sabotage this institution, no intent to interfere with the regular operations of this institution, and do not anticipate these intentions changing before I next exit this building.”

Alice repeated the statement.

The handsome teenager relaxed a bit. “Good to see another first year. When is your first class of the day?”

“Twenty minutes from now. Why?” The teenager grinned at her.N0v3lTr0ve served as the original host for this chapter's release on N0v3l--B1n.

“It’s good that you gave yourself enough time to find your way around. Some people get lost – this building only has a few stairways, and they’re all near the back of the building. Which is pretty inconvenient for [Students] trying to walk around, though it would buy a bit of time and create some nice choke points if a Sigmusi army was trying to storm the school. Anyway, head to the back of the first floor if you’re looking for stairs – a lot of first years get confused by that. Good luck!” The boy opened the gate for Alice, seemingly done talking to her.

The interior of the school was quite different from the militaristic exterior. As if to flaunt the school’s wealth and magical know-how, the walls were lined with a variety of globes, most of which floated in midair and well out of reach. Alice took a step closer to one, before looking up and chuckling to herself.

The first globes she saw were designed to sense the surrounding temperature, and then drop the temperature if it was too hot and boost the temperature if it was too cold. Even on another planet, air conditioning was alive and well. Some of the other globes were pure mana globes, and seemed to be in charge of regulating mana flow inside of the building. Alice guessed it was supposed to keep areas with lots of experiments ongoing supplied with adequate mana. There were several other globes, many of which contained kinds of mana she had never seen before. She spent a few seconds looking at them, but was forced to give up because she couldn’t figure out what they were doing.

The globes were all encased in little lantern-shaped objects made of some sort of clear, thick glass. At the bottom of each lantern were a large number of monster cores, linked together in some sort of ingenious circuit that made it easy for them to supply the enchanted globes with mana whenever they ran out, and also made it easy to replace the power sources needed.

Finally, there were little metal hooks buried in the sides of the walls that were also enchanted. They seemed to be a kind of enchantment she hadn’t seen before, but she was able to intuitively guess the use of them: they were enchanted as a ‘pair’ with the floating lanterns. The knobs themselves were only able to influence the object they were paired with, and the only thing they did was make the globes float in midair and keep them from moving around or falling down. Alice grinned to herself when she observed the floating metal lanterns – she could see where Ezrien had taken inspiration for the device the research team was trying to build. While the two enchantments were very different in scale and purpose, they seemed to share a certain ‘base’ to them. Ezrien’s project was, essentially, a plan to make it easier and cheaper to produce the metal hooks she was looking at, and make the enchantment work without being a paired enchantment. She wouldn’t have realized it if she hadn’t seen the metal hooks, but after a month of working on the kinetic plates, there was no way she would miss the similarities between the two. She chuckled to herself, before she decided to look at the floating lanterns more closely later. She might get more ideas or inspiration from a more detailed examination.

It had been less than a minute since she had entered the building, and she had already found a few types of enchantment she had never seen before. Alice grinned to herself before she continued walking towards the back of the building. It took her a few more minutes before she found the stairs while she eyed her schedule.

All students were supposed to sign up for anywhere between three and five classes for the year, based on student preferences. Two of them were mandatory classes for first years: self defense, to make sure mages trained in Illvaria had at least a minimal ability to keep themselves alive, and public morals, because Illvaria felt the need to preach about public responsibility. Or maybe the ruling class of Illvaria wanted to make sure that Mages, who had the highest average combat ability in the population, were less likely to run amok and wreak havoc on the country. Alice expected both classes to be rather dull, but since they were mandatory in every educational facility there didn’t seem to be a way to dodge out of the classes.

Apart from the two mandatory classes, Alice had taken theory of mana (since it related so closely to her interests and based on the class description, it was also likely to be heavily related to pure mana), an introductory course to Organic Mana (because it was one of the three consistently repeating mana types she found in System fractals, and she had a seed for the mana type but couldn’t use it), and biology of monsters (because monsters didn’t have access to the System, Alice deemed that they were interesting ‘exceptions’ to her primary topic of interest.) She wasn’t actually sure if she would get anything useful out of the last one, but she figured it was worth a shot. Apart from the fact that monsters ate mana, she didn’t know much else about the species, and maybe she would get some interesting ideas or information from studying them. This lack of knowledge made her uncomfortable, so she wanted to correct it in case she was overlooking something obvious that might help her.

Her first class of the day was monster biology.

Alice finally located her classroom, before she stepped in.

Unlike in her high school at home, the classes weren’t just rows of identical tiny desks shoved together in a room with a blackboard. Instead, comfortable sofas were arranged throughout the room, all of which were surprisingly well made according to this world’s furniture standards. Floating in front of each sofa was a small wooden board. On the floor in front of each sofa were more of the paired metal hook enchantments that kept each board floating in exactly the same spot.

Lounging on the sofas and talking to each other were nine other students, most of which were somewhere between their mid teens and early twenties in age. However, there was one student who was noticeably older – a woman who was in her early thirties was seated near the front of the room, completely ignoring others as she looked through a textbook for another class. Near the podium at the front of the class, a teacher was floating in midair with his eyes closed, practicing balancing himself with kinetic mana. It was a highly impressive feat of magic, and one that Alice had seen Illa use and had tried (and failed) to emulate herself multiple times. The teacher was also in possession of an Organic seed, making him one of the few people to bother branching into multiple magic seeds besides Alice. The teacher looked to be in his late twenties, and was thus younger looking than the student in her early thirties. Though, since he had denser mana Alice suspected he was probably older than the woman and just had a younger body. The teacher had short black hair and a severe looking expression, and seemed a bit on the shorter side. There was an angry looking scar on his left hand, which made Alice wonder if a vinebear had mauled him at some point in the past and he had never gotten the scar removed by an Organic Mage.

Underneath the teacher’s desk, Alice could also see a spidercrab trapped inside of a cage. There was some sort of enchantment on the cage that Alice assumed was reducing the sound the spidercrab should have made, but it was still throwing itself against the cage over and over again as it tried to escape and eat the students. Alice felt one of her eyes twitch, before she turned her attention back to the students.

Arsi, like Alice, had been born a nonmage. He was a former kid from the slums, and while he was on the verge of starvation, he decided that it was better to gamble on the four percent chance of surviving a mana baptism than the much smaller odds of finding food for the next day. He managed to survive his mana baptism and became a mage, and was now on track to join the military. Alice was slightly baffled by the fact he was present in the research focused academy and not the military focused one, but since Arsi didn’t mention it, she decided not to ask. If they got to know each other better in the future, maybe she would bring it up.

Finally, Laila was the daughter of a wealthy merchant family. Both of her parents were nonmages, but she had won the genetic lottery and ended up with a talent for Magic. She didn’t seem to be particularly passionate about magic or enchanting, or selling and buying things – instead, she seemed content to drift through academy, never failing but never excelling as she did things at her own pace. But even though Laila didn’t seem particularly motivated or enthusiastic, she was pleasant enough to talk to for a brief conversation.

Finally, as more students streamed into the classroom, the total number of students in the class reached about forty. The teacher stopped levitating himself in midair and opened his eyes when the time for class came, before he took a good look at the classroom.

“So, you’re here to learn about monster biology. I’m professor Esaiyas, and this is introductory monster biology. Can anyone tell me about monsters? Yes, you – the tall girl with black hair.” He said, pointing to a girl near the front of the classroom.

“They’re violent and universally hostile to humans.”

“All right, a good start. What else?”

“They eat mana.”

“They aren’t very intelligent, and in the past the church has sometimes claimed they’re manifestations of human laziness or evil.”

“They can eat broken mana, even though broken mana is usually dangerous for humans.”

“Good. Then why study monsters?” asked the teacher, once he was done collecting student responses. Without waiting for anyone to answer, he launched further into his speech. “We study monsters because doing so gives us a better idea of what we might encounter in the wild. There are a lot of other reasons why one might study monsters – however, knowing what might try to kill you tomorrow is definitely one of them.

“Humanity lives on two of the three discovered continents – monsters live on all three. In mana-dense areas, monsters are strong. The species of monsters are so strong and numerous in mana dense regions that even an army of Immortals would avoid those areas. South of Illvaria is the great unknown, because human explorers don’t live if they try to explore those areas. The Western Continent is even worse – the number of humans who have successfully set foot on that continent and returned to tell the tale number less than twelve in all of recorded history.

“Studying monsters pinpoints their strengths and weaknesses, and ways we can survive encounters with them. Of course, they can also provide valuable insights into scholarly studies. Studying monsters has given us valuable insights on how vital mana is to life, for example, and monsters can serve as valuable test subjects for experiments that we can’t test on humans for ethical reasons. There are many reasons to study monsters.”

The teacher walked over to the cage that held the spidercrab, before he opened it. The spidercrab leapt out of the cage, before it froze in midair. Belatedly, Alice realized that the man wasn’t using kinetic mana on other parts of the spidercrab, nor had he been using kinetic magic on the hairs of the spidercrab’s legs. He was just using kinetic magic on the spidercrab’s skin, and paying for the massively increased cost and difficulty of using kinetic energy on a living being. It was the same thing he had done when levitating himself in the front of the classroom earlier. How big were his mana reserves?

“The lowly spidercrab is one of the most common monsters in the world. They are stupid, even for monsters, they breed quickly, and they have minimal fighting power. Even a normal farmer considers a solitary spidercrab to be more of a pest than a real threat. The only exception is during spring, which is breeding season. During that time, spidercrabs group up around females and form packs, forming threats to solitary humans and children if they aren’t dealt with. However, on the whole they’re the most common and least threatening species of monster on the two inhabited continents.”

The spidercrab that was hovering in midair suddenly tore in half. In two neat motions, the teacher’s mana tendrils flooded the spidercrab’s body with kinetic mana. With a neat twist, the spidercrab was ripped asunder in midair. Instead of bleeding, all of its blood and guts hovered in midair, as the teacher carefully turned the halved spidercrab innards to face the students.

“In this class, I’m going to show you what a variety of monsters looks like. We will observe them in their natural habitats, we will dissect them, we will discuss their strengths and weaknesses and how to neutralize them if you find yourself in a fight with them. We will discuss their uses in magical and nonmagical branches of study, observe their organs and innards in detail, and learn how to kill them. Welcome to introductory monster biology.”

The teacher gave the students a manic grin, as some of the students grinned or cheered. Alice noticed, with some surprise, that there weren’t any squeamish students who flinched from the monster guts frozen in midair. The effect of a completely different cultural mindset in this world, perhaps?

The teacher spent the rest of the class going over a more routine syllabus – it was something Alice was used to seeing in her former high school classes. How grading was done, what classes would look like, etc. However, the floating spidercrab corpse, as well as the very brief display of where a spidercrab core was located, gave Alice the feeling that the class might be very different than her expectations.

After the class, Alice had something to do before her next class started. She had three hours of free time before her first mandatory class of the day, Self-Defense, started. A short enough period of time that going back to her inn room or going to Cecilia’s workshop would be a waste since she needed to spend forty minutes walking to and from the academy, but a long enough period of time that she needed something to occupy herself while she was waiting.

And luckily, she had something she had been looking forward to for a long time.

It was time to visit the academy library.