In this world, there were a total of 23 types of magic:
Mortality.
Faith.
Laws.
Vibration.
Silence.
Body.
Mind.
Spirituality.
Enchantment.
Love.
Curse.
Equivalence.
Structure.
Heaven.
Earth.
Barrier.
Embroidery.
Proliferation.
Assimilation.
Eye.
Blindness.
Stars.
Haze.
These manifested through the body's innate magic core, which was divided into thirteen levels.
Crucially, at the third level, a person's magic would become bound to their core. If they needed to advance from level six to level seven, they had to discover a Path.
What exactly was a Path? That was something Ron told Quân to go figure out on his own.
"I think you'll manage to find it."
Ron guided Quân further into the mansion, where the dark and damp atmosphere felt utterly suffocating and unpleasant.
Inside a simple, pitch-black, and moisture-laden corridor teeming with dust and cobwebs, a sudden glimmer of light flickered in the darkness, illuminating everything around them.
Ron led him past various rooms along the hallway, but they didn't impress him much; at the very least, it just felt like an escape room game he had once played.
Even so, he was quite curious about the architecture here. Just about everywhere he looked seemed to feature European Renaissance style, or something along those lines.
"This is the library. Most of the books here have been burned to ashes, but perhaps a few survivors are still left."
Ron pushed open a door. Inside the room were dozens of neatly arranged bookshelves. Quân remembered that even if he were to search through all four schools he had ever attended, or all the bookstores he had ever visited, he had never once felt so weighed down by bookshelves.
"Wow..."
...
Quân shut the door. He scanned his room, which was originally supposed to be a bedroom but now resembled a complete dumpster fire.
However, Ron had told him, "I'll send someone here first thing tomorrow. They'll probably start with the bedroom, and it should take about two days to clean the whole place up."
Meaning he had to sleep here for one night, right on top of this messy clusterfuck.
Looking around, Quân saw wood shavings scattered everywhere. Just staring at them made his entire body itch, so he planned to climb out the window to find a slightly more comfortable spot in the garden to sleep.
But the moment he opened the window, he realized to his surprise that he was actually on the second floor. Perhaps the corridor from earlier had been built on an incline, but Quân couldn't shake a deeply bizarre feeling about it.
Suddenly, a cold gust of wind swept across his face, making his hair flutter and causing him to fall silent for a few seconds.
'Maybe I should just sleep outdoors.'
He let out a sigh, his expression turning somewhat dreamy. Rainy days were always the easiest to make people reminisce about the past, and they were also the days that most easily stirred the human heart.
...
"You guys should stop snooping on him."
Ron Irus spoke into the empty air as he walked down the pitch-black corridor, raising a cigarette to his lips.
"He belongs to me now."
Ron added. He had no intention of letting anyone target Quân, who was a complete and mysterious anomaly.
A line of text resembling starlight manifested right behind Ron's footsteps.
It seemed Quân was a highly sought-after, special target—at least, he was to Ron.
But Ron didn't give a damn. They were both Level 1 members of the organization anyway, so why bother caring about someone of equal rank?
This time, Ron turned around to face the words floating like starlight. He put on a look of feigned guilt, though his heart had long remained unbothered.
These lines of text seemed to carry a bizarre sense of mockery, but this vague, incomplete way of talking could be infuriatingly annoying.
"..."
Ron said nothing, waiting until another sentence materialized.
"It took you three years just to dig that up? I've got to ask, is your mother's cooking actually any good?"
<...>
"Three years. You wasted three years just to uncover something I threw together half-assed when I was twelve. And you're still proud of it? I bet you only know how to scurry around like sewage rats flying over the drainpipes."
Ron added. His face was as calm as a blank sheet of paper, yet his words carried an unspeakable level of insult.
"What do you plan to do next? Call your entire bloodline over to swarm like flies on shit."
With that, Ron opened a door on the side of the corridor, stepped inside, and completely ignored the starlight text outside.
He looked toward the center of the room. Resting there was a blood-red coffin.
The entire room was littered with weapons thrown haphazardly on the floor next to various spare parts.
And strangely enough, those weapons were firearms—something one probably wouldn't dream of existing in a world of magic.