Early in the morning, the Hollows dormitory was filled with sharp coldness.
Isaac, already awake, sat in the center of the gloom, with the only light being the faint dying glow of a mana-lamp on his desk.
His eyes were closed. He was performing his daily routine of meditation—the routine which he upheld for a decade.
He breathed, but he wasn't just breathing. He was analyzing. Today's meditation was drastically different from any other, for he discovered something he considered surreal.
[The Prism].
It was spectacular in innumerable ways. It allowed him to perceive in his own Manafold Circuitry—the vessels and meridians that form a circular loop in one's body, a path which mana flows through—of all things.
It was no longer just about 'feeling' the flow; all five senses that he had at disposal registered the flow of his very own mana in his network.
It was an incredible discovery that made him numb to the ongoing coldness around him.
So he looked. The landscape of his Manafold Circuitry was, objectively speaking, rather unique.
Conventionally, when it came to assessing the efficiency of one's Manafold Circuitry and corresponding mana output, there were two distinct qualities that were looked upon.
First was the Total Reserve, which was the measure of the total amount of mana deposited into the Circuitry. It represented the "mass."
Second was the Mana Efficiency, which was the measure of the viscosity of mana. The more viscous and dense the mana was, the greater its resistance against the vessel walls. It represented the "acceleration."
Meditation and wand training were two primary means in honing one's Manafold Circuitry. The idea was to condense mana and bump them into the vessels during its circulation. The vessels' inner walls would tear, ultimately widening its space permanently. The idea was to push more. Fill more.
This wasn't the method that Isaac took during his sessions of meditation. Therefore, his Manafold Circuitry was, objectively speaking, mediocre by the usual standards. His Total Reserve amounted to no more than a size of a marble. Given the high relative viscosity of his mana, his Mana Efficiency was lackluster as well.
However, what the lens—[The Prism]—showed him suggested something else.
Isaac studied many literatures and cases involving the Manafold Circuitry training over a decade, hoping to impress Patriarch Valerius. He eventually concluded that having mana clash against its own walls to enlarge the space results in scarring. The inner walls would end up being irregular and bumpy. Regardless of Total Reserve and Mana Efficiency, the resistance that those vessel walls induce would become detrimental.
For ten years, he took an opposite approach. He used his "viscous," slow-moving mana to scrape along the narrow vessel walls of his Manafold Circuitry. He focused on the theory of "smoothening" those vessel walls, not "widening."
The lens confirmed that his hard work paid off. Although his Manafold Circuitry was not wide, it was unbelievably clean, smooth, and sturdy.
Therefore, the friction the textbooks described as inevitable was nearly absent. What flowed through his Circuitry didn't lose half its force to turbulence before arrival. And now, with the perception provided by [The Prism], he could do even better.
Now, the manipulation.
He located the path of mana flow. He watched the flow. Clean, still, running at the specific low-level current that had been sustaining this practice for ten years.
Then, he paused.
"Why am I doing all this, again?"
He was no longer Valerius. Academy was mandatory—the only ways to get himself expelled were to defect or die.
A memory then surfaced.
"They look at the crest of the wave that moves the ocean, Isaac, but they forget the summation of tides that gave birth to it."
It involved the smell of lavender and a soft, steady voice from a world that felt entirely different from his current life.
"Your perseverance is your greatest strength. I believe in you."
It was his mother's voice, the most cherished memory that he had.
It was the reason he has been working hard for a decade, even though he, to some extent, foresaw a future like this at some point.
"I won't let you down, mother," he whispered in the empty room.
Dark in the morning. It would not always be dark in the morning. But today it was, and today was the variable currently in front of him.
He dressed in the dim light and picked up the training wand he had been issued the previous afternoon. It was indistinguishable from the hundreds of others handed out.
Isaac then paused.
Again.
His fingertips found the anomaly before he had finished closing his hand around the handle.
A modification. Sabotaged wand… once again.
This was already the second time he received a wand so faulty that it was essentially unusable.
"Someone is deliberately trying to make me fail, over and over again."
He adjusted his collar under the rising light, with this issue regarding the wand engraved in his mind.
The day had begun, and the day had specific requirements.
...
As the time arrived, students gathered in the lecture hall.
There were hundreds of them occupying the tiered rows with their uniforms crisp. Many were filled with excitement and eagerness after having passed the Rite of Manifestation.
The professor, Master Thorne, walked the front of the hall at a leisurely pace. On the obsidian board behind him, there was a diagram of a Pressure-Volume loop was etched in crystalline chalk—the theoretical framework for mana output management, rendered with the specificity of someone who had stopped finding it abstract a long time ago.
"Most of you view these wands as tools of focus, something of no significance at all," Thorne said, starting the lecture without an introduction. "You are wrong. For those of you with unstable reserves, the wand is a pressure-relief valve. It is the only thing standing between a successful cast and a localized collapse of your Manafold Circuitry. If the valve fails, the back-pressure will shred your internal pathways into charred slag."
Isaac sat near the back with the sabotaged wand on his desk in front of him. He was currently calculating what to do with it.
"Still playing with sticks, Isaac?"
The shadow fell across his desk before the voice arrived—a broad-shouldered student with unrefined features. The air around him carried ozone and the faint crackle of static leaking from his collar at irregular intervals.
Behind him, a lanky student with a narrow-eyed smirk occupied the space that secondary participants occupied in these arrangements—close enough to participate, positioned to retreat.
Jax, and Kael behind him.
"I heard the papers are final," Jax said, his diction simple and blunt in the way of someone who had never needed vocabulary to establish position. "You're officially nobody. Guess a waste lost his protection."
Kael's hand came down on Isaac's shoulder with the specific weight of someone applying low-level mana discharge through contact. "Born into Valerius and came out a defect, now Nameless. Like a battery that won't hold a charge."
Isaac didn't react, although he was inwardly amazed by these two's blatant ignorance to Thorne's lecture. It was a matter of time before Thorne's eyes turned on them.
Jax, finding the absence of a response unsatisfying in the way that absences always unsatisfied people who came looking for reactions, reached for the variable most likely to produce one.
"I bet your mother is proud of what you've become," Jax said, leaning in. " A worthless puddle whom no one pays attention to." Jax casually, as if not aware of his own action, placed his wand on the corner of Isaac's desk and leaned in further, his frame acting as a complete physical screen.
The nearby students, who heard the insult, stiffened, wondering who would lack common sense to an extent of raising a commotion mid-lecture.
Isaac paused. It was no longer possible for him to view the ongoing lecture thanks to Jax, but that wasn't the reason why he paused.
Is that supposed to be an insult?
His mind was integrating the words spoken by Jax. It was a single-dimensional insult that he couldn't be bothered by. However, his usage of the word "mother"… did irk him.
Then, Jax found Isaac's wand sitting nearby his own. Smirked as he swatted it off the table. It fell to the floor and rolled.
Isaac watched it roll. A quick calculation went through his head. He stood up slowly.
He reached for his wand—sabotaged—and picked it up. Reached back to his seat where Jax and Kael were waiting, which appeared rather idiotic in his eyes considering how all other students were seated.
His left hand braced against the desk's surface. It was as if the time slowed down—the precision that [The Prism] allowed to his cognition was incredible. In the same motion, he palmed Jax's wand from where it rested on the desk corner, all while placing his own sabotaged wand in its stead.
Everything happened in an instant. No one saw the careful swap of wands. As Isaac returned to his seat, the wand in his grasp was not his, but Jax's.
In the middle tiers, a girl leaned toward her companion. "Is that him, Cassiopeia? The one Silas said shouldn't be allowed in orientation?"
Another girl named Cassiopeia didn't look up from her notebook, where she was reproducing Thorne's pressure-valve diagram with a precision that matched the original. "It is, Marlene," she said. "But look at his hands."
"What about them?" The girl named Marlene asked.
"He isn't shaking." Cassiopeia's pen continued its movement, capturing a detail of the diagram. " Considering how Jax Wason announced all around that he attained B-rank: [Bolt Streak] as his skill, a normal owner of a F-rank skill would respond with fear and submission. Yet, look at the grip on that wand. It's not fear." She paused, completing a notation. "It's something else."
"It's fascinating, Jax," Isaac then said.
The conversation in the middle tiers stopped, with the ongoing lecture by Thorne no longer as interesting. The quiet was different from the quiet that had followed Jax's comment about his mother—that had been the silence of discomfort. This was the silence of attention.
"You've spent the last several minutes using a very specific and very limited vocabulary to, if I were to borrow your word, a puddle." Isaac's voice carried the flat quality of someone reading an observation from a notebook. "If I'm as irrelevant as you've described, I'm curious what that makes you—a person who has invested his morning at the Academy into the project of explaining that irrelevance to me."
Jax's expression moved through trance to surprise to anger. He growled, "Because it's the truth, freak."
"Truth, you say." Isaac wasn't asking a question. "You've researched my legal status, my family history, and the specific circumstances of my mother's death. You've positioned yourself at my desk during a lecture of all time. What are you, my fan?"
Isaac's gaze moved to Jax's shoulders. To some extent, he understood the reason why Jax may have gotten this impulsive. B-rank: [Bolt Streak]—he heard about rumors. Most of the students awakened a D-rank skill, and therefore, anything above D-rank were usually considered a jackpot.
An exhilaration led to the case of stupidity. That's what Isaac concluded the current Jax as.
And now, Isaac noticed that the background voice—of Thorne lecturing—stopped. Jax and Kael by his side didn't. Thus, he returned to the silence.
"Say more, freak." Jax, not liking Isaac's sudden shift, raised his fist threateningly.
Isaac leaned back slightly. Raised his eyebrow at Jax. Then, gave a light shrug.
Such subtle actions were enough for Jax to pull his fist back, B-rank: [Bolt Streak] coiling around his knuckles. Many looked at him in disbelief, as he was now trying to use a combat skill in a lecture hall.
"ENOUGH."
Thorne's voice hit the hall with annoyance written in his tone. Jax had to pause before the skill was executed.
"You two over there." The quiet register of Thorne's voice someone reached everyone in the lecture hall. "Get out of my lecture."
Jax stood frozen with the coiled discharge still visible at his knuckles.
"P-Pardon—"
"Get. Out." Thorne said.
The two of them didn't move for a second, still registering. Jax looked at his fist, before lowering it. Dejectedly, they walked away,
"Jax Wason," Isaac then called, making him turn. "Your wand."
Jax made a frustrated growl. Quickly walked back to Isaac's table, grabbed his wand, and stormed off. Two students left—or were ejected—from the lecture hall.
"Now," Thorne said, turning back to the obsidian board with the economy of someone closing a parenthesis. "Since we've had an unscheduled demonstration of what inefficient grounding looks like under emotional pressure, let us proceed to the practical application of pressure management. Take out your wands."
In the middle tiers, Marlene let out a slow breath. "Idiots."
Cassiopeia turned her pen once between her fingers. "You found the right word," she said, "but it wasn't just that they were idiots. Rather, it was that Isaac reacted calmly." A pause. "Patience is a virtue that is rarer than you think."
Marlene looked at Isaac's back briefly, before turning away.