A new week began.
Starting today, afternoon classes will be held. In other words, our life at Geumgang Academy was finally beginning in earnest.
“There’s no class during fourth and fifth periods, right? Then let’s go eat.”
“I don’t have any plans, so sure. But you’re not planning to walk all the way to someplace far again, are you? If we’re going, can’t it at least be somewhere close?”
“Ask Ha-neul.”
Because afternoon classes were electives students chose freely, everyone’s lunch break was different. So Min A-rin and I decided to eat with whoever whose schedule lined up with ours.
That said, since we finished earlier, we’d probably have to go to the cafeteria first, grab seats, and wait.
“You and that Ha-neul, Ha-neul, Ha-neul…. Do you like living chained to her? If you’re from the Divine Sword Do Clan, why not show a little dignity?”
“You only say that because you don’t know. Life is give-and-take.”
“If you give, you get something back? You and she have that kind of thing going on?”
“You don’t know yet, but Ha-neul looks out for me in ways you don’t even notice.”
“Huh. And how exactly does she ‘look out for you’?”
“If you’re curious, pay up.”
“What?”
“I’ve been following something lately. Buy me a hundred collection tickets instead, and I’ll consider telling you.”
“What kind of nonsense is that?”
“You don’t read webtoons or web novels?”
“Why would I read that stuff?”
“That’s why you’re such a straight-laced nerd…. A-rin, let’s live a little. Enjoy some culture.”
“Ugh. I’m about to start swearing. Why do I have to hear that from you?”
“Well, you don’t have any friends….”
“…!”
“It’s okay. I’ll be your friend.”
“…Apologize. Right now. If you don’t, I’m going to consider this an insult to Min A-rin.”
“Then do you have friends?”
“….”
“If you do, I’ll apologize.”
“I-I do! You just don’t know, okay? I have tons of friends!”
“A-rin.”
“What! What! What is it!”
“Yeah, sorry. Happy? Must be nice to have so many friends. I don’t have many.”
“Ugh…. Fine! As long as you know!”
Min A-rin looked startled, as if she hadn’t expected me to apologize so quickly. For a second, she even looked a little hollow.
But her pride wouldn’t let her keep arguing, so she forced herself to act cool and let it go.
Then she huffed and stomped past me.
I quickly caught up and nudged her side lightly with my elbow.
“You sulking?”
“Hmph. Why would I be sulking?”
“You’re sulking.”
“I’m not sulking.”
“Guess I took the joke too far. Sorry. Come on, let it go.”
“I said I’m not sulking!”
“Want to go wherever you want today?”
…
She stopped mid-stride.
Min A-rin blinked her yellow eyes, then looked up at me carefully, like she didn’t want to believe it too quickly.
Hope seemed to fill her gaze.
“R-really?”
“Sure. Where do you want to eat?”
“Ahem! I’m not affected by your silly jokes at all, but… if you insist that this is what will ease your conscience, then fine. I’ll allow you to follow my lead.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Honestly, Min A-rin was fun to tease.
It also explained why, in my previous life, people had called her “actually the weakest member of the party.”
Her mood brightened immediately. With a proud little huff, she tossed her red hair and strode ahead.
With her personality, she’d probably head for the nearest cafeteria.
And sure enough, my guess was right.
Before long, the building with the cafeteria came into view.
And around the entrance, there were booths lined up, swarming with students.
“Why are they gathered like that?”
“Ugh… I hate crowds.”
To get into the cafeteria, we’d have to pass through them.
From the look of it, they were trying to rope passing students in.
As we got closer, we understood what was going on.
‘Club recruitment.’
Come to think of it, there had been a club promotion period around this time in the game, too.
I listened as students shouted while handing out flyers.
“A life without chicken is unacceptable! Chicken is my life, my light! We are the Chicks, a club that loves chicken, lives for chicken, and dedicates our lives to chicken! Bone-in, boneless, Golden Olive, seasoned, soy sauce, Bburinkle—anyone here love chicken?!”
“Anyone who likes alpacas, come here! Anyone want to go see alpacas every week?! Our club maintains a perfect 1:1 gender ratio, and it’s full of handsome guys and pretty girls—”
“Have you ever dreamed of marrying an oil prince and living in luxury? We’re a club that discusses how to marry an oil prince…. Ah, of course, men can join too! Preferences come in all kinds!”
“Cardio hard! Weights hard! Anyone want to build muscle?!”
“The next class is you! If you want to be a Hunter, you need to get used to murder cases, too! Anyone want to be a detective?! Join, and we’ll give you a tranquillizer gun and tracking glasses!”
“We’re recruiting for the Urban Legends Club. If you stay active for three years, we’ll give you one billion won in cash.”
“Looking for people to join the Lunchbox Wars! We fight every evening at the nearby supermarket for discounted lunchboxes that are cheap and delicious—”
“Recruiting for the Dark Gourmet Society! We go around visiting restaurants, and we terrorize places that taste bad—”
Did they have to be that distinctive to survive the promotion battle?
Or was it simply that the academy was so large, clubs came in every imaginable variety?
As we passed the booths, we were bombarded with one bizarre pitch after another.
“A protein club…. That’s tempting. The bodybuilding club, too.”
“…Are you seriously saying that?”
“I’m always serious.”
With every step,
more flyers were pressed into my hands.
Somehow, I’d ended up accepting whatever they shoved at me, so I started flipping through the flyers one by one.
A few actually looked interesting.
Min A-rin, however, looked appalled.
“You’re not thinking of joining those muscle freaks who walk around wearing nothing but underwear, are you?”
“Muscle freaks? Do you have any idea how ideally developed those muscles are?”
“They’re just disgusting.”
“Seriously, A-rin.”
“What?”
“Stop studying all day and go enjoy some culture outside. How can you not recognize muscles like that?”
“Why do I need to recognize that garbage? So. Are you joining?”
“No.”
At Min A-rin’s suspicious interrogation, I shook my head.
If I were being honest, I wanted to.
But I wouldn’t have time, and more importantly, I had to give it up for the sake of the game’s story.
There was a club I had to join.
‘It should be somewhere around here….’
The club that, in the game, became the place where I first built ties with Gang Han-byeol, Go Eun-bi, Do-gyeon-woo, Yong Hae-rang, and several other younger party members.
I planned to join a club that had at least some involvement in the main story.
‘The Mystery Exploration Club….’
A club that researched mysterious phenomena in the academy city and, under that banner, went out to explore the city itself. For short: Myseop.
I searched among the booths.
Not long after—
‘There it is.’
I spotted a booth that students weren’t paying attention to.
At a glance, it looked unpopular, shabby, and underfunded.
I walked toward it.
“The cafeteria’s right there, so where are you suddenly going?”
“There’s a club I want to check out.”
“That Mystery Exploration thing? Just from the name, it sounds boring….”
“Only the name is boring. I’m thinking of joining. Want to join with me?”
“Hmm…. Clubs can be part of your portfolio when you apply for a Hunter job, but something like that is kind of….”
“Other people will probably join too.”
…
“Then I guess we’ll be going out and having fun every weekend without you.”
“I-I’ll just listen to the pitch first and think about it slowly. And just so you know, I’m not doing this because I don’t want to be left alone, okay? I’m only looking into it because it might help my portfolio. So if I join, it won’t be because of you guys. It’ll be purely for my future—”
“Okay, okay.”
Min A-rin kept chattering.
I gave her a vague answer and addressed the person at the booth.
“Hi. I’m interested in the club. Could I hear an explanation?”
Monday, 8th and 9th Period
Understanding Elemental Magic of Light (Second Tier).
After finding the classroom, I took a seat and waited for the lecture to begin.
A moment later, Hong Ye-na opened the door and walked in.
…
Under the students’ attention, she crossed the room with crisp, measured heel-clicks, chin lifted as she headed for the lectern. She placed the attendance sheet down, then swept her gaze across the classroom.
Her eyes met mine.
“Tch.”
It was only for an instant.
Still, I caught the way Hong Ye-na clicked her tongue as if my mere existence irritated her.
‘Seeing you again after this morning, too, Lady Witch.’
Judging by the way her eyebrow twitched, she seemed delighted to see me. Delighted enough to be annoyed about it.
I gave her a polite nod of acknowledgement.
She snapped her gaze away and started calling roll.
“…If you’re not here, did you drop the class or something? Fine. Then we’ll begin. I’m Hong Ye-na, and for this semester, I’ll be teaching you second-tier light elemental magic.”
Brushing back her chestnut-brown hair, she continued in a pointed tone.
“Anyone who read the syllabus will already know this, but I’m going to teach assuming you’ve reached the second tier. So if anyone here hasn’t, leave now. You won’t be able to keep up, and I recommend you take a different class. And if you were hoping I’d kindly help you raise your tier, give up. I don’t have the time to babysit.”
…
They say the blood vessels spread throughout the human body add up to roughly 100,000 kilometers.
If you pulled them out and laid them end to end, you could wrap around the Earth two and a half times.
In a way, it meant a human being carried a world larger than the planet inside themselves.
‘And mana circulates in a similar pattern.’
That network is called a mana circuit.
A being can use magic by activating those circuits.
So if you wanted to walk the path of magic, you had to try to use as many circuits as possible, in as many ways as possible, with as much precision as possible.
But the number of circuits you could activate was finite. There was always a ceiling.
You couldn’t climb any higher.
That was where the concept of tiers came in.
‘Like CPU cores, maybe.’
Mana originates in the heart.
In other words, for mana to flow through the circuits, it had to pass through the heart first.
The limits of magic could be expressed as:
1 heart × mana circuits.
So what if you made one more heart?
It would become:
2 hearts × mana circuits,
Doubling the limit.
Three hearts would triple it. Four hearts would quadruple it.
If you had infinite hearts, the idea of a limit would become meaningless.
Of course, creating actual hearts was impossible.
But creating virtual circuits inside the heart, circuits that could interlock like rings, wasn’t impossible.
‘Just unbelievably hard.’
A tier referred to the realm of magic you reached by activating those rings and circuits.
That was why anyone who wanted to make magic their profession needed to have those rings wrapped around their heart.
As a rule of thumb, you generally had to reach the fifth tier and be truly versed in that tier’s field of magic before you were recognized as a proper mage.
That was why Hong Ye-na, known as the Witch of Seven Colors, commanded respect.
Handling even one element was difficult, yet she had mastered multiple up to the fifth tier.
‘Maybe that’s why she’s so prickly. She must’ve suffered like hell to get there.’
It might be.
While I listened, I let the thought drift through my mind.
In any case, I’d already reached the second tier, so I wasn’t worried.
Then Hong Ye-na shifted the topic.
“Today, I’m going to see how well you understand the element of light. Everyone, manifest Light.”
A sphere of radiance floated above her outstretched palm.
It was Light, a first-tier spell of the light element, bright enough to push back darkness.
It was the first spell you learned when you began studying light elemental magic.
The other students and I formed the spell without much trouble.
<Light>
A glowing orb, almost identical to Hong Ye-na’s, formed over my palm.
Keeping the spell active, I listened as she taught.
“Usually, when you cast Light, you shape it like this. But have you ever wondered why it becomes a sphere? The formula doesn’t dictate the shape.”
…
“It’s because, conceptually, people imagine light as a sunlike sphere that emits radiance. And because shaping it into a sphere is easy.”
…
“But if you want to truly use magic, you need to break away from that concept. That’s not just true for magic, but for every process that uses mana. You need to know how to break frames. Especially if you want to master the second tier.”
The moment she finished speaking,
the Light hovering over her palm began to change.
The sphere sharpened into a tetrahedron, then shifted into a star, and finally became an umbrella.
Hong Ye-na held the glowing umbrella above her head and spoke as if it were nothing.
“Like this. You need to be able to change Light into different forms, too.”
…
“Now you try. Tetrahedron, star, then umbrella. I’ll dismiss those who succeed perfectly first.”
With that, the assignment was set.
From then on, the students had no choice but to experiment with Light to solve it.
“Ugh….”
“Damn, this is hard.”
“Why did it turn into a poop shape…?”
With Hong Ye-na’s teaching style, which demanded a shift in perspective and added depth,
students who thought they’d simply be learning second-tier magic were bound to struggle.
They strained in every way they could, trying to change the form of their Light.
But I wasn’t one of them.
“Instructor.”
“What is it?”
“I’d like to be checked.”
“Alright. Stand up and show me.”
…
With no one else having succeeded yet,
I rose from my seat.
The students’ eyes snapped toward me.
I didn’t flinch under their attention.
<Light>
I lifted the spell easily.
Then, just like Hong Ye-na had done, the sphere changed into a tetrahedron, then a star, then an umbrella.
“I’m done, so I can go now, right?”
…
Spinning the umbrella slowly, scattering shimmering particles,
I asked for Hong Ye-na’s confirmation.
She let out a short scoff.
“Who taught you? I don’t know, but it’s flawless. Fine, Gyeon-woo, you can go. Leaving thirty minutes after class starts.”
As if I didn’t know who taught me.
I grinned to myself.
“Class isn’t anything special, is it?”
“You’d better not get cocky. I’m thinking of raising the difficulty quickly, if only because of you.”
…
Right then, groans and sighs rose from around the classroom.
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