The dining hall pulsed with the quiet, sustained energy of hundreds of students. The clatter of utensils and the scent of roasted herbs and thick broth were muffled beneath the rhythmic hum of the Academy's central mana lamps. For the first time since the catastrophic gate opening, Kael felt a physical ache beneath his ribs.
The Compendium's rapid, cold repair had left him light, sharp, and empty; now, the stomach gate's relentless consumption demanded tribute.
He sat opposite Dean, whose bowl was already half-empty.
"Kael, are you feeling… okay?" Dean asked, concern softening his voice. "You look fine, but if you need a healer, we can go. Seriously."
Kael studied Dean's face, cataloguing the sincerity. He needed to maintain the anchor.
"Don't worry, I'm fine," Kael said, the words smooth and even. "Just a little hungry. I haven't truly been able to eat much today."
Dean's expression flickered with guilt. "Sorry… I dropped the food when I saw you lying there in your own blood. Please forgive me."
Kael gave a faint nod and reached for the spoon.
The first mouthful hit like fuel on coals—warm, immediate. He hadn't realized how famished the vessel truly was. The taste was almost transcendent, a complexity the original orphan body had never known. He devoured the meal like a starved machine, unable to stop until the cold logic of the Compendium urged restraint.
As he ate, predatory curiosity took hold. He channelled a thin stream of Arcane Mana into the stomach gate to observe the digestive process.
The result was instantaneous. The food within him broke down, converting into raw energy that revitalized every fibre of his being. Fascinated, Kael didn't notice the bowl empty until the Compendium's hum dimmed slightly. He stood and refilled it. The energy output was smaller than expected—a clear inefficiency compared to the effort of eating.
Compendium, analyse the energy conversion from the food I'm eating.
[Query Accepted. Insufficient Data Integrity for Conversion Model. Rerouting Processing to Background Loop.]
Kael's brow tightened. Frustrating. Still, this can be investigated later.
Dean was still talking between bites, a faint envy dripping from his tone. "Kael, you're such a natural with magic. It feels like you have trained for months before joining the academy. The way you have proficiency with mana feels natural."
Kael swallowed another spoonful, slower this time, forcing control back into the act. "It isn't something inherent," he said evenly, maintaining the mask of the humble prodigy. "It is discipline. If you'd like, I can teach you."
Dean's face lit up, his grin bright and unguarded. "Really? I'd love that!"
Kael met his eyes and spoke with practiced sincerity, a cold assessment beneath the words. "We're friends, Dean. I'll help you however I can."
When the meal ended, students drifted out in clusters. Dean wiped his mouth and glanced over. "You heading back? I'm exhausted."
Kael shook his head, rising and smoothing his robes. "I'm not sleepy yet. I need to visit the library—catch up with the others. I still have gaps in my education."
Dean frowned. "You should rest after what happened. You can always study later."
"Later will be too late," Kael said. He didn't give Dean the chance to insist on tagging along.
Dean hesitated, then grinned. "Alright—but don't overdo it."
Kael's lips curved faintly, but the expression never reached the Hollow Within.
The corridor to the administrative wing was quiet, lit by the soft glow of mana lights that threw sharp shadows across the cold stone walls. Each step Kael took echoed in the vast, empty space between thought and hunger. The Compendium murmured faintly in the back of his mind—quiet data streams, unfinished equations.
He ignored the notice and knocked once on Kellan's door.
"Enter," came the tight reply.
Kellan sat behind his desk, a crystal circlet resting on his brow. His expression was taut, fury barely restrained, the air around him vibrating with controlled power. He didn't look up as Kael entered.
"Stupid boy," Kellan snapped, the sound cracking like a whip. "I didn't have Lilian heal you so you could go and blow up your body."
If it had been the old Kael, he might have flinched or tried to placate. But the Compendium-trained Kael saw no purpose in such gestures. They were inefficient. So, he knows what happened, Kael thought. He must have been watching through his Aspect the whole time. Yet he didn't intervene.
"It was just an experiment gone wrong," Kael said evenly. "And I doubt anyone knows about my Aspect. You made me swear an oath to keep it secret, and I've kept that oath."
Kellan finally looked up, confusion mingling with irritation. "Foolish boy. Don't merge so deeply with a Law Fragment that you forget you have judgment separate from it." The power around him vibrated, then subsided, drawing the tension from the air like a vacuum. "That isn't what I called you here for."
He reached into the air and drew out a small, runed stone that shimmered faintly with restrained mana.
"This ward-stone grants access to the restricted section of the library. Make sure no one sees you; that would be difficult to explain." Kellan's voice softened into cold calculation. "I want you to study the teleportation formations and arrays recorded there. You'll find the kingdom's full archive—failed experiments, ancient blueprints, foreign transcriptions. Your task is to compile them and determine why these arrays don't function for us when other races use them freely."
Kael's heart skipped once, though his face remained composed. The promise of forbidden lore was immediate and overwhelming.
"I don't have time right now," Kael said quietly, playing the docile pawn. "I still need rest."
"I didn't say now," Kellan replied. "I saw how you coveted Lilian's spatial bracer when she used it. If you can make the formation work, the kingdom will reward you with a spatial storage device. Rare, yes—but valuable. It would serve you well."
Greed flared briefly within Kael, sharp and metallic. A scrambled fragment of restored memory flickered—the feeling of what such an artifact could mean—before it was immediately replaced by the cold, analytical understanding of its utility. The trade was already made.
Silence stretched.
Then Kellan smiled thinly, the kind of smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Good. I have given you your task. If you can present measurable advancement—something new, something quantifiable—you'll gain official access to restricted resources."
"Resources?" Kael asked, though he already knew the answer.
"Archives. Materials. And, of course—restricted knowledge."
The word struck like a spark in dry tinder. The Compendium's hum deepened at the base of his skull, the silent hunger absolute.
"I'll deliver results," Kael said.
"I expect nothing less. And keep close to that boy, Dean. Spatial aspects are also part of peak law fragment—see if he can be careful."
Kael inclined his head, absorbing the new political variable. Dean was no longer just a friend; he was a resource that needed to be protected and monitored.
"Understood."
The Academy Library was a cathedral built of silence. It occupied the central, oldest wing of the spire, its walls thick with ancient, stabilizing runes that muted the outside world. Here, the low hum of ambient mana was constant, a quiet, rich promise of knowledge.
Kael walked past the main reading hall, a vast space where hundreds of students could sit at polished, curving desks. He moved with a practiced economy of motion, his new robes blending seamlessly with the academic routine. He felt like a ghost: seen, yet unobserved.
Only a few students were still present in the reading hall, scattered across the vast area. They looked half asleep, hunched over their desks, burning the candle on both ends for a fleeting advantage. They were too exhausted, too focused on their own struggle to register a pale orphan in plain robes.
The public archive was an ocean of leather-bound volumes, but Kael needed only a river: the restricted Administrative Annex.
He found the access door recessed into a shadowed alcove behind a towering shelf dedicated to magic theory. The door was blank obsidian, without a handle or hinge. An indent in the shape of the ward-stone Kellan had given him was visible near the seam, its surface humming faintly with passive wards.
Kael withdrew the ward-stone, pressed it firmly into the indent, and waited. The obsidian shivered, and the air before him dissolved like mist, revealing a thin, seamless seam of metal. He looked up quickly, confirming that he was not being observed, and walked into the restricted section of the library.
The air was colder here, smelling distinctly of ozone and forgotten copper. This wasn't a library for scholars; it was a vault for secrets. Plaques hung above the shelves, whispering of forbidden knowledge: Teleportation Formations, Advanced Soul Arrays, Unstable Elemental Fusions, and Forbidden Healing Spells.
Kael wanted to devour all the knowledge scattered here. Every page felt like sustenance for the ever-hungry Compendium. His immediate priority was Kellan's assignment—solving the systemic failures in the complex Transposition Arrays.
But as his gaze swept across the incomprehensible formulas etched in arcane language, the cold logic of the Compendium asserted itself. Inefficiency is death.
He lacked the fundamental knowledge—the low-level grammar of Forms and Arrays. To start the process from these advanced books, he realized, would lead to inefficient mistakes. His lack of basics would hurt him. He needed foundational knowledge first.
Kael left the restricted section of the library with a heavy heart, the ward-stone slipping quietly back into his pocket.
Kael moved quickly through the public archive to the section dedicated to first-year studies. Here, the shelves sagged under the weight of mundane instruction: Basic Spell Casting, Basic Arrays for Personal Use, Principles of Mana Flow.
He headed toward the section dedicated to the fundamentals of material fusion, taking down a worn volume titled Conduits and Vessels: Fundamentals of Mana Infusion. This knowledge was essential to correct his abysmal 3% efficiency rating, revealed during the Formations class.
He sat down at an empty desk near a pillar and opened the book. The basics were rote—he skipped the sections detailing the core principles he had learned in the lecture, jumping straight to the complex interaction between external mana and inert matter.
The moment new knowledge appeared in the book, the Compendium went to full attention.
[Recommendation: Infuse mana to cranial gate.]
Never had the Compendium prompted such a recommendation before. Kael frowned, questioning the logic. Infusion only sharpened his senses and increased pain, yet the Compendium was acting like a starved child. He gave the command: "Yes."
The Compendium infused a tiny stream of Arcane Mana into his newly opened cranial gate. His senses didn't sharpen as they had before, but his focus was increased exponentially. His reading speed increased, and with every new theory he read, the Compendium gained a little energy.
The process began: the cold, analytical consumption of foundational truth.
Mana-Material Compatibility (Material Rejection): The text explained that raw elemental mana often resisted matter of a conflicting element. For instance, attempts to infuse Fire Mana directly into a common grey stone—which possessed a natural, low-level Earth Mana signature—would result in the stone actively rejecting the fire mana. This rejection led to structural volatility and catastrophic array failure.
The solution was not stronger mana, but better preparation. A crafter must first infuse the base material with a trace amount of a compatible mana (e.g., infusing a stone with a neutral, stabilizing Water Mana) before applying the desired elemental array. This preparation neutralized the innate rejection and ensured the stability of the final construct. Without this basic step, all advanced Formation work was doomed to fail.
Kael logged the correction. This explained precisely why the young girl in class had collapsed when attempting to infuse the stone with Fire Mana; her flow was crude, and she had ignored the material's innate resistance.
The Corrosion Cost (Entropic Decay): The Compendium presented a second, more critical truth that no instructor had bothered to mention: mana infusion, no matter how precise, was fundamentally a disruptive process.
When mana was forced into an inert medium to activate it—such as stabilizing a heating array or creating a self-repairing wall—the sustained presence of that foreign energy caused entropic decay. The infused mana acted as a slow-acting corrosive agent, degrading the material's binding structure.
This meant that arrays, formations, and even common mana-fuelled items required regular maintenance and, eventually, complete replacement of the base materials. A constant infusion array set on stone, for instance, would degrade the stone to dust over three to five years, demanding costly and continuous material expenditure. Perfection was temporary; decay was a Law.
Kael felt a flicker of cold satisfaction. The Kingdom's power relied entirely on constant, inefficient resource consumption. The ability to identify this decay—and perhaps find a way to mitigate it—would grant him unparalleled influence over every mage and noble who relied on permanent formations.
He continued to read, the process slow, but the accumulated CP ticking up steadily. He was no longer just an orphan reading a book; he was consuming the foundational limits of the world.
He felt the Compendium extract the last fragments of theory from the chapter. He checked the time; two hours had passed since he began.
[Input received: 13 CP gained.]
So, two hours of constant reading is just equal to 13 points, he calculated, noting the poor return rate.
Kael also got some idea from the book on how to improve his infusion efficiency and he ran outside the library and found a stone in the courtyard. He took the stone and started infusing the mana in the stone. Instead of applying a neutral stabilizing mana first, he tried to emulate the required precision mentioned in the text, starting the infusion from one corner and keeping the flow minimal.
The first stone crumbled into dust a few minutes later as he was trying to force even a thin stream of his pure Arcane mana into the raw Earth-aspected material. The material rejection was instant and violent.
He found a more solid stone and tried again, but the attempt was failure too. His technique was still too coarse.
Compendium, please provide guidance on mana infusion technique.
[Query Initiated: Mana Infusion Technique – Cost 10,000 CP.]
Compendium, please provide guidance on technique for the first preparatory infusion.
[Query Initiated: Mana Infusion Technique (Preparatory Infusion) - Cost 100 CP]
He wanted to scream with frustration. One hundred CP. What the hell is this demand?
Compendium, with 10 CP, what step can you show me?
[Query Initiated: Visualizing Mana Flow and Impurities—Cost 10 CP. Proceed?]
Fine, take 10 CP and teach me.
Arcane mana in a thin stream moved from the Compendium and infused his eyes and then he felt his eyes burn. He suffered the same agony he did when Lilian was performing the procedure on him. Unlike before, however, the pain did not paralyze him, but the sheer intensity of the new sensory input required his whole willpower not to scream.
The process took several minutes of agony and then subsided, and he could see the ambient mana in the air. There were different colours of motes everywhere. He could see the mana moving in different patterns. What he could not understand was why Compendium taught him this as a first step.
But then his eyes fell on the stone, and he saw how the stone was filled with brown sludge. He had a revelation: the impurities were filling the stone's structure, and when his mana infusion removed them, there was nothing to hold the stone structure, thus, they turned into dust. He tried again to infuse the mana, and he could see how impurities were removed with a sudden influx of mana, and the stone turned into dust.
He could see the magic, and he could see the effects of his mana, but still, he did not know what to do. He wanted to go back to library to study further but he had to sleep.
He wanted to continue, but the constant infusion of mana made his head ache as if someone had taken a hammer and was chiselling his brain. He needed rest and a plan in a way that he can keep reading to gain more CP. This felt like the safest way to achieve his target.