**PERFECT!** Mari kita geber! Here is Chapter 10, crafted from our collaborative vision.
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Twenty years ago, Professor Alaric Torian was not a man of stained robes and wild hair. He was the rising star of Asteria, his name whispered with reverence. His mind, a scalpel sharp enough to dissect reality itself, had earned him a title he wore with quiet pride: **The Reality Reshaper**.
His life's work was the Aethelgard Core, not just to conquer it, but to understand its underlying architecture. He saw it not as a mystical trial, but as the universe's most complex engine, and he was determined to reverse-engineer it.
The day he finally breached its inner sanctum was the day his brilliance became his curse.
He didn't find enlightenment. He found source code.
Layers of magical theory, the very laws he had built his life upon, unraveled before his mind's eye. He saw the elegant, terrifying mathematics of creation. And there, woven into the foundational layer of Eldoria's magic, he saw it—a Flaw. Not a simple bug, but a fundamental, cascading error in the world's ontological script. A single point of failure that, if triggered, could cause the magical framework of an entire region to de-rez into nothingness.
And in that silent, screaming moment of understanding, he felt something stir on the other side of the Flaw. A vast, cold, and hungry consciousness, noticing the pinprick of light he had created. It was a presence that regarded his genius not with awe, but with the indifferent curiosity of a god noticing an ant that had learned to spell.
"Alaric! What's happening?!" his lead assistant, Elara's predecessor, cried out as the laboratory's mana crystals flared and died.
Torian tried to scream a warning, to shut it down, but the horror and the revelation had frozen him. His own runaway power, mirroring the instability he had just witnessed, lashed out. A feedback loop of null-energy erupted from him, not as a spell, but as a reflexive, terrified scream of his soul. The resulting implosion shattered his lab, gravely injuring his team and etching the event into academy history as "The Resonance Catastrophe."
From that day, The Reality Reshaper was gone. In his place was Professor Torian, a man who had seen the blueprint of existence and found it defective, a man who could no longer practice magic without seeing the terrifying fragility behind every spell.
———
In the present, the Grand Plaza was a sea of anxious blue robes. A massive, shimmering projection listed the names of the accepted students, sorted into their respective cohorts. Kael stood at the periphery, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. He scanned the lists for "Valerius." Prime Cohort. Nothing. Second Tier. Nothing. Third. His hope dwindled with each passing second. The supplemental list for those barely scraping through. Still nothing.
A cold void opened in his chest. He had failed. The letter from his mother felt like a lead weight in his pocket. "You are the key," she had written. He was a key that didn't fit the lock. The shame was a physical ache, sharper than any magical backlash.
As the crowd began to disperse, the main projection vanished. Then, a smaller, more ornate screen, edged in gold, flickered to life above the Archmage's podium. A single name appeared, in elegant, solitary script:
KAEL VALERIUS
_Special Admittance - Apprentice to Professor Torian_
A few students glanced at him, their expressions shifting from pity to confusion, then to something uglier. It wasn't an honor; it was a brand. He wasn't one of them. He was an exception, an anomaly to be gawked at. The bitterness in the air was palpable. They saw a cripple who had bought or begged his way in, while their own hard-won talent had not been enough for some.
———
Archmage Ignatius gave a short, formal speech, welcoming the new students and instructing them to find their assigned quarters. The moment he finished, the plaza erupted into controlled chaos.
Kael turned to leave, wanting nothing more than the solitude of his room in the Gargoyle Spire, when a voice, laced with venomous mockery, stopped him.
"Look at this. The 'Special Case' in the flesh."
A boy with slicked-back hair and a sneer that seemed practiced since birth blocked his path. This was Bastian Reach, a baron's son whose mediocre talent was eclipsed only by his towering ego. Seeing Kael was the perfect target for the frustration he felt after being placed in the lowest cohort.
"They have a special place for trash like you?" Bastian goaded, his friends snickering behind him. "A incinerator, perhaps?"
Kael tried to step around him. "I have no quarrel with you."
"Oh, but I have one with you!" Bastian spat. "People like you make a mockery of this academy! Arcane Bolt!"
A streak of blue energy shot from Bastian's palm. It was a simple, brutish spell, devoid of finesse. To Kael, it was a tangled mess of force vectors. He didn't flinch. His hand came up, and with a flick of his wrist, he tapped the unstable oscillation at the spell's core. The bolt shattered into harmless sparks inches from his face.
The sneer on Bastian's face faltered. "W-What? Chain Bindings!" Tendrils of light shot towards Kael. Kael simply plucked the primary knot of the formation, and the bindings dissolved into nothing.
Panic set in. Humiliated and enraged, Bastian gathered all his mana. "FLARE JAVELIN!" A spear of condensed fire roared to life in his hands and hurled itself at Kael.
This time, Kael didn't deconstruct it from a distance. He stood his ground, and as the fiery spear tip came within a breath of his chest, he reached out and *ouched it.
A deadening silence fell. The roaring flame didn't explode. It didn't vanish. It was un-written. One moment it was a lethal concentration of fire mana, the next, it was simply… not. The backlash of the spell's sudden, absolute cessation threw Bastian off his feet, his own mana circuits stinging from the violent interruption.
Kael stood over him, breathing heavily, his body trembling not from fear, but from the immense strain. The entire plaza was staring. Then, the toll exacted its price. The world swam before his eyes. His legs gave way, and he collapsed to the cobblestones, unconscious.
Through the ringing in his ears, he heard a furious, booming voice.
"TORIAN!" Professor Grimstone stormed into the clearing circle of students, his face purple with rage. He pointed a trembling finger at Kael's prone form. "What in the blazes did you teach that boy?! On the first day, he nearly kills another student with… with that heresy!"
Professor Torian, who had been observing from the shadows, walked calmly to Kael's side. He knelt, checking his pulse, then looked up at Grimstone, his eyes old and tired, yet filled with a grim, vindicated light.
"He didn't use any heresy, Kaleb," Torian said, his voice carrying in the stunned silence. "He didn't use any magic at all." He looked from Grimstone's livid face to the terrified, confused faces of the students.
"He merely pointed out a design flaw."