Sleep came in fragments.
Each time Kael drifted under, faint geometric impressions surfaced behind his eyelids, not bright enough to wake him but impossible to ignore. By the time the dormitory bells rang, his mind felt heavy, as though he had spent the night thinking rather than resting.
He lay still for a moment, staring at the wooden beams above his bed, trying to decide whether the previous day had truly happened. Then he focused, just slightly, and the world answered.
Subtle threads shimmered along the ceiling, thin currents of mana drifting through the structure of the building. The sight no longer startled him the way it had the day before. Instead, it settled into his awareness with quiet certainty, like a detail he had somehow overlooked his entire life.
Yesterday had divided everything. Before the crystal. After the symbols.
He dressed in silence and stepped into the corridor. The academy already felt different. Students gathered in louder clusters than usual, conversations animated as they discussed affinities and rankings. The evaluation ceremony had stirred the invisible hierarchy of the school, and everyone seemed eager to measure themselves against one another.
Fragments of conversation followed him as he walked.
"…second-tier fire, that's impressive…"
"…dual element…"
"…Valeris… zero mana…"
The words reached him, but they did not land the way they once would have. Instead of settling like weight in his chest, they passed through him, distant and strangely irrelevant. His thoughts were elsewhere, circling the quiet fracture he had made in the enchantment the previous day, the way a gentle push at the right place had undone something built on magic.
Practical magic theory was held in one of the larger lecture halls, its stone walls covered with etched diagrams of spell frameworks and mana circulation cycles. Instructor Marrow stood at the front, hands clasped behind his back, gaze sharp as he surveyed the class.
"Containment structures," he began, his voice carrying easily. "Stability precedes strength. Power without control is merely a faster path to failure."
Students moved to marked circles across the floor, each inscribed with monitoring runes that responded to mana flow. Kael chose a position near the back, where attention rarely lingered.
At Marrow's signal, mana stirred throughout the room. Threads of light formed between students' hands as they shaped the assigned spell. To most eyes, the air filled with shimmering spheres and wavering barriers.
To Kael, the classroom unfolded into something entirely different.
Layers of structure revealed themselves within each spell, patterns of tension and balance interwoven beneath the surface glow. He could see where students overcompensated, where mana pooled unevenly, where the shape would falter under stress. What had once seemed incomprehensible now resembled a set of diagrams laid over reality itself.
Beside him, a first-year struggled to maintain a containment sphere. The outer layer thinned along one side as the student's focus wavered, the imbalance worsening with each attempt to force more mana into the shape.
Kael recognized the flaw immediately.
It mirrored the weakness he had touched in the garden.
The sphere trembled as the structure buckled inward, the student's breathing growing shallow with panic. Instructor Marrow was occupied across the room, correcting another formation.
Kael stepped forward almost without realizing he had decided to move. He extended his hand and placed his fingers lightly against the unstable seam, directing his attention toward the flaw he could see rather than the light others saw.
He did not force the spell. He did not try to overpower it.
He simply pressed where the structure was already giving way.
The sphere unraveled into fading particles, dispersing harmlessly.
The student stared, stunned.
Marrow's voice cut across the hall. "What happened?"
"I lost control, sir," the student replied, still shaken. "But it didn't burst."
Marrow's gaze shifted to Kael, lingering. "You interfered."
Kael held his expression steady. "The structure was unstable."
Marrow studied him a moment longer than seemed necessary before nodding once. "Better a controlled collapse than an uncontrolled detonation. Reform."
The lesson resumed, but the air felt subtly different. A few students cast glances in Kael's direction before returning to their own spells.
Seraphine's gaze lingered with quiet curiosity, as though she had noticed a detail others had missed. Lucien Ardent, on the other hand, watched with a focus that felt less like curiosity and more like calculation.
Kael returned to his circle, the familiar ache building behind his eyes as Law Observation faded. The strain reminded him that understanding came at a cost, and that his control remained limited.
A small notification surfaced at the edge of his vision, unobtrusive.
Skill usage recorded.
He let out a slow breath.
He had not meant to draw attention, only to prevent a mistake he could clearly see. Yet the result was the same. Something about him no longer fit the simple story the academy had assigned him.
The world still believed he could do nothing, but it had just witnessed something that did not align with that belief, and such contradictions rarely went unnoticed for long.
As the lesson continued, Kael's thoughts drifted, not toward proving himself, but toward the quiet patterns beneath everything around him. For the first time, the question occupying his mind was not how to be accepted within the world's rules, but how those rules had been constructed in the first place — and why he alone seemed able to see where they bent.