Chapter 838: Core Myst Torture
Chapter 838: Core Myst Torture
The Core Myst examination settled over the hall like a weight.Once the bell rang, the second-years had no room left for jokes, complaints, or last-minute panic disguised as conversation. Pens moved over parchment in uneven rhythms, some steady and confident, others slow enough to suggest the student holding them was bargaining with every sentence.
The silence was not peaceful. It was dense, filled with the scratch of writing materials, the occasional turn of a page, the shift of a chair, and the quiet suffering of nearly a hundred students realizing that Core Myst theory was far less friendly when arranged into formal questions.
Some students wrote with their heads bent low, shoulders tense, eyes fixed on their papers as if looking away might cause the answers to escape. Others stared at the ceiling for a few seconds at a time, clearly trying to drag buried knowledge from the corners of their minds. One girl near the front had already rewritten the first line of her answer three times. A boy two rows from the back seemed to be silently mouthing definitions, then pausing whenever he realized the question was asking him to apply them rather than repeat them.
The exam did not simply ask what Myst flow was. It asked what happened when flow was interrupted unevenly between core and channels. It did not merely ask for definitions of resonance. It gave scenarios where resonance clashed with affinity output and demanded explanation.
The academy had not made a paper. It had made a trap with ink.
Dylan, to the surprise of several students who had expected him to collapse first, was writing.
Actually writing.
Not doodling. Not staring at Mystica with tragic devotion. Not muttering dramatic farewells to his future. His pen moved quickly, pausing only when he leaned back to think for a few seconds before diving into the next section. The sight was strange enough that a student seated diagonally behind him glanced at his paper more than once, not close enough to copy, but enough to wonder whether Dylan Wellington was producing actual answers or inventing nonsense at heroic speed.
The uncertainty itself seemed to disturb them. Dylan did not look like someone guessing wildly. He looked like someone who, unfortunately for everyone’s assumptions, knew what he was writing.
Maxwell worked more heavily, his brow furrowed as he wrote through the sections on Myst reinforcement and channel endurance. Questions tied to practical application seemed to suit him better than the more abstract ones, and whenever the paper asked about physical strain, amplification stability, or the relationship between Myst circulation and bodily output, his pen moved with more certainty. The questions requiring lengthy theoretical comparison slowed him down, but he fought through them without visibly giving up.