Chapter 48 : Chapter 48
Chapter 48 : The Princess
Chalk dust drifted softly down.
By the time Professor Horne drew the seventh nested rune on the blackboard, half the class had already given up on taking notes.
The intricate paths of Mana circulation sprawled and intertwined like vines, occupying two-thirds of the entire slate board.
The old man’s hand was steady. His chalk lines were so precise that they looked as though they had been measured with a ruler and compass.
Ryan traced one of the branch structures in his notebook. The charcoal pencil scratched softly over the paper. On the third stroke, his pencil tip suddenly stopped.
In the seat across the aisle, Cecilia Ishtar was not taking notes.
She was not even looking at the blackboard.
The princess rested one hand against her cheek, while the other lay on her open textbook, her fingertips absentmindedly tapping the edge of the page.
Her gaze was fixed outside the window, toward the training grounds. A few first-year students were practicing basic defensive spells there, their pale blue shields flickering in and out of existence. Her platinum-gold hair slid over her shoulder, the ends trailing across the dark wooden desk.
She looked distracted.
But Ryan noticed that each tap of her fingertips landed perfectly in time with Professor Horne’s explanation. When the chalk paused, her fingers paused as well. When the professor quickened his speech to emphasize a key point, her soft tapping sped up by half a beat.
It was as though she were silently repeating the lecture.
Ilis sat diagonally behind her. The black-haired girl’s back was held perfectly straight, both hands resting flat on her knees, her gaze lowered toward the folds of her uniform skirt. She had maintained that posture for more than twenty minutes already. Even the flutter of her lashes was almost imperceptible.
A gap opened in the cloud cover outside.
Sunlight spilled in and fell directly across Cecilia’s profile. Her golden lashes cast fine shadows against her porcelain-white skin, and her blue eyes took on the luminous clarity of colored glass in the light.
“—So the third circuit must use silver powder to guide the flow.”
Professor Horne tapped the blackboard, and chalk dust floated down. Several students jolted upright as though waking from a dream.
“Otherwise, Mana accumulation will form a resonance point here.” The old man pointed with his thumb to the lower right corner of the rune array. “And then...”
Chalk dust fell softly from Professor Horne’s fingertips.
This was one of his old tricks.
In thirty-seven years of teaching, he had repeated this motion thousands of times. His thumb would brush across the board, leaving behind a blurred white mark, and then he would turn around, his gaze behind the lenses of his spectacles sweeping through the classroom like a probing needle.
He was searching for wandering eyes, fingers unconsciously spinning pens, or faces staring blankly out at the clouds beyond the window.
Students called upon in that moment would usually swallow hard, their lips moving several times without sound.
Some would fumble frantically through their notes, pages rustling in panic. Others would freeze where they sat, their cheeks flushing red, until the professor said, “Sit down. Pay attention.”
Everyone in the room knew the routine.
Some had even privately kept statistics on Professor Horne’s “hit rate.” On average, he called on someone once every three classes, and eighty percent of those students failed to answer.
But today was different.
When the professor’s gaze passed over the platinum-gold figure by the window in the third row, the entire classroom seemed to stop breathing for an instant.
Cecilia Ishtar was looking out the window.
Sunlight cut a clear line of light and shadow across her profile, and her lashes cast fine shadows over her cheekbones. One hand rested at the edge of the desk, her fingertips lightly tapping the wood grain in an even rhythm, like a pendulum.
Professor Horne’s thumb stopped at the edge of the board.
The classroom was so quiet that one could hear the faint hum of the magic lamps’ ballast.
Several boys in the back row exchanged glances. One of them was already smiling—the kind of smile worn by someone waiting to watch a spectacle.
They had all heard the stories about this professor. He had once made the son of the Minister of Finance stand through an entire class because the boy had turned in three assignments in a row with crooked rune engravings.
He had also dismantled, in front of the whole class, a Magic Tool that a marquis’s daughter had spent two weeks making, on the grounds that its structure was redundant.
But this was the princess.
The Empire’s Second Princess, with the surname “Ishtar” attached to her name.
By all logic, the professor ought to pretend not to notice, or at least offer a gentler reminder.
Professor Horne pushed up his glasses.
The reflection on the lenses obscured his eyes. He turned and tapped the blackboard with a small dot of chalk.
“Miss Ishtar.”
Cecilia turned her head. The motion was unhurried and graceful, golden strands of hair tracing a smooth arc in the air.
“Professor?”
“Tell us, then. If red copper powder were used instead, where would the resonance point shift?”
The princess rose to her feet. Her white-gold skirt fell into place, the folds gleaming softly beneath the sunlight. She did not look at the blackboard. Instead, she tilted her head slightly, as though recalling it from memory.
“It would shift two nodes toward the upper left,” she said. “But red copper’s Mana conductivity is only sixty-three percent of silver’s. After the shift, the array’s overall Mana output would decline by seventeen percent. Unless the engraving depth of the fourth and fifth circuits were adjusted at the same time to compensate for the loss.”
Professor Horne pushed up his glasses again. Behind the lenses, his eyes studied her for two seconds.
“The exact figure for the decline?”
“Sixteen point eight percent,” Cecilia corrected. “If the fourth circuit is deepened by zero point three millimeters, and the fifth circuit is engraved zero point one millimeters shallower, it can be reduced to below fifteen percent. But the stability of the array will decline.”
The professor said nothing.
He turned and began calculating rapidly on the blackboard. The screech of chalk against slate continued for more than ten seconds.
Then he stopped and stared at the figures he had written.
Someone in the classroom sucked in a sharp breath.
“Very good. Sit down,” Professor Horne said, his tone unreadable.
Cecilia inclined her head and sat down again. Her skirt flared and gathered once more, like a white flower blooming only for an instant.
The dismissal bell rang at that very moment.
Professor Horne closed his lesson notes and dusted the chalk from his hands.
“Your assignment is to complete three variant designs of this array and submit them before next class.” He looked at Cecilia. “Miss Ishtar, you need only do two.”
The princess rose again and gave a formal bow.
The professor was already walking out of the classroom with his lesson notes in hand.
The moment the door shut behind him, it felt as though the air in the room began to move again.
The scraping of chair legs against the floor rose one after another.
Ryan closed his notebook and tucked the charcoal pencil between its pages. He had just risen to his feet when he heard the sound of a chair being pushed back from the other side of the aisle.
Cecilia had also stood up. She was slightly taller than she looked at first glance, and beneath the white-gold skirt, the lines of her calves were slim and straight. Ilis silently stepped into place half a step behind her, already carrying both of their textbooks and pencil cases.
Three boys moved toward them almost at the same time.
“Your Highness, that answer just now was truly brilliant!” The boy with short brown hair spoke first, his face full of eager smiles. “I’m Robert Fischer. My father is the Finance Minister’s secretary—”
“Your Highness is so skilled in rune arrays. You must have studied under an excellent tutor, I imagine?” another tall boy pushed forward. “I am—”
“Your Highness, if there is anything about the coursework you do not understand now that you are newly arrived at the academy, you may ask me anytime.” The third boy spoke rapidly. “My grade in this class is usually an A+—”
They clogged the aisle like a wall.