Chapter 50 : Chapter 50
Chapter 50 : Magi-Engineering Studies
Ryan finished the last bite of bread. The crust was hard and required effort to chew. He lifted his cup and took a drink. The cool water slid down his throat, washing away the greasiness of the stew.
When he set the cup down, Cecilia happened to raise her eyes.
Their gazes met briefly in the air.
There was no emotion in the princess’s blue eyes. They resembled the surface of a frozen lake.
She looked at Ryan for a second—or perhaps even less—before her gaze shifted aside, settling somewhere in the empty space behind him.
Ryan stood up. The legs of his chair scraped the floor with a short creak.
He picked up his tray and walked toward the return counter. As he passed Cecilia’s table, the edge of her white-gold skirt hung less than half a foot from his trouser leg.
Ilis’s violet eyes turned toward him.
The look was cold, like the edge of a blade soaked in well water on a winter night. But it lasted only an instant before the black-haired girl lowered her head again.
Ryan walked out of the dining hall. The noon sunlight was glaring. He narrowed his eyes and raised a hand to shade his brow.
The wind blew from the direction of the training grounds, carrying the scent of dust and grass. In the distance, the clock tower struck one o’clock. The bell echoed across the open campus—one toll, then another, then a third.
He stood on the steps for a moment, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the light.
Behind him, the dining hall doors opened and closed as people came out. Their footsteps were uneven, and fragments of conversation drifted past.
“…She actually eats in the same dining hall as us…”
“…I thought there would be a private kitchen…”
“…The black-haired one beside her—is that a maid? She has been standing the whole time…”
The voices faded away.
Ryan stepped down from the stairs. The canvas shoulder bag at his side swayed as he walked. Inside were the tools and textbooks he would need for the afternoon’s Magic Tool Application class. The strap pressed against his shoulder, the weight distributed evenly.
He walked along the tree-lined path toward the departmental classroom. The leaves of the plane trees had begun to turn yellow. Their edges curled into brittle brown, and some had already fallen, scattering across the stone path.
When his shoes crushed them, they broke with a dry, brittle sound, like stepping on thin ice.
Ahead stood a large oak notice board.
The surface was divided into more than a dozen uneven sections, each covered with parchment notices of various colors.
The sheet in the center was bordered in red ink. Its title read:
《Whispering Forest Selection Tournament — Third-Year Combat Assessment》
Ryan stopped walking.
The parchment was new, and the ink had not fully dried yet.
The notice listed the rules in detail: registration would close in five days. Participants must survive independently in the Whispering Forest for seventy-two hours while searching for items buried in advance by the academy. Magical beasts might appear, and students were permitted to compete and fight against one another.
Evaluation criteria included survival time, the number of items obtained, and “overall adaptive performance.”
Ryan stared at those lines for a long time.
A gust of wind swept past the notice board, making the edges of the paper rustle. The lower right corner had already curled up, revealing the faded remains of an older notice beneath it—an award list from a Magic Tool design competition the previous year. Most of the names were already blurred.
This selection tournament was exactly the competition that the head of the junior magic department had once suggested Ryan participate in.
In the original storyline, something like this should not have existed at this point.
Two years before the game’s main plot began, academy life was supposed to consist only of routine classes, occasional sparring matches, and the ordinary events that quietly laid the groundwork for future storylines.
The Whispering Forest did appear in the game as an early dungeon, but that only happened after the Saintess route progressed far enough, when the party went there to obtain a certain key item.
Ryan remembered the serious expression on the junior department head’s round face. At the time, he had assumed it was some kind of internal academy tournament—the sort of event where noble students wore elegant clothes and fired harmless spells at one another under protective barriers.
But this would take place in the real wilderness, in an ancient forest, where participants would have to survive alone for three days. They would also have to search for twelve runes hidden somewhere in an environment that might already have been tampered with.
The wind lifted fallen leaves from the ground. A dry yellow plane tree leaf spun upward and stuck briefly to the top of Ryan’s shoe. Its veins were sharply defined in the afternoon sunlight, like the imprint of blood vessels. The edges were already brittle and would crumble at the slightest touch.
Ryan lifted his foot.
The leaf drifted down, spinning toward the cracks between the stones. The next moment it was crushed beneath the boot of someone passing behind him, breaking with a faint sound that was almost impossible to hear.
Ryan turned away from the notice board.
His canvas bag swayed as he walked, the tools inside clinking softly together. He counted those sounds: the light chime of the engraving knife striking the probe, the dull roll of the spool of conduction wire, and the heavy thud of the thick spine of 《Northern Mana Environments and Material Properties》 tapping against the compartment inside the bag.
The departmental classroom was at the end of the third-floor corridor.
When Ryan pushed the door open, seven or eight students were already inside.
There were only thirty third-year students in the Magic Tool Application specialization, and most of their classes were taught in small groups.
The podium was piled with metal components, crystal fragments, and half-finished prototypes of Magic Tools.
Along the north wall stood a row of workbenches. Each was equipped with a small vise, a magnifying stand, and a full set of tools.
Ryan’s workstation was the second one by the window. The surface was marked with scratches and scorch marks from years of use. In a small dent near the edge remained a drop of solidified solder from the previous class.
Ryan set down his bag and took out his tool case. When he opened the lid, neatly arranged rows of tweezers, probes, miniature wrenches, engraving knives, and several spools of conduction wire in different gauges appeared inside.
Each tool had been carefully cleaned. The metal surfaces glinted coldly in the sunlight.
Ryan picked up a basic Magic Tool plate about the size of his palm.
The plate was made from a dark gray alloy. Standard rune grooves had already been engraved across its surface, but the Mana circuits had not yet been connected.
It was the assignment from the previous week: design and build a simple Mana trigger device.
Ryan picked up an engraving knife. The tip touched the edge of the plate and pressed down lightly.
A hair-thin groove appeared on the metal surface, the depth precisely reaching the underlying conduction layer.
He guided the blade along a previously drawn guideline. His wrist moved steadily, as though the knife were mounted on a mechanical arm.
Clouds began gathering outside the window again. The sky dimmed, and the wall-mounted magic lamps in the classroom had to be lit.
Soft white light poured from the spherical lamp covers, casting sharp shadows across the tools and parts.
The door opened again.
This time it was Professor Horne.
The old man had changed into a dark brown work jacket, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing the firm lines of his forearms.
He carried a metal toolbox in one hand. The surface of the box was covered with dents and scratches.
“Today’s assignment is optimization of Mana circuit stability.”
The professor set the toolbox down on the podium with a loud clang.
“Each of you will receive a standard Magic Tool core. On the basis of the existing design, add at least two redundant circuits. Before the end of class, I want to see it run stably for more than five minutes.”
The students began lining up to collect materials.
Ryan stood in the middle of the line. When it was his turn, Professor Horne reached into the box and took out a pale blue crystal the size of a fist.