Chapter 120: Fantasy-Born Creatures
The next morning, Evan got up and set about making breakfast with Xiaoshuang. He watched the fire while toasting bread, while Xiaoshuang flitted about, arranging everything with little bursts of magic.
Once breakfast was ready — toast, jam, cereal, eggs, cured bacon, and coffee on the side — Xiaoshuang gave her wand a flick, and everything settled itself onto the table exactly as she wanted.
Time to call the other two in. Evan stepped outside to find Tina already up, running through her morning training. He watched her move — precise, fluid, every ounce of force landing exactly where it should. The same sword as always, roses etched along the blade, though now a faint edge of sword-force shimmered along its length. She'd become a knight. Her progress genuinely astonished him. Her talent really was something to envy.
She spotted him and shifted from Unicorn Stance into Ox Stance, sheathing the blade with a smile. "My swordwork's not bad, is it?"
Evan clapped. "Tina, your swordsmanship's reached real mastery. Genuinely impressive. Saint Katherine's clearly a fine teacher. Come on, wipe off and let's eat."
Tina wiped her brow with a towel. "My swordwork started with the foundation you built. Katherine always says whatever you laid down at the beginning was solid — rock solid, in her words — which is why everything after came so naturally. You're a good teacher too, you know."
"Of course I'm a good teacher. Not bragging — the students say the same thing. I teach Black Magic and Defense at the school," Evan said with a grin.
"Of course you are. Look at you, so pleased with yourself," Tina said, laughing and rolling her eyes at him.
Xiaoshuang flew over, calling out, "Come on, it's just you two left. The food's getting cold!"
At the table, Leonardo already had his napkin tucked in, plate and utensils set before him. Xiaoshuang flew to the far end of the table, where her favorite honey and eggs waited, the dishes miniature and toy-like. She tucked her own napkin in with all the ceremony of the rest of them.
Once Evan and Tina had sat down, the pre-meal prayer began. Out of habit, Leonardo and Tina closed their eyes to pray. Evan and Xiaoshuang, seeing this, crossed their hands and closed their eyes as well, though with some reluctance — Evan and Xiaoshuang counted as heretics by any measure, and neither prayed under ordinary circumstances. A lich praying would hardly get the Creator's attention even if he tried, and Xiaoshuang had never developed the habit at all. With guests at the table, though, she went along with it. Whatever the two of them actually thought during those silent moments, only they knew.
Leonardo opened his eyes and, catching sight of the two of them, seemed to remember something and gave a rueful laugh. "My apologies — force of habit. I never thought to ask whether the two of you pray."
"Praying's fine enough. The Creator just doesn't think much of me, so I don't bother praying to him. I pray to heaven and earth instead — a kind of mental discipline, really. Nice to settle the mind before a meal, think for a moment about what it took to put this food in front of us," Evan said with a smile.
"What it took to put this food in front of us. Well put — rhetoric every noble is meant to study, and that line could serve as a model sentence for it. You're clearly a man with some stories behind him," Leonardo said, with no idea he'd just praised a borrowed line from another world entirely.
Evan felt a flicker of embarrassment. "Just something that came to me," he said — and immediately regretted it, another line lifted straight from his old life slipping out before he could stop himself. He had nothing left to say after that.
"Something that came to you — I hadn't realized Professor Wang had the makings of a traveling bard," Leonardo said, impressed.
Tina's eyes flickered, and she shot Evan a shy glance, clearly pleased by Leonardo's praise on his behalf. Xiaoshuang, meanwhile, had no patience for any of this and had already put her head down to work through her own breakfast. No one could say what her stomach was made of — the food she put away looked like it outweighed her, and yet her belly never showed the slightest sign of it.
Leonardo and Tina stayed ten days before setting off home again. Leonardo, ever polite about it, still couldn't resist carrying off the finely-made microscope before he left — a genuine masterwork, magnification pushing nearly a thousandfold, right at the edge of what Evan's craftsmanship could achieve even with the help of a magic array. This world had advanced magic but backward technology; nothing like a microscope existed anywhere in it. Magnifying glasses existed, but with limited power, treated more as toys than tools. Necromancers doing dissection work relied more on spells like Keen Eye for enhanced vision, which offered some magnification of its own — seven or eightfold, at best, already considered remarkable.
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Evan gave a rueful laugh at losing it. That microscope had been the only one at Hollingburton, built entirely by his own hands, meant for studying the physiological changes magic produced in living tissue. He'd barely gotten to use it — he had plenty of slides and cover glasses prepared, but almost no actual specimens to study.
Leonardo carried it off like a prize, packing it away with great care. Tina looked reluctant to leave, glancing at Evan several times as if wanting to say something, though the words never came. Xiaoshuang, having grown close with Tina over these last few days, had likely let slip more than a few secrets by now, and flew alongside her for quite a distance as they left. Evan let her go.
Once they'd gone, only a few days remained before the tournament rankings were finalized, and student matches were reaching their peak intensity. Since Evan taught the large general-education class shared by all four colleges, he had no reason to favor any particular side, and used the lull to finally put one of his theories to the test.
He invited Jessica out to the school's dedicated dueling ground. She'd been a little surprised — Xiaoshuang had mentioned only that he wanted her help with some experiment, without saying what kind. Once at the field, Evan still didn't explain his actual purpose. He wanted to run a summoning experiment, to test his theory about fantasy-born creatures.
Evan could summon skeletons and similar undead himself, but he'd already developed a theory he couldn't test objectively through his own summons. He needed someone with no prior knowledge of the theory at all, and Jessica fit perfectly — she specialized in the mind school, and beyond her handful of common spells, most of her arsenal consisted of summoning fantasy creatures into combat. Exactly what he needed.
Jessica summoned her fire giant first. Evan monitored it with his own mental awareness and found the creature made entirely of a phantasmal force field — in other words, a manifestation of Jessica's own mental power. And yet the energy contained within it seemed to far exceed what Jessica's own mind should have been capable of projecting.
Evan carefully recorded everything he observed. What people saw as the creature's physical form was, in truth, illusory — nothing more than a mass of specialized energy given shape.
He pulled out a detailed drawing — a Water Dragon Beast, annotated thoroughly, describing this remarkable creature in depth and identifying it as a fantasy-born creature recorded in an ancient secret text, a native of the Water Plane, complete with its summoning incantation. He handed it to Jessica. "Do you think you could summon this creature — a Water Dragon Beast, passed down from antiquity — based on this drawing and the notes here?"
Jessica looked it over and nodded. "I'll try. If it really exists, I should be able to call it."
She murmured the incantation quietly to herself, studying the image, picturing its form in her mind. Two hours passed before she spoke again. "I think I'm ready. I can sense something now. I'll attempt the summon."
She began the incantation, her mental power pouring outward. A shimmer of water-light appeared in the air, something like a distant roar carrying with it. Evan's eyes lit up, his hands trembling — but the space around them rippled, struggling to take shape. A tear opened, water sprayed briefly into existence, and then the ripple subsided without producing anything. Evan looked at Jessica with a flicker of doubt. Her face had gone pale. "First attempt. I'm just not used to it yet. It's fine — let me rest a moment and try again. It should work."
Evan nodded. "My apologies, lovely Miss Jessica. This Water Dragon Beast probably hasn't been summoned in a very long time. Don't worry about it — rest as long as you need."
After another half hour's rest, Jessica began the incantation once more. This time, water surged upward with a roar, and a massive beast materialized in the field — the Water Dragon Beast, unmistakably. Evan trembled with excitement from head to toe. Jessica studied the creature and let out a breath of genuine awe. "Magnificent. The water element itself seems to be boiling around it. I can't believe you actually had a record of this creature, Professor Wang — a true relic of antiquity. If you donate this bestiary to the school, they'll reward you generously for it."
After a moment, Jessica sent the Water Dragon Beast back. Evan finally managed to steady himself, scribbling rapid notes in his log. How could he not be excited? He'd just uncovered a secret about summoning itself — or rather, a secret about fantasy-born creatures. The Water Dragon Beast didn't exist. That so-called ancient secret text didn't exist either. It was something he and Xiaoshuang had invented out of whole cloth over the past few days — a made-up summoning creature — and it had just materialized, vivid and real, right in front of him.
"Thank you, lovely Miss Jessica. I do have a book with several other summoning creatures recorded in it — some genuinely hard to imagine. It's getting late, though. We'll continue the experiment tomorrow," Evan said, pulling out a book bound in monster hide, its pages worn as though it had survived countless years. Inside were nothing but illustrated entries — a dozen or more, every one of them a creature this world had never heard of. He handed it to her. One page held the exact same Water Dragon Beast illustration he'd just shown her.
"You're giving me this book, Professor Wang? Do you have any idea what something like this is worth?" Jessica asked.
"I do. But I'd like you to summon every creature in it, one after another, and then present the book to the school yourself. Don't argue the point. Go home and familiarize yourself with each entry — after all, I need to confirm whether what's written here actually holds up," Evan said, waving off her protest with a laugh.
"All right, then. I'm truly grateful you let me be the first to see this," Jessica said, genuinely moved.
Evan left the dueling ground with her, smiling. Xiaoshuang didn't fly this time, sitting instead in stunned silence atop Evan's head, still shaken by everything she'd just watched unfold.