Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 1085: The other side

’Just what have you been controlling all this time?’

The question remained lodged in Selenne’s mind while the examination continued.

Three manifestations moved around Lucavion according to the formation’s instructions, each one holding its position while artificial currents crossed the chamber at irregular intervals. Several minutes earlier, every shift in that surrounding mana had demanded an immediate response from him. His hands had tightened whenever a structure bent, his breathing had followed the rhythm of his corrections, and the strain passing through his core had eventually become visible even to those who lacked the senses to follow mana directly.

Now the same currents reached him and found something different.

The manifestation on his left drifted beneath a lateral current, gave perhaps an inch, then recovered toward the point Lucavion had established for it. The one above his shoulder compressed when the ambient density thickened, though its boundary adjusted before the deformation could travel toward its center. Lucavion still remained connected to all three, and occasionally one of his fingers moved when a correction required greater precision, but the frantic exchange between disturbance and response had disappeared.

He had stopped carrying every movement himself.

That realization interested Selenne far more than the measurements glowing beside Elir.

She could already see fragments of what Lucavion had discovered.

They were crude.

Almost offensively crude, if judged according to the standards of proper spell construction.

Yet they were real.

’Shape.’

The first condition remained impressed upon each manifestation.

’Position.’

Another.

Density appeared beside them, followed by something that resembled an acceptable range of deformation rather than a fixed command. Lucavion had apparently realized that forcing the spheres to remain perfectly motionless only made the environmental currents fight them more violently, so he had allowed each structure to move within limits before guiding itself back toward its assigned state.

Selenne’s eyes narrowed.

’He gave the mana rules.’

Calling them rules might have been generous.

A beginning, perhaps.

Still, he had crossed the important threshold.

A swordsman and a mage both controlled mana. That fact was so obvious that explaining it to first-years often created more confusion than clarity, especially once those students began treating the distinction between the disciplines as though mana itself somehow changed according to profession.

It did not.

Mana remained mana.

The difference lay in what they asked it to do, how they taught themselves to accomplish that task, and where they placed the burden of maintaining the result.

A swordsman generally learned control through immediacy.

His body moved, his weapon followed, and mana strengthened the relationship between them. At the beginning, he reinforced flesh and bone. Later, he extended that reinforcement across steel until the weapon carried his mana as naturally as his hand did. Once his cultivation advanced far enough for external manifestation, that same relationship could continue beyond physical contact. Aura left the blade, a projection crossed distance, an attack changed direction according to the cultivator’s will.

The complexity could become extraordinary.

The control could become exquisite.

Yet the swordsman remained at the center of it.

His mana reacted because he reacted.

Magic approached the same problem from another direction.

Mages eventually discovered that the caster did not need to personally maintain every relationship inside a magical phenomenon if those relationships could be established beforehand. A circle could preserve geometry. An incantation could arrange sequence. Runes could define behavior, while formulas allowed one condition to respond predictably when another changed. With enough training, portions of those structures could be internalized until experienced mages required fewer visible supports, but the principle survived beneath every refinement.

A mage gave mana instructions that persisted beyond the immediate command.

That was why spellcraft became so deeply entangled with theory.

The more work a mage delegated, the better the structure needed to become.

And that was also why poorly constructed magic could fail so spectacularly. A swordsman carried much of the burden directly and therefore retained immediate authority over his power. A mage distributed that burden through systems, gaining complexity and efficiency while creating structures that could themselves become vulnerable.

Neither method was inherently superior.

They produced different strengths because they solved different problems.

Lucavion had spent years living almost entirely on one side of that divide.

Selenne could see it now that she knew where to look.

Everything about his control favored response.

Someone pushed; he adjusted.

Mana shifted; he corrected.

A structure weakened; he caught it.

His mind treated mana almost like another opponent within reach of his sword, something to be read continuously and answered before the change could mature into danger.

For combat, the method was terrifyingly effective.

For three detached manifestations performing separate tasks under sustained interference, it had nearly broken him.

Until he discovered that he could leave part of the answer behind.

Selenne folded her arms.

’And you understood that here.’

That was the absurd part.

Lucavion had possessed perhaps several minutes in which to encounter the limitation, fail against it, endure enough strain to understand what caused it, and then improvise a solution from a discipline he had seemingly never studied properly.

The solution itself remained elementary.

An Academy-trained mage would have found dozens of improvements before breakfast.

The fact that Lucavion had independently reached the underlying principle was something else entirely.

Tamara had been watching him with increasing concentration as well, although her interest carried a different character.

The Tower mage had spent much of the morning treating Lucavion as an unresolved irregularity whose claims required verification. That attitude had hardly disappeared. If anything, the successful retest had made the boy more worthy of investigation.

But suspicion had limits when evidence became inconvenient.

Lucavion’s control had been excellent through reinforcement.

His weapon coating had been cleaner still.

The external section had finally placed him under serious strain, and then, rather than collapsing, he had changed his own method quickly enough that the same difficulty now appeared almost inadequate.

’That is talent.’

Tamara disliked how readily the conclusion arrived.

Talent without pedigree always made people reckless.

They saw an exception and immediately wanted to use it as proof that inheritance meant nothing, that bloodlines were merely aristocratic vanity, or that generations of magical records could be discarded because somewhere an unknown child had done something remarkable.

Tamara knew better.

Lineage mattered.

So did instruction, environment and resources.

Patterns remained patterns even when exceptional individuals escaped them.

Yet intellectual honesty demanded the reverse as well.

A pattern could not erase the individual standing outside it.

And Lucavion, irritatingly, was standing very far outside.

’Where did you come from?’

His records still supplied almost nothing useful.

Someone might have taught him.

The sheer polish in his swordsmanship made that explanation attractive.

But who?

No school claimed him. No recognized master appeared in his history. No noble branch had stepped forward after his entrance performance, and nobody in the Tower archives had yet attached his strange flame to a known inheritance.

The alternative was that he had built most of it himself.

Tamara found that possibility considerably harder to accept.

Because if he had—

’Ridiculous.’

Her fingers moved against the edge of her document.

Elir increased the required output.

The formation communicated the change through the markers rather than through spoken numbers, allowing Lucavion to feel the new demand through the same sensory reference established earlier. He drew more mana from his core and fed it toward the three structures.

That was when the atmosphere changed.

Selenne noticed the reaction before the appearance.

A faint chill moved across her forearms.

She looked down instinctively.

The chamber remained warm.

The temperature readings beside Elir barely shifted.

Another sensation followed, subtle enough that someone without magical sensitivity might have dismissed it as unease after watching Lucavion struggle.

Selenne did not.

Her own mana had reacted.

Only slightly.

A tightening somewhere beneath conscious control, as though her channels had recognized an unfamiliar presence and become cautious before her mind had decided whether caution was warranted.

The mana surrounding Lucavion darkened.

Tamara’s quill stopped.

Elir raised his head.

Marcus’s attention sharpened.

Ash-black flame gathered around the first manifestation.

It began as a thin trace along the sphere’s surface, then spread until the pale mana beneath it disappeared beneath a restrained layer of dark fire. A muted violet hue appeared whenever the flame shifted against the chamber light.

The second followed.

Then the third.

Selenne felt the chill deepen.

Tamara stood.

”Is the containment functioning?”

Elir immediately checked the ward measurements.

”Yes.”

Tamara looked toward him. ”Completely?”

”So far as the formation records are concerned.”

Selenne extended her senses toward the barrier.

Starlight moved through her perception in fine threads, passing over the overlapping ward layers and checking each junction where mana might have leaked through improperly.

The field was intact.

She withdrew her awareness slowly.

”He’s not crossing it.”

Tamara’s gaze moved toward her. ”Then what are we feeling?”

Selenne looked back at Lucavion.

”That is what I would like to know.”

Marcus frowned. ”Dark mana?”

The suggestion was natural.

Black flame.

Cold discomfort.

An oppressive quality that made the body instinctively wary.

Someone with less experience might have stopped there.

Tamara did not.

Neither did Selenne.

”No,” Tamara said first.

Marcus looked toward her.

She kept her pale eyes upon Lucavion’s manifestations.

”I’ve worked with dark-aligned specimens. This feels different.”

Selenne nodded faintly.

Dark mana was hardly some mythical substance known only through forbidden manuscripts. Numerous legitimate magical branches possessed affinities that ordinary people casually grouped beneath the term, while actual dark arts covered everything from curses and spiritual manipulation to corruptive techniques prohibited for reasons that varied considerably between jurisdictions.

Experienced mages learned to distinguish them.

Dark mana possessed relationships that could be studied. Shadow-affiliated varieties interacted with light and perception in predictable ways. Corruptive mana left recognizable contamination. Curse structures carried intent and attachment differently from ordinary spells.

Lucavion’s flame fit none of those patterns cleanly.

Its color invited the comparison.

Its nature rejected it.

”Something related to dark arts, then,” Marcus said.

”Perhaps,” Tamara replied.

Selenne glanced at her.

The careful answer interested her.

Tamara noticed the look. ”What?”

”You resisted the convenient conclusion.”

”I am capable of scholarship, despite what you seem to remember from the Tower.”

Selenne’s mouth shifted.

”I remember plenty.”

”I am sure you do.”

Elir cleared his throat before their shared history acquired momentum.

”The temperature is increasing slightly, although nowhere near enough to explain the physical reaction.”

Selenne studied the nearest flame.

”That is because the heat isn’t what we’re reacting to.”

Her skin prickled again.

The sensation remained difficult to articulate.

Calling it cold was inaccurate because her body temperature had barely changed. Calling it oppressive came closer, although the pressure itself lacked direction. It did not push against her mana or threaten to overwhelm it.

It simply made some primitive part of her awareness uncomfortable.

Like hearing a sound too low for the ear while still feeling its vibration through the bones.

And beneath that discomfort...

Something else remained.

Selenne’s expression changed.

The flame was hardly empty.

There was a strange fullness within it, a vitality that contradicted the unease woven through its presence. Whenever she tried to focus entirely upon the quality that made her mana recoil, another impression surfaced beside it and blurred the distinction.

Warmth without heat.

Stillness without emptiness.

Movement held beside cessation.

She frowned.

’Two qualities?’

Maybe.

Or a single principle presenting different effects.

The distinction lay beyond what she could establish through observation alone.

That itself explained something.

Lucavion had used these flames before.

Publicly.

Repeatedly.

Thousands had watched them during the entrance examination. Experienced combatants had encountered them directly. Elir had stood beside a smaller manifestation during Crystal Hall, and only earlier this morning Lucavion had held the same flame in his palm for thirty seconds beneath examination.

Yet nobody had cried out that he carried some identifiable forbidden attribute.

Because there had been nothing obvious to identify.

The black flame looked suspicious.

It felt strange.

That was all.

Here, the chamber happened to provide an unusually favorable environment for noticing the difference. Lucavion was sustaining three manifestations simultaneously at increasing output while four experienced magical practitioners sat several paces away with their senses already fixed upon him.

Even then, all they possessed was a sensation.

Selenne almost found that reassuring.

Almost.

Tamara watched another wave of interference strike the three flames.

Their surfaces bent.

Then the crude structures Lucavion had established guided them back into place.

Her expression shifted again.

”Whatever the attribute is, his control over it is genuine.”