Professor Linus's monologue math class was in full swing. I could hear the scribbling of pens and the chitchat of students. Time always seemed to slow down in math class. It felt like being put in a time prison. The classroom door opened, abruptly interrupting Linus's monologue.
A teacher entered and whispered something to Linus before asking me to come with her. Aylin looked at me with worried eyes but then smiled. She knew I had not done anything wrong, so there was nothing to worry about.
I walked alongside the teacher through the corridor. They did not say anything and simply led me to the head Professor's building before knocking on the door.
The doors to Devina's office opened immediately, and the teacher took her leave without even looking at me.
I entered the office, which had yet to be cleaned. Documents covered the floor, and crumpled papers were scattered across her desk. She looked up from her paperwork and gave me an eerie smile. Her playful, cunning eyes wandered across my body, almost like a predator toying with its prey.
"You called for me?"
"Why else would you be here?" Devina scoffed.
"May I ask why you summoned me?"
"I want to check your Aeon a bit closer." Her eyes seemed to see through everything.
"Remember. This is something only for my eyes to observe."
She tapped her finger against my cheek and gently circled it with her index finger. I felt a small tingle run down my spine as she finished. She pulled back in contemplation.
"It seems that forced Aeonic activation through lox injection is ineffective," she said, tapping her chin.
"Maybe I should up the dosage by a million times?"
She looked at me confidently and told me to sit down on her scrap covered couch. A sinister look appeared on her face as I sat down on the couch layered with papers. She took out the lox stones I had manifested during the examination. They were still oozing black, sticky ink. Devina held them up, her face straining as it became flushed. She exhaled loudly before dropping the stones onto the floor.
They did not shatter, nor did they change in any shape or form.
"May I ask what you are doing?"
She dug through her piles of paper and pulled out a normal lox stone. As her face flushed again, the stone exploded into dust and scattered across the room.
"No matter how many loxes I poured into the stones you produced, they would not shatter. The normal lox stone broke with only a fraction of what I used on the black one. I sent roughly thirty seven million times more loxes through your stone, yet it never even fractured. It seems your loxes somehow negate other loxes, or a better explanation would be that they consume loxes entirely."
She bent over in front of me and placed her hand on my cheek.
"Let's try again."
The pure, rich energy radiating from Devina's body overflowed into mine. At first, it felt warm and cozy, but then it began to swell. My body started to overheat, and my heart beat faster to compensate. My breathing became labored and strained.
Then, just as the Professor had hoped, the Aeon inside my body responded. Roots dug themselves into my skin as a black flower bloomed across my cheek.
The head Professor's eyes glimmered as if she had found a treasure.
"Truly… an anomaly that cannot be explained. Even the eye of Landia cannot tell me what I am witnessing. This is beautiful."
Professor Devina began to contort and twist as my eyes slowly closed on their own. The flower on my cheek quickly wilted before I collapsed onto the couch in exhaustion.
The sound of a pen tapping against the table woke me minutes later. I sat up, groggy and tired, and asked what had happened.
"Lox overdose. You overdosed on energy."
"Overdosed?"
"I poured far too much energy into your body," she said nonchalantly.
"If I may ask, how much did you send through my body?"
"Almost half of my energy reserves."
"And how much is that?"
"You are asking far too many questions," she sighed, telling me to be quiet.
As she continued writing, she told me one thing. I was an anomaly.
"There have always been twelve Aeons governing the whole, yet your existence defies that rule. It seems the concept of your existence does not exist… the eye of Landia tells me that you should not exist."
I heard a pen drop.
"And that is what makes you an interesting specimen."
By the time I returned from Devina's office, class had already ended. But Aylin was standing by the classroom door, holding two bags.
When she saw me, she ran up and handed me the bag I had forgotten in class.
As we walked back to our dormitories, she asked why I had been summoned.
Words echoed in my head.
"My eyes only."
"They wanted me to sign a few documents regarding new renovations in my room."
"If that's so, mind letting me see once the renovations are done?" Aylin smiled brightly, swinging her bag.
A few days later.
Aylin was lying on my bed, eating grapes while reading a book. I sat at my desk, drawing. My concentration broke when Aylin asked if I knew about the upcoming recruitment event.
"Recruitment?"
"Yeah. Basically, different employers across Nautilus come to our school to recruit students for a year to prepare them for the future." She stuffed another grape into her mouth before adding, through muffled words, that you could also choose to abstain and continue studying normally.
"Do you earn anything while working?"
"I think so, yeah!"
"Should we go somewhere together, Vivshi?"
I thought about it and said that if a place seemed interesting enough, I would go.
"How about exploring the sea?"
"Like a fisherman?" Aylin joked.
"I kind of want to go out onto the sea and see it for myself."
Aylin reminisced for a moment before smiling.
"It's really beautiful, Vivshi. You should see it for yourself."
My star seeing eye suddenly activated and peered inside her body. The pure light within her flickered.
"Now that I think about it, I don't want to explore the sea just yet. It feels a bit scary knowing you wouldn't be on land for several days."
Her stars slowly stopped flickering.
Aylin lay back down and covered her face with her book.
"Let's see what there is to choose from that day." I tapped the book on her face with my finger.
Her body jolted as she removed it and nodded slowly.