"This is…"
Medea Bartholomew had been watching her students' behavior inside the Star Palace Labyrinth with keen interest when she caught an odd ripple coming from the very back row of the classroom.
Dark Demon, still submerged in the Star Palace Labyrinth, showed not the slightest change of expression, yet the air around him had shifted in a way impossible to miss.
As a seasoned diviner, Professor Medea needed no more than a glance to confirm it: that was the aura of a Divination Talent revealing itself.
A "Divination Talent," being a talent, is something one is born with.
It is only that some people are born already knowing, while others are late bloomers. Cases of it awakening later in life are common enough.
But awakening later does not mean it was created later.
After all, either you have it or you don't.
In a person without the talent, no amount of digging will ever turn it up.
Those who bloom late simply carried a Divination Talent from birth that had lain buried deep all along.
Professor Medea concluded at once that the Divination Talent buried deep in Dark had finally surfaced.
But was that really what had happened?
…
From the very beginning, a Magic Guide Master and the Magic Guide Spirit he forged with his own hands share a bond as close as that between limbs of one body.
So in certain spellcasting frameworks, a Magic Guide Master and his Magic Guide Spirits are treated as a single entity.
Dark's grasp of this principle ran fairly deep.
But what if one carried the idea further?
If Eevee, one of those limbs, possessed a Divination Talent, then could the one who owned that limb be counted as possessing a Divination Talent too?
It was, in truth, a very simple matter of logic.
Even as Dark's own character and nature shaped his Magic Guide Spirits, he was being assimilated by them in turn.
And with this journey through the Star Palace Labyrinth as the catalyst, the Divination Talent that originated in Eevee had at last quietly blossomed and borne fruit within him.
…
Walking the mirrored corridor, Dark found that after the Divination Talent bore fruit, that faint sense of something guiding him grew steadily sharper.
And as he changed, the corridor pressed between those mirrors changed with him.
He stopped mid-stride. The mirrors to either side no longer reflected his figure. Instead a constellation shaped like a long serpent appeared across the glass, stretching away ahead of him.
"Hydra?"
Professor Medea, whose attention Dark's strangeness had drawn, frowned at the constellation.
Hydra is the longest and largest of the eighty-eight constellations by both span and area.
If this was Dark's Inner Constellation…
She was still turning the thought over when Dark started walking again.
Not long after, he came to another halt, and the mirrors flanking him reflected a different constellation — and there it was, unmistakably Gemini!
Gemini, as Dark's Outer Constellation, had always signified the twins: two faces of one body.
But after the first encounter, Dark only worked out the shape of Gemini and then pressed on.
Before long he met yet another new constellation, and so it continued…
By the time he finally walked the corridor from end to end, all eighty-eight constellations, without a single one missing, had appeared in its mirrors.
Professor Medea, who had grown numb to it partway through and turned her attention to other students, only came back to him once he had crossed the entire corridor.
What she saw then was Dark stepping out of the passage into a circular palace hall.
The ceiling was built as a hemisphere, and a single upward glance took in the intricate starscape carved across it — every star belonging to all eighty-eight constellations arrayed above.
What a vast star chart it was!
Merely lifting one's head to look at it was enough to make a person feel utterly small.
The golden-furred, green-eyed short-legged cat wobbled to the exact center of the hall, tipped its head back at the eighty-eight constellations overhead, and stared in complete bewilderment.
"The heck is this?"
His goal was to finish the assignment — to find the Inner Constellation that belonged to him within the Star Palace Labyrinth — not to be shown all eighty-eight of them.
For his purposes, this was meaningless!
…
But when Professor Medea confirmed the scene, her face said she had expected nothing less. "So my instinct hasn't been wrong all this time. Dark Demon is the Stars."
From the first moment she laid eyes on him, Professor Medea had believed Dark was the Child of the Stars, and now that belief seemed to have found further proof.
Her original purpose in accepting the invitation to teach here had been to unravel a prophecy concerning the stars, the black mist and the abyss.
Which was why she had kept a particular watch on Dark for so long.
And this time, her certainty had only deepened.
…
Just as Dark stood lost before those eighty-eight constellations, a mirrored door opened in one wall of the hall, and a brown-haired little sweetheart came tottering out of it.
Guided by that same faint inner sense, Eevee-chan had found her way into the palace as well.
The moment she spotted the upright short-legged cat, she gave a hard sniff, her eyes lit up, and she came stumbling over at a run.
Dark was still marveling at why there would be a human child inside the Star Palace Labyrinth when Eevee-chan reached him.
A golden cat with stubby little limbs and a child who looked two or three years old collided in a hug.
"Bui, bui!"
That delighted cry gave Eevee-chan's identity away instantly.
Dark stroked her hair, curious, and gained a deeper appreciation for just how strange this Star Palace Labyrinth was.
…
The journey through the Star Palace Labyrinth was not over yet.
Having recognized Eevee-chan, Dark took her by the hand and led her through a side door in one corner of the palace, then into the mirror within that side passage, and on they went.
He would not stop until he had definitively found the Inner Constellation that belonged to him.
With a roar, scorching flames leapt up beneath his feet.
They did not burn him, yet he felt their heat.
He lifted a foot on reflex, and the flames erupted, a surging river of fire rushing outward in every direction until the world was a sea of it.
Crack!
The world around him seemed to split under that blaze, fissures opening out of empty air and widening, widening.
Before Dark's eyes, the whole world shattered.
Blocks of color came pouring out of the cracks and filled his vision in an instant.
A world that had been growing ever more monochrome was stained by brilliance once more.
Shards rained down from overhead, blotting out everything, as if to finish destroying a world already broken.
Dong—
The nine o'clock bell rang in his ears.
Dark's eyes snapped open, and there was Eevee, sprawled across the desk.
At the same moment, every student in the classroom opened their eyes.
The faces that had been perfectly still a heartbeat earlier came alive all at once.
Some were twisted with terror, some broke into smiles, some brimmed over with grief…
More of them were loudly comparing the constellations they had found.
In the space of a breath the classroom filled with noisy chatter.
"Dark, what's your Inner Constellation?" Diana turned around in the row ahead of him, her big eyes shining.
Dark didn't need to ask to know that Diana's constellation was either Ursa Major or Ursa Minor, and that she was thoroughly pleased with it either way.
But excitement is a hard thing to share between people.
Between someone who has found their Inner Constellation and someone who hasn't, there is simply no common ground.
Dark thought back to that last scene before he left the Star Palace Labyrinth and gave a small shake of his head. "I can't say for sure yet."
"Really?" Diana said, curious.
So Dark asked, "What about yours? Ursa Minor?"
"It's Ursa Major!" Diana said, bouncing in her seat.
…
Clap, clap, clap!
Professor Medea clapped her hands lightly, and the eighty-eight crystal spheres scattered throughout the classroom stopped spinning and flew swiftly toward her, arranging themselves around her like stars strewn across the heavens.
Drawn by the sight, the students fell quiet one after another.
Standing in that starlight, her figure looked all the more mysterious. She said with a soft laugh, "The Star Palace Labyrinth reflects the self. Whether or not you ever take up Astrology again, learning to see yourself clearly matters enormously.
All right, that's all for today. I suggest you write down everything you saw and heard in the Star Palace Labyrinth as soon as you get back, before you forget it.
Then hand in the assignment before the twenty-seventh of this month. This will serve as the final major project of your first-year Astronomy class, and it will count toward your end-of-term grade."
With a small wave of her hand, the eighty-eight crystal spheres merged into twelve, and then the twelve fused into one, with stars glittering inside it.
"There are three classes left before the end of term. If there's anything about the assignment you don't understand, you can ask me during those three sessions. I hope you'll all give this final project the attention it deserves. Class dismissed."
…
With Professor Medea's dismissal, the students filed out of the classroom, their many conversations drifting away beneath the night sky.
Dark set Little Eevee on his shoulder and went down the stairs with the crowd, worry plain on his face, his expression drifting into sync with Eevee's.
It wasn't only because neither of them had found the Inner Constellation that belonged to them. It was also because of that scene of ruin he had glimpsed just before leaving the Star Palace Labyrinth.
Inside a labyrinth built by Astrology, nothing one sees is rootless.
All the more so with an Eevee who possessed a Divination Talent at his side.
That vision of destruction had to be foretelling something!
…
Dark had no idea that he now possessed a Divination Talent of his own, but that didn't stop him from taking the vision seriously.
And per the assignment Professor Medea had set, he needed not only to find his Inner Constellation but also to make a "prophecy" about the coming few months.
True or false, in the end he had to put something on paper.
…
Back at the dormitory from the Spiral Clock Tower, Dark immediately set down everything he had seen inside the Star Palace Labyrinth.
Beside him, Eevee — long since accustomed to gripping a pen in her paws — was writing away as best she could.
Her little notebook substituted phonetic spellings for a great many characters she didn't know, but the account itself read smoothly enough.
Once Dark finished his own record, he began reading hers.
From the moment she entered the Star Palace Labyrinth, Eevee-chan had followed that faint inner pull, slipping from mirror to mirror.
Unlike Dark, she ran into plenty of other students along the way, but they all wore the shapes of small animals.
And every one of them walked upright, which struck her as deeply unfamiliar, so she timidly kept her distance from them all — until she met a glowing little fox running on four legs, and followed it without thinking.
She trotted after that little fox and had all sorts of wondrous encounters, a journey immeasurably richer than Dark's monotonous one.
After a few dozen minutes of starting and stopping, just as she was about to catch the little fox, she ran headfirst into a mirror and came out inside that palace hall.
Everything after that was exactly the same as what Dark had seen.
"Going by this, your Inner Constellation should be Vulpecula."
"Bui?"
Eevee cocked her head and thought it over, then nodded hard, relief finally showing on her small face.
With her Inner Constellation confirmed, she could look up references, analyze the constellation, and then try her hand at a prophecy.
Whatever it took, she was going to score high on the Astronomy final project!
…
Eevee-chan's diligence was highly contagious. Even the play-loving Vampire Young Lady, for once, was curled up with her own little notebook, reading.
Dark's gaze lingered on her, and watching the Vampire Young Lady study so earnestly set him thinking.
Of all his Magic Guide Spirits, she was the only one in fully human form.
After a long stretch of learning, the Vampire Young Lady had gradually picked up speech as well.
She looked no older than seven or eight, but there were quite a few girls at St. Marian's Academy with youthful faces.
"If it can be arranged, maybe she should enroll with the first-years next term?"
Once the idea took hold, Dark turned it over and over.
A human-shaped Magic Guide Spirit and a beast-shaped one did, in the end, give people rather different impressions.
If it were possible, he wanted to give her a better education.
And she had the makings for it herself.
The trouble was that getting into St. Marian's Academy was no easy thing.
Apart from those the school actively recruited, every student at St. Marian's Academy had to enroll by application.
Parents or guardians submitted an enrollment application, the applicant passed the entrance examination, a set amount of tuition was paid, and enrollment went through.
Put simply, it came down to facing the entrance examination.
Dark himself had received a letter of invitation and been actively recruited, so he had never sat the entrance examination and had no idea how difficult it was — hence his misgivings.
He didn't have much confidence about the Vampire Young Lady getting in.
"If the front door really won't open, I suppose we'll have to try the back door."
…
That night Dark made little headway on his Astronomy project, but he drew out a drop of "Greed" and successfully completed the Forging of a second improved "Lust III - Moon".
With that, he held two improved copies of "Lust III - Moon", and the original, uncontrollable "Lust III - Moon" could finally be retired.
____
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