The morning sun was a clean, pitiless glare on the white marble face of the High Spire. As Aleric walked through the gates into the Scholastic District, the weight of his satchel was a rhythmic, metallic pulse against his thigh—a reminder that for the first time since his entry into this world, the variables were finally working in his favor. He did not go to the dining hall or his small cell in the student quarters. He headed directly for the Administration Spire, where the scent of expensive paper and the cold, electric hum of magical wards was ever-present in the air. The gold in his satchel was his protection; it was the only way that he would be able to complete his plans within this world before his own expiration from it.
He arrived at the heavy oak doors of the Bursar's Office. Inside, the room was filled with shelves of magical ledgers whose pages were updated by floating quills. Behind the huge desk was the Academy's Chief Accountant and mage, Master Vane. Vane loved money more than any student. In fact, to Vane, every student was simply an entry on an account. The first ones to be deleted every time were those on the "charity" list.
Vane did not raise his head. He was too busy furiously scribbling in a journal using a quill pen made from the feather of a phoenix. "The deadline for the 'Liability' scholarship expired last sundown, Thorne," Vane said, the rasp of his voice a cold reminder of the crunching of dead leaves underfoot. "Preparations for expulsion have already been made. You, Thorne, are a statistical anomaly that the Academy no longer deems the most efficient to maintain. You have no business here. You are an inefficiency. Leave."
Aleric didn't move. He dug into his cloak and produced a leather pouch. He didn't dump the whole thing out – it would be unnecessary ostentation, and it would draw curious questions. Instead, he dug into the pouch and extracted three heavy gold coins. Each had the stamped likeness of the Emperor's face on it – sharp edges and bright polish. To the average man in the Sinks, three such coins would mean the difference between poverty and prosperity. To the Academy, it was the cost of one term's worth of quiet and sitting in the back of the lecture hall.
CLINK. CLINK.
The sound was deep and heavy as the coins clinked onto the mahogany desk. All of the floating quills in the room paused in mid-air as they sensed a change in the energy of the room. Vane slowly raised his eyes, his spectacles sliding down the bridge of his nose. He gazed at the three gold pieces in front of him, his brow furrowed in confusion.
"Three gold?" Vane whispered, the edge gone from his voice. "The tuition for an F-Rank Generalist costs two gold and five silver. Where does a boy without a house and without patronage get Imperial mint?"
"The source is not relevant to the calculation," Aleric said, his brown eyes—now clear and boring—locking onto Vane's. "The gold is real. The weight is precise. Two gold and five silver for the current term. The additional five silver will be noted as a credit towards the laboratory fees of the upcoming term. Note the transaction and remove the status of 'Liability' from the ledger."
Vane bit his lip, his fingers twitching toward the coins. He clearly wanted to find a reason to refuse the payment—to keep his "low-born" wing free of charity cases—but the Academy's charter was absolute: if a student settled their debt, they could not be removed without a criminal cause. With a frustrated flick of his wrist, Vane pressed his signet ring into a wax seal on a fresh parchment. The ledger on the wall glowed for a moment, the name Aleric Thorne shifting from the "Red" deficit column to a stable, neutral black.
"You have bought yourself time, Thorne," Vane hissed, sliding a receipt across the desk with his mechanical copper hand. "But do not think this makes you one of the elite. You are still a fly in the ointment. When you eventually fail your mid-term evaluations, no amount of gold will save your seat."
Aleric accepted the receipt and exited without a word. Insults flung at him by Vane had no effect, the way sounds bounced off him on a blustery day. In the flesh-and-blood walls of the Academy, he existed hardly at all—a forgettable student with no one to associate him, no one to dislike him, and no impact whatsoever. He had maintained such a protective seal on this facade. In the Sinks, he wore another mask altogether—omega cipher with glowing crimson eyes unique to the hunt. In the mind, he considered a failure with a dull, brown gaze. He insulated these dual realities behind a wall constructed of physiological and social deception.
With the threat of imminent expulsion out of the way, he focused on the next deficiency. The Stone-Hide Boar incident yesterday demonstrated a serious lack. Carrying five tons of biological weight through the back streets of a city even as an masked, faceless vagabond had been dicey – too many variables to balance. If he hoped to pull this off successfully, he required an infrastructure solution capable of overcoming the physical constraints of weight and volume.
Therefore, he made his way towards the Great Library of Aetheria, navigating around the busy fight-related sectors and into the Summoning Magic department. This library had very few pursuers because of its gargantuan mana cost. Aleric was not looking for a partner but for the way of the transfer.
He retrieved a heavy, dust-filled book called *The Architecture of the Summoned*. He sat down at a darkened desk and began to unravel the essential logic of the summoner. The text divided the community into two factions: those who built the 'tools' and those who used them.
The first method relied on the work of Scholars who studied animals and made the summoning magic. These were the architects who designed the foundational spells. They would spend years in the wild, observing a specific beast with painstaking detail, mapping its density and its biological essence. Using this data, they would code a summoning magic that acted as a blueprint. Other scholars, who simply wanted a beast but lacked the time to observe one from scratch, would use these pre-made spells to manifest their own creatures.
This ritual required the spell to constantly siphon the user's mana, 24/7, to construct and maintain the beast's body in a private void-space. Because the body was made of pure, dense mana, the process was agonizingly slow. Depending on the size and complexity of the creature, it took months or even years of constant siphoning to complete the manifestation.
The second method was Mark-Taming—finding a living beast and forcing a contract onto it. It was crude, and the beast died forever if killed.
Aleric's eyes scanned the diagrams of the blueprints made by the scholars who studied the wild. His mind, trained in the cold logic of the Unknown Land, saw the underlying architecture immediately. The "Source Magic" was an interface designed to maintain an object within a pocket of non-existence.
They use these frameworks to sustain a living construct of mana, Aleric thought. But if I strip away the biological blueprints and simply use the 'Void-Space' storage protocol, I can repurpose the tool.
The summoning technique provided a "Void" that nobody could pinpoint—a place where things stayed until called. The scholars used it for beasts, but the physics of the gateway were indifferent to the contents. If he could hijack the summoning ritual but omit the beast-creation code, he could use the space to store raw matter. A dead carcass wouldn't need a constant mana-siphon to "live" in the void because it wasn't made of mana; it was physical data. He would only need a brief burst of energy to trigger the "Summoning" of the object back into reality.
He closed the book, his mind already calculating how to bind this new storage logic to his hidden adventurer's plate. He didn't need to observe a wolf; he needed to observe the fundamental nature of the Void itself.
As he stood to return the book, Aleric's Gaze-Detection began to prickle. The sensation was sharp. Someone was watching him.
It was not a student; students didn't bother looking at a "failure" like Aleric. This presence was cold and sharp. He turned a corner into the Whispering Cloisters, a less-traveled hallway. He stopped. He didn't turn around.
"You are wasting your stamina," Aleric said to the empty air. "You have been trailing me for two point four miles. Your breathing is steady, which suggests training, but your footfalls are slightly heavier on the left side."
From the shadows, a figure materialized. It was a girl, perhaps a year or two older than him, dressed in the dark leather of a scout. Her eyes were sharp and gray. She looked at him with intense curiosity.
"Most people can't even feel their own mana," she said. "Most people don't even have a clue. My name is Kaelen. I'm a professional scout from Sinks. I watched you this morning, Aleric Thorne. Not here. I watched the guy in the cloth mask at Guild. The guy with the red eyes and the pig. I watched him figure his footsteps. I trailed his footsteps back through the back streets until he put down the mask and donned the robes."
Aleric slowly turned. His brown eyes remained fixed, giving no indication of the crimson color present in his eyes during his night work. The secrecy he had so diligently protected now had a flaw, an unpredictable human factor.
"You've been very thorough," Aleric stated, his voice emotionless. He reached into his cloak and produced a single gold coin, offering it to her. "This is for your silence. This is a deposit. If you breathe a word about what you've witnessed, the account will be sealed forever."
Kaelen recoiled at the coldness of his tone. She looked at the gold, and then at the calm, ordinary brown eyes of the boy before her. This was more than a year's income, handed out solely for her silence.
"Your payment for me to forget?" she whispered, her fingers closing around the metal.
"I'm paying to keep my privacy intact while I'm inside these walls," Aleric said. "But your ability to follow me through the blind spots of the city indicates a useful skill. I may have need of it someday. But until then, you do not know me, and I do not know you." He didn't give her a chance to answer. He simply turned and walked back in the direction of the library, his footsteps precise. He had not hired her to work, nor had he given her a job. He had simply eliminated a threat to his persona with a trade and left a door open to a potential source in the future. As he walked away into the recesses of the library, Kaelen was left standing in the darkness, holding the gold coin and trying to figure out what kind of man was hiding behind the disguise of a common failure.