Chapter 178: Mundane

There were only around a dozen students inside the workshop, and judging from the faces Ilya recognized from occasionally passing them in the hallways, most were already in their second or third year.

There were even a few fourth-years among them, which made his presence as a first-year considerably more unusual than he had initially assumed.

It was hardly forbidden for someone his age to participate in a workshop, but most first-years were still busy adjusting to the Magic Department’s regular curriculum, let alone volunteering for additional research under a professor.

The woman who had questioned him appeared to be one of the older students.

She had been sorting through several documents when Ilya entered, and after confirming that Professor Antoine had personally accepted him, most of her initial suspicion disappeared.

"Well, if the professor approved you, then I suppose that’s that. Welcome to SkyRune."

"Thank you."

With that surprisingly simple introduction out of the way, Ilya was shown toward one of the empty seats and left to settle in while they waited for Professor Antoine to arrive.

A few people continued looking at him, particularly after his name inevitably made its way around the room, but nobody bothered him further once their curiosity had been satisfied.

That suited Ilya perfectly well.

It gave him the opportunity to properly look around.

The workshop occupied one of the smaller research rooms in the Magic Department, although calling it small was somewhat misleading when nearly every available portion of the room had been put to use.

There was little uniformity to what the students themselves were doing, either.

One group was examining several mana crystals positioned around a formation, carefully recording whatever changes occurred whenever the structure was activated, while another student had covered several sheets of paper with different variations of the same spell formula.

Near the windows, a pair of older students were working with a collection of measuring instruments, and the enormous blackboard at the front of the room had already been covered with enough calculations to make it difficult to determine where one person’s work ended and another began.

It was noticeably less organized than Ilya had expected.

Though not disorganized, exactly. There simply wasn’t an obvious connection between everything happening around him.

That was probably the greatest difference between SkyRune Lab and most of the workshops operating throughout the academy.

A workshop dedicated to enchantment naturally attracted students interested in enchantment, just as one focused on formations or magical artifacts usually had a clearly defined field around which its research revolved.

SkyRune Lab, on the other hand, seemed willing to investigate practically anything as long as Professor Antoine found the question interesting enough.

At least, that was the impression Ilya had formed from reading through the laboratory’s previous work.

Some projects concerned spell construction, others dealt with unusual magical phenomena, and a surprising number appeared to have no immediate practical application whatsoever.

There were studies that had begun because someone noticed an inconsistency in an established theory, experiments meant to determine why mana behaved differently under extremely specific conditions, and several abandoned projects that seemed to have existed solely because Professor Antoine wanted to know whether something was possible.

Ilya found himself strangely comfortable with that.

For most of his life, nearly everything he had been taught came with a correct way of doing it already attached.

Hold a sword this way because generations of Belozerskys had determined it was correct.

Move your feet this way because that was the proper stance.

Circulate Aura according to the methods perfected by those who came before him because those were the methods that worked. If he couldn’t do that, then the problem naturally rested with him rather than the system.

Magic had been different.

There were rules, certainly, and Ilya had spent the better part of the year learning as many of them as possible, but the deeper he went, the more often he encountered questions that didn’t have universally accepted answers.

Even something as established as spell construction could be approached in several different ways, and occasionally the only reason a particular component remained in a spell was that generations of wizards had learned it that way and never found enough reason to remove it.

He was still examining one of the formations spread across the nearest table when the door finally opened behind him.

The conversations throughout the room gradually quieted as Professor Antoine Chastellain entered.

He appeared preoccupied with something even as he walked inside, only raising his head after reaching the center of the room.

His eyes eventually landed on Ilya, causing him to stop for a moment as though he had only just remembered something important.

The professor blinked once before glancing around at the other students, several of whom were already looking back at him with expressions that suggested this was hardly the first time something similar had happened.

"Ah. Right. I suppose I forgot to mention that we’d be having someone new join us today."

A few sighs could be heard around the room, confirming Ilya’s suspicions immediately.

Professor Antoine had apparently accepted him into the workshop, continued with the rest of his day, and completely forgotten about the small matter of informing everyone else that a first-year Belozersky would suddenly be appearing among them.

Antoine didn’t seem particularly bothered by his mistake.

He walked toward the front of the room and placed the books he had been carrying onto an already crowded table before briefly introducing Ilya to everyone, explaining only that he was a first-year from the Magic Department whom he had personally allowed to participate in the workshop.

There was no lengthy explanation of why he had been accepted, nor did Antoine mention the conversation that had taken place in Anders’ office, something Ilya was perfectly content with.

"You can introduce yourselves properly later. For now, Belozersky, take the empty seat near the second table. You won’t be assigned to anything today, so observe whatever catches your interest and try not to interfere with anyone’s work unless they allow you to."

"Understood, Professor."

With that matter settled, Antoine moved on.

There was no formal beginning to the workshop and certainly nothing resembling the opening of an ordinary class.

Antoine spent several minutes speaking with the older students about the work they had completed since their previous meeting, checking documents that were handed to him and occasionally stopping beside one of the tables to inspect an experiment for himself.

Everyone else gradually returned to what they had been doing before his arrival, and within a short time, Ilya had been reduced from the most interesting thing in the room to merely another person sitting among them.

He preferred it that way.

For the next half-hour, Ilya did exactly what Antoine had told him to do and observed.

It quickly became apparent that joining a workshop was very different from attending another course.

There was no professor standing at the front of the room explaining a subject while everyone else copied notes.

Every student appeared to be working on something different, with Antoine moving between them whenever his attention was needed and the more experienced members occasionally helping those working on related subjects.

Some of the projects were individual, while others involved groups of two or three students working toward the same objective.

The amount of independence they were given surprised Ilya most of all, particularly when he noticed Antoine question one student’s methodology without actually telling him what he should do instead.

The professor merely pointed out the problem, asked several questions, and walked away after telling the student to come up with a better solution himself.

Ilya watched the exchange with interest.

It was certainly different from the way most things were taught at the academy.

Even in Spell Construction, where students were encouraged to understand the individual components of a spell rather than simply memorize completed structures, there was still a curriculum to follow.

Antoine had material he needed to teach them, assignments designed around particular concepts, and standards by which their work could be judged.

Here, there appeared to be considerably fewer boundaries.

Although that freedom did not make the work easier.

If anything, Ilya suspected the opposite was true, because nobody was handing these students a question with a known answer waiting at the end.

Several of them were attempting to determine whether their questions even had answers in the first place, and judging from the growing pile of discarded documents beside one of the older students, failure seemed to occupy a perfectly ordinary place in the process.

Eventually, Ilya rose from his seat and began wandering between the tables.

He was careful not to touch anything, particularly after noticing a cracked mana crystal sitting inside a reinforced container near the far wall with a handwritten warning telling people not to remove it.

Most of what he saw was beyond his current knowledge, but that only made him linger longer whenever he encountered something he could partially understand.

One table in particular caught his attention.

The student working there noticed him.

"You can come closer. It isn’t going to explode."

Ilya glanced at the reinforced container across the room.

The student explained that the spell itself wasn’t important.

It was merely simple enough to provide a convenient foundation for testing how efficiently mana could be transferred through several altered structures without introducing too many additional variables.

If they could determine exactly where energy was being lost and why, the same principle could eventually be tested on more complicated spells where even a minor improvement could have a considerably greater effect.

That caught Ilya’s attention.

He leaned closer, and for the next several minutes, the student walked him through the portions he could understand while leaving the more advanced calculations for another time.

Ilya still lacked much of the theory necessary to follow the entire experiment, but the underlying question was simple enough.

They were taking something everyone already knew worked and asking whether it could work better.

Ilya liked that considerably more than he expected.

"Having fun?"

Professor Antoine’s voice came from behind him.

Ilya straightened and found the professor standing a short distance away with his arms crossed.

He had apparently been watching for long enough to understand what Ilya was looking at.

"I think so."

"You think so?"

"I understand perhaps half of what he’s doing."

"That’s generous."

The student beside Ilya looked offended.

Antoine ignored him and stepped closer to the table, briefly examining the pages before returning his attention to Ilya.

"You aren’t expected to understand everything happening here, Belozersky. In fact, if you did, I would have serious questions regarding what exactly you’ve been doing for the past sixteen years."

"Mostly holding a sword."

"Yes, I’m aware."

A few of the nearby students laughed quietly, but Antoine’s attention remained on him.

"For now, that’s exactly what I want you to do. Look around, ask questions when people have time to answer them, and figure out what interests you enough that you’re willing to spend several months being wrong about it."

Ilya raised an eyebrow.

"That doesn’t sound particularly encouraging."

"Then you may have misunderstood what research involves."

Antoine picked up one of the discarded sheets from the table and briefly looked over the failed structure drawn across it before placing it back down.

"Most questions worth asking don’t reward you with an answer simply because you were clever enough to ask them. Sometimes you’ll spend a week proving that your original assumption was wrong, and occasionally you’ll spend considerably longer discovering that someone else already proved it wrong fifty years ago."

"Hmm..."

Ilya looked around the room once more.

Nobody appeared particularly discouraged by that reality.

The student beside him had already returned to his calculations, while across the room another group had begun arguing quietly over a result that apparently contradicted what they had expected to happen.

For some reason, Ilya found himself smiling.

Perhaps this place suited him better than he had thought.