Chapter 179: Dead or Lie [1]

These days, Ilya had been wondering just how much time he had left.

Every minute and every second of the day was spent internally heating his body, keeping the Ring of Fire circulating through him regardless of what else he happened to be doing at the time.

To be frank, it was working far better than he had expected, to the point where the cold that had once constantly gnawed at his body was now barely noticeable unless the temperature dropped particularly low.

In fact, Ilya had practiced the technique so much that he could now circulate the Ring of Fire in his sleep.

That had been a rather strange discovery.

The first time it happened, Ilya had woken in the middle of the night and immediately noticed the familiar warmth moving throughout his body, only to realize that he had somehow maintained the circulation despite being unconscious for several hours.

He had initially assumed it was a coincidence, perhaps something his body had continued doing for a short while after he fell asleep, but several nights of deliberately checking proved otherwise.

The Ring of Fire had now become instinctive.

His mana followed the same internal path with almost no conscious instruction, continuously producing enough heat to counteract the cold while consuming so little mana that his natural recovery could comfortably compensate for it.

Unless he deliberately stopped the circulation himself, his body seemed perfectly content to maintain it indefinitely.

Under ordinary circumstances, Ilya would’ve considered that nothing but good news.

Unfortunately, his circumstances were anything but ordinary.

He raised one hand and slowly curled his fingers.

There was no frost.

Not now, at least.

But that was exactly why the question had been bothering him.

How much time did he have left?

It was a question Ilya had asked himself before, although recently, it had become considerably harder to answer.

The cold was nothing new. Ilya had lived with it long before he even knew what Niflheim was and what it did to his body.

He had known the risks for quite a while, and the gradual progression of those effects had once given him a rough idea of how his condition was changing.

The problem was that he couldn’t feel them anymore.

The Ring of Fire worked too well.

What had originally been a method of keeping himself warm had gradually become something his body maintained almost automatically, constantly circulating heat through him and suppressing the effects of Niflheim before they could become uncomfortable.

That should have been reassuring.

However, it left him with a rather unpleasant question.

Had he actually solved the problem, or had he merely become better at hiding it from himself?

Ilya leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, maintaining the Ring of Fire without even thinking about it.

As far as he could tell, his body was perfectly healthy, and if anything, he felt better than he had several months ago, but that observation meant less when he was constantly using magic to maintain that condition.

The Ring of Fire could produce heat and prevent his temperature from falling, but what Ilya didn’t know was whether keeping himself warm actually slowed whatever Niflheim was doing to him.

That was the distinction that bothered him.

If the danger of Niflheim truly began and ended with the cold, then the solution he had stumbled upon was almost embarrassingly simple.

He could continue refining the Ring of Fire until the heat it produced comfortably exceeded whatever his Domain demanded from his body, and the problem that had followed him for so long would become little more than another expense of mana.

But Fallen Wizards were not known for having problems that could be solved by keeping themselves warm.

Ilya lowered his gaze toward his hand.

For all he knew, the cold wasn’t the disease.

It was the fever.

And if that was the case, then suppressing it had only taken away the one warning his body had been giving him.

That thought stayed with him for several seconds before Ilya deliberately stopped circulating the Ring of Fire.

The warmth he had grown accustomed to gradually faded, and the natural chill of the room began creeping back into his awareness, first along his fingers and then across the rest of his body.

Ilya waited.

"...."

There it was, the cold.

The sensation was so familiar that, after spending so much time without it, experiencing it again almost felt nostalgic.

He remained still for another minute, paying close attention to his breathing, his fingertips, and every other sensation he could distinguish before finally allowing the Ring of Fire to resume.

The warmth returned immediately.

Ilya flexed his fingers as the cold disappeared once more, but the experiment had told him very little.

He could still feel the cold when he wanted to, and the Ring of Fire could still make it disappear, but neither answered the question that actually mattered.

Was he buying himself more time?

Or was he simply making whatever time remained considerably more comfortable?

...Then there was another question, one that had been sitting quietly in the back of his mind for some time now.

Ilya had never given it much attention because there had never seemed to be much reason to question the obvious.

Niflheim possessed the characteristics of a Fallen Domain, using it placed an obvious burden on his body, and the person who had first explained what was happening to him had spoken with enough certainty that Ilya simply accepted her conclusion.

That person was Vera.

Ilya slowly lowered his hand.

"...Am I really a Fallen Wizard?"

Even thinking about it felt strange.

For all the time he had spent worrying about the consequences of being a Fallen Wizard, Ilya had never actually investigated how certain that conclusion was.

Vera had told him what Niflheim was, explained enough about Fallen Wizards for him to understand the danger he was facing, and because everything she said seemed consistent with what he was experiencing, he had never found much reason to doubt her.

But who exactly was Vera Adelheid Lischke?

Even her name raised questions Ilya had deliberately avoided asking for a long time.

To practically everyone else at the academy, she was simply Vera Adelheid.

That was the name students knew, the name other professors used, and the name by which she seemed perfectly content to introduce herself.

As far as Ilya could tell, almost nobody even knew that Lischke existed, much less why she had chosen not to use it.

Ilya only happened to be one of the exceptions.

Her uncle knew, naturally, and there might have been others Ilya simply wasn’t aware of, but the fact remained that Vera clearly had no interest in advertising the name.

Ilya had noticed that discrepancy a long time ago, filed it away with the increasingly large collection of strange things surrounding his mentor, and decided that asking her why she concealed her surname was probably an excellent way to receive an answer he didn’t want.

It wasn’t the only thing about her that made him curious.

He knew what everyone else at the academy knew about Vera, along with a little more that he had picked up through their dealings with one another, but there were still enormous parts of her life that remained completely unknown to him.

She was an assistant professor at Holy Trinity Academy, an absurdly capable wizard whose actual limits Ilya had never managed to determine, and a woman with enough knowledge about subjects she had no obvious reason to know that he had long since stopped being surprised whenever she produced another answer from nowhere.

Fallen Wizards were merely one example.

Back then, Ilya had been too concerned with understanding what was happening to him to question it.

Vera knew what Niflheim was, knew what its existence meant for him, and spoke about the subject with a familiarity that went considerably beyond anything Ilya had been able to find on his own afterward.

How?

He had never asked.

It wasn’t because the question had never occurred to him. If anything, Ilya had wondered about Vera more times than he could count, particularly whenever she revealed another glimpse of just how much knowledge and experience she kept hidden behind that perpetually indifferent expression.

He simply respected her enough not to pry.

Whatever relationship existed between the two of them had always been strangely businesslike.

Vera taught him when she felt like teaching him, Ilya occasionally did things for her in return, and neither of them asked too many questions about matters the other clearly had no intention of discussing.

There was a comfortable distance between them that Ilya had learned not to disturb, and considering how long their arrangement had lasted, he saw little reason to test where exactly that distance ended.

More importantly, he had the distinct impression that Vera preferred keeping it that way too.

Ilya wasn’t foolish enough to mistake her willingness to help him for permission to dig through her personal affairs.

There was a line somewhere between them, one Vera had never needed to explicitly draw because Ilya had always understood that it existed, and he suspected that if he ever became careless enough to cross it, their peculiar little arrangement would end immediately.

And Ilya valued it far too much to risk that merely to satisfy his curiosity.

Still, that left him with the same uncomfortable problem.

Almost everything he believed about Niflheim had begun with Vera, yet Ilya knew remarkably little about the person whose judgment he had trusted in the first place.

He didn’t know why she understood Fallen Wizards so well, why she recognized Niflheim so quickly, or even why the surname Lischke seemed to disappear the moment she stepped outside the handful of people who knew it.

And although Ilya trusted her judgment, trust was not proof.

He leaned back slightly, his gaze settling on nothing in particular as another possibility slowly took shape in his mind.

Perhaps Vera was completely correct and he was wasting his time questioning something she had understood from the moment she saw it.

But after everything Ilya had learned about magic over the past year, accepting an answer solely because someone more knowledgeable had given it to him no longer came as naturally as it once had.

"Belozersky, mind if I borrow some of your time?"

Ilya stopped halfway down the corridor and looked back toward the voice.

Professor Hakon Vinter was approaching from the opposite direction.

Judging from the fact that his attention had already settled firmly on Ilya, this wasn’t going to be one of those encounters where a polite greeting would be enough to send them both on their way.

"Of course, Professor. Is something wrong?"

"Nothing’s wrong. At least, I don’t think anything is."

Hakon stopped in front of him and briefly glanced toward the students passing around them/

"But I’d rather not have this conversation in the middle of everyone. Come with me for a moment."