Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 979: Protagonist

They stood there for a while—caught in that strange rhythm the hall seemed to breathe with.

The crystals pulsed. The floor murmured. The line inched forward with no real urgency, just a kind of collective waiting that made minutes feel like they were made of glass.

Lucavion said nothing for once. He had that look again—half here, half somewhere else entirely. She couldn’t tell if he was bored or thinking or pretending to be either.

Elara kept her gaze forward. She tried to count the patterns of light refracting through the high glass ceiling—anything to keep her nerves steady. It was better than letting her mind wander back to the sound of the machines or the way each instructor’s voice softened right before they said unstable.

When the board on the side wall flickered, she didn’t even realize she’d been watching it. A dozen names glowed in neat rows—some fading out, some appearing. The magic hummed quietly under the din of whispers.

Then her own name shimmered into view.

ELOWYN CAERLIN

14:30 — CRYSTAL HALL, STATION 2

For a heartbeat, she just stared. So that’s me now, she thought, with a dry little tug of amusement that didn’t quite reach her face.

“Your turn?” Lucavion asked, following her line of sight.

She nodded once. “Yeah.”

He gave a small motion of his hand—half encouragement, half mock salute. “Then go make the crystals nervous.”

“Not how it works,” she said, though her voice was softer now.

She stepped forward, weaving through the others until she reached the front of the line. The student who’d been next—a nervous-looking boy clutching his sleeve—looked at her, then at the glowing schedule, then back.

“It’s showing your name,” he said, hesitant. “Guess that means you first?”

“Yeah.”

He hesitated again, then stepped aside with a shrug. “Lucky timing. I wasn’t ready anyway.”

“Thanks.”

She passed him, the hum of mana growing sharper the closer she got to the front. The air around the spheres was cooler, carrying that faint metallic tinge of overworked enchantment.

The instructor glanced up from his tablet as she approached. “Elowyn Caerlin,” he confirmed.

Elara nodded. “That’s me.”

The instructor gave a curt motion with his hand. “Station Two, then. Follow me.”

She stepped after him, her boots making almost no sound on the polished black-veined floor. The closer they got, the more the air seemed to hum—soft at first, like a whisper caught behind the walls, and then deeper, resonating in her ribs. The crystal sphere at Station Two glowed faintly, pale as morning frost.

“Hands flat. Don’t push your mana unless it prompts,” the instructor said, checking something on his slate. “It’ll do the rest.”

She hesitated just long enough to feel it—her pulse, a tight little rhythm against her palm. Then she laid both hands on the surface.

The glass was cold. Not biting, not kind. Just… there.

And then, slowly, it breathed.

A faint vibration ran under her skin, the kind that didn’t stop at the surface—it crawled inward, through her hands, up her arms, into the narrow pathways where her mana slept. It wasn’t painful. But it wasn’t neutral either.

It felt curious.

A quiet inhale that wasn’t hers, the world leaning close enough to listen.

Her body reacted before her mind could. The first flicker of power coiled tight in her chest, the old instinct to brace—Eveline’s voice in her head, steady and calm:

“Don’t fight it. Let it in. You only need to fight when it means to stay.”

That same voice. That same tone. The one she’d sworn she wouldn’t think about now.

The sensation wasn’t entirely new. It was like déjà vu, but crueler. She remembered it—the first time Eveline had touched the dying threads of her core, when the world inside her had been nothing but dust and cold and she hadn’t known if she was still a mage or a corpse pretending to be one.

The feeling then had been sharper—raw light piercing through rot, threads of mana burning back into channels that didn’t want to open. It had felt like drowning and breathing at once.

This… was softer. Measured. Like the machine knew the edges of her scars and was careful not to press too hard.

Still, her throat felt dry. She could almost smell that old scent—the sterility of curative incantations, the faint tang of ether mixed with blood and frost.

Eveline’s hand had been steady that day. Her eyes had not.

“You’ll feel cold,” Eveline had said, her voice low, sharp around the edges of exhaustion. “That means it’s working.”

Cold. Yes. She remembered that part right.

Because that was what the crystal sphere became now—a slow, gathering chill, blooming outward from where her hands met glass, reaching for her elbows like a tide rising under the skin.

Her breath hitched, not from fear but recognition. Her fingers tightened once before she forced them to relax again.

The hum deepened. Lines of light spidered under the sphere’s surface, bright and clean and exact. The glow threaded up her arms in delicate veins, outlining her mana channels in pale blue-white.

The instructor’s voice was somewhere to the side—low, unreadable, mostly for the tablet’s benefit. “Pulse steady… resonance establishing. Good.”

The glass pulsed. Once. Twice. Then she felt the pull—gentle, but insistent.

It wasn’t taking mana exactly; it was reading it, tracing the edges of what was left, what had been mended, what had been burned through and rebuilt.

The rhythm was familiar. Too familiar.

Her eyes unfocused, the hall around her slipping away until all that existed was that strange echo of the past—the same invisible fingers threading through her veins, asking her body to remember what it had forgotten.

Back then, she had been half-conscious, Eveline’s hand against her sternum, light spilling from her fingertips. Now she was fully awake. Aware. Watching it happen again under artificial light and the indifferent gaze of an academy assessor.

But this time, it didn’t hurt.

It only reminded her.

And that was, somehow, worse.

She swallowed hard, the sound small against the quiet hum of the hall.

The sphere brightened again, the pale light bleeding toward silver before settling into its rhythm—a clean, steady thrum that matched her heartbeat for a moment, then diverged. The mana pressed deeper, probing, gentle but insistent, tasting what lay beneath the surface.

Within her, the rhythm deepened—slow, deliberate, as if the sphere were listening for something it couldn’t yet find.

The light curling under her skin shifted hue, faint blue seeping through the silvery glow like dye spreading through clear water. The cold settled in properly now—steady, quiet, confident. The kind of chill that didn’t bite but claimed.

Frost.

It was subtle at first. The air around her fingers began to haze, thin trails of condensation rising like breath on a winter morning. The glass beneath her palms pulsed, threads of crystalline blue crawling outward in delicate veins. Each pulse synchronized briefly with her heartbeat before tapering off again.

The instructor murmured something—numbers, maybe readings—but his tone had eased, routine returning to his voice.

“Primary frost,” he said softly, confirming what the sphere had already painted across the glass.

Elara barely heard him. The hum beneath her hands smoothed out into something she almost recognized, and for a heartbeat, her body relaxed. It was like slipping into a memory she understood—cold air, white silence, the faint ache of power that used to be hers before everything went wrong.

Then, as suddenly as it had flared, the glow began to settle. The cold receded into the glass, and the pulse under her palms quieted.

The instructor shifted, tapping his slate. “That should be it,” he said, almost to himself. He leaned slightly closer. “You can let go now.”

But she didn’t move.