Surviving as a Mage in a Magic Academy

At Black Turtle Tower, Renzid looked up at the building with a tense face.

It was just a shabby old building on the seventh floor with nothing particularly special about it, but to Renzid, who had made up his mind, it somehow felt dignified and even full of tradition.

That’s right. I’m joining the Iactus Soup Club.

Because of suggestions from friends in the same tower, he had seriously considered the Smuggling Club and the Outing Club too, but in the end Renzid had chosen the Kitchen Club.

The history and philosophy of the Kitchen Club had moved the heart of Renzid, who came from a family of cooks.

To be honest, last year there really weren’t any ingredients to speak of, so there was hardly anything you could even call cooking. If I join the Kitchen Club, I’ll be able to use ingredients generously. The rumors said they were piled up like mountains…

Unable even to imagine that countless upperclassmen had all been deceived in exactly the same way, Renzid gulped and stepped forward.

“Wahaha! So you’ve decided. Welcome, welcome!”

Senior Palcrius welcomed Renzid enthusiastically.

After breaking free of the hug, Renzid staggered and let out a groan full of pain.

“Urgh, my ribs…”

“Renzid?”

“W-Wardanaz!”

Recognizing Lee Han, Renzid brightened immediately.

They were from different towers, but this friend from House Wardanaz was someone he could trust.

“As expected. You were already here. Take care of me. I decided to join this time too.”

“Mm. I see.”

Lee Han looked at Renzid with a complicated expression.

The club was probably going to be very different from what Renzid expected…

“How is it, Wardanaz? What’s the club atmosphere like? What are the upperclassmen like?”

Before Renzid could even finish the question, shouting came from behind.

“Wardanaz! Where’s Wardanaz?!”

“Junior Wardanaz, let’s think together about tomorrow’s food! Let’s join forces and make profits that will go down in club histor—”

“Then I’ll be off.”

Lee Han quickly slipped away.

Renzid stared at Lee Han’s retreating back with a bewildered face.

Wh…

What in the world had happened here?!

*****

The person in charge of the lecture <Wand Materials and Magical Amplification> was the most wicked and underhanded person in Einroguard.

“Good day, Professor.”

Even at Lee Han’s greeting, Professor Verdus kept his head lowered, focused only on the wand he was working on.

Lee Han glanced at the wand. The wand lying on Professor Verdus’s workbench gave off a peculiar mana wave unlike anything he had seen before.

Amazing.

The discipline of magic was one that only became newer and more awe-inspiring the more you learned and mastered it.

There were realms that passed unnoticed before simply because he had not known enough, but became visible once he did know.

If it had been last year, he would only have grasped it vaguely by feel and thought, There are high-density spells compressed on top of the wand, but now that he had begun learning incantation shortening and magic storage from Professor Voladi, he could see different things.

That one is a spell that strengthens the control of telekinesis, the next strengthens the output of telekinesis itself, and the next increases the range of telekinesis…

If a mage who mainly used telekinetic spells were to take hold of that ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) wand, with all those spells compressed into it to delicately produce linked effects—

There was no way to guess what kind of firepower it would produce.

After admiring it, Lee Han approached Professor Verdus. Then, after drawing up mana and spreading it through his whole body, he shouted into Professor Verdus’s ear.

“GOOD DAY, PROFESSOR!!!”

Professor Verdus jumped and raised his head.

Then, after spotting Lee Han, Professor Verdus shouted,

“Speak quietly! You’ll shake the wand!”

“I greeted you quietly at first.”

“You should greet me quietly enough that I can still hear it!”

Lee Han merely smiled quietly.

Professor Verdus, without imagining that Lee Han would shout right into the ear again next time, gestured with a hand.

“Anyway, sit down. Good that you came.”

“You need my mana, I see?”

If it had been another professor, that professor would have at least pretended not to for courtesy’s sake, but Professor Verdus nodded boldly.

“That’s right! Do you know how inconvenient it was when you went outside the school during the break?”

“How unfortunate. It truly is regrettable that going outside the school during break is the rule.”

“You can stay if you have special circumstances, though. You just need to apply.”

Special circumstances? What, am I supposed to plot the murder of a professor?

As far as Lee Han could tell, in the entire long history of Einroguard there probably had not been a single person who had stayed behind during break.

“I will consider it. So where should I use my mana?”

“Here and here.”

Professor Verdus pointed at the jewels lying in a mess across the workbench.

One was an opaque gray gem with wind elements flickering inside it, and the other was a softly glowing white gem condensing pure force.

“Just these two?”

“Hm? Everything in between too!”

“……”

It was practically an order to pour mana into every material on the workbench.

Lee Han’s smile deepened slightly.

“But Professor. Today’s lecture is <Wand Materials and Magical Amplification>, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Charge them with mana.”

“I’ll ask a few questions about the lecture first and then do it. That is my rightful privilege, isn’t it?”

“Can’t you charge them with mana and then ask?”

Lee Han pretended not to hear.

Once the mana charging was done, Professor Verdus would disappear into a world of his own.

“Why am I the only student here?”

“Why are you asking me that? You should ask the other students.”

Needlessly logical. Makes me want to hit you.

Certainly, if he wanted to know why there were no students, he had to ask the students.

Still, Lee Han thought the professor should at least have some guess…

“What kind of lecture is this?”

“It’s a lecture about charging mana.”

“And what else do we do?”

When petty tricks failed, Professor Verdus grumbled and began explaining.

The ultimate goal of this lecture was, in fact, for the participating student to make a personal wand.

“…?”

Lee Han doubted his ears.

Of course, among outstanding enchanters, those who majored in artifact studies could make wands too.

But conversely, that meant you needed at least that level of experience to make one.

A wand took the role of the axis and core in the complex and unstable process by which a mage changed the world through will, while also often taking on functions such as amplification and guidance.

There were so many roles a wand played in magic that it was impossible to list them one by one.

Which naturally meant that making a wand was anything but easy…

“Can a second-year make one of those?”

“Why are you asking me that?”

Now I really do want to hit you.

When Professor Verdus used the same logic from earlier, Lee Han pulled out the excuse he had used before.

“Professor. My mana suddenly seems to have dropped, so charging may be difficult. It feels like my mana won’t rise unless I get a proper answer.”

“Since you won’t be making a wand that complicated, maybe you can?”

Professor Verdus answered kindly at once.

Of course, Lee Han did not completely believe it.

Professor Verdus has a numb sense of difficulty.

If the professor said something was easy, you had to take it as difficult, and if the professor said something was difficult, you had to take it as impossible.

“For what reason is it not complicated?”

“Can you see this right now?”

“Yes.”

“Can you see what kind of spell linkage it is?”

“Yes.”

The two geniuses calmly continued a conversation that would have made other mages burst into tears of despair if they had heard it.

The wand Professor Verdus was working on atop the workbench was far too difficult to use as a teaching aid for students.

It was an artifact being made on commission from the <Green Pyroxene Mage Tower>, where telekinetic mages had gathered.

Naturally, since it was a commission from an outside mage tower, the spells built into it were high-level, and its security was also quite thorough.

If the spells inside could be understood just by looking from the outside, the artifact’s weaknesses would become far too obvious, so a certain degree of secrecy was essential.

Since difficult spells were involved, along with spells to preserve secrecy, it was not even enough for Professor Verdus to explain them in detail, yet he was casually saying that it was fine to just look and move on.

But neither Professor Verdus nor Lee Han cared.

Because both of them were more than strange enough to count as abnormal mages.

“What you lot will do doesn’t need any of that at all. You just need to match the materials.”

“By materials, you mean…”

Instead of weaving special spells into the wand, it meant that all they had to do was get the mixing ratios of the wand’s materials right.

Of course, that still was not easy. The composition of the wand, and even the balance of its shape, could affect the magic.

Still, it is much better.

“I might be able to do it if I work at it for a year.”

“You have to do it. What are you going to do if even you can’t?”

“Professor. My mana suddenly…”

“You don’t have to!”

After teasing Professor Verdus enough, Lee Han prepared to begin working.

Originally, when it came to the carrot and stick, there had to actually be a carrot mixed in. If all you did was swing the stick, then it was just a stick.

“How much mana should I pour in?”

“As much as possible.”

Crack!

The gem in Lee Han’s hand shattered.

“Was a shattered gem what you needed?”

“You’re supposed to stop before it breaks!”

“……”

Professor Verdus forgot the careless thing said a moment ago and immediately scolded the disciple.

“You told me to put in as much as possible.”

“Did I? You have so much mana, so you can’t put in the maximum.”

“Yes…”

After pouring in mana, Lee Han sharpened his senses and extended them to detect cracks in the gem.

If it looked as though it might crack or shatter, he had to stop immediately.

As the disciple beside the professor quickly charged and infused mana, Professor Verdus became about twice as excited as usual and started working.

“Next!”

“Here it is.”

“Next!”

“Here.”

“Quickly! Next!”

“Professor. Because you’re hurrying, my mana suddenly—”

“Slowly!”

While the two worked, third-year students began entering one by one.

Then they looked at Lee Han and Professor Verdus with perplexed eyes.

…Who is that?

“Did our year have… someone like that?”

“Isn’t that a fourth-year senior?”

“Among the fourth-years, there was someone like that…?”

Einroguard’s lectures did not really have strict year restrictions, but in practice, they might as well have.

There was no reason for a second-year to come all the way into a lecture mainly taken by third-years.

Once in a while, an upper-year student with a truly unavoidable reason might beg desperately to take a lower-year lecture, but that was not common.

Which was why, to the third-year students who had come to take <Wand Materials and Magical Amplification>, Lee Han was an extremely alien presence.

They had never seen him in their year, and since he was helping Professor Verdus with work, he seemed like a fourth-year student, but had there been a fourth-year senior like that?

“Oh. Professor. Other people came.”

“I have eyes and ears too, you know?”

“…Shouldn’t you be teaching the lecture? Wait. Ah, is this <Wand Materials and Magical Amplification>?”

Lee Han was flustered because all the students had unfamiliar faces.

Still, at least with students from the same year, since he had done all sorts of things with them last year, he remembered their faces at least roughly.

“Yes, it is. Aren’t you a senior by any chance?”

“Pardon?”

“Aren’t you a fourth-year senior? You don’t need to worry too much. You can take a third-year lecture.”

“I’m a second-year…”

“……”

“……”

The atmosphere in the lecture hall turned chilly, and the third-year students whispered among themselves.

“Did Professor Verdus perhaps get annoyed and combine two lectures into the same classroom?”

“There’s no way that… could be. Actually, there could be.”

“But wasn’t he helping with the work?”

As the atmosphere became strange, Lee Han quickly said,

“Seniors. I am taking this lecture too. I’m not attending some different lecture.”

“This lecture? Isn’t it too difficult? Wouldn’t it be better to switch even now?”

“Wardanaz doesn’t matter.”

Professor Verdus waved a hand because the students were noisy.

“Wardanaz? Is that him?!”

“I think that’s him?”

“He really is different in every way…!”

That was the end of it.

The seniors quickly accepted it, then each sat down and started working.

“……”

Only Lee Han, by himself, failed to accept it and stared at the seniors.