Surviving as a Mage in a Magic Academy

“…Don’t joke around.”

“I’m not joking. Check it yourself.”

Lee Han held out the wooden box containing the fragrance. Professor Thunderstep stared at it in disbelief.

“Don’t tell me you brute-forced it with mana?!”

“Oh, was that an option? I figured the box would break if I tried.”

“…Correct.”

Professor Thunderstep knew Lee Han’s mana better than anyone, which was precisely why he had prepared additional safeguards.

If Lee Han tried to overwhelm it with mana, the wooden box would shatter on the spot. Sandalwood incense was an exceptionally delicate and intricate fragrance.

If Lee Han had shown up grimacing and saying, ‘The box exploded,’ the professor had planned to reply in a mildly pitying tone:

‘This is a fragrance-analysis test, not a destruction exercise. Try not to solve everything by blowing it up with mana.’

Snatch!

Professor Thunderstep took the box, then paused before opening it.

“Wait. Take three steps back.”

“Yes, but why?”

“No particular reason.”

“…Wait. You don’t think I’m going to attack you, do you?”

Lee Han looked genuinely incredulous.

No matter how he thought about it, that was the only explanation for the professor telling him to step away.

Professor Thunderstep awkwardly stroked his beard. His disciple’s instincts really were terrifyingly sharp.

“You could say that thought crossed my mind.”

“Isn’t that a little excessive?”

“Don’t blame me. Blame your upperclassmen.”

“There were upperclassmen who actually attacked you like this?”

“Of course there were.”

Professor Thunderstep pulled out a ring set with gray heavy stone and swept it over the wooden box. Fortunately, it detected no dangerous traps.

“Oh, what an admirable disciple. I knew I could trust you!”

“…”

Despite the praise, Lee Han’s expression remained flat.

“Don’t take it personally. This level of suspicion is practically a compliment. I don’t even bother suspecting ordinary second-years like this.”

“Why not?”

“That sort of thing usually starts in third year…”

“Hm. I see.”

Lee Han nodded thoughtfully.

The moment he saw that expression, Professor Thunderstep had a terrible realization.

‘Oh no.’

Had he just taught a baby dragon how to deceive people?

‘Well, Professor Verdus will probably suffer first anyway.’

Comforting himself with that thought, Professor Thunderstep opened the wooden box.

A gentle fragrance spread through the air in layers.

Every component of the sandalwood incense had been perfectly separated and analyzed.

“…”

At that moment, Professor Thunderstep would have been less shocked if Lee Han had actually attacked him.

The boy from House Wardanaz had always possessed a talent for astonishing people, but this was the first time the professor genuinely had no idea how it had been accomplished.

What method had he used to analyze the fragrance this flawlessly?

“By my lightning-struck beard… I can’t believe this… How did you do it?? Have you worked with sandalwood incense before during vacation?”

“No.”

“That’s not the point! Even if you managed it eventually, I expected it to take at least until the end of the weekend!”

Although Professor Thunderstep had designed the assignment specifically with Lee Han in mind, he had never underestimated his disciple’s abilities.

He had assumed Lee Han might barely complete it before the deadline.

But to solve it immediately after the day changed—

The professor was so shocked his beard nearly stood upright.

“You didn’t receive a dragon stone from Prince Jowurin, did you? No, nonsense. Even I know that’s absurd. No matter how fond His Majesty is of you, there’s no way a dragon would hand over something like that.”

Even as he said it, Professor Thunderstep shook his head.

Jowurin might still be young and childish, but a dragon was still a dragon.

The moment someone approached with greed or ulterior motives, dragons sensed it instinctively through the power in their bloodline.

If Lee Han had said, “I’ll bake you a pie, so give me a dragon stone,” Jowurin would have swatted him with a front paw without hesitation.

“He did give me one.”

“What kind of trick did you— …What?”

“I said he gave me one.”

Lee Han answered with the exhausted expression of an older sibling driven to the brink by a troublesome youngest child.

Why did Jowurin keep doing things without permission?

***

Early that morning.

After roughly finishing his other studies, Lee Han picked up the wooden box and prepared to tackle Professor Thunderstep’s assignment.

Several of his friends had already been thoroughly destroyed by this test, so he was genuinely tense as well.

‘Yonair was cursing about how this thing was designed by a demon.’

Lee Han carefully opened the lid, already thinking that after graduation they might someday unite to assault Professor Thunderstep together.

Although alchemy carried a strong association with potions, it was fundamentally the discipline of material synthesis as a whole.

Potions, metals, even chimeras—all of them fell within its domain.

And Professor Thunderstep was a true master of perfumery.

The sandalwood incense inside the box was crafted so exquisitely that merely looking at it gave Lee Han a headache.

At least he was fortunate in one regard. Unlike his friends, who reportedly experienced their consciousness drifting into other dimensions the moment they inhaled the scent, the fragrance barely affected him.

‘Black shadow sand.’

Lee Han drew out a handful of black sand from his reagent pouch and slowly scattered it across the sandalwood incense.

The grains left behind faint glowing traces.

‘Now geranium over the marks.’

Geranium petals fluttered down one by one.

One petal drifted slightly off course and brushed against the flow of the fragrance.

Instantly, the sandalwood incense churned violently inside the box and blasted away the black shadow sand.

“…”

Suppressing the urge to swear, Lee Han leaned in again.

He had to separate the fragrances one at a time somehow.

‘This won’t work. Expensive or not, I’ll use malachite.’

When people got angry, they tended to make impulsive decisions.

Lee Han immediately reached for a costly reagent he normally avoided using. He didn’t even need to check inside the pouch.

He knew every item by touch alone.

Thunk.

Lee Han grasped the ore and carefully held it over the wooden box.

The sandalwood incense suddenly rippled.

Then it split apart into dozens of separate fragrances all at once.

“?????”

Lee Han was so stunned by the abrupt transformation that he failed to notice one crucial detail.

The ore in his hand wasn’t malachite green.

It was gold.

Meanwhile, the sandalwood incense had already been completely analyzed.

The entire situation was so absurd that Lee Han briefly wondered whether he was dreaming.

‘What?’

For a moment, he wondered if he had accidentally discovered some entirely new application for malachite.

Then he finally realized something was very wrong with the ore in his hand.

The power radiating from within it was extraordinary.

The color was wrong for one thing—his actual malachite was still inside the pouch—and inside the golden ore swirled constantly shifting energies, as though the essences of hundreds or thousands of reagents had been compressed into a single mass.

A soft light endlessly flowed from it.

One reagent capable of replacing hundreds or thousands of others.

It resembled a philosopher’s stone.

Of course, a real philosopher’s stone could never # Nоvеlight # be left lying around at room temperature. It would require multiple layers of magical sealing merely to store safely.

So this wasn’t a philosopher’s stone.

If there was a comparable substance, it would be—

A dragon stone.

“…Jowurin! Jowurin!!”

Realizing the truth at last, Lee Han kicked back his chair and sprang to his feet.

The baby basilisk coiled inside his sleeve opened its eyes in alarm before immediately closing them again.

“Jowurin, you—!”

What’s wrong?

Jowurin, who had obviously been pretending to sleep while waiting for this exact moment, opened her eyes as though she had only just awakened.

Lee Han fixed the young dragon with an icy stare. Somehow, “Your Majesty” had disappeared from his vocabulary.

“There’s a dragon stone in my reagent pouch. Any idea who put it there?”

Jowrin knows nothing.

Jowurin blinked innocently.

More importantly, did the rosewood problem get solved? What happened?

“Quiet. I’m asking you something right now.”

…

Jowurin folded her wings slightly, intimidated by Lee Han’s harsher-than-expected tone.

Still, she wasn’t frightened yet.

She had a trump card.

“Jowurin. Dragon stones are extremely rare materials. Only dragons can produce them.”

Jowrin knows that too.

‘Is she insane?!’

Gainando trembled in horror at Jowurin’s stubborn response.

This was the moment to beg for forgiveness immediately, not provoke Lee Han further.

As someone with extensive experience losing arguments, Gainando understood perfectly that this kind of defiance only led to disaster.

He wasn’t the only one nervous.

Several students who had once been mercilessly crushed after saying things like “I trained my intellect through chess, not chores” or “I came here to study magic, not clean dormitories” swallowed hard as they watched the exchange.

…Wardanaz looks like the type who’d flick even a dragon on the forehead…!

“But somehow, a dragon stone that definitely wasn’t in my reagent pouch yesterday suddenly appeared overnight. And coincidentally, there just happens to be one dragon in the common room who talked about dragon stones before. So who could possibly be responsible?”

Hehe. There’s one thing Lee Han forgot.

“…What did I forget?”

As Gonadaltes said, and as Lee Han himself said, at Einroguard you’re innocent unless there’s evidence! No matter how suspicious Jowrin looks, if nobody caught her in the act, then she’s innocent!

Jowurin proudly invoked one of Einroguard’s sacred principles.

This was exactly what she had been relying on.

Einroguard’s treasured school rules guaranteed student freedom unless there was concrete evidence or the offender was caught red-handed.

It was one of the two great freedoms supporting the academy, alongside the Skull Principal’s freedom to torment students however he pleased.

“True enough.”

Hehe. Jowrin is clever. Now then, Lee Han! What happened with the rosewood?

Spreading her wings triumphantly, Jowurin shouted proudly.

“You’re grounded.”

Lee Han replied coldly before turning away.

…Huh? H-Huhhh?

Jowurin froze in shock.

But her logic had been flawless!!

Why!? Lee Han! According to Einroguard’s rules—

“Y-Your Majesty… that is technically true, but…”

The students answered hesitantly.

“There’s one thing you overlooked.”

What did Jowrin overlook!?

Jowurin was practically in tears.

“He can just ignore the rules…”

Einroguard students weren’t exactly famous for respecting regulations in the first place.

…

Only then did Jowurin finally realize the fatal flaw in her argument.

“Lee Han! Lee Han! Jowrin was wrong!”

But Lee Han had already disappeared upstairs.

Gainando shook his head gravely.

“This is bad. It’s level-five anger.”

“…Level-five anger. That’s really bad…”

Jowurin had no idea what level-five anger meant, but she understood instinctively that it was catastrophic.

Servant! What should Jowrin do? How can she calm Lee Han down?

“Uh… well…”

Gainando faltered awkwardly.

If he knew the answer to that, he wouldn’t spend half his life apologizing and begging for mercy himself.

“At this point… I think your only option is to assume you’re dead and keep begging…”

Lee Han! Jowrin was wrong!

Following the expert advice, Jowurin immediately began shouting toward the upper floor.

Creak.

A private room door opened upstairs.

The young dragon brightened instantly.

Servant! Lee Han came out!

‘No way. He’s forgiving her already just because she begged a little?!’

For some reason, Gainando suddenly felt deeply wronged.

Does he go easy on her because she’s an actual dragon!?

But Lee Han didn’t come downstairs.

Instead, another creature sluggishly crawled down.

It was the baby basilisk.

“-…Master kicked me out and told me to live with Your Majesty… waaah…!!!”

…Uwaaaah!

The two baby rare creatures burst into tears so loudly that the entire common room shook.