A full week passed with Rein keeping himself within DVM’s borders.

  He moved through the Academy like air—there only when he had no choice.

  He showed up to class with perfect punctuality… and the moment a Master dismissed the lesson, he blurred away like smoke—leaving behind only the faint confusion of classmates who barely noticed when he arrived, or when he disappeared.

  The nickname “Monster of Devil’s Den” began spreading in whispers.

  But that was just the mask—something Rein wore to hide a regimen that gambled against the limits of his own body.

  In the outside world, every time he returned from LIZ’s dimension, he spent at least four hours a day running Haste and Might Enhance through his body—again and again.

  It was the sound of a hammer hitting an anvil, and the anvil was his own skeleton.

  He could feel his bones growing denser—reforged in the heat of his own mana. His tendons tightened into coiled wire, snapping back with a cold, elastic violence.

  All of it for one purpose:

  To make sure that when he activated Vortex Drive at maximum output, his body wouldn’t shatter under the G-force waiting to crush him.

  And when he slipped back into the silence of the Mana Realm, his work only became more complex.

  He spent most of his time relentlessly tuning CUBE Synchronization, chasing the harmony until the magical cube felt like a thirty-third organ—something that belonged to his own anatomy.

  On top of that, he trained his concentration until his mind could withstand the flood of data LIZ poured into his HUD.

  If his brain processed a single frame wrong…

  a speed measured in hundreds of kilometers per hour would turn into a one-way ticket to the underworld.

  Some days, Rein emerged from the Mana Realm with blurred vision, starving to the point of collapse.

  Yet every day, the same simple kind of “encouragement” waited by his door:

  A warm bag of food from Kingdom Zone—delivered in turns by Boris and Mira.

  It was the only thread that still tied him to reality—

  and the only reason he kept moving forward on a path no one else dared to walk.

  After a full week of that private hell, Rein opened his door looking absolutely wrecked.

  Dark circles swallowed his eyes until they were nearly black. His body was undeniably stronger and sharper from the brutal training… but the alternating research sessions—the Mana Realm to reality, reality to the Mana Realm—had hollowed out his face until he looked like a punk-rock band member who forgot to wash off his eyeshadow.

  What surprised him was the person waiting outside.

  Not Boris or Mira.

  It was Ingrid.

  Before Rein could even greet her, the blonde girl in glasses shoved him back into the room and slammed the door shut behind her.

  “Hey—wait! People are going to misunderstand, you glasses demon!”

  Rein started protesting in a hoarse voice, but Ingrid didn’t spare him even a fraction of attention.

  She opened the brown leather bag slung over her shoulder, pulled out a small glass vial, and held up a crystal-clear pink potion.

  It smelled fresh—nothing like the usual stamina mixtures he’d suffered before.

  “Drink it,” Ingrid ordered flatly, “before you turn into a real undead.”

  “A zombie has not bitten me,” Rein argued weakly. “How am I supposed to turn undead?”

  “In your current condition,” she shot back, “even a zombie would look at you and call you family. Drink. It.”

  The last words weren’t a suggestion.

  Rein grimaced, swallowed hard.

  For him, fighting a werewolf was less terrifying than becoming a test subject for Ingrid’s newest formula.

  But when he met the green glare behind those silver-framed lenses, he knew there was no escape.

  In the end, he tipped the potion down his throat.

  And then—

  …he froze.

  The taste was completely unexpected.

  Sweet. Soft. Floral.

  Like distilled wildflowers.

  A faint pollen scent bloomed across his mouth, and within seconds the exhaustion he’d carried for an entire week washed away, like it had never been there.

  His body felt light.

  His mind cleared—sharp again.

  “Wow…” Rein let the praise slip out before he could stop himself. “Your skills leveled up.”

  Ingrid’s mouth curved with quiet satisfaction.

  Then she began placing more vials on the table in neat rows: recovery potions for vitality and mana, anti-fatigue mixtures, and boosters for speed, strength, and more.

  “You’re going to need all of this… from here on out,” she said, her expression turning serious.

  Rein blinked, about to argue that he could handle it—only for Ingrid to speak first, as if she’d read his mind.

  “I already heard everything from Mira,” Ingrid said. “The student council is moving.”

  “Marcus Crown filed an official complaint. They convened an emergency council meeting, and there’s a very high chance that today they’ll issue an order to have you ‘brought in’ for questioning.”

  “It’s an investigation,” Rein replied evenly. “I’ll tell them the truth. They were the ones who started it—they came in a pack, a dozen of them.”

  “If I hadn’t defended myself, I wouldn’t be standing here. I’d be lying in the Vault… or a graveyard.”

  Ingrid sat down, arms crossed. Anxiety sharpened her gaze behind the lenses.

  “I know.”

  “But problems like this aren’t about who’s right or wrong, Rein.”

  “The problem is the student council…”

  “No—more specifically, it’s their Guardian Unit.”

  “Those people are infamous for one thing: they never stop at ‘enough.’”

  Ingrid’s brows knit.

  “I’m a healer. I’ve seen it firsthand. Students come back half-dead because the Guardians claim the target ‘resisted.’ Once mages start fighting, they stop holding back—some of them end up one mistake away from crippled if we don’t reach them in time.”

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  “So you’re worried I’ll get hurt,” Rein said, lifting the vials one by one to catch the light, “so you brought me a whole pharmacy.”

  “No,” Ingrid said, standing. “I know exactly how strong you are.”

  She didn’t soften.

  “But sooner or later, every mage runs dry—mana gone, stamina gone. And when that day comes, these might be the only thing that lets you escape alive.”

  She walked to the door, then paused and looked back at him.

  “Consider it repayment for what you did for me. This batch is free.”

  She paused.

  “But if you like it… next order gets a special twenty-percent discount. Delivered straight to your room.”

  “Here. My discount card.”

  In one swift motion, Ingrid set a small card on the table near the door, then left the room, shutting it behind her.

  Rein stood there, staring at the line of potions—and the discount card—with a strange, quiet weight settling in his chest.

  Outside, the air had turned cold enough that the chill seeped through the window cracks.

  Rein chose a harsher wake-up.

  He splashed icy water over his face, forcing his senses fully awake.

  Then he grabbed the jet-black cloak—DVM’s signature uniform—and draped it over his shoulders.

  He slid his black pen neatly into his chest pocket.

  And one by one, he began dropping Ingrid’s vials into his cloak pocket.

  That was when he noticed something strange.

  The pocket looked flat—barely wide enough to slip in a hand.

  Yet it swallowed more than ten glass vials without leaving the slightest bulge.

  Rein’s lips curved with quiet satisfaction.

  “I should thank Kellen’s space-expansion spell… and the fact that LIZ successfully rewrote the Ekhosar code.”

  This wasn’t a miracle. It was high-level magical engineering. Rein had inscribed a space-expansion ring into the pocket’s inner fabric—then anchored it through his own body, siphoning mana straight from the Mana Realm. With LIZ’s optimized circuit, the micro-dimension stayed stable at a fraction of the usual cost.

  The pocket’s internal storage was nearly ten times larger than it looked.

  Now he wasn’t just prepared in body and magic.

  Now he carried a concealed personal armory beneath his black cloak.

  The last thing he stored was Ingrid’s discount card.

  Then he stepped out of Room 13, locked the door calmly, and headed down into the lower levels of DVM.

  Along the corridor that used to feel empty, students slowed—then stopped to stare.

  Strange eyes followed him. Whispers trailed behind like dust in cold air.

  Rein didn’t acknowledge a single one of them.

  Not long after, he reached the front doors of the DVM building.

  It was the first time in a week he’d stepped out into the open—feeling the crisp winter air of Arath against his skin and letting the late-morning sunlight fall on him directly.

  Rein rolled his shoulders, stretched his limbs, drew a deep breath into his lungs… then exhaled it as a plume of white vapor.

  Behind him, Boris and Mira came running, worry written across their faces.

  In front of him, however, a line of ten figures approached in perfect formation—white uniforms, gray cloaks, and the red-and-black armband that marked them as the Student Council.

  Each of them carried a magic staff openly in hand.

  That, Rein knew, was a privilege only council members were allowed to display in public.

  “The Guardian Unit is coming, Rein!” Boris shouted from a distance.

  But before he could finish the warning, Rein standing in the sunlight simply… slipped out of the world.

  Mira blinked hard and rubbed her eyes in disbelief.

  “Wait—he was standing right there, wasn’t he?”

  The most confused weren’t the two figures.

  It was the ten Guardians.

  Their expressions faltered as their target disappeared in plain sight.

  “W-What the hell is this?!” the leader blurted, panic flashing across his face. He barked orders with a trembling voice. “Spread out and search the area, now! He has to be hiding nearby!”

  “Is it an illusion spell?” one subordinate asked, already starting a detection cast.

  “That guy’s from Devil’s Den,” another spat, scanning left and right. “Those freaks are all the same—specialized in escape routes, not stand-up fights!”

  For nearly half an hour, the Guardian Unit tore through the DVM vicinity and the lecture complex, turning the area inside out.

  They found nothing but emptiness.

  “Where the hell did he go?” the leader muttered, sweat soaking his face.

  Then a messenger spell-bird swooped down with an urgent report.

  “What?! He’s standing out in the open in front of the Department of Elemental Magic?! That’s impossible—wait… we had every entrance and exit covered. When did he get past us?!”

  He immediately signaled for a regroup and sprinted toward the Elemental Department, leaving Boris and Mira staring after them in stunned silence.

  “What do you think Rein is doing, Boris?” Mira asked, her voice uncertain.

  “I don’t know,” Boris answered, eyes narrowed in thought. “But it doesn’t look like he’s running.”

  “If he wanted to run, he’d be in the Kingdom Zone within thirty minutes—or out of the Academy entirely. He wouldn’t waste time looping around the Department of Elemental Magic.”

  “Yeah…” Mira shook her head, like the situation was too ridiculous to be real. “This feels like… he’s playing tag.”

  “Don’t be so sure, Mira,” Boris murmured, and his short-haired friend stared at him blankly. “Maybe Rein really is doing something that stupid.”

  They weren’t wrong.

  Rein wasn’t running away.

  He was playing tag—on purpose.

  He sat calmly on the long stone bridge leading to the Department of Elemental Magic until the Guardian Unit closed to within a hundred feet.

  Then his body blurred out of existence again—gone in a blink.

  To everyone watching, it looked like a miracle.

  Rein knew better.

  He was moving from point to point at extreme speed, continuously—using nothing more than an ordinary Haste spell.

  Most people didn’t realize Rein’s body had already reached Bronze Warrior standards long before the Academy. With Haste layered on top, he moved like a Silver.

  True, this trick wouldn’t work against those on the Warrior Path—fighters trained to read airflow and respond with their entire body.

  But for mages who relied almost entirely on eyesight and mana-detection…

  Rein slipping into their blind spots now was faster than their brains could process.

  You rely on magic too much and forget the human body has latency.

  He launched himself upward and landed as lightly as a feather on the roof of an Arcadia Tram, then hopped off at another station and strolled through campus like he had nowhere else to be.

  A week on Arath—bio-hacking his own body for four hours a day—had hardened his lungs and heart against sustained workload, until fatigue barely registered.

  Three hours later, the Guardian Unit looked ruined—like a patrol that had marched straight through hell.

  Their once-pristine white uniforms were drenched, clinging to their bodies. The arrogance had drained from their faces, replaced by pallor and exhaustion.

  They staggered, discipline forgotten.

  Rein, who had been waiting on the Kingdom Zone platform for nearly half an hour, exhaled softly as he watched the pack of hunting dogs crawl toward him.

  A bag of roasted peanuts sat in his hand—bought to quiet his hunger.

  He tossed a few into his mouth, leisurely, then rose and waved down at them with a pleasant smile.

  “Thanks for the escort.”

  “But I think you need to rest more than I do.”

  And then he was gone.

  Only emptiness remained… and a few peanut shells that fluttered to the ground.

  The ten Guardians collapsed onto the platform as if their legs had been cut out from under them. One even let his staff slip from his fingers in despair.

  Their ragged breathing echoed across the quiet station.

  This defeat wasn’t because they lacked magical power.

  It was because, physically, they’d failed completely.

  Rein—now perched atop a nearby lamppost—looked down on the miserable scene with a flat, unreadable gaze.

  “The Academy really should add physical education to the curriculum…”

  He let the line fall like an afterthought—

  and disappeared again.

  Only the metal pole remained, trembling faintly from the enormous force he’d left behind.

  …

  “This,” Rein whistled softly, turning the page of a book piled high in front of him, “is what paradise looks like.”

  He had hauled an entire stack of tomes into a private reading corner tucked into a dead angle of the building—so obscure that almost no one ever came here.

  The Central Magic Library rose in the Knowledge Zone like a fortress of burnt-brown brick and ancient stone. Monastery arches. Massive columns. A quiet severity that made even footsteps feel guilty.

  Inside, a vast circular court opened all the way to the topmost floor.

  Above it hung an enormous white dome—not merely a roof, but a magical lens that pulled sunlight from outside, filtered it, and poured it down the curved walls like golden water.

  It lit the oak shelves packed with hundreds of thousands of books—turning them into a labyrinth of paper, ink, and silence.

  The scent of aged pages mixed with enchanted ink, filling the cool air—quiet enough that even a clock’s ticking felt loud.

  Like the libraries of his old world, this place was calm, plain, and forgotten by students who chased excitement over knowledge.

  Which, for Rein, was exactly the point.

  Normally, he came here once a week—after Master Bloom’s class.

  He leaned back into a thick armchair, letting the dome’s light fall perfectly across the page.

  The Guardians would never find him in a four-story maze with tens of thousands of hiding places…

  At least, not for the next few hours.

  “All right, LIZ,” Rein murmured, eyes returning to the text. “Let’s get back to hunting the roots of that ‘lizard’ language.”

  These entries expand the lore and mechanics introduced in this chapter.

  Completely optional—read only if you enjoy diving deeper into the system.

  Organization

  Guardian Unit

  A special combat-oriented division under the Student Council, notorious for extreme measures. They are licensed to carry staves in public and are known to use excessive force during enforcement. According to Ingrid, many students end up severely injured after encounters with this unit.

  Items & Artifacts

  Rein’s Cloak Pocket (Space-Expansion)

  Rein’s standard DVM uniform has been modified using advanced magical engineering. With LIZ’s help, he inscribed a space-expansion spell into the inner fabric of his cloak, then anchored it to the Mana Realm. The resulting pocket functions as a micro-dimension, holding more items than physically possible without showing any bulge.

  Ingrid’s Potion Kit

  A custom kit of high-performance elixirs crafted by Ingrid:

  – Recovery Potions (Vitality and Mana)

  – Anti-Fatigue Mixtures

  – Boosters (Speed, Strength, etc.)

  Each is finely tuned beyond standard Academy blends. Rein notes their floral taste and the almost immediate revival effect. This marks a major evolution in Ingrid’s alchemical skill.

  Ingrid’s Discount Card

  Ingrid leaves Rein a custom “discount card” for future potion purchases—blending humor with emotional subtext. Though played off lightly, it serves as a personal gesture and reminder of her gratitude.

  Location

  Central Magic Library

  A towering four-story archive in the Knowledge Zone. Built like a fortress with monastery aesthetics, it is magically lit by a solar lens dome. This rarely visited location becomes Rein’s temporary refuge—a metaphorical safe zone that also reflects his love of knowledge and introverted nature.