The academy they entered stood apart from the rest of Coria like a heart chamber powering the city’s mechanical pulse. Its fa?ade was all reinforced steel and etched glass, heat vents breathing steady streams of steam that coiled into the morning fog. Inside, the air was cool but heavy with the scent of oil, crystal dust, and ozone.

  Linne had already split off toward another building, carrying her case of crystalline arrays for her mana synthesis lecture. That left Dalan to guide Ludger through the wide iron corridor toward the mechanics wing.

  Every few meters, wall panels displayed diagrams of gears, conduits, and golem limbs. Some were still mid-drawing, ink quills sketching lines on their own, guided by hovering runes that adjusted precision strokes in real time. Apprentices hurried past with stacks of parchment or sealed mana tubes, offering Dalan quick bows before darting off again.

  “This way,” Dalan said, clearly in his element. “We’re teaching advanced applications today, load balancing, structural feedback, control-core calibration. You’ll see the backbone of every machine that runs this city.”

  Ludger followed silently, hands in his coat pockets. The further they walked, the more the corridor began to remind him of something half-forgotten. Rows of identical doors, nameplates of professors, the faint murmur of voices and tools clinking from every room.

  When they finally reached the lecture hall, the familiarity hit him harder than expected.

  The room opened into a large, sloped amphitheater lined with tiered benches, every surface spotless and arranged with precision. A dozen projector crystals hung overhead, humming softly, ready to display schematics onto the massive wall screen. A faint smell of chalk and ozone clung to the air.

  Ludger’s brow creased. It looks like a damn college lecture hall, he thought.

  The shape, the acoustics, even the bored murmur of students waiting for the class to start, it all stirred something uncomfortably nostalgic from his previous life. He hadn’t expected that.

  As he stepped in with Dalan, the background chatter shifted. Dozens of heads turned. The students were young, late teens, early twenties, all wearing the same sleeveless coats marked with the Academy’s gear-and-sigil crest. Their eyes flicked over Ludger, and their expressions tightened almost as one.

  He wasn’t one of them. Whispers rippled through the room, curiosity mixed with suspicion. Some students tried to look subtle, others didn’t bother. One muttered something under his breath about “outsiders,” another crossed his arms and stared like he was gauging a rival.

  Dalan didn’t seem to notice or care. He strode straight to the front, setting down a metal case on the central desk. “Settle down,” he called out. “We have a visitor observing today. Don’t glare; he’s not here to steal your notes.”

  The students gave polite laughter that didn’t sound very polite.

  Ludger remained standing off to the side, his posture relaxed but his gaze sharp. He wasn’t bothered by the cold looks, he’d seen worse in war councils and border taverns, but the atmosphere told him everything he needed to know. Competition here wasn’t quiet or friendly; it was bred into their bones. Every glance was an evaluation, a calculation.

  Dalan clapped his hands, and a series of projection runes flared to life above the desk. A three-dimensional diagram of a golem’s shoulder joint appeared, gears meshing in slow rotation. “All right,” he said, voice steady with practiced enthusiasm. “Let’s review mechanical resonance and why half of you keep blowing your test models apart.”

  Ludger found a seat in the back, the faint smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth fading into focus. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes following every flicker of the runes.

  He wasn’t here to impress anyone. He was here to learn. And if this city believed its machines had no secrets left to discover, he was ready to prove them wrong.

  Dalan began the lecture with the calm authority of someone who had long since stopped needing to read from notes.

  “Mechanics,” he said, his voice carrying easily through the vaulted hall, “isn’t about strength or precision. It’s about rhythm — the balance between motion and resistance. Most apprentices think building a golem arm is like forging a sword. It’s not. It’s closer to composing a song.”

  He flicked a switch on his desk, and a section of the floor slid open with a hiss of pressurized air. From below, a mechanical limb rose on a platform — a human-sized arm of interlocking steel, rune-laced veins of copper and quartz running through its joints. The students straightened instantly.

  Dalan grinned faintly. “Now, let’s see how many of you remember your resonance ratios.”

  He reached into his coat pocket and drew out a control rod, its tip etched with a spiral rune. With a twist of his wrist, the arm came alive — the fingers flexing, the wrist rotating, every movement fluid and unnervingly organic. The sound wasn’t the grinding of gears but the soft hum of harmonized mana.

  “Observe,” he continued. “Mana drives the limb, but mechanical feedback keeps it stable. If you force mana directly through the core without tuning the regulators…”

  He flicked another rune, and a secondary arm activated beside the first — this one misaligned, its energy lines glowing unevenly. The result was immediate: the elbow joint locked with a sharp crack, a hiss of steam bursting from a vent. The arm seized mid-motion, shaking violently.

  “—you get that. Overloaded feedback. Mana input exceeds structural capacity.” Dalan waved the control rod, cutting the flow. The damaged arm went limp.

  Some students scribbled notes furiously; others leaned forward, analyzing every angle. A few exchanged smug looks — the kind of faces that thought they already knew better.

  Ludger sat near the back, one hand resting against his chin, eyes narrowed in focus. He followed every step, every rune pattern, every stabilizing motion.

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  The level of detail here was far beyond anything the Empire allowed public access to. The League’s engineers weren’t just combining metal and magic — they were marrying them.

  Still, for all the complexity, the principles were clear. Inputs, flows, ratios, stability — it was all about understanding how mana behaved when forced through a vessel that wasn’t alive.

  He leaned back slightly, tapping a finger against his chin. So this is their foundation, he thought. If this is the advanced level, the basics must deal with conversion rates, mana conductivity, and core attunement.

  And that… might be enough.

  He could feel the faint hum of his own mana reacting to what he was seeing — a familiar tingling in his fingertips, that subtle tension that came whenever his mind pieced something together in a way the System recognized. The beginnings of a trigger.

  He didn’t expect to unlock anything from watching alone, but systems had their own logic. Sometimes knowledge itself — when properly understood — was power.

  Dalan moved through more demonstrations. He adjusted rotation axes, swapped out plates, and walked through the delicate act of balancing load distribution between mechanical leverage and mana flow. The diagrams shifted above him in real-time, drawn directly from the limb’s internal sensors.

  “This,” Dalan said, tapping a glowing point on the display, “is where most engineers fail. They treat metal as passive. But every material responds to mana differently — steel sings, bronze hums, crystal vibrates. You must listen to what your material tells you before you force it to obey.”

  That line hit Ludger harder than he expected.

  Listen to what the material tells you.

  His mind flashed to the feeling of stone under his palms, the way the ground whispered tension and grain when he used geomancy. Different element, same principle.

  Maybe he didn’t need a golem to understand this system. Maybe he just needed to translate it into his own language.

  He rubbed his chin again, suppressing the faint smirk tugging at his mouth. If the System’s watching, he thought, then it’s about to learn I’m fluent in more than one craft.

  For now, though, he just kept watching, calm, patient, letting every new principle sink into his memory. He didn’t need to stand out here. He only needed to absorb enough to make something happen.

  Dalan’s voice carried clearly through the hall, steady and precise even as his hands moved faster than most eyes could follow.

  “Every construct lives or dies by the quality of its mana flow,” he said, disengaging the bolts that held the arm’s plating in place. “The core provides energy, but the veins determine how that energy behaves. Think of them as nerves, they must carry mana in rhythm, not just quantity.”

  The outer casing of the golem arm came apart piece by piece, each segment clicking loose under the careful pressure of his rune-wrench. Students leaned forward as the shining bronze veins beneath came into view, thin channels etched with spiraling sigils that pulsed faintly blue with contained energy.

  “This,” Dalan continued, tapping a conduit line, “is the arterial pathway. It carries compressed mana from the heart core to the joint nodes. The veins themselves are made of quartz-infused copper, stabilized with a thin shell of enchanted resin to prevent overload.”

  One by one, he dismantled the limb until the desk was covered in parts, plates, gears, channels, and crystalline conduits arranged with perfect symmetry. The faint hum of mana persisted, even with the arm disassembled, like the ghost of the machine refusing to die.

  Ludger, sitting near the back, watched the process with narrow, calculating eyes. His fingers itched. Each movement, each mechanism, reminded him of the logic of geomancy, form dictating flow, precision shaping stability.

  As Dalan turned to write a diagram on the projection board, Ludger let one hand drift toward his coat. His fingers brushed the small sand pouch he always carried, emergency material for shaping weapons or sealing ground traps. Quietly, he pulled it open beneath the desk.

  His mana pulsed once, muted, unseen. The grains stirred. Beneath the table, the sand flowed like liquid, shaping itself into miniature copies of the dismantled components on the desk, a smaller core, a tiny conduit, the faint pattern of runic lines etched by mana precision alone. Ludger wasn’t forging anything functional; he was mirroring what he saw, translating it through the earth the way others did through tools.

  He moved carefully, masking the energy signature beneath the ambient hum of the hall. No one noticed, not the whispering students, not Dalan engrossed in explanation.

  The replicas took form, floating in his palm for half a heartbeat before turning to dust again.

  That was when the ping echoed faintly inside his head.

  A familiar blue shimmer flickered at the edge of his vision, translucent and unmistakable.

  Job Unlocked: Sculptor (Master: Dalan)

  New Skill Acquired: Sculptor’s Touch Lv.01

  Sculptor’s Touch (Lv.01): Enhances control and finesse when shaping raw materials such as stone, metal, or wood. Improves detail precision and aesthetic harmony of crafted works. Slightly increases structural stability when creating artistic or symbolic constructs.

  Bonus per Level: +5 DEX, +5 LUK

  Ludger froze for a second, staring at the message only he could see.

  Then his brow furrowed deeply.

  Sculptor?

  He had been expecting something mechanical — Engineer, Mechanist, maybe even Rune Craftsman. But Sculptor? That sounded like a title for someone who carved furniture, not someone dissecting mana engines.

  The message faded, and he pinched the bridge of his nose in quiet frustration. He’d aimed for practical innovation and gotten a glorified craftsman’s license instead.

  Still, he could feel the new awareness settling in, a finer understanding of material texture, balance, density. His geomancy senses had sharpened subtly, like he could hear the resonance of each element better now.

  Dalan’s voice snapped his focus back to the front. “As you can see,” he said, reassembling the joint with a clean twist of the wrench, “everything depends on precision. A single misaligned line, and the entire structure collapses.”

  Ludger exhaled slowly through his nose, half amused, half annoyed. Yeah, he thought, tell me about it.

  He leaned back, letting the faintest smirk touch his lips as the class scribbled notes around him. He hadn’t meant to learn a new craft today. But the System apparently had its own sense of humor.