The last night before leaving Valderun should have been a time of relaxation. Orion had achieved almost every goal he had set for himself, from advancing to tier two to building a network with emerging leaders in other factions and even helping his father become Speaker.

  By any reasonable measure, he had been extremely successful and should have been able to ease off the gas and relax for a while before needing to return to the Sanctum.

  The next few months were bound to be very stressful, even though his mother could now protect him from Morliana, so he looked forward to relaxing.

  Instead, he was back in his lab, tirelessly working through his calculations to come up with something he could give Yue.

  He’d initially been tempted to just blow her off. It wasn’t like she’d chase after him, and by the time he came back, he wouldn’t technically be under her jurisdiction anymore, so he should be safe, but the promise of repayment from the Sanctum’s First Alchemist was not something he could ignore.

  “The biggest problem I face is that I don’t know how their methods work,” he muttered, pacing back and forth. "It’s probably through some kind of faith, but I haven’t been lucky enough to catch anyone inspecting others, and since I am a born and raised member of the Sanctum, I haven’t experienced that myself. Not that I know of, at least.”

  It was possible that it happened during the tense period after the ghoul attack, but he didn’t have any Trait to notice such things back then.

  The one thing he knew was that whatever method it was, it lacked the depth and clarity his own possessed. That was fascinating, considering that Yue, as a tier four, should have a much, much greater connection to the System than he did, and thus be able to pull more and better quality data, but she’d admitted that seeing Traits was beyond her.

  “She is an Alchemist, not a mage, so it makes sense that her methods aren’t very advanced, but I doubt she manages all the layers of protection herself. A witch inclined toward pure magic should be able to create something better.”

  But then, that wasn’t necessarily true, was it? He knew for a fact that the Sanctum frowned upon excessive research into System Mechanics, viewing it as a divine artifact meant for religious ceremonies, not something to be poked and prodded as Orion had done.

  Then, what did they do to get any information at all? If he could just figure that out, he could slap something together and get paid without leaving suspicions that might haunt him later.

  The problem was that his mother wasn’t available to help him right now. Yue was keeping her close while they reviewed all the information they had gathered from the spy, and Orion couldn’t just barge in and ask for help, or he’d basically admit that he wasn’t sharing his method with her.

  Kissea was his next best option, so Orion closed his lab and moved through the dark corridors, allowing the spatial magic to guide him toward his etiquette teacher.

  The journey took him outside and into the gardens, where the magic lost clarity, and he had to move on his own two feet. He was surprised to see the old Magistra having what smelled like herbal tea with another elderly woman, someone he hadn’t thought about in a long time.

  “Magistrae,” he greeted cautiously, eyeing Abella warily. The last time he’d seen her, she was hiding in the bushes, spying on his conversation with Zania.

  She was much more relaxed now, which softened much of the harshness he remembered in her face.

  Her eyes lifted to meet his, and for the first time, he saw no hostility there. “Boy,” she said. The word was still somewhat demeaning, but her tone lacked heat.

  “Orion,” Kissea smiled over the rim of her cup, took a sip, and set it back down. “What brings you here at this hour? I hope you don’t need my help packing; you’re well past the age when I’d agree.”

  Orion rolled his eyes. “No, that’s not why I am here,” he said, then paused. This whole matter was sensitive enough that he was hesitant to bring it up with Kissea, much less when Abella was around, regardless of the reduced hostility.

  “Oh, don’t worry about her. You can speak,” Kissea said, and Abella smirked. The expression was so out of place on the usually stern and pinched woman that he almost couldn’t recognize her.

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  “What’s going on?” he asked instead. Something felt off, but [Hypotheticism] wasn’t revealing anything new to him. While examining the woman, he learned that Abella had increased a level since his last check, and was now at one hundred and nineteen, but also that she was exactly who she appeared to be.

  “I told you he wouldn’t get it, not unless you told him,” Abella said.

  Kissea sighed and nodded. “I guess I had too high expectations, but I believe he can be forgiven, considering everything that’s been demanding his attention. It’s a miracle he managed to find even one spy. Why would he second-guess every interaction he has with someone in the embassy when his life is so chaotic?”

  “I would like an explanation,” Orion said firmly.

  The two old women exchanged similarly amused smiles, but finally, Kissea told him. “The Lunar Sanctum is an old organization, Orion. One that has survived the test of the centuries and existed long before Mallon brought the factions together to form Cyril. We have our own ways of doing things, and one of those is to keep some people around strategic assets, especially when they are away from the coven.”

  “These people are bound not to interfere,” Abella said for herself, “sworn to allow the buds to bloom on their own, lest they get smothered. We are to follow the pace they set, and only pull back when our charges realize the error of their ways.”

  “Within reason, of course,” Kissea finished, and Abella nodded sagely.

  “Do you mean to say,” Orion sounded the words out slowly, confused by the implications, “that you were only so hostile at first because Zania was hostile, and that you had to follow her lead as her protector?”

  Considering how rare extra-rankers were, it made sense to keep an eye on them, but it didn’t really align with what he knew about the Sanctum’s teaching methods. They were usually much stricter and didn’t tolerate foolishness.

  But that’s not necessarily true. I was allowed to do anything I wanted until Morliana stepped in, and even she only really escalated things in the end. Selene, for example, didn’t follow the preordained path, and she was let off most of the time, whereas others would have been punished.

  That wasn’t to say they weren’t strict, but it was becoming clear that their child-rearing methods were more complex than he’d initially assumed.

  “That is exactly what I said,” Abella confirmed, and Kissea nodded in approval.

  “See, I told you he’d get it,” she said, before shaking her head, “well, now that the cat’s out of the bag, you should feel free to ask what’s on your mind.”

  It took Orion a moment to remember why he had been looking for her, but the urgency of the situation forced him to set aside the fact that he had been assigned a minder instead of a teacher, and that she would have let him do almost anything as long as it wasn’t openly blasphemous.

  “How much do you know of what Elder Yue asked of me?”

  Kissea shared a look with Abella before humming and tapping a nail against the porcelain cup. “I wasn’t made privy to everything, but I do know she’s interested in how you figured out about the spy, since he escaped our usual methods.”

  “That’s good enough,” Orion muttered. “I don’t really want to reveal everything about my methods, so it would be helpful if I could understand how the standard checks work, and I could just give her that part.”

  It was a thin cover, but he had made a name for himself as something of an innovator, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that he was hesitant to share the fruits of his labor, especially with Kissea, who knew him better than most.

  “I can’t share everything,” Kissea said apologetically, “but I suppose giving you a few basic hints isn’t that bad. As you know, the System is the Moon Mother’s creation, meant to help humanity against the dark tides. Through proper prayers, its shadow can be visualized, at least in the way it casts around people in the mortal world. That is what we study.”

  Orion stared for a long moment before sighing. “I guess that will have to do. Thanks.”

  Back in his lab, he drummed his fingers against the workbench, trying to coax his brain into coming up with an idea. It was obvious to him that the Sanctum’s method was more like divination than the real-time data analysis his glasses performed, and if there was one branch of magic he was terrible at, it was divination.

  Oh, he could find specific items or places quite well now, especially with the control the CC gave him, but it was very data-dependent, while the Sanctum’s method was so vague that they could, for once, claim better results than him.

  They simply needed to wish to find something very difficult, and they would succeed. Selene, in particular, was a prodigy at it, and it drove him crazy, but he wasn’t stupid enough to deny its power just because he couldn’t replicate it yet.

  Still, there must be something I'm missing. Divination helps find places or people, but it doesn't provide detailed information, at least not at the level I can work with.

  Either there was more to the art than he knew—which was quite possible, since he hadn’t dedicated himself to it since leaving the Sanctum—or something obvious was staring him in the face, and he just couldn’t seem to see it.

  “Divination, divination..." Kissea had said that they studied the shadow cast by the System. Was it possible that they weren’t actually interacting with it at all?

  If they were only observing its shadow, essentially gathering data through second-order effects, then the dispersion rate would be extremely high. It’s almost a miracle they can gather anything at all.

  Why, then, had he been so confident they had better options? “Because someone told me they, too, could do what I was doing. More, they nullified my attempt without effort.”

  That someone, however, was not a witch of the Sanctum, but rather Antares himself. Orion had made the foolish mistake of judging what others could do based on what the greatest mage in the land believed was possible.

  Thinking about it more, it wouldn’t make sense for them to know everyone’s classes, let alone their traits, or I would have been revealed as something different from the start. But if they could at least get an impression of things, then several things would make sense, starting with Morliana’s hostility.

  It was all speculation, of course. He simply couldn’t peer into the old witch’s mind to know what had triggered her feelings for him, and while he now knew she’d used him as a pawn in her long game with Yue, he also suspected she didn’t like him at all, independently of that.

  If she could gather enough information from his status to realize he wasn't a typical mage, but rather someone who could be called the opposite of everything a witches’ coven stood for, then he could finally understand where her mistrust had come from.

  That, however, meant he couldn’t give Yue a satisfactory answer. He simply didn’t know enough about divination to correct their methods, and he was fairly sure that if he suggested they scry the System itself instead of its shadow, there was a fifty percent chance he would be laughed at, and another fifty percent that he would be tried as a heretic right then and there.

  No reward for me, I suppose.

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