Rafel Siroquan. Male. Age nineteen. Magic course, first year, class C. Entrance exam ranking: fourteenth in the class. No complaints from staff or classmates. A student as average as one could get.

  Would an undercover terrorist openly attend an academy in the enemy territory, and not bother to even hide his imperial roots? I wasn’t trained as a spy, but the risks seemed abnormally high. If he were arrested, questioned, tortured, and confessed everything, the enemy’s raid team would be exposed and their spectacular hike across the continent would be nothing but a waste of time.

  Still, it was very difficult to think Mr Siroquan was in the country—in an academy designated as a probable terrorism target—to innocently study magecraft.

  The imperials had their own arcane culture, leaning closer to animism than the continental system promoted by Mysterium. In a sense, they had more in common with the esoteric orthodox wizards than the rationalists. How could the youth have developed an interest in teachings that his compatriots widely scorned and spent decades vilifying? Nobody could be fully immune to generations of indoctrination. And then there was his martial artist friend.

  Well, it could be a pure coincidence too, he wasn’t really involved with the commandos, and I was only overthinking it. Maybe the Empire’s defeat had made them recognize the upsides of our education? If you can’t beat the enemy, join them?

  The only way to learn the truth, it seemed, was to hear it in person.

  But how to best handle it, without making too much noise? I couldn’t well just go see him in class and ask, “Are you a foreign commando with a fake identity?” He probably wouldn’t give me a straight answer. The men’s dormitory was a no-go zone for female students, and Siroquan was there surrounded by ordinary native roommates. If neither at school nor the dorms, then I had to find a different location to question him.

  Where and how? Should I mail a love letter, or what?

  If he were a trained commando, he wouldn't fall for any old ruse. A fumbled approach would only put his guard up, and expose me. Dang it. I never needed to hatch petty, stealthy schemes like this in the past, and found myself out of my depth. I didn’t want to involve Emily any deeper in this business, but I might not pull this off without some backup.

  Let’s hold back and observe, for now. The answer would show itself, given time.

  Siroquan had quietly returned to school after his weekend rendezvous with the Swordmaster, so it didn't seem like they had anything big planned in the nearby future. There was time.

  The night wore away. I lazed in my dorm room, waiting for the clock to move. Guess I had nothing else left now but that. To get my mind off spy maneuvers and terrorism, I reluctantly picked up the book Professor Couren had given me. My coursework was all done and I’d reviewed my notes to death—As much as I detested obeying that man’s whims, this was the only weapon I had left to kill time with.

  Comprehending Spatial Magic, Vol.I.

  The author’s name, Karl Ryndell, didn’t ring a bell for me. Couren said he was a former professor at Belmesion, but he’d never been famous enough that I’d know him. Why this specific book, by this nobody, out of the million other titles?

  I sat at the desk and began to lazily turn the aged pages, expecting nothing. The print date was almost sixty years ago, but the paper and the edges of the pages looked virtually pristine. Very few hands seemed to have held the book since the day it came out.

  Rather than an explanation of magical techniques, it seemed more like a history book. According to the summary, space manipulation was a non-elemental branch of magic, which in the past ages was also known as “colorless”, or formless magic. Just like the affinities of wizards themselves, there existed phenomena that couldn’t be easily assigned into any one of the existing boxes of elemental labels. People didn’t understand them well enough yet.

  Space. Hearing the word, you’d likely imagine the starry sky at night, the distant stars and planets and colorful nebulae upon their desolate canvas. But the study was more concerned with what lay between the heavenly bodies. The mysterious, fathomless emptiness that held everything but seemed to be made of nothing.

  Did it have any limit? Where did it begin, or did it have a beginning at all?

  Apparently, something called “redshift” proved that the universe was steadily expanding.

  Picture light as a long, squiggly serpent, a cobra slithering across sands. Walking alongside the snake, you'd behold the curve of its back longer than if you went past it the other way. Similarly, the wavelength of light appeared to elongate if the observer moved in the same direction as the rays. When unfurled like so, the color of the light changed in our eyes, becoming redder. This meant that when a star’s light took on such a bloody hue, it had to be distancing from us.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  Measuring thousands of stellar objects, their distances and movements, people found the universe that they’d previously thought was inert unexpectedly restless.

  As per the law of mechanics, the stars and galaxies themselves couldn’t be drifting apart on their own—Their quality to resist motion would eventually stop them in the void. There was no clear origin coordinate to be identified as the collective starting point of their journey either, where the culprit that had sent them on their way could be found. Therefore, it was reasoned that it had to be the volume of space itself that was continuously increasing, pushing the objects further apart from one another.

  How could something immaterial expand, and presumably contract too?

  Did it have an elusive medium that just couldn’t be detected by the currently known methods?

  Scholars presented that a luminiferous element called “aether” existed, which filled the gaps. The theory seemed sound. How could waveforms and various forces propagate in a total vacuum, unless they had such a bridge to carry them? We shouldn’t have been able to see starlight at all without aether, they believed. Since ripples on water’s surface couldn’t leave the liquid and leap across air either.

  The theory was popular in its time, but experimentally disproved.

  As our planet circled the central sun of the system, it should logically have dragged through this aether and created waves in it, like a boat cruising across a lake. If the motion of light depended on the presence of aether, its behavior should change depending on whether it moved across or along the planet’s path.

  But it didn’t. No matter which way light rays were aimed, their speed and direction remained constant. Although people didn’t have the technology to verify the movements of something as fast as light manually, and these results were obtained with sensory magic, the scientific community saw no reason to suspect the underlying conclusion. The existence of aether was tested in various ways, all with equally poor results, and the concept was eventually abandoned. Explaining its reality took more effort and assumptions than its non-reality.

  Space—remained a great nothingness.

  Then this school of magic shouldn’t have existed. There was no subject to study.

  But though the concept seemed to belong only in works of speculative fiction, new generations of thinkers in the recent century revived space as a more abstract element. Improved observation methods led space to be redefined, not as a pseudo-water like aether, but as a four-dimensional entity consisting of height, width, depth, and time, each of them intimately linked and inseparable. An ever-present ghost without a tangible shape, which could nonetheless stretch and sag relative to other objects, distributed across the cosmos as referential frames.

  Spacetime.

  That’s strange. Time being a component of geometry? I’d never thought of it that way before.

  The tyrant behind the clock face, dictating our daily lives, counting down our days on this earth to their ultimate finale, was maybe not plain pendulum movement, but another vector of positional values alongside height and width——

  “Kuh—!”

  I covered my mouth, overcome by a sudden fit of nausea.

  For a moment, I felt like wavering on the threshold of something immense and terrifying. Peeking into realms behind the veil, not meant for mortals to spy on. A cold hand of dread gripped my heart and I shut the book, as if afraid of being swallowed by it.

  The underlying implications of this research were—too much. My mind and ego were about to fall into pieces, unwittingly getting to work at cracking a puzzle I wasn’t ready for. I stood to pace around, drawing deep breaths to clear the bout of dizziness and calm my agitated pulse.

  What the Hell was this book?

  The research was mostly theoretical and didn’t offer any practical applications. But as I thought about it more, another idea hit me. Let’s say space could indirectly influence objects and forces regardless of their physical characteristics, like resistance to motion, or lack of mass—In that case, it could also potentially be used to manipulate items that had magic resistance…

  I glanced at the dragon rings peeking from under the shirt sleeve. Was here a clue on how they were made? A way to force magical effects into something that repelled magic by essence.

  If I kept studying space magic, maybe I could find a way to disable the rings at will, or at least mitigate their effects? If I could regain my full power at will, without triggering the alarm system, without anyone else knowing about it—what a massive advantage that would be. My ticket to freedom. And the one who had led me to discover this clue was…

  “...Are you serious?”

  What was going? Was I overthinking it?

  Did Couren predict this situation already years ago?

  What on earth was he after? Did he want to free me from the Kingdom’s control? Why? Was it regret? Was this his idea of redemption? Making up for everything he put me through since childhood? No, it couldn't be. That man had no remorse. No heart or conscience. He never apologized for anything. Never admitted his mistakes. I didn't think he was even capable of that. He was a true mage, a machine, who did nothing without a rational reason. There had to be something more to this deal.

  No, who cared about his reasons? Whatever Couren wanted, the merits of this research were still helpful to me, and that was the only thing that mattered. But the study was split into several volumes, of which I only had one. I returned to the first volume and finished it by midnight, but it was painfully incomplete and didn’t add much to what was already explained. Couren told me to ask him for the rest, but…

  Damn, I so didn’t want to ask him for favors.

  They had to have more than one copy at school. I’d have to pay a visit to the campus library tomorrow.