“Second layer…” Lucina mouthed blankly as Tiberius and Aurelius stared at each other in sync, exchanging shocked glances with each other.

  Seraphine just sipped on her tea wordlessly, looking a little proud of herself.

  “Y-You are 21 right?” Tiberius asked with disbelief evident in his eyes.

  “Oh stop. There are plenty of people who've reached second layer by my age.” Seraphine said dismissively, clearly fishing for more compliments.

  …Yes. Like 5 of them per continent. Aurelius thought to himself.

  “And the hard part is getting the foundation stable enough to cast the more advanced magic in the second layer.” Seraphine added, shrugging her shoulders.

  “You’re from Valentis, right? I believe that the Dwayne family is an established magical family in the region.” Lucina continued smoothly, attempting to put the conversation back onto the rails.

  However, much to Lucina’s alarm, the mention of her family seemed to sour Seraphine’s expression.

  “It’s simply a product of legacy and history. We’re nothing special, really. Plus I’m only a first generation Dwayne.” Seraphine said blandly.

  “You were adopted?!” Tiberius asked loudly.

  Aurelius felt his eyelids twitch at the sheer idiocy of his friend. And he decided to take over Lucina’s job temporarily.

  “...proici” Aurelius muttered darkly under his breath, sending a single well-aimed mana bullet at Tiberius’s… decidedly exposed manhood under the table.

  “ACH!” Tiberius yelled out in shock, hitting his knees on the table on the way down to the ground.

  “Tiberius!” Lucina scolded, giving him an additional slap on his back to drive in a lesson in tact and politeness.

  “Haha, it’s alright.” Seraphine said in amusement, staring at the writhing boy clutching his groin on the ground.

  “There’s really nothing much to talk about, and there’s nothing to apologise for. I’m sorry if I was vague in explaining my family situation.” She continued, looking unbothered by the commotion that the groaning Tiberius was making on the ground.

  “...Tell us about your specialty, Seraphine!” Lucina asked, eager to turn the conversation on a more positive note.

  Tiberius carefully made his way up back to his seat in the meantime, earning himself a constant glare from Aurelius throughout the way.

  “Hmmm. As a Caelestis, I’m sure you’re familiar with what I’m interested in.” Seraphine said, thinking carefully about the question.

  “I’m interested in the research on brain boxes.” She declared.

  ???

  Aurelius returned to his room that day with thoughts clouding his mind.

  It seemed that Seraphine, despite clearly being a magical prodigy, had made a breakthrough in her practice with magic.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  While Aurelius had, over the course of 3 weeks, continued his training under the tutelage of Mr. Tona, he had to admit that he wasn’t particularly talented at magic.

  He had gotten more familiar and comfortable with using Pultris to spar, but his personal magic journey was still stagnant.

  A soul-shape as complex as the one outlined in the blueprint was clearly going to prove challenging to shape into even the first layer.

  However, Aurelius felt himself strangely uncomfortable with the idea that Seraphine had reached an impossibly far goal for him with a mere 3 year head start.

  Clearly an inferiority complex played a part, but also the frustration that he was stuck in a pit of no clear progress…

  “I am back. Please applaude.” Pultris greeted, taking refuge in Aurelius’s poor brain once again.

  “...I don’t want to talk to you.” Aurelius said in exasperation.

  This man was absolutely insufferable!

  “You seem to be in a worse mood than usual. Not that it amounts to much.” Pultris criticised leisurely, making Aurelius desperately wish for a second charm or something that could be used to shut him up throughout the day.

  “You’re a creep, and a criminal. I feel no obligation to tell you about my thoughts or problems.” Aurelius responded, feeling like a slightly crazy person as his frustrated voice echoed back to him in his small room.

  “Like I said, I am him, and also not him.” Pultris said cryptically.

  “Yeah, yeah. What spirit did you fuse with anyway?” Aurelius asked without a single ounce of curiosity lining his words.

  He was absolutely, utterly uninterested in Pultris. But clearly someone as attention seeking as Pultris had to be entertained if he didn’t want to be driven mad from their ranting and rambling.

  “I believe it was a mid-ranking spirit.” Pultris replied enthusiastically, happy to find Aurelius finally interested in his poor, miserable life.

  “Mid-ranking?” Aurelius asked, feeling maybe a tiny bit more curious.

  “Sure. The real question is how I was able to achieve angelhood by fusing with a mere mid-ranking spirit.” Pultris said matter-of-factly.

  “Uhhuh.” Aurelius replied, packing up his laundry with disinterest.

  “Can you tell me the name of a single man who wants to die, Aurelius?” Pultris asked.

  “I, for one, refused death. And made many preparations before that ridiculous, high and mighty Aethernalis woman came to drag me away from everything I held dear.”

  “You may think that lichdom is the easiest way to achieve immortality. But that’s only if you like to take your chances at going completely insane.”

  “Do you think that the liches that the Fae Queen had in Her army were the only ones that were created?”

  “There were probably more than a hundred attempts at creating liches. And the success rate was clearly less than 10%.” He explained.

  “I forget the exact number of souls, but I know that the process of lichdom needs a specific number of human souls to manipulate enough of them into a magic circle.”

  “And if a spirit is unable to even withstand the fusion of a mere 2 souls, can you imagine the mental agony that a 100,000 souls would cause?”

  “That’s why the Queen farmed children and babies for her magic circles during the war. It was to lessen the conflict of identity and create a better chance of success.”

  This gave Aurelius pause. That was a horrific detail that he was not quite aware of.

  While there were ‘human farms’ found after the end of the Greenwich War, he had learnt of these facilities as a footnote in his history textbooks.

  It seemed that the Greenwich War was much more brutal than he had thought…

  “But the idea is that lichdom is crazy hard to survive as a sane individual. You’d just lose your sense of identity in the process.” Pultris continued.

  “So I decided that my best bet was to become a spirit.”

  “And I very cleverly used my binding magic on a mid-ranking spirit of the wind. And using restrictions, I managed to create a strong enough connection to move my soul up to the spirit realm immediately after death.”

  “Obviously, getting executed by the Commission put a wrench in my plans for immortality, but by the grace of the gods, I managed to fuse successfully with the mid-ranking spirit without much loss in my identity.” He concluded.

  “...Why don’t more people do what you did?” Aurelius asked, aware that he needed to ask a question now to satisfy Pultris.

  “Oh, because it still requires quite a lot of human sacrifice.” Pultris replied nonchalantly.

  …And all of the sudden, Aurelius felt much, much worse about the fact that he had Pultris as a contracted angel.