Research was the first step. The blueprint. But a blueprint is just a piece of paper. The architect, eventually, has to get his hands dirty.
For a week, I did nothing. I continued my performance, a meticulous, obsessive routine. Days in the Verdant Archive, poring over my "dwarven" research. Nights in my dorm, sinking into my cold, mental exercises, practicing the "emptiness" until I could hold it for a full, terrifying minute before my survival instincts kicked in and my emotions came flooding back.
I was waiting. I was watching the academy's rhythms. I needed the perfect moment.
It came in the form of the Winter Solstice Ball. A mandatory, all-night, campus-wide celebration for the nobility. It was a night of politics, dancing, and high-society nonsense. It was also the single-best alibi I would ever get. The entire student body and most of the faculty would be in the Grand Hall, their attention focused on each other.
I, of course, was expected to attend as Damien's celebrated protégé.
I put on the formal, black-and-silver uniform. I met Damien, who looked every inch the young king in his own finery. I entered the Grand Hall, a place so bright with magical light and alive with music that it hurt my eyes.
For two hours, I played the part. I stood by Damien's side. I accepted cold, respectful nods from nobles. I even shared a brief, chillingly pleasant conversation with Damien's father, Lord Vrael, a man with eyes as cold and calculating as his son's.
Then, at the height of the festivities, I made my move.
"Damien," I murmured, leaning in, "The wine is... not agreeing with me. I need some air. I will return shortly."
He glanced at me, his eyes sharp. He saw my pale face—a face I had made deliberately pale by holding my breath—and my hand on my stomach. "Go," he said, his voice clipped, already turning back to a conversation with a Duke. "Do not be long."
I didn't head for the balcony. I didn't head for my dorm.
I slipped out a side exit and into the cold, empty, and blessedly silent service corridors.
The mask of the noble scholar fell away. I was now an infiltrator. My first move was to use my shadow affinity. In the old days, I would have cast a "Shadow Veil," a clumsy, attention-grabbing swirl of darkness. But my control was different now. My Condensed Core was not a pool of power, but a pinpoint of perfect, precise energy.
I didn't cast a spell. I leaked. I let a thin, controlled wisp of shadow mana seep from my Core and wrap around me. It didn't make me invisible. It made me... uninteresting. It clung to my formal uniform, dulling the silver threads, swallowing the light. My footsteps became whispers. I was a patch of moving darkness, a shape that the corner of an eye would dismiss as a trick of the light.
I moved with a liquid speed, my hand-drawn map of Alastair's route a perfect, three-dimensional image in my mind. The Grand Library was on the far side of the campus, its public doors locked and barred. But I wasn't going to the public doors.
My map led me to the library's "roots," the massive, foundational pylons that anchored it to the floating island. I found what I was looking for: a small, unmarked, and half-frozen iron grate, hidden behind a curtain of dead, ice-covered ivy. It was a maintenance access port for the library's lower-level golems, a route no human would ever use.
It was locked. A heavy, rusted, physical lock.
I placed my hand on it. A simple, precise pulse of my mana, focused into a needle-point, traveled from my palm. I wasn't blasting it; I was feeling it. I felt the internal tumblers, the rusted pins. I sent a second, sharper pulse. With a loud CRACK that echoed in the silence, the rusted metal of the lock-pin shattered. The gate groaned open.
I slipped inside.
This was not the Verdant Archive. This was the academy's underbelly. The air was cold, damp, and smelled of wet stone and ozone from the massive magical conduits that ran through the walls like glowing, blue-green veins. The only sound was the distant, rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the academy's magical core—the heartbeat of the entire island.
I was in a labyrinth of stone and metal, following the faint, memorized lines of my map. I used my Soul Resonance, not to feel for people, but for wards. I could feel them in the walls, thin, shimmering "tripwires" of magic. I moved around them, stepping over an alarm-rune here, ducking under a detection-ward there. Alastair's path was, as he'd written, a perfect bypass, a dead zone in the fortress's security.
After what felt like an hour of navigating the cold, oppressive darkness, I found it.
It was exactly as I'd pictured. A dead-end corridor. A single, rusted, iron door, a patch of faded paint on it just barely legible in the gloom: 7-BETA.
It was a janitor's closet.
My heart was hammering, a frantic, loud thing in the tomb-like silence. This was it. The culmination of all my work. I reached out a trembling hand and tried the handle.
It wasn't locked.
The door groaned open on rusted hinges, revealing a small, dark, and utterly mundane room. It was exactly what it claimed to be. A closet. Cobwebs hung in thick sheets. A broken bucket and a rusted, snapped mop-handle lay in the corner.
For a single, agonizing second, I thought I had been wrong. That I had been a fool, chasing a madman's fantasy.
But the far wall... the one that should have been solid foundation stone... it was wrong. It was too smooth. Too perfect. There were no cracks, no mortar, no stone-grain.
I stepped inside the small, cramped space and let the door hiss shut behind me, plunging me into absolute darkness.
I reached out and placed my hand on the wall. It was not cold, like stone. It was... neutral. It had no temperature at all. I pushed. It was solid.
My Soul Resonance. I reached out with it, "feeling" the wall. It wasn't stone. It was a wall of pure, solidified, and "asleep" magic. It was a door, sealed not by a lock, but by a concept.
This was the Scribe's Path.
I was here. I had the location. Now, I had to use the key.
I took a deep, steadying breath, the smell of dust and ancient, dead air filling my lungs. I closed my eyes in the total darkness, and I began the process.
I let my consciousness drift. I called up the image from the Runic textbook, the clean, logical, beautiful theory of harmonics. The guilt, the fear, the faces... I felt them try to surface, and I buried them. Irrelevant.
My breathing slowed. My heartbeat, once a frantic drum, became a slow, deep, and measured thump. The identity of "Lucian" faded. The memory of "Aiden" dissolved.
I was not a boy. I was not a prisoner. I was a mind. I was an intent. I was a pure, cold, and logical thing, and I had a purpose.
I opened my eyes, though it made no difference in the dark. I placed my palm flat against the wall.
And I pushed. Not with my arm. But with my mind.
For a moment, nothing.
Then, a soundless click vibrated through my bones. The wall, the one that had been solid, unmoving, and real, dissolved under my hand like a curtain of smoke.
In front of me was a cold, dark void, and a single, spiraling stone staircase, leading down.