Not long afterwards, Cecil walked down the corridor and stopped outside the door to the third faculty‑member’s office. There was no nameplate on the door, only a brass doorknob, its surface polished warm and smooth from years of countless hands.
Gwendolyn crouched on his shoulder, her tail giving a light tap against the back of his neck.
"Knock."
Cecil lifted his hand and rapped three times on the wooden door. The sound echoed twice down the empty hallway before fading away. No reply came. He waited for more than ten seconds, then knocked three more times. Still, silence.
"...She’s not here?" Gwendolyn murmured.
Cecil hesitated for a moment, reached out and twisted the doorknob gently. The door was unlocked. The brass handle turned halfway in his palm, and the door swung inward soundlessly, leaving a narrow gap. He leaned forward to peek inside. It was a modest‑sized office. An old desk stood against the wall, piled with open notebooks and a rolled‑up map. A dried‑out potted plant rested on the windowsill, and a dark grey leather jacket hung in the corner.
Flint was nowhere to be seen.
Cecil stood in the doorway, caught between leaving and staying. Gwendolyn hopped down from his shoulder, landing on the doorframe. Her blue eyes swept quickly across the whole room.
"Go in," she said. "If she left the door unlocked, she means for us to wait."
Cecil stepped inside and sat down on a chair near the door.
He waited roughly three minutes, his fingers tapping an idle rhythm against his knee, while Gwendolyn perched on the windowsill, flicking the leaves of the dead potted plant with her tail.
The door suddenly swung open.
Flint strode inside, holding a steaming enamel mug in one hand, a worn dark‑brown leather tube tucked under her other arm. She spotted Cecil already seated inside, her expression barely shifting, and simply gave a short nod.
"A student stopped me to ask questions on the way here, held me up for a couple minutes." She set the enamel mug down on the desk, propped the leather tube upright beside the desk leg, then turned to close the door. "You don’t mind the wait, do you?"
"Not at all."
Flint sat down behind her desk, folded her hands on the tabletop, and fixed him with her ice‑grey gaze. No small talk, no drawn‑out preamble. She cut straight to the point with her very first line.
"That cold aura inside you wasn’t put there by your lizard. It’s growing from within you."
Cecil did not deny it.
"I didn’t press you on this this morning, there were too many ears around." Flint spoke a little slower than she had earlier, enunciating every word clearly now that the door was shut. "You have two choices. One: you can tell me you don’t know what this is. I won’t push you. But I will add you to my observation list, and file a report on you every semester. Two: you share everything you know, and I will share what I know. An even trade."
Cecil leaned back in his chair, resting his hands on his knees. Gwendolyn jumped down from the windowsill onto his lap, curled her tail neatly around herself, and stayed quiet.
"You go first. Tell me what you know," Cecil said.
Flint stared at him for two seconds, then pulled an old, yellowed notebook out of her desk drawer, opened it, and slid it across the centre of the desk. Its pages were covered in cramped, fine handwriting, the margins filled with runes and annotations. Some lines were smudged and blurred by spilled ink, though several pages were heavily marked with red lines.
"Soul Resonance is no modern invention. It is ancient knowledge, at least seven hundred years older than the Church’s current bonded beast system. Back then, mages did not need the Ritual Spring to summon bonded companions. They could form soul pacts directly with wild divine beasts, offering their own magic in return to wield a portion of the beast’s power." Flint ran her finger over a circled annotated paragraph. "Later, the Church standardised the bonded‑beast registry, labelled all wild divine beast pacts heresy, and had most of this knowledge sealed away or destroyed. To this day, fewer than a dozen people across the entire continent can perform Soul Resonance on their own. You are the first seventeen‑year‑old I have ever seen pull it off."
Cecil’s eyes scanned the red‑marked passages, locking onto several key phrases: wild divine beasts, soul pact, sealed knowledge.
"Everything you just said," he began, "does it have something to do with my father?"
Flint’s finger froze on the page. She lifted her head to glance at him, a fleeting glint of something flickering deep within her ice‑grey eyes before it vanished.
"Your father was Knight‑Commander Ashford. I am aware of his disappearance." Her voice dropped a notch. "When he supposedly touched that forbidden relic, whatever he came into contact with may share the same source as the cold inside you. I have no proof, only a theory. But —" she paused, "whatever resides inside you cannot be the work of an ordinary bonded beast. It is the remnant of an ancient divine beast. As for your lizard — she claims to be an ice dragon. I am inclined to believe her."
The tip of Gwendolyn’s tail twitched. She said nothing, yet her blue eyes brightened for a split second.
Cecil fell silent for a moment, his fingers brushing absently over Gwendolyn’s scales on his lap. They felt faintly cool beneath his fingertips.
"You mentioned an even trade," he said. "I can tell you what I know. Though there is not much for me to share."
"Just tell me everything you have."
Cecil recounted briefly the physical changes his body had undergone over the past few days: the cold aura emerging out of nowhere, the sensation when he released it, and how he had gradually adapted to channelling it repeatedly. He did not mention the word system, nor the silver‑glowing interface or available stat points. He only explained what Gwendolyn had taught him: how to gather the cold energy, release and restrain it, and widen the internal channels inside his body.
Flint listened intently, never interrupting. Once he finished, she leaned back in her chair, took a sip from her enamel mug, and set it back down.
"You are learning faster than I expected. I assumed you had only unleashed that cold by sheer luck once, never that you were already practising consecutive releases. That only confirms my theory. The source inside you is alive. It is growing."
"Growing?"
"Can you not feel it?" Flint tapped her pen towards his chest. "The cold you used this morning is different from yesterday’s."
Cecil fell quiet for a second. She was right. Yesterday, his fingers took ages to warm back up after channelling the cold. Today, after three successive releases, his body recovered more than twice as fast. He had blamed the system for the change, yet Flint’s explanation of it growing offered another possibility.
"The source inside you is adapting to you. The more you draw upon it, the more it grows accustomed to your body, and the smoother your releases become." Flint closed the old notebook and slid it back into her drawer. She then picked up the dark‑brown leather tube from beside the desk leg and set it on the table. Its opening was tied shut with leather cord. She untied the knot and unrolled a yellowed parchment map across the desk.
It was hand‑drawn, its ink faded to pale brown, depicting a mountain landscape Cecil had never seen before. A red cross marked its centre, with tiny handwriting beside it reading: Lower Entrance, Frozen Rift Valley.
"What is this?"
"This is an extra part of our even trade." Flint tapped the red cross with her finger. "The academy’s underground portal network links to countless trial grounds, one of which has been sealed away for many years. I stumbled across its coordinates last year and explored it once. Inside, there are resources that perfectly align with your ice‑cold affinity. If you can get your hands on them, your rate of growth will at least double."
Cecil stared at the red cross on the parchment. Frozen Rift Valley. Lower Entrance.
"You already have the coordinates. Why haven’t you gone in yourself?" he asked.
A faint, half‑smile tugged at the corner of Flint’s mouth. "My affinity is fire. That place is incompatible with me. I could barely take a single step inside. But you —" she looked straight at him, "your cold aura might just be the key."
Gwendolyn stood up on Cecil’s lap, resting her front paws on the edge of the desk to study the map. She stared at it for roughly five seconds, then tapped a nearly invisible tiny symbol in the bottom‑right corner of the red cross with her tail. The mark was extremely faint, shaped like a six‑petalled snowflake.
"This seal was left by dragons," she stated.
Flint’s head snapped sharply toward her. Gwendolyn pulled her tail back and settled back down on Cecil’s lap, her expression calm.
"Are you certain?" Flint questioned.
"I am certain," Gwendolyn replied. "That symbol belonged to my mother."
Silence hung in the office for several seconds.
Cecil glanced down at the six‑petalled snowflake mark on the parchment, then lifted his gaze back to Flint. Surprise slowly melted from her features into something far more profound. She did not press Gwendolyn for details about her mother. Instead, she rolled the parchment back up, placed it inside the leather tube, and pushed it toward Cecil.
"Keep it. The map and coordinates are yours. Come find me before you head inside, and I will get you clearance to open the portal."