Elara watched the maid for a moment, wondering why it was so difficult for her to accept the first refusal.
Not long ago, she had worn a similar uniform herself, and she knew that extra chores rarely sparked such enthusiasm among the girls. Now, a complete stranger was clearly desperate for an excuse to step inside her room.
“Thank you, I can manage,” she repeated, hauling the heavy cart over the threshold and shutting the door before the girl could offer anything else.
The door hit the frame a little harder than intended, but Elara didn't open it again to apologize.
She parked the cart by the desk, straightened a slipping bundle, and only then let out a breath, welcoming the silence of her own room with profound relief.
Out in the corridor, the maid straightened up, glaring in annoyance at the closed door.
A moment later, a second girl passed her, pushing an empty cart back from a delivery to room 603.
“Wouldn't let you in?” she asked, stopping briefly.
“She’ll be begging for help soon enough,” the first one replied, adjusting her collar and smoothing the fabric on her shoulder, as if the rejection hadn't bothered her in the slightest.
Elara didn't hear their exchange, too busy carefully unloading the books. Their sheer weight felt like a promise of something incredibly important.
Every volume was thick, and some had rough, coarse bindings. When she opened the first one, she found densely written pages interspersed with illustrations of plants, animals, and minerals.
She flipped through the stack, trying to grasp just how much wildly different information was considered foundational knowledge here.
One textbook detailed the properties of magical materials. Another described spirits and dangerous creatures, complete with accounts of the regions where they could be encountered. A third looked like a foreign language primer, filled with tables of symbols and explanations that spilled into the margins.
The most unsettling were the illustrated volumes. Some of the drawings felt fundamentally wrong, though Elara couldn't pinpoint a specific error.
If she tried to study them for too long, she would feel a familiar, squeezing pressure behind her eyes. She quickly learned to turn the page before the headache could fully set in.
So even a book can punish you for looking too closely around here…
It would be nice to at least know which pages I’m supposed to memorize and which ones I shouldn't look at at all.
After a preliminary sweep of the textbooks, she turned her attention to the objects wrapped in black velvet.
Beneath the first cloth, she found a crystal ball. It was shaped similarly to the one used in the qualification trial, but this one was completely transparent. She turned it over carefully for a moment, looking for any markings.
She set it down without trying to use it and unwrapped the next bundle, revealing a set of test tubes, beakers, and a small crucible.
She couldn't yet tell if the transparent vessels were made of glass or crystal, but the sight of laboratory equipment instantly brought back memories of Vespara’s table, prompting her to handle them with extreme caution.
A large wooden box was divided into over a dozen compartments holding smaller tools. Neatly folded beside it were a few sets of uniforms and a first-rank apprentice badge.
Elara opened the rulebook to the equipment inventory and began cross-referencing the list, placing the checked items on one side of the desk.
It took her longer than she had expected, but when she finished, she at least knew what she had received and where everything was stored.
Finally, she pinned the badge to her uniform and ran her fingers over the slightly textured design, studying it as intensely as if the small piece of fabric and metal could guarantee no one would send her back to the shared dorm tomorrow.
Just wearing it isn't enough… In three months, they’ll want to see that I’m actually worth teaching.
She reached for the textbook titled The Language of Magic: An Introduction to Veyl Script, pulled a blank sheet of parchment closer, and settled into her chair, intending to prepare for the next day.
She didn't yet know the teaching methods used here, but in her past life, she had dealt with exams that required endless repetition and solving countless problems. At the very least, just looking at a difficult book didn't make her want to instantly give up.
There was no window in the room. The only indicator of passing time was the hourglass with blue sand. Elara glanced at it during her first break, then again when her meal was delivered, and after that, she lost track of the last time she had looked up from the textbook.
She copied symbols, compared their structures, and flipped back to earlier explanations whenever she hit something she couldn't immediately grasp.
Not everything clicked into place perfectly, but with every passing page, at least some of the symbols stopped looking like a random jumble of lines, encouraging her to tackle just one more example.
She ate lunch with her elbow pinning the book open, and at dinner, she had to shove her filled parchments aside just to make room for her plate. Only when she rubbed her stiff neck and checked the clock did she realize it was already midnight.
She set her quill down and slowly straightened her back, feeling the ache of muscles held in the same position for far too long.
Her shoulders begged for rest and her neck was stiff, but her mind remained surprisingly clear. There was no trace of the mental fog she used to fight off during her morning cleaning rounds.
Ever since the trial with the wooden doll, she couldn't shake the feeling that something had fundamentally changed. She didn't know if the test had actually altered her mind, or if this was simply the first time she had the chance to test her endurance on something other than grueling physical labor.
As a maid, she had often finished her chores late into the evening, only to be woken by a kick at four in the morning. Exhaustion had become so completely normalized that she stopped wondering about its causes.
Now, she had a bed entirely to herself and the freedom to lie down without asking anyone's permission, yet sleep refused to come.
Maybe this is what having high mental strength is actually like…
Or maybe I’m just too wired to sleep.
She wasn't about to test the theory with another few hours of reading, so she closed the book, deciding to ask about these symptoms at the first appropriate opportunity.
She washed up quickly, laid out her materials for class, and walked over to the wall sconce, dimming the light to its lowest setting.
The flame shrank, but remained visible.
The lighting in both the rooms and the corridors could be adjusted, but it was strictly forbidden to extinguish it entirely. Elara remembered this rule from her time as a maid.
No one had ever explained exactly what would happen if she broke it, but in Noxveil Spire, that kind of vague omission hardly encouraged experimentation.
She lay down and stretched her arms and legs for a moment, trying to make use of a space that would have previously accommodated several girls.
Even when she shifted closer to the middle, there was still enough room to roll over without elbowing anyone. She smiled up at the dim ceiling and adjusted her blanket.
However, lying sprawled out turned out to be less comfortable than she had imagined. After a few attempts at finding a good position, she pulled her knees up, tucked her arms close to her body, and curled tightly under the blanket, finding a familiar sense of peace in the cramped posture that the wide bed simply couldn't provide.
At four fifteen, Elara opened her eyes, registering the time before she even realized no one had woken her. She sat up reflexively, ready to throw off the blanket and reach for her maid's uniform, but the sight of the empty room quickly reminded her she didn't have to push a cart anywhere this morning.
She yawned, drawing in a breath of cool air, and watched the blue sand trickle down, debating whether she should lie back down for a few more hours.
She didn't feel sleepy, though, so eventually, she turned up the light and went back to her desk.
Before opening the textbook, she rested her hand on the cover and looked toward the door.
Room 604 was located near the end of the corridor, offering a clear view of the ramp connecting the levels. Elara walked over to the entrance, cracked the door open, and listened until faint footsteps and the sound of heavy breathing echoed from the distance.
In the dim light, a girl appeared, struggling to push a cart up the incline.
Elara recognized Brynn. She instinctively gripped the edge of the door tighter, feeling a sudden urge to step out and confront her, right here where she wasn't surrounded by her cronies.
She watched the girl hunch over the handle for a moment, then pulled her hand back and shut the door.
Getting textbooks and a badge yesterday hadn't magically made her stronger.
She could overpower Brynn, but she had absolutely no guarantee that fear would wring the truth out of her instead of whatever lie seemed safest to tell.
Just a few days ago, she only ever did the rounds when there was absolutely no way to dump the work on someone else…
Did my promotion suddenly remind the supervisor exactly who used to boss everyone around?
Rumors about Elara cheating during the trial might be circulating among the apprentices, but the servants likely cared far less about that detail.
From their perspective, Elara had left the shared dorm, gotten her own room, and now belonged to the class of people you stepped aside for in the hallways. Brynn's previous behavior might have suddenly become a very inconvenient memory for the supervisor.
Elara didn't know if that was why the girl had been sent back to work, but she wanted to uncover something far more important: who had summoned Brynn after the first Elara's head injury, and what they had wanted from her.
For now, though, she couldn't approach the problem any safer way than simply waiting.
She looked at the book by her left shoulder and reached out her right hand, trying once again to touch the dark red cover.
Her fingers passed straight through it without any resistance, closing on empty air. She lowered her arm with a short sigh.
Maybe when I become a fully-fledged Magistra, I’ll finally understand what you are… For now, it would be nice to at least survive to the first evaluation.
Becoming an apprentice hadn't eliminated the danger; it had only shown her just how many things were happening around her without her knowledge.
She couldn't unravel all the connections yet, but she could memorize another rune, read another description, and make at least a tiny fraction of this world a little less completely alien.
She sat down, opened her textbook, and picked up exactly where she had left off the night before.
A polite knock finally pulled her away from her reading, just as she was once again comparing two nearly identical symbols, trying to figure out why altering a single stroke changed the entire meaning.
Elara raised her head, glanced at the hourglass, and instantly pushed her chair back. She had far less time before class than she had thought.
Kelira was standing outside, her satchel slung over her shoulder, faint shadows lingering beneath her green eyes.
“It’s time to go. We can compare what we read yesterday on the way,” she announced, peering over Elara's shoulder at the desk.
Elara hurried back for her textbook, parchment, and quill, scooped everything awkwardly into her arms, and stepped out into the hall, checking one last time to make sure she hadn't left anything by the lamp.
“You can set a reminder on the hourglass,” Kelira noted. “It’s explained in the rulebook.”
Elara reflexively pinched her thumb and index finger together, but seeing the confusion on her neighbor's face, she dropped her hand and simply nodded.
“I’ll check when I get back.”
They headed toward the passage to the Ash Wing, initially preoccupied with dodging the other apprentices spilling out of their rooms.
Only when they found a bit more space did Kelira adjust her bag and glance at the book in Elara’s arms.
“How long did you read last night? After two hours, I couldn't even focus my eyes on the text anymore. I had to close them and rest because everything was starting to blur together.”
Elara stared straight ahead for a moment, recalling eating lunch with the textbook at her elbow, having dinner over her notes, and only noticing midnight because her neck started aching.
She wasn't about to describe that in detail until she understood what was actually happening to her.
“Maybe three or four hours, then I took a break,” she replied.
Kelira turned her head and stared at her in sheer disbelief for several steps - a reaction that felt far more spontaneous than most of her previous behavior.
“You have an absolutely absurd mental endurance,” she finally said. “No wonder you could stare at that doll for so long.”
She looked down at her own textbook, a hint of jealousy creeping into her voice that she didn't even try to hide.
“I wish I could read that long without a break.”
Elara didn't respond immediately. Only now, comparing herself to someone who had scored the highest in magic aptitude, did she realize just how massive the gap might be.
She had slept for roughly four hours, woke up, and immediately went back to her book without feeling any of the fatigue Kelira had just described.
So it wasn't just excitement after all… Which makes it even better that I didn't tell her everything.
Chatting about the first few pages of the textbook, they reached the large lecture hall on the tenth floor and stopped in the doorway, surprised by the sheer number of people inside.
There were apprentices Elara didn't recognize from the previous meeting, and most of the benches were already taken.
The only empty seats were in the front row and a few scattered singles in the far back corner.
Elara scanned the room, instinctively gravitating toward a quieter spot by the wall, but Kelira was already marching straight toward the front row. She only stopped when she realized her neighbor wasn't following, and jerked her chin toward the empty chair beside her.
“Come on. After yesterday, you're not going to be able to stay under the radar anyway.”