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"W-what the!"
[dd n hi orm sp l]
The moment I touched it, the spell seemed to crumble, its letters scattering strangely and beginning to shake unstably.
Even I, who knew nothing about magic, could tell that this was about to explode.
Panicking, I instinctively gestured, trying to move the scattered letters back into place.
[Fire Worm of Hidden Form]
'Huh? The letters moved back...?'
Just as I was startled to see the spell, which had been shaking as if about to burst, suddenly settle down as if nothing had happened, she quickly began scattering the spell herself while shouting.
"Have you lost your mind? Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to interfere with a formula?"
She shouted in a shrill voice, but it didn't reach me.
I was too caught up in the deep sense of unease from having moved the letters exactly as I'd intended.
Before the regression, something like this had been impossible, but now suddenly it was...
[Editor]: Can artificially edit the flow of mana whose logic has been grasped.
So this was the kind of ability Editor actually was?
Hurriedly, I reached toward the residual mana fading from Professor Elin's palm, and as if entranced, edited the letters.
The spell slowly began assembling itself in my palm.
[Fire Worm of Hidden Form]
In a short span of time, all the letters were complete.
It was far smaller than the spell the professor had cast, but a spell of the exact same form had roughly taken shape above my hand.
"Th-this is..."
The professor's startled voice mixed with the murmuring of the students.
"Status."
[Status]
Name: Benjamin
Age: 18
Talent: Reader, Editor Body: 30
Synchronizing... Mana: 1
Status Ailments: Muscle pain, overload.
Mana, which had refused to rise no matter what I did, now showed the number 1.
Startled, I quickly reached out to check the detailed entries, curious what action had caused it to increase.
[Mana]
Manipulation: 1. Accumulation: 0.
"Holy shit."
Seeing the mana score I'd hoped and wished for actually rise, a curse slipped out of me before any sense of amazement could catch up.
If it was really this easy to use the Editor Talent, I should have asked Luna to fight me using mana ages ago.
Just as I was about to savor this bittersweet mix of joy and exhaustion, the spell that had formed in my hand vanished, and blood began trickling from my nose.
I hurried to wipe my nose, but suddenly my vision started blurring.
"Benjamin!"
A voice calling out to me urgently.
But I couldn't answer.
Because it seemed I was, of all things, passing out right now.
…….
"There was a bit of a commotion today, I hear?"
Sitting at a desk piled high with paperwork, Elin Creek, who had been diligently moving her quill pen, pushed up her glasses.
Since she hadn't heard the sound, and kept moving her pen, an old woman knocked on the door a couple of times.
Only then did Elin, hearing the sound, look toward the old woman standing at the door, set down her pen, and quickly rise from her seat.
"Oh, I'm sorry. I was too focused to hear you. Have you arrived, Senior?"
The old woman smiled faintly and, following her guidance, naturally took the seat prepared for guests.
"When did I even get kicked out of the Tower of Magic that you're still calling me Senior. Besides, we're both professors here now, so just call me Beatrice. Ah, does that feel too impersonal? Then call me Professor Marey."
"How could I possibly address someone as far above me as you that casually."
"Are you trying to say I'm old, by way of implication?"
She probably hadn't meant anything by it, but hearing those words, Elin's face turned pale.
She knew.
Never to judge the woman speaking with that warm smile by her appearance alone.
Roughly seventy years ago, during the height of the war between the Northern and Southern continents.
In an era when countless lives vanished like dew overnight, she had not only survived that fierce battlefield, but had also achieved feats renowned enough for the demihumans of the northern continent to give her the nickname "Blue Devil."
Despite having built such an outstanding legacy as a hero, her uniquely eccentric personality had caused so many incidents everywhere that she was treated as, at best, half a hero.
Having caused so many problems, the furious Tower Master had eventually bound her with all sorts of restrictions and had her take up a professorship at the academy instead.
Unlike now, when she at least pretended to behave herself, in the early days of her professorship, she had once, during a faculty meeting, folded another professor's arms and legs backward and hung them from a tree, simply because that professor had coughed.
This incident was still talked about among the faculty, famous enough that it hadn't been forgotten to this day.
"What brings you here, Professor Marey?"
Quickly correcting her form of address as she brought out tea, Marey watched her and spoke again with that same warm smile.
"I heard a student watched your spell once and copied it, is that right?"
"Yes. That's correct."
"Is that really even possible?"
At Marey's question, Elin fell silent for a moment, took a sip of tea, and answered firmly.
"It's impossible."
Just as she said, what had happened this time should have been impossible from the very start.
For magic, the form the spell took upon manifestation was just as important as understanding the formula and making mana flow according to it, so if one imagined a different form, the formula simply wouldn't complete.
It wasn't a matter of difficulty, it was a matter of absolute impossibility.
The only reason she herself had been able to hide the form of her spell was because she had contained the completed spell within her own Talent, Cocoon.
"Hmm..."
Knowing this, Marey thought for a moment before speaking again.
"Or perhaps that student had absolutely no knowledge of magic at all, and simply constructed the formula based on the shape of the spell you showed him?"
Marey's suggestion was theoretically possible.
If you handed a ball to someone who didn't even know what fire was and told them this was fire, then the spell that person created, imagining fire, would naturally take the shape of a ball.
But this was purely a theoretical issue, and the hypothesis had a fundamental flaw.
Someone that ignorant simply couldn't complete a spell through such an intricately complex formula.
Just as one couldn't multiply without first knowing how to add, magic too required a certain baseline of knowledge as a prerequisite.
Moreover, he had restored, on his own, a formula that had collapsed the moment his hand touched it.
That meant he possessed an absurd, outstanding level of formula application skill, one capable of understanding and reconstructing not just another person's spell, but even their Talent itself.
There was no being anywhere in this world capable of tearing apart and reassembling another person's formula to their own liking.
Having taught for years, she had seen countless brilliant students, but never one like this.
"Could it be that his Talent is one that can intervene directly in formulas?"
As she sank into thought, Marey asked again.
There certainly were ways to use talent to manipulate formulas.
Professor Nin Save, one of the other first-year professors alongside Elin, could slow another person's formula completion speed down to an extreme degree.
Hugo, the absolute ruler of the North, could use his Talent, Infiltration, to inject his own mana into a formula and trigger an explosion.
And the Tower Master, through his Talent, Domination, could forcibly overwrite someone else's completed formula with his own.
But Benjamin was different.
He hadn't crudely forced mana into the formula, nor had he seized ownership of it.
"That child... doesn't have the Talent to directly intervene in a formula."
Since Elin was Benjamin's homeroom professor, she knew that his Talent was called Reader.
But revealing another person's Talent directly was considered taboo, so she couldn't go into further detail.
In the case of people like Hugo or the Tower Master, they were simply too famous, and they themselves had no qualms about their Talents being publicly known.
An ordinary person might have been called a fool for revealing something that could become a weakness, but for people as powerful as them, it came across not as recklessness but as sheer confidence.
"Hmm... but it can't be that he has two Talents..."
Though she had come close to the truth, Marey ultimately shook her head, convinced her own guess had been wrong.
"But there is one thing I can say for certain."
Turning to her, Elin continued calmly.
"That child... might be able to reach Perfection."
At the word Perfection, Marey's gentle expression hardened in an instant.
"Now that's a word I haven't heard in a long time."
There was no such thing as a perfect spell in this world.
Just as everyone's fingerprints differed, the mana each person accumulated differed as well, so the way it moved and the way it was restrained differed from person to person too.
Moreover, the form a completed spell took varied depending on the caster's power of association, so even if a hundred mages cast the exact same formula, it would only mean they shared the same formula, not that any of it could be called a perfect spell.
To make matters worse, formulas were frequently broken or stolen due to talents that operated on a level above magic itself.
But what if a spell were created that understood and embraced every difference in mana, one that could even resolve Talent itself into formula and resist it?
Any spell that collided with his would, without resistance, simply assimilate and vanish, and it was certain that a spell no Talent could interfere with would be completed.
Quite literally, a perfect spell.
The lifelong wish of every mage, a dream never yet achieved.
"Perfection, huh..."
With Marey's murmur as the last word spoken, the two of them fell silent for a while, doing nothing but drinking their tea.
……
"Ugh, I'm going to lose my mind."
The place where I opened my eyes, having fainted during my very first class, was the recovery room of the Lazda Order within the academy.
Once the priest in the recovery room confirmed I was awake, he examined my condition carefully and spoke.
According to him, I had fainted due to an overload condition that occurred from casting magic beyond a certain level...
Simply put, it meant that the professor's spell had been far too advanced for someone with a mere 1 point in mana manipulation like me to cast.
It probably meant my current level was still incredibly low, in other words, but I wasn't particularly discouraged.
Because my mana score, which hadn't risen no matter how much I hoped and worked for it, had finally gone up.
I felt happy, like a possibility I could never have had before the regression had finally appeared.
Of course, there was the issue that I might collapse from overload again, but that was something I could work on with effort.
"Haah, what do I do."
Despite being in such a happy situation, I trudged wearily back to the dormitory, my head spinning with worry.
That was because the priests of the Order had treated the physical strain caused by the overload, and the treatment cost was nothing to sneeze at.
"Four rounds of Holy Potion IV, two infusions of Holy Power... that comes to a total of 8 gold."
The priest, who had thrust the bill at me before even asking if I was okay, once I regained consciousness.
The bright, cheerful smile on that priest's face, as if wondering what the problem even was, still flickered before my eyes even now.