The temporary seminar room smelled of damp chalk and stale coffee.
Half of its windows had been boarded up with rough construction panels, allowing only a bleak gray light to seep through the cracks.
The classroom felt less like a place of learning than a bunker hastily converted into one, where silence carried more weight than any lecture ever could.
Professor Livia Moreau lowered herself onto the edge of her desk with visible fatigue.
She removed her rectangular glasses, rubbed the bridge of her nose for a long moment, then swept a weary gaze across the students seated before her.
The usual whispers and idle conversations had vanished, replaced by shallow breaths and eyes that instinctively avoided one another.
“Put away your tablets and your first-year manuals,” she said, her voice rough from exhaustion.
“You won’t be needing them anymore.” Seated in the front row beside Kaïs, Tariq folded his arms across his chest.
The phantom ache of his shattered ribs still lingered beneath every breath, refusing to let him forget what had happened only days ago.
To his left, Issa quietly placed a plain notebook and a pen on his desk, while Goman Arashi, isolated at the back of the room, stared at the blackboard with almost unsettling intensity.
“Last week, you watched your classmates die.
You watched some of them transform,” Livia began as she adjusted her glasses.
There was no sympathy in her delivery because sympathy was no longer useful.
She was merely stating facts that everyone in the room had already engraved into their memories.
“For three years, you’ve been taught to view Spirit as nothing more than a resource.
A convenient reserve of power you spend to strike harder.
That misunderstanding is the exact reason you were slaughtered.” The silence grew noticeably heavier.
Kaïs clenched his jaw, preparing to protest, but Livia silenced him with a single raise of her hand before he could utter a word.
No one else dared interrupt.
“Can anyone give me the true definition of Spirit?” she asked.
“And I don’t want to hear the words ‘magic’ or ‘life energy.'” Sira, the first-year student who possessed the Anti-Friction Spirit, timidly raised her hand from the second row.
She hesitated before answering, clearly unsure of herself despite years of study.
“It’s…
the expression of human will through a biological fluid?” “That’s the answer found in outdated history textbooks, Sira,” Livia replied with a tired sigh before taking a sip from her paper coffee cup.
“It falls apart the moment reality starts trying to kill you.” Issa stopped spinning his pen between his fingers.
Slowly lifting his head, the pale daylight reflected across the lenses of his glasses as he spoke in his usual calm monotone.
“Spirit is a localized disruption of physical law.
We do not create fire, shadows, or pressure.
We impose a new law upon the surrounding environment.
Spirit is the mechanism that forces reality itself to obey an anomaly.” Livia pointed her coffee cup toward him in quiet approval.
“Exactly, Kaneshiro.
You are not magicians.
You are walking physical anomalies whose brains generate a specific frequency, while your circulatory system expels it into the world to bend reality itself.
Every ability you possess is simply a consequence of that distortion.” She rose from her desk and slowly walked across the front row, her footsteps echoing softly through the motionless classroom.
Every student’s eyes instinctively followed her movements despite their exhaustion.
Even the air seemed reluctant to disturb the oppressive stillness.
“Now let’s move on to the true nature of that anomaly,” she continued.
“If Spirit alters reality itself, what happens when the body or mind generating that frequency collapses beneath fear, psychological trauma, or the accumulation of toxic Spirit residues?” Tariq closed his eyes for only a second.
Instantly, the horrifying image of his classmates twisting into grotesque forms across the academy courtyard resurfaced inside his mind.
Bones snapping, flesh warping, and screams dissolving into inhuman noises returned with unbearable clarity.
“They mutate,” Tariq answered quietly, his voice dark and emotionless.
“They become Spiritual Suppurations,” Livia corrected with surprising gentleness.
“Understand this well.
These creatures are not monsters from another dimension.
A Suppuration is simply a living organism whose governing frequency has catastrophically collapsed beyond every limit of stability.” She allowed the explanation to settle before continuing.
“Their abilities become monstrous because the human mind is no longer capable of regulating the anomaly it created.
Once reason disappears, every psychological limiter vanishes with it.
The body reshapes itself however it must in order to survive the overwhelming force of its own Spirit.” The tragedy of mutation is not merely physical.
Once an individual becomes a Spiritual Suppuration, their original ability is often twisted into something grotesque beyond recognition.
A student capable of producing clean water may mutate into a creature secreting corrosive acid powerful enough to dissolve reinforced concrete.
A Suppuration is nothing more than Spirit that has been stripped of reason itself.
Goman Arashi, who had remained silent since the lesson began, suddenly leaned forward in his chair.
His silver eyes locked onto Livia with restrained hostility, while the muscles in his jaw tightened beneath the weight of frustration he had been suppressing since the attack.
“That’s laboratory theory,” he said coldly.
“It doesn’t explain why Morgen crushed us without even looking at us.
If Spirit is nothing more than a frequency…
why did mine simply shut down?
Why did my Pressure Dome have absolutely no effect on him?” The heir’s voice trembled ever so slightly, despite every effort to conceal it.
It was the first time he had openly admitted his own helplessness in front of others.
Tariq and Kaïs instinctively turned toward him, surprised to hear him give voice to the question that had haunted every survivor since the battle.
Livia stopped in front of the blackboard.
She didn’t smile, nor did she show the slightest hint of pity.
Instead, she calmly picked up a piece of chalk.
“Because of Domain Authority, Goman.” She drew two circles on the board.
One was small and isolated, while the other dwarfed it completely, enclosing the smaller circle inside its own boundary.
The image was simple, yet every student immediately understood that it represented far more than geometry.
“You believe your abilities failed,” she explained.
“They didn’t.
Morgen didn’t negate your Spirits.
His Spirit Density was simply so immense that it completely saturated the surrounding environment.
Whenever someone possesses a Domain Authority greater than yours, they become the one who defines the physical laws governing that space.” Her gaze shifted toward Tariq.
“Your shadow didn’t crumble because you were weak.
It disintegrated because Morgen declared, through nothing but his own existence, that within a one-hundred-meter radius, his sand was the only anomaly permitted to exist.” Silence descended over the room like molten lead.
No one argued.
No one even breathed loudly enough to disturb the crushing realization settling over them.
The Equation of Overwhelming.
They had not been defeated through superior technique, greater talent, or better tactics.
They had simply been erased by the mathematical density of a single man’s existence.
“If the environment becomes completely saturated…” Kaïs murmured, his brows furrowed as he struggled to process the explanation.
“Then how do you beat someone like that?
If we can’t even activate our own Spirit inside their Domain, what are we supposed to do?” “By understanding the theory before throwing a punch,” Livia answered as she tossed the chalk back into its tray.
“Domain Authority is not infinite.
Every Domain possesses a center of stability, zones of friction, oxygen limitations, and structural weaknesses.
Brute force alone will do nothing except ensure your death.” She let the silence linger for several long seconds, allowing every word to settle into their minds before continuing.
“The next time you encounter a Captain-class individual…
or a world-level Suppuration, your first objective won’t be to overpower them.
It will be to identify the law they’re imposing upon reality, then discover the variable capable of breaking that law from within.” Without another word, Livia returned to her desk and lifted a thick stack of encrypted dossiers.
The classroom instinctively straightened, sensing the shift in atmosphere.
The lesson was over.
“That concludes today’s review session,” she announced in a voice that had suddenly become entirely professional.
“Now your theoretical examination begins.
Clear your desks.” A wave of nervous tension spread across the room.
Students hurriedly packed away everything except a pen and a calculation tablet while Livia walked between the rows, placing a heavy dossier and a blank answer sheet before each survivor.
“You have two hours,” she declared as she returned to her chair.
“There is only one question.
Inside your dossier, you’ll find the complete atmospheric, energetic, and hygrometric recordings gathered from the Central Courtyard during Morgen’s appearance.
His Domain Authority has been mathematically reconstructed and broken down in full.” Kaïs opened the dossier.
Dozens of pages overflowing with pressure graphs, Spirit density curves, atmospheric models, and impossibly complex equations filled the file.
His throat tightened as the first signs of a headache pulsed behind his eyes.