Chương 80: Heavy Heart II

The duel between Lilia and Prince Giles was a fool's errand at best; magic does not suddenly become stronger once an Aspirant becomes a Dreamer, but to step a foot into the door of magic, a user's Will plays a significant role in development and understanding magic, since most beings of flesh and blood, sapient or not, require Will in order to form a mana nexus, and once a mana nexus is formed, Will simply becomes an auxiliary source.

At the end of the day, magic is a science despite the disconnect between nature and the supernatural. If an Aspirant scholar who knows the rule of causality and has a deeper knowledge of process awakens a mana nexus a month prior, they would be able to match or potentially even marginally exceed the capabilities of a Dreamer who had awakened a mana nexus years ago.

Few among the few sapient species have the capability to cast magic using raw mana; the typical body refuses raw magic like a cancer and could have life-ending consequences if ingested without a mana nexus, which filters raw mana into usable mana.

Lilia was unfortunately not one of those few people who had the capability of using raw mana, but as a scholar, she was considered a paragon among paragons; a person becoming a Dreamer at her age was as common as viewing a ball lightning phenomenon with your own eyes, let alone being a mage loved by ice mana. She was viewed as an icon and a role model for mages and even worshipped by fellow ice mages.

In any case, being a mage loved by mana was a rare occurrence that was viewed as both a curse and an invaluable boon.

In Lilia's case, she was a mage loved by ice mana, meaning she intuitively was capable of understanding it and, by extension, manipulating it at a level above mastery, but with the caveat of a portion of her self being deeply intertwined with ice magics, she would find other elements that directly clash with ice elements incomprehensible; her body constantly emitted a cold aura that chilled the air and sometimes froze it, often chasing away others, and her Dreamer transformation was even influenced by her predisposition of being loved by ice mana; it was why her eyes resembled pools of ice and her presence was considered cold and harsh.

To put it simply, magic is a study of the world, then influencing mana to spur certain parts of it into a desired reaction. Lilia zoned back in to hear cheers as she saw a small singular ice spike form in front of the prince's training wand and slowly melt and tepidly float towards the target, grazing the side of it. The chant itself took the prince several minutes and was impractically long for a combat spell.

The crowd, on the other hand, seemed to roar at what she viewed as a letdown; she expected to see an intermediate display of ice magic, but the prince's magic somehow resembled a weak toot instead of an actual spell. She unenthusiastically clapped her hands at the prince's supposed feat.

'I think a child throwing ice cubes would be deadlier.' Lilia tried not to let her letdown show on her face and had to wait longer than she thought she would for the prince to stop showboating to the audience before he approached her with a cocky look on his face.

"Your turn, Princess Lilia, no need to feel too intimidated." Lilia's eye twitched. She took a moment to compose herself as she exhaled a cold mist despite the hot conditions in Lengue.

'Tch, should we kill him? We could stage it as an accident.'

'Sister, don't tempt me.'

'Just win in a way that no one else can refute.'

'No training spells then? How about an intermediate shard spell?'

'No, no, that's too simple for half these honor-bound idiots to understand.'

'Then what?'

'We could use a mana maneuver instead of a spell or a no-chant spell, something with a bang. There are plenty of royal mage families. I can see some in the audience.'

'I think something big and simple could work. How about accumulated large shard mana maneuvering instead?'

'Hmm… Sure, it should be enough of a spectacle to deem a win.' Lilia looked at the cocky grin of the prince as he offered the training wand to her. She held in a scowl and an urge to slap the young prince, since handing a training wand to someone else is considered disrespectful to the recipient, since it's a gesture that undermines their skill and is disrespectful to the mage who painstakingly taught their student and handcrafted it just for them.

She turned away from the impudent prince and pointed a double-jointed index at the target as the natural lighting in the room dimmed. Some servants and royals shivered as their breath turned into a cold fog; snowflakes began to form out of thin air and rushed to form a lance-like spear almost as tall and wide as a young pine.

This much would already grant her the win, but to top it off, she whisked her finger down, and like a crystalline lance, tore a path in the air, leaving an afterimage and a trail of mist as it decimated the target and embedded itself within the stone walls behind it. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

The room was silent; a quiet crowd both awed and failed to evaluate how vast the difference in skill was, but in terms of speed, size, power, and the sheer aura of a single spell, Lilia knew that she won.

Lilia sat with a group of her peers with a droopy look. She did not have many friends among royals, and she was unsure of where they were. The posse of peers formed around her as she tried to have some quiet time after the duel. She knew of some of them and interacted with fewer in the past, but more often than not, her sudden peers carried motives that she wanted nothing to do with. Some wanted her to marry into their families. Some wanted her to marry them.

Others were not as tactful and directly approached her with an offer of birthing the next powerhouse. Being a Dreamer was akin to being a worshipped celebrity, and an undesirable commonality was shared among a plethora of royal families. The royals believed themselves to be beings of a superior race, so a royal who also happened to be a Dreamer was like gold in their eyes, and their greed often was splayed across their faces.

'I miss June.'

'I miss June.' Lilia hated social interaction simply because people always approached her with motive; she didn't quite truly understand why until she had heard of a newly awakened flesh-shaper, and since her grandfather and Mortimer were the only flesh-shapers she knew, she was curious how a third and newly awakened flesh-shaper would be like in their infancy.

That is how she met June; she had met better-looking people, more affluent people, and more powerful people, but even then, she never quite understood why the simple, handsome, short, poor, and weak boy she met that day entranced her so much.

After meeting him for the first time, she felt an odd sensation within her every time she saw him and spent her time trying to approach her feelings in a scholarly, objective fashion as she would with her studies; she made pros and cons charts, read several books, discovered yaoi, and explored several other romantic genres, fiction and non-fiction, but no matter how much she searched, she couldn't understand why.

There were several objective points like his Dreamer aura, the fact that he was a Dreamer, or his eyes or face, and the list went on, but prior to meeting June, Lilia imagined a potential suitor to be tall, strong, and… Lilia did her best to ignore the conversation happening outside her thoughts.

'Hey, sister, what do you think our ideal partner was before meeting June?'

'…'

'We, or at least I, just thought someone tall, handsome, or strong?'

'Why do you think we get that feeling to pounce on him whenever we see him?'

'…' Both alters still shared a single brain, and despite their disconnected personalities, they both felt a blush come on.

Lilia sat on the floor with a blanket covering her tall figure; her face was fixed on the contents within a translucent pod door without any propriety in mind when it came to her expression, her breath mixed with the chilling air of her room.

"June, guess what happened today?"

"…" He lay unmoving, corpse-like in his glass coffin.

"Some stupid prince challenged my sister and me to a duel of ice. HA! What an idiot!" She slapped her knee and laughed.

"He had the audacity to force a duel and a wager on us, and of course, we won by a landslide."

"…"

"…" June's face and body remained unmoving except for the occasional rise and fall of his chest.

"We… We won the wager, and he said he would do ANYTHING we asked of him. So I commanded him to strip into his tighty-whities and gallivant back to his room."

"Sister was going to command his nards to be chopp—""Shhh, Sister, you're going to embarrass us in front of him."

"…"

"…" Her posture and voice dropped from excitement to a droopy melancholy.

"He's not waking up today, isn't he?"

"…" Lilia stood up with the blanket draping her shoulders and walked around June's pod to a bedside nightstand with a printed calendar.

"Only seven more days… unless he loses… Are we bad people for wishing for him to lose and come back?"

"… I guess… just a little… maybe…." Lilia let out a sigh, and a mist of cold fog billowed from her mouth as she exhaled. She walked back over to near June's pod and lay on the floor instead of the bed next to it and simply fell asleep, hoping to wake up to him outside of his pod. But, to her happy and a little disappointed surprise, she woke up to a loud shout from the large screen in her room.

"FREEEDOOM!" June's feed had started working again.