Chương 139: Interlude: Without Looking Back

[Time]: 1988 [Location]: The Yggdrasil Academy The reality of Yggdrasil Academy was not harder than Caroshadel. It was simply a completely different taxonomy of suffering. That single, leisurely afternoon on their first day of enrollment had been a logistical anomaly. They would not make that mistake again. The ice cream had been, in retrospect, a catastrophic financial decision.

If they were still operating under their original trade, every silver-spooned aristocrat wandering the sunlit courtyards was a walking, breathing sheep practically begging to be fleeced. All they could do was watch them pass with the hollow, frustrated longing of two starving foxes locked in a henhouse who had, against every biological instinct, sworn a strict vow of vegetarianism. Money was a suffocating constraint. They needed a legal gray area.

Ghostwriting academic papers presented the perfect thermodynamic equilibrium. The students admitted to the Yggdrasil Academy possessed egos far too fragile to ever admit they were failing the curriculum's brutal standards. To buy silence, they paid obscenely well. And paradoxically, being Plumed Dragon Witches—a lineage synonymous not with shameless extortion, fraud, and a pathological inability to keep a promise—provided the ultimate credit backing. They had no social network to protect.

No institutional reputation to lose. They would vanish the moment the year ended. If they tried to blackmail their clients, the clients could simply trigger mutually assured destruction by reporting the academic fraud. A clean, self-sustaining deadlock. The cost of maintaining operational secrecy was absolute zero. There was one structural flaw: the last time either of them had formally written an academic paper, they had been in high school. Temporary, frantic cramming became a survival imperative.

Fortunately, they had actually been exceptional students back then, a fact entirely omitted from the official record, as their teachers had usually been too busy screaming about the property damage to assess their arcane theory examinations. In the even, climate-warded quiet of their dormitory, Adeline's quill scratched elegantly across heavy parchment.

She was effortlessly weaving citations from texts she had skimmed ten minutes prior, while a secondary mental thread quietly digested the dense magical theory for her own use. She finished the draft. She sent it via the localized pneumatic tube. Twenty minutes later, the delivery tube on Paddy's side of the room spat a reply onto the floor. Paddy, who had been hanging upside down from the ceiling beam, dropped to the floor and snatched the cylinder.

She broke the seal, her face twisting into a scowl the moment her eyes skimmed the parchment. Adeline looked up from the parchment, her quill pausing.

"Is there a problem with the structural logic?"

"She says it's too good," Paddy grumbled, tossing the letter onto the desk.

"Says anyone with eyes will know she didn't write it. She wants us to dumb it down." Adeline's polite smile tightened by a fraction of a millimeter.

"Tell her to send a sample of her previous work." When the client's original essay arrived, Adeline read the first paragraph. She pinched the bridge of her nose. For a professional scam artist who had talked her way out of execution orders and armed robberies, she experienced a rare, entirely novel sensation. So this is what they mean, she thought bleakly, when they say a heavy purse requires a strong stomach.

With the blank, detached expression of a coroner performing an autopsy on something that had died in a particularly embarrassing way, Adeline began drafting a paper that aligned with the client's intellectual ceiling. She aggressively blurred the abstract. She took a beautifully cohesive logical progression and violently rearranged the sequence, ensuring the transitions felt disjointed and slightly breathless.

She excised the most critical piece of evidentiary support with a scalpel, leaving the conclusion dangling on an unearned thread of assumption. She diluted the final thesis into bureaucratic, meaningless drivel. On the other side of the room, Paddy had dragged herself back to her desk and slumped over her parchment, emitting a sustained, low groan of physical agony. Adeline didn't look up from the parchment.

"If you make that noise again, I am going to place a permanent [Silence] on your vocal cords."

"I hate people who can't even insult someone properly," Paddy grumbled, crossing out a sentence so hard the quill snapped.

"If this idiot wants to dedicate her entire opening section to calling the reigning Dean of Evocation a mathematically illiterate salamander, she needs an actual thesis to back it up! You can't just follow a blood-feud declaration with 'the mana fluctuated weirdly.' Fluctuated how?!" The commissions flooded in. The Academy was never short of aristocrats drowning in the curriculum, nor of people who valued their pride far above their bank accounts.

And with every paper Paddy finished, she swore a blood oath to the cosmos that she would never again have to ghostwrite a manifesto of unearned arrogance for a student whose footnotes were mostly just misspelled slurs against previous researchers. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. Professor Nino Lucent's Introduction to Magitech presented no real challenge.

The foundational skill of a grifter was adopting someone else's language, and Nino's was simply more precise than most. The true difficulty lay elsewhere. Nino knew the papers were ghostwritten. Of course she knew. In the middle of a lecture on spatial compression arrays, Nino paused. The chalk stopped against the slate. She turned around and called one of their highest-paying clients to stand up.

She asked the trembling aristocrat to explain a specific derivative equation in the third paragraph of her submitted paper. The client stammered. The silence in the lecture hall became a physical weight. Nino simply asked three rapid, consecutive follow-up questions regarding the basic arithmetic underlying the formula.

When the student failed to answer all three, Nino turned back to the chalkboard and proceeded to mathematically, precisely, and mercilessly display the exact parameters of the student's intellectual deficit to the entire amphitheater.

"If you cannot reverse-engineer the foundational arithmetic of a conclusion you supposedly reached yourself," Nino said, her voice dropping the temperature of the room by several degrees, "you do not have the structural integrity required to occupy a seat in my classroom." The client sat down, visibly destroyed. Nino picked up a fresh piece of chalk and resumed the lecture. But just before the bell rang, for a fraction of a second, Nino's analytical gaze swept across the tiered seating.

It rested, for a single unreadable beat, on the precise coordinates where Paddy and Adeline were sitting. Then she walked out. That night, Paddy looked up from her parchment.

"What did that look mean?" Adeline was silent for a long moment.

"She has already decided what we are," Adeline said softly.

"Decided what?"

"Things with a ceiling." They had already mapped the elder Lucent sister. But the younger sister, the one universally acknowledged by the faculty as the truer, more terrifying genius, remained an unevaluated variable. The opportunity arrived in the form of a new batch of clients. Surprisingly, the academic foundation of these particular students was passable. By the abysmal standards of their usual clientele, it was practically stellar: a single, unsoiled pearl at the bottom of a pig trough.

The sheer anomaly of it brought a phantom tear of relief to a ghostwriter's eye. Heidi possessed the uncontainable, erratic gravity of a true visionary. Her lectures were wild, improvisational flights anchored in firsthand field experience, a live performance of genius that attracted the most brilliant and arrogant minds in the Academy while exposing anyone merely "excellent" as hopelessly, irrevocably average.

The new commission prompt read: The Potential Mutative Behavioral Mechanisms of the Sea-Erosion Dragon Under the Influence of the Blue Moon. The trap in the prompt was elegant. Most students would read it as Blue Moon appears → dragon's behavior changes: a perfectly linear chain that earned a passing grade and missed the point entirely. The Blue Moon was not the cause. It was the byproduct: the leaked residue of a dragon that had already mutated.

Any student who understood they were observing a mutation within a mutation, not a stable receptor, had actually answered the question. When Adeline read the prompt, something in her posture shifted. She picked up the quill and began to write. Her mind slipped into a state of absolute, fluid clarity. She mapped the cyclic causality, tracing the biological imperative of the dragon against the tectonic pressure of the ley-line. She was halfway down the parchment when she stopped.

She looked at the ink drying on the page and realized, with a cold jolt, that she had vastly exceeded the client's maximum theoretical capacity. She re-evaluated the client's upper limit. She drew a line through an entire paragraph. She left a single sentence intact. Paddy, hanging over her shoulder, squinted at the parchment.

"Why did you delete so little this time?"

"Because this client's foundation is actually somewhat solid," Adeline murmured. Paddy read the surviving text.

"Are you sure? You think she can actually pull off writing that?" Adeline didn't answer. She hovered the quill over the parchment. Slowly, she crossed out one more sentence. It was the only time in the entire academic year that they weren't struggling to hide their brilliance, but rather calculating exactly how much truth the client's identity could bear. When Heidi Lucent sat at her desk to grade the submissions, her red pen hovered over the surviving transitional description.

The observation didn't exist in any published literature. It was purely empirical. And crucially, the vector of observation was fundamentally different from her own fieldwork perspective. Where did this student conduct their field research? She pulled the client's academic file. No field excursions. No relevant ecological background. Heidi stared at the file. She looked back at the sentence. She drew a clean red circle around it, assigned the grade, and moved on.

She flagged the anomaly in her mind, as she flagged all anomalies worth revisiting. In the courtyard that afternoon, Adeline said to Paddy: "She is the ceiling of this era. A seat on the High Council is simply waiting for her." Paddy chewed thoughtfully on her sweetgrass.

"The purest silver tarnishes the fastest," she said. Adeline did not argue. The academic year dissolved into a relentless, suffocating blur. No entertainment. No rest. Just the endless cycle of studying, experimenting, and absorbing knowledge like starving sponges. They watched a broadcast in the student hall. Irene effortlessly defended her title as World Champion. She was still distant. But the distance no longer felt like a mathematical impossibility.

The day they finally walked out of the Academy's towering iron gates, Paddy stretched her arms high behind her head. She tilted her face up to the sun, the sweetgrass dangling from the corner of her mouth, and took a long, profound breath of un-academic air. From a high window in the faculty tower, Heidi's gaze rested on their retreating backs for a single, quiet moment. Nino, standing beside her with a stack of grading rubrics, didn't look up from the paperwork.

"What do you see?" Heidi watched the two Plumed Dragon Witches disappear down the path.

"Those two will reach the tier of Arch-Witch," she said, her voice carrying the unmistakable lightness of a verdict already decided.

"But a Grand Witch seat will be very difficult to attain." Nino's hands paused on her papers. An Arch-Witch ceiling was already an astronomical verdict, a rank Nino herself had not yet secured. And difficult to attain a Grand Witch seat was not a lament. It was the highest form of praise in a civilization of 4. 2 billion. Nino took Heidi's assessments as structural fact. Therefore, she began, in silence, to recalibrate her own previous assessment. Heidi was right about Adeline most precisely of all.

In the years that followed, Adeline would cultivate raw combat power that genuinely rivaled the Sixth Seat of the High Council, a position situated physically and politically directly beside the Fifth, and she would have burned down half the continent to take it. But the ceiling Heidi had identified was not a boundary of arcane output. It was a political guillotine.

The Lily Cable incident left the electorate with a single ruthless calculation: when the Plumed Dragon lineage ascended in 1999, they chose the cleaner record. Adeline was locked out. The ceiling Heidi had named from a faculty window turned out to be absolute.

What neither Lucent sister could have calculated, standing at that window, was the variable that would force even that ceiling open: a name engraved in gold on a corridor wall, a figure on a broadcast crystal, and the specific, consuming obsession of two Plumed Dragon Witches who had walked past it all, without looking back.