Chương 169: Interlude: Do Not Say Sorry to Others

[Time Span]: Spring 1999 [Location]: Minothnago Academy The surface of the water did not break with a gasp of relief. When Cecilia Wellington finally dragged herself upward through the drowning dark, the first breath of oxygen burned. It was the agonizing, razor-sharp clarity of survival: to stand amidst the smoking ruins of one's own life and realize that the heart is still stubbornly, rhythmically beating. That tomorrow is arriving on schedule, without asking permission. She needed something. An anchor.

A quiet corner where the universe was not watching. So when spring arrived and the question of what next could no longer be deferred, she did not go back. She did not return to the White City. She did not return to the Yggdrasil Academy, to the blinding light-pollution of political expectations, the exhausting, ceaseless malice of high-society duels, the whispers that would always cling to her family name. She stayed in her home district. She enrolled in a small, beautiful, unapologetically quiet campus.

Minothnago Academy. The Department of Folklore. A dead-end academic track studying dusty myths. She arrived in the spring. Cecilia's perception had always operated on a different frequency. The Mystic Eyes of the Wellington bloodline made it a biological impossibility to overlook the true weight of a person's mana. Therefore, the moment she stepped onto the campus grounds, she noticed her. Karula.

She was lounging on the thick branch of an ancient oak tree, doing nothing with the practiced, effortless perfection of someone who treated gravity as a mild suggestion. But it was her mana that stopped Cecilia entirely: a deep, heavy purple, vast and still. Cecilia's footsteps faltered. For a single, violent instant, the Mystic Eyes reached without permission. Not her. The architecture was wrong. The temperature was wrong.

This mana had its own gravity, its own origin, its own distinct shape—nothing borrowed, nothing echoed. Whatever this was, it was entirely, incontrovertibly itself. Cecilia drew a slow breath. Up in the oak tree, Karula had already noticed her the moment she walked through the academy gates. Mathematically, it was impossible not to notice Cecilia Wellington. A winter had passed since the "Wedding of the Century," but its shockwaves still rattled the windows of the Inner Sea.

The PR departments of two ancient houses had incinerated the official records, but they could not incinerate human memory. The version that had reached Minothnago was chaotic and fragmented: a ceremony interrupted, the sky tearing open, the camera feed instantly painted red by a tidal wave of whale blood, Liandra Milan'thirskaya's breaking scream, and then static. The rumors had filled the rest. Failed political marriage. Deliberate humiliation. Cecilia used as bait to lure a runaway sister home.

A tragic heroine, Karula had thought lazily from her perch. But the moment Cecilia's head lifted and their eyes met, Karula discarded that notion. There was no tragedy in that gaze. Only a crushing, oceanic depth. On the adjacent branch, Wei Changqing sat with a heavy tome across her lap. A rapid social survey of the campus had assured Wei her social circle would remain liberatingly small. Karula was a menace: engineering minor humiliations and demanding juice at inconvenient hours for pure entertainment.

It was irritating, but preferable. Karula wasn't an idiot. Statistically, this placed her above ninety percent of the student population. Wei had decided to keep her. Wei had also noticed Cecilia. Without turning her head from the new arrival, she spoke.

"Take a guess." Her voice carried the unhurried cadence of someone reading a weather report.

"Which one of us do you think she'll choose for her entrance duel?" Karula leaned back against the bark.

"Me, obviously." Down on the cobblestone, Cecilia stopped. She looked up into the branches.

"I'd like to duel that one," she said quietly. Though the two Witches were sitting less than three feet apart, there was zero ambiguity about who had been chosen. Because those ocean-blue eyes possessed a gravity that made no sense by ordinary physics: no matter who she was looking at, she made them feel as though they were the only object existing within her entire universe. Karula executed a clean [Blink], slipping from the branch and materializing perfectly on the cobblestones below.

Wei Changqing remained in the oak tree, crossing her legs and settling in with deep, quiet amusement. Statistically, Karula's odds of winning were higher. Cecilia had not fought a real battle in months, and prolonged inactivity degraded a Witch's combat edge. But even with the rust, a Wellington was a structural nightmare. More pressingly, the fight was uncomfortable. Cecilia never looked away. Not for a fraction of a second.

As spells shattered the air and kinetic barriers flared, those deep blue eyes remained locked onto Karula with an unwavering, suffocating intensity that had no tactical explanation. The Mystic Eyes, Karula concluded, her paranoia building. That has to be it. Everyone knows the Wellington bloodline possesses optical spells capable of hypnosis, memory-tampering, and rewriting common sense. She's staring at me to trigger a cognitive override.

Distracted by her own frantic countermeasures against a mental attack that wasn't happening, Karula's spell-rhythm fractured. She lost the duel in a messy, disjointed exchange. She stood in the courtyard, straightening the front of her coat with a precise, controlled gesture, searching for an external cause. She looked up at the oak tree. Wei Changqing had her hand pressed against her mouth, her shoulders trembling with suppressed laughter. Karula found her target. She pointed an accusing finger at the canopy.

"You cursed me!" Wei Changqing stopped laughing. If I am falsely accused of a crime, Wei reasoned quietly, equivalent exchange demands I commit the crime to balance the equation. She raised one finger. A localized [Silence] hex settled neatly over Karula's head. Karula opened her mouth to continue the tirade. Nothing came out. She tried again. Complete, surgical silence. She glared at Wei Changqing with eyes that promised immediate, catastrophic retribution.

Wei drifted down from the tree with the easy grace of a falling leaf, landed soundlessly in front of Cecilia, and offered a warm, perfectly cultured smile.

"Please pay no mind to the idiot, Miss Wellington," Wei said.

"If you have the time, allow me to show you around the campus." Cecilia looked at the furiously vibrating, magically muted Karula. Then she looked at the impeccably composed Wei Changqing.

"... Thank you," Cecilia said softly. By the time Karula finally brute-forced the hex apart, Wei and Cecilia were already fifty paces down the path. Karula stared at Wei's back. Then her gaze drifted to Cecilia's. She shoved her hands into her pockets and fell into step several paces behind them, aggressively looking at the trees. I just happen to be walking in this exact direction. It is a completely unrelated decision. Minothnago was a small academy, by the absurdly extravagant standards of Witches.

But "small" still meant it took an entire afternoon to traverse on foot. Wei Changqing was an immaculate guide, possessed of the rare talent of making even a crumbling stone archway sound like a lost chapter of ancient history. Karula trailed behind, ostensibly ignoring both of them. But whenever Wei paused for breath, Karula would seamlessly insert a sharp, sarcastic footnote into the history lesson, proving conclusively that she had been listening to every single word.

Midway through the promenade, they passed an ice cream stand. Wei Changqing stopped, with the air of someone who had simply noticed a pleasant thing at precisely the right moment.

"It is quite warm. We should get something cold." Karula scoffed.

"Who exactly wants to walk around a formal campus licking a public dessert like a complete undignified—""—That sounds wonderful," Cecilia said. Karula's mouth closed. Wei Changqing returned from the cart with two waffle cones. She handed one to Cecilia, then turned to Karula. She held her own cone and simply looked at her. Karula narrowed her eyes.

"When I say I don't want something, it means I want it. It is a test of basic social intuition. Do you not understand nuance?" This woman is beyond saving. I should have layered the silence curse. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. Wei sighed, turned back to the cart, acquired a towering pineapple cone, and shoved it into Karula's chest. They resumed walking. Every gaze she had faced since the Hanging Gardens carried weight. Political calculus. Grief.

The long, suffocating shadow of Babylon. People didn't look at her; they looked at what she represented. Here, no one was looking at the wreckage. Wei Changqing was explaining the architectural lore of a bell tower. Karula was aggressively pretending not to care while holding a bright yellow pineapple cone. It was an entirely, miraculously ordinary afternoon. Cecilia couldn't remember the last time she had experienced one. Karula, meanwhile, was losing a war of attrition against her own aesthetic principles.

She fundamentally refused to be seen licking a dessert in public. The sun was hot. The ice cream had crossed the point of no return across three of its six scoops. She calculated her options, waited for Wei and Cecilia to glance toward a fountain, then opened her mouth and swallowed the entire remaining mass of the ice cream in one violent, continuous motion. Six massive, freezing scoops of solid dairy. A brain freeze of apocalyptic proportions struck her nervous system.

Karula's effortlessly cool expression contorted into a mask of pure, sub-zero agony, her hands coming up to her temples. Cecilia and Wei Changqing turned back. They stopped. They stared at her. Cecilia looked at the empty cone in Karula's hand. She looked at Karula's pain-twisted face. Then she looked down at her own mixed-flavor cone.

"If... if you like ice cream that much, Karula," Cecilia said carefully.

"I still have a pineapple scoop here...?" Karula desperately wanted to say she had already consumed enough ice cream to induce physiological hypothermia. But Cecilia's eyes were on her, carrying zero judgment and pure, earnest concern, and Karula's mouth moved before her brain could authorize the words.

"Sure." Karula took the cone from Cecilia's hand and, with stiff, freezing dignity, bit the pineapple scoop entirely off the top.... Even colder. Having consumed the scoop, Karula found herself holding Cecilia's half-eaten waffle cone and experiencing a severe logistical crisis. Returning it felt impossible. She had just eaten off it. Not returning it also felt impossible. It belonged to Cecilia. She stood paralyzed by the precise, crushing weight of this dilemma.

Seeing Karula frozen, staring blankly at the cone in her hand, Cecilia simply leaned forward, closed the distance, held Karula's wrist gently to steady it, and took a calm, unhurried bite of the remaining waffle.... Ah. Karula froze perfectly solid. Her soul temporarily departed her physical body and went somewhere considerably quieter. Wei Changqing gave Karula a long, judgmental look, stepped forward, and ate the remaining half of the cone. Karula snapped back to reality. She looked at her empty hands.

She looked at Wei Changqing. Wei Changqing returned a look of profound, saintly innocence. The afternoon ended at the steps of the dormitory. Numbers were exchanged. Cecilia smiled, her eyes curving slightly, and offered soft, genuine thanks for the day. Karula said nothing. But she did not leave. She stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Wei Changqing and watched Cecilia walk through the heavy oak doors until the door clicked shut behind her. Wei Changqing did not turn her head.

"Pineapple," Wei noted.

"Shut up," Karula said. Life had settled into a comfortable rhythm. Cecilia, Wei Changqing, and Karula had become a fixed trio. Cecilia was genuinely growing fond of Minothnago; the quiet, dusty work of folklore suited a mind that had recently decided it needed somewhere to be. Then came the group projects. Flandmira was experiencing a deep, aristocratic crisis of logistics. Advanced fieldwork required a minimum of three Witches. Currently, Flandmira's permanent roster consisted of exactly one other person: Maria.

Because they were both absurdly powerful, they technically managed to complete every assignment. But Flandmira harbored an unshakeable, privately embarrassing belief: Just the two of us is not enough, because every single time we step outside, we barely survive by the skin of our teeth. If she could just recruit a third member, surely the difficulty would normalize. She just wanted a standard university experience. She did not want every homework assignment to become a live-action survival-horror scenario.

Flandmira campaigned tirelessly. She failed tirelessly. Nine out of ten Witches in her cohort had already been personally traumatized by her passive luck field. Flandmira was a breathtaking objective masterpiece of genetics, and Witches were notoriously susceptible to aesthetics. Fresh students were continuously charmed into agreeing, only to subsequently find themselves navigating genuine nightmares and regretting their life choices from a hospital bed.

Flandmira's reputation in the academy had transcended typical student gossip: she was a breathtaking, catastrophically cursed crown jewel, statistically guaranteed to inflict life-threatening misfortune on anyone foolish enough to claim her, while she herself remained utterly spotless and genuinely bewildered as to why her companions were always screaming. During one seminar class, Cecilia presented a solo field report. The professor praised it in front of the entire lecture hall.

The moment the bell rang, the walking hazard made her move. Flandmira stood in the doorway, smoothing her kidskin gloves. The ambient lighting instinctively shifted to frame her silhouette. Every other Witch in the room collectively paled and began vaulting out the back windows. Cecilia remained in her seat, packing her notes, looking mildly confused as to why the gorgeous blonde woman was staring at her with the predatory focus of a natural disaster. Flandmira walked toward her. The gait was elegant, unhurried.

The trajectory was mathematically calculated to seal off every viable evasion vector. She had extensive experience in this area. But Cecilia had no intention of evading. Flandmira stopped at Cecilia's desk. She stared down at her.

"I am Flandmira," she announced. Then she fell silent. She waited for the recognition. The fear. The polite excuse to flee. Cecilia looked up at the golden-haired woman and offered the most sincere thought in her head.

"That is a very beautiful name." Flandmira blinked. The imperious theatrical posture slipped for a fraction of a second. She coughed delicately into her glove. A faint flush touched her cheeks.

"Thank you." Recovering quickly, Flandmira launched into her well-rehearsed recruitment pitch.

"My research group is currently recruiting. By joining us, you will gain access to exceptionally practical field experience—" True. Experience in not dying.

"—and we possess excellent operational funding." Also true, though pitching money to the literal Wellington heir felt embarrassing. Halfway through the flawless, rapid-fire monologue, Flandmira began to stutter. Because Cecilia was sitting perfectly still, giving Flandmira her complete, undivided, entirely earnest attention, and Flandmira's lungs felt entirely too small. She trailed off involuntarily. She had just realized, standing three feet away, how deep Cecilia's eyes actually were.

Noticing the pause, Cecilia tilted her head.

"Who else is in your group, besides you?" Flandmira's spirit instantly revived.

"Maria!" She turned and waved urgently at the doorway. Maria, leaning against the doorframe, offered a cool, professional nod of acknowledgment. And then nothing. Flandmira stood radiating visible guilt. Two people. The entirety of the pitch she had left. Cecilia smiled, her eyes curving into soft crescents.

"So, I would be the third member?" Flandmira nodded vigorously.

"Yes, yes..." Then her brain processed the syntax. Her silver eyes went wide.

"Wait. You agree?!" Cecilia looked faintly confused.

"Yes. Is there a problem?" She closed the last of her notes, stood, and looked at Flandmira with quiet sincerity.

"Thank you for the invitation. You have a very beautiful voice." Flandmira was an opera singer. A prodigy of the stage. Thousands of people had praised her voice over the years. She knew exactly what those praises were: an audience reacting to a performance. Applause for a character on a stage. But Cecilia hadn't been watching a performer. She had just listened to a desperate university student stumble through a terrible sales pitch, and her observation was: You have a beautiful voice.

Flandmira lunged forward and grabbed both of Cecilia's hands. It wasn't a theatrical grasp. It wasn't an elegant, stage-crafted gesture. It was a desperate, immediate grip, executed because she didn't have time to think about how to make it look pretty. She just knew she couldn't let go.

"No problem!" Flandmira insisted.

"Absolutely no problem at all!" Their first group assignment was a field study that would later be classified in the Authority's archives with an Influence Factor of 1. 05+, under the case file: [Lake of the Nocturnal Kin]. The assignment was strictly observational. The location was classified in the academy syllabus as [Known Hazard, Stable]. The lake itself was not a true body of water; it was merely the exposed, liquid anchor of a naturally occurring, centuries-old folded space.

At night, the boundary thinned, allowing the 'Nocturnal Kin', bizarre entities trapped in the evolutionary purgatory between organic life and spatial fragments, to seep through the surface tension and roam the shoreline. Hence the local taboos. Observe the bleed. Document the anomalies. Do not engage. Cecilia realized something was wrong the moment she crossed the treeline. The environment around the lake was actively hostile to Witch physiology.

The ambient space clamped down on her mana circuits with the crushing, suffocating weight of the deep ocean. An ordinary academy student walking into this zone would have their mana instantly flatlined, reduced to the combat capacity of a baseline mortal. To retain even a fraction of combat effectiveness here required a personal mana pool so monstrously deep that the remaining 'fraction' was still a lethal weapon. The three of them possessed that depth. But they were walking a tightrope over a gorge.

Flandmira stood at the edge of the water, her silver eyes scanning the calm, dark surface. She let out a long, quiet sigh.

"I hate this," she murmured. Then, Flandmira's passive luck mechanism triggered. The boundary didn't just thin. It violently fractured. The surface of the lake didn't ripple; it shattered upward like broken glass. The localized physics of the folded space stopped merely 'leaking' and began actively expanding. Cecilia watched, her breath catching, as an ancient willow tree on the shoreline was swallowed by the expanding spatial distortion, its physical mass dissolving instantly into the void. It was eating reality.

"The anchor is destabilizing!" Flandmira shouted over the sudden, roaring vacuum.

"It's a spatial mutation! It's expanding!" And pouring out of that expanding rift were the Nocturnal Kin. Not beasts. Not monsters. They were jagged, shifting horrors, half-flesh and half-spatial distortion, shrieking as they dragged themselves into the physical world. You cannot kill a natural dimension. There was no enemy caster to assassinate, no central core to shatter.

"We have to force the rift shut!" Flandmira yelled, her hands already flying through complex sealing geometry, sweat beading on her forehead as she fought the environment's crushing mana suppression.

"Hold the line! I need ninety seconds to map the coordinates and stitch the boundary!" This was the night Cecilia saw the true Maria for the first time. As the shoreline collapsed and the screaming spatial anomalies swarmed them, the idol's radiant, carefully maintained smile vanished entirely. The worse the situation became, the heavier the spatial pressure, the more desperate the odds, the colder, sharper, and more devastatingly lucid Maria grew.

Moving through the spatial tears with flawless, lethal precision that the environment's suppression barely touched, Maria was something else entirely. She wasn't just surviving; she was a surgical instrument built for the abyss. Forty seconds left. A massive Nocturnal Kin, its form a terrifying blur of claws and fractured space, shattered the defensive line. It bypassed Maria's zone of control and lunged directly toward Flandmira's blind spot. Flandmira was mid-chant, her hands locked in the sealing matrix.

Dropping the spell meant the rift would consume them all. The ambient suppression made a defensive cast a fraction of a second too slow. Driven by pure, unthinking reflex, Cecilia placed her own unprotected back between Flandmira and the kill-zone. Maria's spatial intervention arrived in the exact millisecond it needed to, severing the Kin before it could fully connect. If it had not, Cecilia would have been torn in half. Maria's face was already completely drained of color.

Flandmira slammed her hands together, the spatial coordinates locked, and the rift violently snapped shut. When dawn finally cracked open the sky, the three of them collapsed onto the damp, half-eaten shoreline, breathing heavily in the sudden, eerie silence. Maria pushed herself upright. She walked to where Cecilia was sitting in the mud. She dropped to her knees on the shoreline and grabbed Cecilia by the shoulders.

"Why did you do that?" Maria's voice was shaking with a cold, controlled fury.

"Flandmira and I are not weak. We are not liabilities. Why did you immediately assume it was your duty to die to protect us?" Cecilia shrank back slightly, looking completely bewildered by the anger.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, her voice dropping.

"I just... I didn't think of anything else." Maria looked at her. The fury in her eyes didn't cool. It transmuted into something deeper, sharper, infinitely more painful. Maria's hands were harsh on Cecilia's shoulders. Her voice was harsh. But her hands were steady.

"Do not say sorry to others." Flandmira sat on the grass a few feet away, watching them in silence. Do not say sorry to others. Flandmira's silver eyes stayed fixed on Cecilia. She had spent her life surrounded by people who applauded a performance. Flandmira watched Maria grip Cecilia's shoulders, and didn't look away.