Chương 202: Chapter 181: The Academic Pressure of a World-Class Girlfriend

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 49 — 9: 30 AM [Location]: White City · Townhouse 107 · The Ludwig Estate Victoria stepped back in through the garden doors. She had returned from the garden with the quiet, unhurried composure of someone who had just closed a door on a heavy conversation and was not going to carry it into the next room. She pulled off her coat, smoothed the front of her jacket, and settled into her chair. Anna looked up from the morning edition of the White Star Chronicle.

She folded the paper with a crisp, deliberate rustle and set it beside her coffee cup.

"Hattie," Anna said, in the mild, administrative tone she reserved for tasks that were non-negotiable but not worth arguing about.

"The terrain integration on the lower strata finished processing overnight. Run a perimeter diagnostic and check the subterranean boundary layers." She picked up her cup. Her gaze slid sideways across the table, landing briefly on Victoria, with the exact precision of a field commander issuing a secondary deployment order.

"The grounds are quite expansive now," Anna added.

"Victoria should come along." Neither of them were invited to decline. The problem with taking a casual morning walk around the Ludwig property was that it required a motorized vehicle. Hathaway guided the touring cart out of the sub-basement bay and onto the wide, paved descent into the estate's lower expansion. Victoria sat in the passenger seat, the collar of her dark jacket turned up against the sudden plunge in temperature, her pale eyes tracking the frost-rimmed tree line rising on either side.

The ramp leveled out, and the coniferous forest opened up into a blinding expanse of snowfield.

"This," Hathaway said, gesturing at the four hundred acres of artificial tundra spreading out beneath an atmospheric ceiling that did not correspond to any natural law, "is a severe violation of non-Euclidean geometry."

"It's an acceptable expansion," Victoria replied, scanning the tree line with the neutral evaluation of someone whose own family estate contained independent mountain ranges and a dedicated weather office.

"The foundational anchors are stable. The spatial folding is relatively conservative for a central city district." Right, Hathaway remembered, I am talking to a Wellington. The concept of 'real estate' did not apply to them. They owned geography. The cart glided forward, cutting a neat track through the pristine powder. The biting cold nipped at Hathaway's cheeks. Somewhere above the frozen canopy, an artificial atmospheric array maintained the high-altitude ambiance with perfect, unfeeling commitment.

The evergreens loomed on both sides, their branches drooping under the weight of accumulated snow. If I had a string of enchanted lanterns and a couple of flying reindeer, Hathaway's internal processor observed, the hallucination would be complete. I am living in a winter fairy tale that happens to be my backyard. This is fine. Victoria sat beside her, the silver hair catching the cold light, saying nothing. The cart's thermal wards kept both of them comfortable. The cart crested a ridge.

Something detonated in the snowfield below. A geyser of dark earth and compacted powder erupted approximately fifty meters ahead, hurling a spray of frozen debris across the treeline. Before the initial cascade of ice and mud had finished falling, a creature the size of a small rhinoceros hauled itself out of the crater. It possessed the muscular, predatory silhouette of a Sand Leopard.

It was wrapped in what appeared to be several excessive layers of insulating blubber, covered in thick, waterproof brown fur that was currently caked in half the topsoil it had just excavated. Jutting from its upper jaw were twin ivory tusks of the exact dimensions and curvature typically found on a very large marine mammal. It shook itself. A significant quantity of dirt achieved brief orbital velocity.

Then it considered the hole it had just created, apparently decided it was insufficient, and threw itself directly back into the earth with the cheerful, thunderous commitment of a creature that had never once experienced doubt about its purpose in life. Victoria stared at the freshly excavated hazard crater.

"... A Walrus-Tusked Ground Leopard," she said.

"Margaret bought a herd of them," Hathaway confirmed, steering the cart around the impact site.

"Close genetic cousins to the standard Sand Leopard. They are pathologically obsessed with subterranean excavation and will swim in any underground water they can locate. Rory has apparently been directing them as her personal terraforming crew." As they descended the ridge, a second specimen surfaced near the base of the slope. It belly-flopped directly into the steaming banks of the hot spring river with the unironic enthusiasm of a creature experiencing the concept of joy at a neurological level.

As it surfaced, the thick fur along its back and flanks pulsed with soft, glowing azure light.

"The coral spores attach to their fur when they swim through the primary reef beds," Hathaway said.

"As they dig and move through the river system, they seed the fluorescent coral throughout the entire underground lake." The net result was currently steaming forty meters ahead: a wide, rushing hot spring river that cut a winding, thermal path through the permafrost in a direction that no river had been planned to go.

Victoria leaned forward against the brass railing of the cart, her eyes sweeping the full topographic spread before her: the geothermal river, the glacial snowfield, the distant peaks of the primary biome, the thunderous sounds of a second Walrus-Leopard beginning an unprompted excavation project nearby.

"It is quite rare," Victoria said, her tone carrying the neutral, clinical precision of a civil engineer examining a stress report for a bridge built by enthusiastic amateurs, "to witness three high-quality ecological cores deployed in such a densely overlapping grid within a single residential footprint." Hathaway's developer brain ran the statement through its translation matrix. Output: I have rarely witnessed such a spectacular, unhinged monument to brute-force financial expenditure.

"If you wish to optimize the circulation output of all three cores," Victoria continued, "the most efficient approach would be to rewrite the central environmental parameters into an island climate. Restrict the sub-zero temperatures to a defined, high-altitude perimeter zone. The ambient mana circulation would stabilize dramatically, and the entire domain would become significantly more livable." Hathaway nodded along. The logic was immaculate. Tropical paradise. Regulated glacial zone. Maximum livability.

Then the physics required to execute a localized atmospheric overhaul of that magnitude arrived in her cognitive queue, and she stopped nodding.

"Wouldn't that be," Hathaway said, her voice carrying the wince of someone doing mental arithmetic on a very large number, "astronomically expensive?" The cart fell quiet. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Victoria turned her head and looked at her.

In the pale blue depths of her irises, Hathaway watched a localized emotional crisis unfold in real time: deep, genuine affection braided with profound exasperation, layered beneath the specific, creeping moral unease of a woman who had just realized she was legally, formally dating someone who possessed the spatial engineering intuition of a very gifted toddler.

"Hathaway," Victoria said, with the patient, gentle cadence of someone explaining something for what they suspected might not be the last time.

"You possess the mana pool of an Arch-Witch." Hathaway blinked.

"Even if your foundational understanding of atmospheric architecture is currently at a nursery-school level," Victoria continued, "you are presumably capable of following a set of written instructions. Mary Ankaton's 100 Wonderful Climates and Landscapes for Your Small Home covers the island-climate rendering protocols in Chapter Four." Hathaway gripped the steering wheel. Do we own that book? her internal processor queried. Statistically, yes. Margaret buys archives in bulk.

The entire Ankaton collection is almost certainly somewhere in the underground library. But Margaret and Anna had ignored those archives entirely and contracted a specialist Siren Witch to terraform the estate at triple the necessary cost, because the Ludwig family possessed a deep, ancestral, load-bearing certainty that deploying a large quantity of money at any given problem was always fundamentally superior to solving it yourself.

The eternal curse of the bloodline, Hathaway thought, with the resigned clarity of someone recognizing a generational pattern. It is hard-coded. I am going to need to fight it deliberately and consciously for the rest of my life.

"Right," she said.

"Chapter Four." The cart descended the final slope and passed through the mouth of the expanded subterranean cavern. The temperature shifted: the dry, biting frost of the surface replaced by cool, mineral-heavy humidity. The darkness lasted for approximately four seconds. Then the cave opened up, and the lake was blazing.

Millions of bioluminescent corals coated the floor of the underground sea, pulsing in cascading gradients of cyan, deep violet, and cold magenta, casting dancing light against the cavern ceiling in waves. Massive fluorescent mushrooms bloomed along the rocky banks, their filaments threading refined mineral powder through the substrate like scattered stardust. The entire cavern vibrated with a quiet, alien beauty that had originated as a backyard. Victoria stepped out of the cart.

The blue light washed over the silver of her hair. Something in her usually guarded expression softened, the precise architecture of the Wellington mask yielding to a rare, unfiltered professional appreciation.

"Bioluminescent coral," Victoria murmured, moving toward the water's edge. The warmth in her voice was the specific warmth of a scholar encountering premium laboratory materials in an unexpected location.

"It is the primary foundational reagent for high-tier [Underwater Breathing] elixirs and [Siren Transformation] potions. And those specific mushroom strains along the banks are excellent universal buffers for volatile alchemical reaction matrices." She watched a Walrus-Leopard paddle lazily through the glowing shallows, its fur trailing spores of soft light across the water. Then she looked at Hathaway.

"Have you given any thought to your A2 Certification subject?" Hathaway's spine executed an unauthorized lock. Why. The panic arrived fast and total. Why is this happening. The Grand Masters Tournament ended literally yesterday. We were inside a sealed spatial void fourteen hours ago. Why are we talking about school?

It hit her with the precise, suffocating urgency of walking out of a sanity-destroying final exam, finally breathing free air, only to find a family member waiting on the sidewalk with a university enrollment form and a pen. Victoria nodded with the quiet understanding of someone who had already modeled the reaction.

"You need to decide soon. The A2 Certification directly dictates your second-year course prerequisites." Hathaway stared at the glowing lake. The A2, short for the Advanced Witch Research Academy Examination, was a professional certification open to any Witch who had cleared the A1. Pass it, and the government unlocked mid-tier exploration access, priority materials procurement, and municipal commission work: the kind that paid out in merit points convertible to restricted spells and premium potions.

With hundreds of available subject tracks, nearly every profession had a viable path through. She ran the preliminary calculations. If the goal was simply to acquire a piece of paper that said [A2] on it, the math was simple: Hunter Certification. The exam weighted practical combat assessment at eighty percent of the total score. Given her current combat profile, she could sleepwalk through the physical portion and pass before lunch. But, her logic engine objected immediately, Hunter is blue-collar.

She had exactly one field reference: a single morning at the Royal Rosas Hunting Reserve with Rhode and Bella, which had immediately involved an unskippable dragon funeral rite and perpetual mud. The career outlook matched. The A2 subjects had a social hierarchy. There were the laborers, and there were the people who did not need to labor because they had made the correct academic choices at nineteen years old. She looked at Victoria. Whatever she chose, it is unquestionably at the absolute apex of that hierarchy.

Hathaway adopted the posture of a humble, attentive student seeking senior guidance.

"What subjects did you select?" Victoria smoothed her gloves across her lap. Her tone was entirely matter-of-fact.

"I already hold A2 Certificates in [Potions] and [Practical Runes]. I intend to sit for the [Alchemy] examination next semester." Hathaway pulled in a long breath of cold cavern air. Two A2 certificates. The academic overachiever halo radiating off her girlfriend was blinding. Genuinely, structurally blinding, the kind that required protective eyewear. [Potions] alone required enough capital to bankrupt a minor noble house.

[Practical Runes] required that, plus a cognitive architecture so rare it made the talent gate for [Potions] look like a suggestion. Just what kind of monstrous base stats was she hiding under that jacket?

"Alchemy," Hathaway repeated, tasting the syllables. Victoria's pale eyes held hers, steady and patient.

"If your primary objective is to process and utilize the raw materials cultivating in this environment," she said, with a gentleness that somehow felt worse than a direct refusal, " [Potions] would be a considerably more forgiving entry point for you." She began to walk along the shoreline, slipping into lecture mode with the smooth, inevitable ease of a natural law engaging.

"Alchemy is not a single discipline. It is an umbrella classification covering several highly specialized branches: Doll-Making, Wondrous Item Crafting, Potion Smelting, and standard Magical Tool Creation. The foundational theory for each branch is substantially distinct." Hathaway processed this.

"So I would need to choose a specific branch? Register separately for [Doll-Making A2], or [Wondrous Item A2]?" The corner of Victoria's mouth moved. It was a small, precise movement, the specific calibration of a smile that knew exactly what it was about to deliver.

"No," Victoria said.

"The A2 [Alchemy] examination is a randomized draw. The proctors seal the prompt on the day of the exam. You are expected to be proficient across all branches." The data stack crashed. Hathaway stood at the water's edge, quietly drowning in the rising tide of academic despair. Then, below the despair, a secondary calculation assembled itself with cold, automatic clarity. Victoria already has an A2 in [Potions]. If I register for [Potions], our course schedules will have zero overlap.

We will be in entirely separate academic tracks for the entire second year. And Victoria had two A2 certificates. If Hathaway took the easy route, if she settled for a less demanding track while her girlfriend sat the most notoriously complex randomized exam in the academy's curriculum, she was not sure she would ever be able to look across a study desk again without her pride spontaneously combusting. Victoria watched it play out across Hathaway's face for a long moment. Then she walked back to the cart.

She rested her gloved fingers briefly, lightly, over Hathaway's hand on the steering column.

"I would personally recommend starting with Sharon Curie's introductory texts," Victoria said.

"She is an exceptional modern High Witch, and the foundational architect of the Third Revolution in Doll-Making. Her early chapters are unusually lucid." She looked at Hathaway.

"Read the theory before you commit. There is no rush." Hathaway looked down at the gloved hand over hers.

"Okay," she said.

"Sharon Curie." The cart hummed back up the passage and emerged onto the surface, breaking out of the cave mouth into the wide, frozen snowfield. They glided over a shallow crest directly above the subterranean lake. Here, the physical divide between underground and sky was thin. The bioluminescent coral was close enough to the surface that its light bled upward through the compacted earth and the packed snow, filtering through the permafrost in soft, cold pulses.

A circular patch of snowfield glowed from below, quiet and unearthly, the powder suffused with a blue-white radiance leaking up from a place light should not reach. Hathaway slowed the cart. She sat for a moment, looking at the glowing snow. Mary Ankaton's 100 Wonderful Climates, waiting in the underground library. Ninety-two thousand Solars in fresh tournament winnings. The name Sharon Curie, newly installed in her to-read queue.

Twenty-four hours ago, she had been sitting in the Greed Umbrella's suite with no answer for Wei Changqing's question and no roadmap beyond surviving the immediate crisis. Her summer had been a blank, structureless void. She looked at the glowing snow. Then she looked at the silver-haired figure in the passenger seat, outlined against the cold light rising from the earth. The void was gone. The summer had finally acquired a shape.