Chương 72: The Modder's Dilemma

[Time]: Day 40–45 (Thursday to Tuesday) [Location]: Yggdrasil Academy Days 40 through 45 blurred together in a highly lucrative, perfectly optimized loop. Re-engraving an entire foundational spell pool wasn't a software update. It was a total neuro-arcane gut renovation. The heavy, sealed boxes of high-purity Aether ink and crystallized logic nodes had arrived on Day 39, exactly on schedule.

Every night since: cross-legged on her bed, decoding spellbooks, designing custom geometric models, brewing volatile engraving potions, and burning hyper-optimized matrices directly into her spinal cord. It was an agonizingly slow, microscopic process. She had calculated it would take a full month to overhaul her entire arsenal. By Tuesday night, she had only managed to successfully re-compile three Tier-1 spells. Passive macro triggered. Base MP permanently expanded. Passive macro triggered.

Mana density increased. She didn't need to look at the exact decimal points. The passive stat-farming loop was already humming in the background—a sweet, steady drip of absolute, compounding power. The financial anxiety that had haunted her since Day 1 was officially dead and buried. Lab 606 had officially become a speedrun category. Thursday. Saturday. Tuesday. Click. Shatter. Sweep. The crystalline residue yielded to her [Analytic Vision] with zero resistance.

Victoria processed the diagnostic data flows with thought-controlled keystrokes, completely bypassing the manual interface. Nino Lucent would emerge from the Leviathan's core, check the zero-tolerance surfaces, and silently update her master spreadsheet without a single change in facial expression. Three shifts. Three soft chimes from Hathaway's communicator. [Salary Deposit: 1, 500 Solars.] Cold, beautiful, highly functional bureaucratic peace. Her standard of living had skyrocketed overnight.

The 5-Solar set-meals downstairs were fine. But fine was no longer the budget. Instead, she sat at the mahogany tables in the second-floor dining hall, cutting into herb-roasted terrestrial-fowl that cost 45 Solars a plate. She closed her eyes to savor the rich taste of black pepper, rosemary, and liquid capital, finally projecting the effortless, well-funded aura of a proper Ludwig. Six days of perfect, uninterrupted calm. A rhythmic, industrial paradise.

[Time]: Day 46, Wednesday, 07: 50 AM [Location]: Yggdrasil Academy · Lecture Hall 7 · "The Golden Zone" The ecosystem in the front row had stabilized into a flawless routine. Hathaway dropped into her seat, instantly enveloped by the familiar, extreme micro-climate. To her left, the oppressive 45°C dry furnace of Surtrina's natural biology. To her right, the absolute-zero entropy sink of Spectra's silent presence. She didn't hesitate. She didn't ask. She just initiated the Morning Protocol.

Hathaway casually suspended a can of [Frost-Bite Cola] to her left. A thick, deep crimson-scaled tail whipped up from beneath the desk. Hiss. The cherry-red spade tip sliced the aluminum tab cleanly off with surgical precision. Before the tail could retract, a blurry, pale hand reached across Hathaway's chest and snatched the can directly out of the Balor's trajectory. Sizzle. White vapor cascaded over Spectra's fingers as the boiling liquid instantly dropped to a crisp 3°C.

The Ghost placed the frosted can on the edge of the Balor's desk without ever opening her eyes. Surtrina picked it up, took a long drink, and let out a puff of aggressively hot air from her nose. Her tail uncurled, coming to rest comfortably against the leg of Hathaway's chair. Transaction complete. The Aesthetic Sandwich was fully operational. Hathaway cracked open her own can of iced coffee, leaning back with a profound sense of belonging. Her mana was regenerating. Her bank account was heavily fortified.

Today is the day we get the quiz results, she thought, taking a calm sip. My derivation on Question 7 was an ugly, duct-taped mess, but the final number was 12 degrees. I definitely survived. She settled deeper into her chair. Fat bank account. Passive stat-farming cheat. Two S-Class monsters serving as personal thermostat and bottle opener. The project is fully on track. Nothing can ruin this mood. She glanced at the heavy double doors at the front of the hall.

[Time]: 08: 00 AM (Sharp) [Location]: Lecture Hall 7 · The Podium BOOM. The heavy double doors slammed open. The chatter died instantly. The temperature in the room didn't drop because of a spell. It dropped because the Apex Predator had entered the ecosystem. Professor Nino Lucent floated into the room. She didn't look at the students. She glided to the podium, her dead gray eyes staring at a floating holographic checklist. Behind her, Six Autonomous Floating Cannons hummed with a low, threatening vibration.

"I graded last week's 'Mana Fluidity' quiz." Her voice was low, raspy, and carried the terrifying indifference of a surgeon checking a list of organ donors.

"Out of 3, 000 students in this department..." Nino paused, her finger hovering over the hologram.

"... Seventeen of you failed." The room remained silent. But it wasn't a terrified silence. It was a heavy, pressurized silence. Mana began to flare up in the back rows.

"Get out," Nino said, deleting the file. A student in the back row stood up. She was trembling with pure Academic Rage. She looked like a predator whose kill had been stolen, her eyes burning with the pride of a genius who had crushed every exam since birth. She slammed her hand on the desk, creating a shockwave that rattled the windows.

"Professor Lucent! I object!" The student shouted, her voice shaking with fury.

"My calculation for the 'Reynolds Number' was based on the 'Klara-Vance Protocol' published in the Journal of Arcane Physics last month! It is the most cutting-edge fluid model available! You cannot fail me for citing the latest literature!" The class murmured. The 'Klara-Vance Protocol' was indeed the new standard. It was the hot topic in the library this week. Every genius in the room knew it. Nino stopped. She slowly lifted her head. Her dead fish-eyes finally focused on the student.

"Klara-Vance?" Nino let out a short, dry laugh.

"You mean that paper published on the 15th?"

"Yes!" the student challenged, holding her ground.

"It redefined the Fluidity Constant!"

"I peer-reviewed that paper three months ago," Nino said, her voice flat.

"I strongly recommended rejection."

"Why?!" the student demanded.

"The math is flawless!"

"Because Klara based her entire mathematical model on an idealized, perfectly stable Aether vacuum," Nino replied coldly.

"It works beautifully in a sterile theoretical simulation. But look at the title of your quiz: Mana Fluidity under High-Pressure Resonance. Did you actually read the limitations methodology of her paper, or did you just memorize the formula from the abstract?" Nino snapped her fingers. A hologram appeared—it was a simulation of the student's calculation.

"Watch." The simulation ran. The mana flowed perfectly for 2 seconds, then... The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. BOOM. The virtual pipe exploded.

"The journal published her paper anyway because pure theoreticians don't have to worry about shrapnel," Nino said, her voice dripping with absolute disdain.

"I build functional reactors. I do."

"If you apply Klara's math in a high-density physical environment, you don't get a generator. You get a bomb." The student's face went pale. Her mana was still doing the math. Her "Cutting Edge" was already Nino's "Hazardous Waste."

"Get out," Nino repeated.

"Before I grade you on 'Industrial Sabotage' instead of just 'Failure'." The student gritted her teeth. She grabbed her bag, glaring at Nino with a mix of hatred and reluctant awe.

"I will recalculate the high-pressure variables myself," she spat, her pride still intact.

"If your simulation is flawed, I will file a complaint."

"Please do," Nino replied, already looking away.

"I need toilet paper." The student marched out. The other sixteen failures followed, heads held high, radiating pure academic fury. They were lions kicked out of the pride, their minds already calculating exactly how many hours of sleep they could sacrifice to plot their academic revenge. SLAM. The doors shut. Hathaway sank lower in her seat, clutching her returned paper. [Grade: D−] [Score: 61/100] [Comment: Your calculation process is an ugly, inefficient abomination that offends my eyes. But the result is technically correct. You survive. Barely.] Hathaway stared at the red ink. She was Number 18. The absolute bottom of the passing curve. And she had never been so unspeakably proud of a D− in her entire life. She was practically vibrating with euphoric relief. I reverse-engineered an undocumented, custom mechanic on the fly, patched the math together with duct tape, and actually beat seventeen native-born geniuses. Sixty-one points, her inner college student cheered.

A 61 is just a highly optimized 100. It means zero wasted effort. Long live the passing grade! She carefully folded the paper and tucked it into her bag, mentally patting herself on the back. Her job as Nino's assistant was safe. The crisis was averted.

"Today," Nino's voice snapped Hathaway back to the present.

"We finish the theory module with 'Non-Euclidean Spatial Folding in Micro-Circuits.'" SNAP. Nino snapped her fingers. The massive blackboard ignited with Hard-Light Mana Projection. This time, it wasn't just formulas. It was Dynamic Topology. Complex 3D shapes twisted, folded, and inverted in the air, accompanied by equations that involved imaginary numbers and spatial coordinates.

"Copy this," Nino commanded, turning her back to the class to draw a new variable in the air.

"I assume you all learned 12-dimensional geometry in kindergarten. I will not repeat the basics." Scritch-scratch-scratch-scratch. The sound of quills scratching frantically against parchment filled the hall. Hathaway's hand was a blur. She threw her entire biological CPU at the hologram. [Thread 1] handled the frantic physical transcription, buffering the raw data. [Thread 2] and [Thread 3] were red-lining, desperately trying to map the shifting 2D equations onto a 3D mental grid.

[Thread 4] was sweating blood, brute-forcing the actual Non-Euclidean spatial folds to make mathematical sense of the impossible geometry. Brain: Overheating. Logic Processor: 99% Load. Cooling System: Failed. She risked a glance to her left. Surtrina wasn't even holding her quill. The Balor was staring at the hologram, her golden eyes burning with predatory excitement. Her tail lashed back and forth. She was parsing the shifting topology entirely in real-time, hunting the logic like prey.

To her right, Spectra had her eyes open. Her pale finger was tracing the lines in the air, effortlessly simulating the spatial fold with a cold, calculating smile. She was dissecting the formula live. Hathaway looked at her own paper. She was successfully decoding the formula, yes. But her derivation process was a desperate, sweaty wrestling match. Monsters. Everyone in this row is a native-born monster.

I'm running four overclocked emulators just to brute-force a stuttering render, and they are casually streaming the universe's source code in 4K. [Time]: 09: 30 AM [Location]: The Podium Clap. Nino clapped her hands. The hologram shattered into pixels and vanished. The lights came back on. The class didn't slump. They straightened up. Their eyes were bloodshot, but they looked hungry for more. They were masochists for knowledge.

"That concludes the theory module," Nino announced. She floated down from the podium, her gray eyes scanning the room with a look of supreme boredom.

"Now, the Final Project." She waved her hand. The blackboard transformed again. [Final Exam Project] [Objective: Original Magitech Invention] [Requirement: Must be Patent-Ready. No Plagiarism. No Iterations of Existing Tech.]"I do not want to see another 'Auto-Targeting Gauss Rifle' or 'Anti-Gravity Hoverboard'," Nino said, her voice dripping with disdain.

"Those are assembly kits for toddlers. You can buy the standard patents for 50 Solars in the cafeteria just to read them for fun."

"Do not bring me 'Weaponized Golems' or 'Mana Shield Generators'. I am tired of grading military trash that explodes after three uses. You will design a device from scratch. You will draw the blueprints. You will manufacture the prototype." Hathaway sat frozen in her chair, her game-designer soul taking a massive, critical hit. A Gauss Rifle... is a toddler's kit? An Anti-Gravity Engine... is a 50 Solar cafeteria purchase?

It wasn't the mere existence of these marvels that broke her mind; it was the aggressive devaluation. In her past life, a Railgun was the holy grail of military engineering. Nations would bankrupt themselves to build one. Here? It was something a six-year-old Witch built for a science fair because it was "easy." She stopped thinking about the railgun. There was no shock left to feel. There was only the quiet, mechanistic acceptance of a woman who had just recalibrated her understanding of what "impressive" meant.

Again.

"And regarding the blueprints..." Nino narrowed her eyes. She reached into the pocket of her robe and pulled out something she had confiscated earlier. A plastic ruler. And a compass. She held them up like she was holding a dead rat.

"I saw some of you using these tools during the quiz last week." The class let out a low ripple of laughter. Not nervous laughter. Mocking laughter. They were laughing at whoever was unskilled enough to need those tools. It was like seeing a university student using their fingers to count to ten. Crack. Nino snapped the plastic ruler in half with one hand.

"Disgusting." She tossed the pieces into the small metal bin next to the podium. BZZZT. A flash of blue light, and the [Miniature Annihilation Field] inside the bin instantly decomposed the plastic into basic subatomic particles.

"You are Witches. You are Living Industry." Nino raised a pale finger and drew a circle in the air. Hum. A line of purple mana trailed her finger. It was perfect. Mathematically, geometrically perfect. A flawless circle with zero deviation. No tools. No guides. Just raw bio-control.

"A Witch who needs a ruler to draw a straight line is a cripple," Nino sneered, tossing the rest of the broken plastic into the bin.

"A Witch who needs a protractor to find a 37-degree angle should go back to being a human." Hathaway stared at the glowing purple circle. The numbness settled deeper into her bones as she accepted the terrifying biological reality of her species. Yeah, I figured that out the Friday before last, Hathaway thought, her internal voice sounding utterly exhausted.

I spent twenty minutes tearing apart my luggage looking for a straightedge to draft my new spell matrices, only to realize my motor cortex could natively lock onto a perfect 37. 5-degree angle with zero deviation. In her old world, precision tools were the peak of civilization—the ultimate triumph over shaky biological hands. Here, they were physical therapy crutches for the disabled. This was a species that didn't develop technology to help them; they evolved to BE the technology.

It was absolutely, terrifyingly perverted.

"For this project, you will draft the schematics by hand. I expect 0. 001mm precision," Nino continued.

"Then, you will smelt the ore and forge the components." She turned her back to leave.

"Build me something new. Build me something that makes me want to file a patent instead of throwing it in the incinerator."

"You have three weeks. Don't disappoint me more than you already have." SLAM. The heavy doors slammed shut behind her. Around Hathaway, the other students—all elite Witches—were already buzzing. The pressure didn't crush them; it ignited them. Directly behind her, the blonde Human Witch—the one Hathaway had internally dubbed the 'Hentai Scholar'—was already sketching furiously. Two of her translucent cranial tentacles were flipping through reference books, while the other two drafted blueprints.

"I'm designing a 'Bio-Arcane Neural Weaver'," the blonde whispered excitedly to her neighbor, her tentacles squirming with academic fervor.

"If I loop the sensory feedback directly into the caster's motor cortex, I can automate the spell-weaving process with zero casting delay! The nerve-stimulation matrix is going to be incredible." Hathaway shuddered, her face burning slightly. I know exactly what kind of 'nerve-stimulation' manual inspired that. You are going to patent a hardcore adult-entertainment spell as a military-grade casting focus, and the terrifying part is, Nino will probably give you an A.

A few seats down, the loud, metallic clinking of liquid gold hair signaled the Purgatory Fortress Witch.

"A standard spatial-folding bag is so First Era," the walking real estate empire scoffed, her three obsidian turrets rotating thoughtfully.

"I'm attempting a 'Recursive Pocket-Dimension Anchor'. I found a loophole in the architectural physics. If I invert the gravity arrays, I can attach a 500-square-meter sub-basement to my True Form without triggering the Academy's spatial expansion tax!"

"Ugh, real estate magic?" A Fox Witch in the next row rolled her eyes, her three tails flicking dismissively to block out the noise.

"The zoning laws on pocket dimensions are garbage. And the temporal lag on the entrance is annoying. I'm building a 'Causality-Reversal Scribe'. The pen writes the essay before the professor even assigns the topic."

"A Retro-Causality pen?" The Fortress Witch groaned.

"I hate those. The answer arrives before you input the question, and it completely messes up your UI. The negative latency is so annoying to deal with." Hathaway covered her face with her hands. Her common sense was officially pulverized. My game-designer soul is curling into a fetal position. They aren't debating IF they can build bionic neural links. They are just repurposing smut into military hardware. They aren't debating IF they can manipulate space and time.

They are using 5th-dimensional folding to evade property taxes, and retro-causality to skip homework. In this world, breaking the laws of physics isn't a miracle. It's just... a tax loophole and a UI bug.

"Victoria..." Hathaway whispered, her voice trembling slightly.

"She wants an original, patent-ready invention? From me? I just barely scraped a 61 by duct-taping a formula together! I don't even know how to build the 'toddler kits' Nino just banned! How am I supposed to invent a completely original magitech device from scratch when I'm still struggling to memorize the alphabet?!" Victoria stood up, packing her quill with elegant, unhurried calmness.

"Of course." She looked down at Hathaway, her blue eyes sharp and assessing.

"You survived today because you are adequate at reverse-engineering existing equations, Ludwig," Victoria said smoothly.

"But breaking down someone else's machine and patching it with duct tape is a mechanic's trick. Creation is a discipline. You have three weeks to prove you are an architect, not just a scavenger." Victoria adjusted her coat, leaving no room for argument.

"I expect you won't humiliate our dormitory. Now, if you will excuse me, I have an advanced runic linguistics seminar in the Upper Tower." Hathaway slumped onto the desk, burying her face in her arms as Victoria walked away. Victoria's assessment was brutally accurate. That was the exact problem. I am a Modder, Hathaway realized with a wave of sinking dread. I can crack an undocumented patch. I can duct-tape four overclocked threads together to brute-force a rendering issue.

I can min-max my existing stats using loopholes. But she's asking me to stop modding and start writing a brand-new, AAA game engine from scratch. I went from 'downloading asset flips' straight to 'inventing a new programming language'. I am absolutely doomed.