Chapter 388: Haunted Magic Academy

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In a daze, Ansu's consciousness slowly cleared.

He could not feel his breath, nor could he sense his limbs; a strange sense of detachment enveloped him.

It was as if he hadn't actually set foot here, but was merely suspended in midair as a misty presence, watching everything around him as a bystander.

This was a dim room piled high with clutter and shelves. An old magic lamp was embedded in the wall, casting flickering shadows on the mottled stone walls.

But Ansu had no way of exploring further. His spiritual body was very weak; he couldn't move even a fraction of an inch, and his field of vision was limited to a narrow range.

This wasn't good.

In a spiritual state, the dissipation of one's spiritual power meant complete demise. He had to make an effort to gather all of his spiritual power.

With no other choice at the moment, Ansu calmed his mind and cast the only magic he could use in his spiritual state: 【Meditation】.

At first, the ambient sounds still lingered in his ears—the faint hum of the magic lamp, the rustling of something crawling in the corner...

Gradually, all the sounds faded away.

Ansu gradually lost all track of time. The magic lamp on the wall went out and lit up again, lit up and went out again. In the end, he couldn't even tell how many days had passed.

When Ansu emerged from his 【Meditation】, he felt more mentally energized than ever before, as if his very soul had been tempered.

He could finally move.

Ansu tried to direct his thoughts, mimicking the way a normal person walked, and eventually began to float slowly around the room.

As the range of his free exploration expanded, the full picture of the room gradually became clear. It was a rather spacious stone chamber. On the display shelves on the other side stood rows of glass jars, filled with liquid in which various human organs and tissues were preserved. The shelves also displayed specimens of all kinds of magical beasts and wild animals.

In the open space in the center of the room stood a dozen cleaned skeletons belonging to various races. A persistent, eerie chill hung in the air.

Ansu floated lazily, looking around. He had never seen skeletons of so many different races. Aside from the familiar humans, dwarves, and elves, there were a few skeletons with bizarre structures whose races he couldn't even identify.

Ansu thought to himself, “This place... should be a specimen storage room?”

As he wandered about, wondering if he should try to leave, living people finally visited the dim room.

With a creak, two young men dressed in apprentice robes pushed the door open and walked in. They carefully stepped over the clutter piled on the floor, whispering to each other as they walked.

From their fragmented words, Ansu gathered that they had come at their mentor's request to retrieve materials for an alchemy experiment.

Observing their attire, he noticed that both of them wore a small golden badge shaped like a seven-pointed star on their chests.

The seven-pointed star was the foundational configuration of most magic circles and also the emblem of the Radial Magic Academy.

Ansu understood immediately. It really was the City of a Thousand Stars.

When he had accompanied Angelu to the City of a Thousand Stars, almost every magic professor and apprentice wore the same badge. It seemed that even after the passage of time, the style of the badge had not changed.

The two apprentices searched around for a long time, then whispered to each other as they moved the items.

Confirming that they couldn't see him, Ansu drifted a few steps forward along the aisle between the shelves, quietly drawing closer.

Their voices became clearer.

One of the apprentices casually glanced in Ansu's direction and suddenly felt uneasy. “Hey, do you think... the specimen room has been getting colder and colder these past two weeks?”

“Cold? A little, yeah.” The other apprentice was bent over, rummaging through a wooden crate, without raising his head.

“Just now as I was walking, I felt a cold breeze blow right at me, as if something drifted right past my side...” The timid apprentice swallowed hard, lowering his voice.

“There are corpses everywhere, so it was already creepy enough here... Do you think there's really a ghost wandering around this place?”

“What ghost? I think you're just scaring yourself.” The bolder apprentice patted the dust off his hands, brushing it off.

Seeing his companion's face grow increasingly pale, his eyes ded around, and he suddenly leaned in, lowering his voice. “But now that you mention it, I do recall something. Back then, a student offended the dean of academic affairs and was skinned and de-boned, turned straight into a specimen. Maybe what you felt... is that vengeful spirit coming back for his life!”

The timid apprentice shivered in fright, nearly dropping the glass jar in his hand.

And right at that moment, Ansu curiously leaned closer, wanting to see what they were carrying.

As he drifted, an invisible, chilly wind suddenly swept past the two apprentices.

The hairs on the backs of their necks stood up in unison. Even the bolder one felt as if a bucket of ice water had been poured over him, his entire body freezing up instantly.

The air fell silent for a second.

Almost simultaneously, the two let out strange cries and bolted out without looking back, clutching their materials. A flurry of frantic footsteps echoed down the corridor, followed by the sharp clatter of something crashing to the floor.

Ansu stared in the direction they had vanished, then looked down at his semi-transparent hands, lost in thought.

“It seemed he had condensed a bit of a physical form?”

...

Over the next few days, Ansu frequently ran into groups of students sneaking in for “expeditions.”

His spiritual body had not yet solidified, and fearing that someone knowledgeable might mistake him for a vengeful spirit and exorcise him, he kept a very low profile. Seeing more and more people coming, he simply moved out of the original specimen room and settled in a storage room deeper inside.

Yet, the rumors of the academy being “haunted” seemed to spread with increasing intensity.

Starting from “chilly winds in the specimen room,” it gradually evolved into “a vengeful spirit wandering the underground storage area,” eventually even alarming a magic professor.

Ansu was forced to change locations once again.

This was his first contact with the outside world since arriving in this era. Blinding sunlight poured down from above, revealing the staggered Gothic buildings of the City of a Thousand Stars. The iconic towering bell tower pierced the sky, exceptionally eye-catching.

Ansu remembered clearly that this bell tower would be personally blown up by Miss Witch in the future.

But before he could look for long, a wave of intense discomfort hit him.

His spiritual body felt as if it were burning in a fire, and his spiritual power dissipated at a visible rate.

Ansu cursed under his breath and quickly shrank back into the shadow cast by a roadside building. Leaning against the stone wall, he recovered for a long time before barely stabilizing his spiritual body.

“I can't really live like a rat in the sewers, hiding in the academy every day without ever seeing the light of day, can I?”

He thought helplessly as he stared at the bright sunlight outside.

Fortunately, the interior of the academy was large enough, with plenty of hiding spots. Aside from the underground storage area, there were many abandoned underground alchemy rooms near the student dormitories.

In the academy, every magic professor had their own private laboratory. Only students who lacked the means would occasionally borrow these public areas.

Thus, Ansu spent his days wandering around these places.

Whenever he came across students reading, conducting experiments, or gathering to chat, he would float over to listen for a while, treating it as entertainment.

“Have you guys heard? The underground storage area is haunted!”

“Of course! I heard from the upperclassmen that back then, a magic apprentice was driven mad by his mentor's torture. He took frantic revenge on the academy and was slain on the spot. His vengeful spirit has been trapped nearby ever since...”

“No, no, that's not the version I heard. The one I heard was that the apprentice stole the academy's most important secret treasure. After he was exposed, he was cornered, and with no way out, he swallowed the treasure and self-destructed! They say... if we can find his corpse fragments, we can reconstruct the powerful force of that secret treasure that once shook the Norn Empire!”

Ansu floated in midair, listening with utter speechlessness.

How were these rumors getting more and more ridiculous?

...

The days passed in this fulfilling yet boring manner.

There wasn't much Ansu could do right now, so he spent most of his time cultivating his spiritual power.

Spiritual power was one of the foundations of magic. The introductory magic book Celia had given him once stated: “A mage needs to use spiritual power to construct delicate spell models, and then absorb and harness the free mana in nature to cast spells.”

However, in his original era, this foundational aspect of spiritual power was often neglected. The mainstream magical schools focused on mana utilization and rune formulas, with very few specializing in spiritual power.

On one hand, this was due to the complete degradation of the magic system, which lacked more detailed categories of magic.

On the other hand, future generations placed greater emphasis on practicality. After all, one's mana level was usually the primary factor determining their strength in actual combat.

Through day after day of meditation, Ansu could clearly feel a massive improvement in his spiritual power.

Compared to before, the scale had probably increased by more than tenfold.

Now, his 0th Circle cantrip 【Mage's Hand】 was so precise that he could use it to embroider...

And it wasn't just highly precise; 【Mage's Hand】 was inherently tied directly to spiritual power, which made its current strength ridiculously high. He felt that to break through a mages' 【Shield spell】 now, he wouldn't even need to pull out his alchemical revolver, but could simply throw a direct void punch and it would be perfectly fine...

He had indeed grown stronger, but it was also truly boring.

Whenever a sense of emptiness washed over him, he would always recall the way Celia looked when she said goodbye to him.

He wondered how she was doing in the Astral Realm. Was she also hiding all over the place like him?

After all, too many powerful entities lurked in the Astral Realm; one had to be careful with every step.

He also didn't know how long it would be before they could meet again...

There were also Vera and Freya.

He wondered how they would react when they saw that letter.

Ansu felt his wording had been lighthearted and humorous enough, but he had truly left after all, and perhaps for a very long time.

They must be both sad and anxious...

Perhaps they would even hold a grudge against him, since he hadn't notified either of them about such a major operation.

As his thoughts drifted, Ansu suppressed these surging emotions and continued to focus on his cultivation.

Because right now, he could do nothing. He couldn't touch physical objects, couldn't speak, and even sunlight could easily harm him.

Only by continuously tempering his spiritual power could he slowly condense a physical form and gradually accomplish the things he wanted to do.

However, he hadn't been completely idle during this period either.

While wandering around, Ansu had managed to figure out the current time.

A calendar was placed on a desk in the student dormitories, clearly reading: Magic Calendar Year 4068 / Norn Calendar Year 1425.

(The Norn Calendar was the common calendar of the Norn Empire, and the academy was located within the borders of the Norn Empire.)

Ansu calculated in his mind—this was a whopping two thousand five hundred and thirty-two years away from his original era.

It was currently the late stage of the Second Era.

It was also the period when the magical civilization transitioned from its peak toward decline, with nine hundred and fifty years still remaining before the curtain fell on the entire era.

A temporal chasm of over two thousand years lay before his eyes, filling him with emotion.

He had to continue training his spiritual power...

Looking back, ever since he embarked on this journey, he had never had a proper, stable period of cultivation.

Events had occurred one after another. As a beginner who had been introduced to magic for less than a year, he had to challenge the demon army, the City of a Thousand Stars, and the God of Clamor and Filth...

Yet with his natural cultivation speed, if he were given enough time, he was confident he could reach the ranks of the top powerhouses.

Who knows, maybe when he returned, he would actually be able to defeat Miss Witch?

(He would win!)

These monotonous days continued for some time. Just when Ansu thought he would have to hide underground for a long time...

The turning point finally arrived.

...

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