Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra - Chapter 898: Archmage of..... (2)
Chapter 898: Archmage of….. (2)
It didn’t take long after that.
Whispers turned to headlines. Headlines to summons.
The Royal Family of Arcanis sent an envoy within the week. A formal invitation was delivered under starlit escort, carried by knights wearing veils of honor silk. Selenne was requested—no, entreated—to join the Imperial Military as an elite commander. A symbol. A force. A continuation of a legend thought lost.
She declined.
No speeches. No defiance. Just a simple refusal delivered with such quiet certainty that no one pressed her twice.
Instead, she turned toward the Magic Tower.
Not to teach. Not to lead. To study. To refine. To ascend.
For years, she remained within its spiraling halls—emerging only briefly to give obscure lectures or walk beneath the open sky when the constellations shifted. Her research broke apart established mana constructs. She rewrote whole theorems. Entire magical systems were declared obsolete after her corrections.
And then—quietly, without spectacle—
She reached 7-Star.
The announcement came from the Tower itself. Scrawled not in ink, but in glowing starlight etched into the marble above its central spire.
| “Selenne, of no house. Of no order. Henceforth recognized as Archmage.”
A name without nobility. A rank earned by will alone.
The continent stirred.
Archmages were not made in decades. They were born of dynasties. Stamped in bloodlines, elevated by generations of collective effort and sanctioned by council.
But Selenne?
She had arrived from silence. From nowhere. From something the world still didn’t know how to name.
And now, she stood where only six others on the continent had reached.
Not with fire.
Not with ice.
With Starlight.
Of course, the announcement did not go unchallenged.
Outrage simmered beneath the surface of every academy and noble house, rising in curt letters, whispered assemblies, and scathing publications. Because no matter how quietly it had been delivered, the meaning was deafening:
Selenne had been named Archmage at 7-Star.
Not 8.
Not at the ordained peak where archmages were forged through sanctioned ritual and council confirmation.
At seven.
It was heresy, by tradition’s standards.
No exceptions. No precedents. Not even Gerald had been publicly granted the title in his lifetime—his recognition had come posthumously, long after his disappearance had shifted from scandal to myth.
And yet the Magic Tower had inscribed it across their walls in starlight as if it were truth written into the very fabric of mana.
| Selenne, of no house. Of no order. Archmage of Starlight.
The backlash came swiftly.
High Councilors demanded retraction.
Tower elders decried the proclamation as premature.
Scholars, too proud to admit they couldn’t categorize her, clung to process like a drowning man clings to dogma.
Because her ascension threatened more than custom.
It threatened hierarchy.
She had not climbed the path paved by names older than kingdoms.
She had built her own road, one step at a time, while the rest of the world squinted upward wondering which lineage she’d been lifted from.
And then the old questions returned.
Was she really the first since Gerald?
Was she the continuation of something the continent had tried to bury?
The theories festered.
Some said she was his secret disciple.
Others claimed she was a vessel—a reincarnation, a living fragment left behind when Starscourge Gerald disappeared.
A few dared whisper darker things: that she was a construct, a magical echo born of his final technique, too powerful and too precise to be mortal.
After all, how else could someone walk a path no one had seen and still reach the same impossible end?
Her answer came during the only press inquiry she ever accepted.
A Tower-controlled forum, limited to ten vetted questions, broadcast across scrying mirrors in three nations.
She wore no regalia. Spoke without flourish.
And when asked—“Are you the disciple of Starscourge Gerald?”—she replied:
“No.”
“I was not trained by him. I did not inherit his legacy. I am not his continuation.”
“Starlight is not his alone. And it is not mine.”
“It is a question the stars asked the world. Gerald answered it his way.”
“Now I am answering it in mine.”
That should have ended it.
But nothing that changes the world ends in silence.
And what unnerved the world most was not her refusal—it was that she meant it.
No need to cling to myth. No need to weaponize a connection to history’s ghost.
She did not seek to wear Gerald’s mantle.
She was weaving her own.
And the Magic Tower, ancient as it was, had seen enough.
With a unique element—one unbound by conventional affinity charts and resistant to categorization—Selenne was classified as an Archmage not solely by tradition, but by necessity.
The Tower’s internal records, typically sealed behind oaths and wards, confirmed what many feared to say aloud:
Her mana output, even at 7-Star, rivaled that of seasoned 8-Star mages.
And not in fleeting bursts, but with consistency.
Her Starlight didn’t overpower through brute quantity.
It overwhelmed through precision.
In controlled trials, binding spells unraveled mid-cast.
Elemental techniques lost cohesion in her presence.
Even sealed formations—tried and tested by imperial legions—shimmered unstable the moment her presence grew near.
Because Starlight did not resist.
It simply ignored.
It made sense, in hindsight, why Gerald’s rise had been so meteoric. Why he’d turned tides without mass battalions, why no counterspell could cling to his movements.
He hadn’t just been strong.
He’d been untouchable—because Starlight itself was resistant not to energy, but to definition.
And Selenne was no different.
So the Tower, slow as it often was, acted with rare clarity.
They invoked the Exceptional Classification Clause, a clause buried in the Tower Codex’s fourth annex—a provision meant for theoretical anomalies.
And they named her Archmage.
Because if they waited for her to reach 8-Star by standard measure, the world might already be reshaped before it arrived.
But it was her next move that turned whispers into political tremors.
She announced—calmly, publicly—that she would be joining the Arcanis Academy.
Not as a guest lecturer.
Not as a consultant.
But as a professor.
The reaction was immediate.
And brutal.
The Royal Family, still sour from her earlier refusal to join the military, saw the move as a calculated slight. They issued formal protest, citing security risks and the “destabilizing presence” of a figure so historically adjacent to Gerald, the infamous Starscourge.
Council members argued it was beneath her rank.
Noble families feared she’d influence their scions—unravel long-standing cultivation doctrines that kept their bloodlines relevant.
But the Tower did not retract the appointment.
And Selenne did not argue.
She simply walked through the Academy’s eastern gates one morning—
A violet shimmer trailing her cloak,
A small satchel slung over one shoulder,
No escort.
No announcement.
She entered the professor’s wing like gravity itself had made room.
And now—three years later—she remains.
No scandal.
No spectacle.
Just lectures held once per constellation cycle, open to all ranks.
Attendance is voluntary.
And yet, the lecture halls are always full.
She doesn’t teach incantations.
She teaches concepts.
Deconstruction.
Essence-lensing.
Mana gravity.
She’s dismantling the very way people think about magic—and offering something else in its place.
Not a system.
A question.
The same question Gerald once answered in fire and war.
But now, offered softly—like starlight itself—
through parchment, chalk, and a voice that doesn’t demand attention, only dares you to look further.
To most, she is Professor Selenne.
But to the ones who listen—
The ones who feel their spells falter when she walks past,
Who dream of nebulae after leaving her class,
Who trace the sigil on the Tower walls when no one is looking—
She is something else.
The Archmage of Starlight.
“That is all I would say about her.”
Selphine briefing ended just like that.
’Such a woman….’
And Elara could only respect someone like that….
