After the chaotic farce, the Rose Pavilion finally settled down.
Of course, the price was that Julius only let Sylvia off after she’d been forced to sign a series of humiliating unequal treaties and promised never to pull a prank like that again.
At that moment, all the lights in the hall had been extinguished.
The entire Rose Pavilion was plunged into darkness, with only a sliver of silver light from the moonlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Helos stood alone in the center of the hall.
A black cloth was tied over her eyes—since she couldn’t see anyway, the blindfold actually made her feel more at ease and helped her concentrate better.
Julius and Gavi stood at the edge of the hall, maintaining absolute silence so as not to disturb her perception.
Sylvia floated above Helos’s head. Despite having been thoroughly scorched earlier, once she entered teaching mode, she displayed the professionalism of an Imperial Archmage.
“Alright, girl.”
Sylvia’s voice rang directly in Helos’s mind.
“Now, forget the habit of seeing the world with your eyes.”
“Your eyes can deceive you. Light can deceive you. Even shapes and colors are false.”
“In this world, only the flow of mana is absolutely real.”
Helos followed the instructions.
“Take a deep breath.”
She inhaled deeply, letting the cool air fill her lungs, then slowly exhaled.
As her breathing steadied, she felt her consciousness begin to sink, sinking into that boundless darkness.
“Now, try to ‘see.'”
Sylvia guided her.
“Don’t use your eyes. Use your ‘curse.'”
“Use that ‘void’ inside you, which craves to devour everything and deny everything, to touch the world around you.”
“Feel that ‘flow.'”
“Your body is a black hole. All surrounding mana instinctively wants to either fill you or flee from you.”
Helos closed her eyes and tried hard to grasp that elusive sensation.
At first, she felt nothing.
Just a dead, silent darkness, along with the slightly rapid beating of her own heart.
But gradually, as the potion’s effect reached its peak and she focused all her attention on perception, something different began to appear in this pitch-black world.
Like a single raindrop suddenly falling onto the surface of a calm lake.
An extremely faint ripple spread through her perception.
“What… is that?”
Helos subconsciously turned her head toward the direction the ripple came from.
That was where Gavi stood.
In Helos’s “field of vision,” where there should have been only darkness, a strange outline now appeared.
It wasn’t a human shape.
It was a complex geometric body composed of countless precise, regularly operating lines.
Those lines emitted a faint silver glow, vibrating at an extremely stable frequency.
That was the fluctuation produced by the mana core operating inside Gavi’s body!
“I… I saw it!”
Helos shouted excitedly.
“Gavi! Gavi looks like, like a glowing—alarm clock!”
Gavi, standing in the corner, was silent for a moment, as if pondering what kind of evaluation “glowing alarm clock” was.
“Good.”
Sylvia’s voice carried a hint of approval.
“The mana inside that golem is very stable, so it’s the easiest to observe. Now, try to find big dummy.”
Helos turned to locate Julius’s position.
This time, the feeling was even stronger.
If Gavi was a small, stable point of light, then Julius was like a lighthouse in the darkness!
Even though he deliberately restrained his aura, the immense divine power inside him was as dazzling as the sun in Helos’s perception.
She could even feel that golden “sun” radiating waves of warm heat outward, and when those waves touched the “curse of silence” on her skin, they silently dissolved like snowflakes falling into water.
That sensation of “dissolving,” the tiny void created when mana was suppressed.
For the first time, Helos so clearly “saw” the essence of her ability.
So this was the “curse of silence.”
It was constantly devouring all mana around it.
It wasn’t a wall. It was a greedy mouth.
“I see…”
Helos murmured, reaching out her hand and grasping emptily toward Julius’s direction.
Maybe…
She could control the “black hole” inside her to change the flow of surrounding mana?
“Don’t rush to try.”
Sylvia poured cold water at the right time.
“You’ve just opened your ‘mind’s eye.’ You’re still far from truly controlling this power.”
“Now, I’m going to raise the difficulty.”
Sylvia snapped her fingers.
“Gavi, release a faint magic wave. Don’t stay in one spot—dart around the room.”
“Understood.”
As Gavi moved, several faint points of light moving at high speed suddenly appeared without warning in Helos’s originally pitch-black “field of vision.”
Like startled fireflies on a summer night, they darted left and right, erratic, drawing faint fluorescent trails in the darkness.
“Lock onto them.”
Sylvia’s voice rang in Helos’s mind at just the right moment.
“Use your consciousness to lock onto them, feel their trajectory, predict where they’ll land.”
“Can you feel it?”
“I can feel it!”
Helos answered excitedly.
She “saw” those small points of light dancing in the air. Though their complicated paths made her a bit dizzy, this brand-new visual experience felt incredibly novel.
“Good. Next, catch them.”
“Ca-catch them?”
Sylvia guided patiently.
“Your ability is like a greedy predator. As long as you’re close enough, it will pounce and ‘catch’ that mana on its own.”
“I see!”
Helos suddenly understood.
“That’s right. No need for your hands. Just get close to them.”
The girl took a deep breath, trying to calm her mind.
She stared intently at those dancing points of light, like a hunter stalking prey.
She locked onto one of the slowest-moving points.
Closer.
Helos was full of confidence.
She strode forward, charging fiercely toward that point of light.
In her perception, the path ahead was clear, with only the prey emitting that enticing magic wave.
But just as she was about to touch that point of light, Julius’s panicked shout suddenly reached her ears:
“Helos! Watch out! There’s a—”
Too late.
THUD!
A dull, solid crash echoed through the empty hall.
Helos’s head, unreservedly, smacked hard into one of the only two load-bearing pillars in the hall.
“Ugh…”
The girl’s forward momentum came to an abrupt halt.
Tears welled up in her eyes as she immediately crouched down, both hands clutching her rapidly swelling forehead, letting out a miserable wail.
“How is there a pillar here—?!”
Just then, Sylvia’s barely suppressed laughter came from above her head, dripping with undisguised schadenfreude.
“Duh. This pillar doesn’t have any mana. In your ‘field of vision,’ it’s nonexistent air. Of course you couldn’t see it.”
“So like I said, you’re still way too early to truly master this power.”