Translator: winniethepooh, Kris_Liu Editor: Vermillion
After leaving the room, while Lucien was walking downstairs, he dispelled the spirit mark he left on Doro, as he didn’t want Smile to somehow find out his own unique way of tracking.
Carefully, Lucien approached the back door. Again, with some easy spells, Lucien managed to leave Copper Coronet quietly and no one ever noticed him. Just in case, Lucien took a very roundabout way first, instead of going back to his place directly,
Lying in his bed, Lucien felt kind of encouraged since now he was certain that he was not alone. He was comforted by the fact that there were still other apprentices working hard while carefully hiding from the church. He wondered how many apprentices, sorcerers, and sorceresses were there in Aalto in total.
…………
In the following few days, Lucien’s life was pretty plain but peaceful. Lucien got up early in the morning to do some work out and then went to work. Sometimes he read music books, and sometimes religion and travel book, sometimes he read in his own spirit library and analyzed the magic structures.
Although Pierre could be kind of weird sometimes, when he was reading his music books, Lucien almost couldn’t feel his existence. And luckily, Wolf had been out of town for a while, and no one else in the association would ever give them a hard time.
Life was almost perfect these days. The only pity was that Lucien didn’t have a chance to see Ms. Silvia, the famous violinist who was still single. According to Pierre, she was a goddess-like lady and was very talented. Since Pierre kept mentioning her for countless times, Lucien also started feeling curious. However, Mr. Silvia didn’t come to the association very often.
While learning music, Lucien was still learning how to read, but the time spent on the latter was much shorter now, since he was learning really fast. Like the rest of the music students, after finishing the class, Lucien would stay at Mr. Victor’s place and start another two-hour piano practicing. Lucien’s quality of being persistent helped him a lot. He never stopped practicing until he had really sore fingers and arms and sweated a lot.
The evening was reserved to the study of magic. Nothing could pull Lucien out of the magic world in this period of time.
On Friday evening, what Lucien was on his way to auntie Alisa’s place, he noticed there were some doodle-like patterns at the very corner of a wall. Lucien quickly understood what they meant.
“Ten o’clock. Saturday night. The abandoned house in the easternmost area in Aderon. Owl.”
Lucien’s expression did not change at all. He kept calmly walking toward Alisa’s place as if he had seen nothing unusual.
…………
Lucien arrived at the place ten minutes earlier in his black robe, with Ice Revenger on his left hand. Before Lucien left his place, he also checked all the magic reagents in the pockets of the robe.
There was neither moon nor stars that night. Thick clouds covered all the light in the sky.
As soon as Lucien arrived, he heard an owl hoot in the darkness. It was Doro standing on the tall willow, serving as a sentinel. Under the tree stood Smile in a black robe. In order to let Lucien recognize him, Smile didn’t wear his hood.
“Welcome, Mr. Professor.” Smiled walked toward Lucien and put on the hood, “I told the other members about you, and they were looking forward to your presence. Several apprentices also wanted to ask you for help with some magic problems. Of course, they will pay.”
Knowing that Smile was trying to test him, Lucien, however, didn’t feel nervous. He was pretty sure that he was more advanced than most of his peer apprentices, although he couldn’t guarantee that he was able to solve all the problems, “I major in Astrology and Element magic. So if these are questions related to those, I shall be able to help them a bit.”
Smile nodded, “Then please follow me, Mr. Professor.”
Smile stopped in front of the old wood door of the abandoned place. After knocking on the door in a unique rhythm, Smile mimicked an owl hoot.
A few seconds later, a man wearing the same black robe opened the door slowly. When the man saw Lucien, he slightly nodded towards Lucien, “This must be Mr. Professor, then.”
Lucien could tell it was not the man’s real voice as well.
“Yes, this is Mr. Professor,” Smile’s voice was also lower than the other night, “and Professor, this is Fire Wolf.”
“Nice to meet you.” Lucien lowered his head slightly and greeted him. His left hand stayed in the sleeve, and his Ice Revenger was ready.
After walking through the living room and another door, Fire Wolf led them to the storage room. At the corner of the room, there was a staircase that led underground.
A basement! He wondered why he never thought about building a basement under his shack, instead of taking the risk and going down into the sewers every time. And at the same time, he could build a bigger crypt in Melzer Black Forest for practicing more powerful spells.
This was not a very spacious basement. Eleven low stools were placed surrounding a long table. Flickering candles sparsely illuminated the place. The other eight apprentices were already sitting there. All of them were wearing black robes.
Lucien walked downstairs with great caution, followed by Fire Wolf and Smile. They closed the door of the basement before they sat down.
“Everyone, today we’re honoured to have Mr. Professor here to exchange ideas and thoughts with us.” Smile stood up and started the introduction, “Mr. Professor is a real sorcerer. I’m sure our apprentice group meeting would benefit a lot from Mr. Professor’s profound knowledge.”
Then Smile started introducing the apprentices present one by one, “This is White Honey, Morning Star, Reindeer, White Glove, Oak, Philosopher, Mercury and Hanger.”
“The honour is all mine.” Lucien slightly bowed, “Please forgive me for being so direct. I come here largely because of the journal, Arcana. Can I take a look at it first?”
“No problem, Professor. Take your time and we can do random discussion first.” Philosopher nodded and slowly handed Lucien a black hardback book. His voice sounded pretty old, “Besides, I heard from Owl that you need a whole set of labwares and I brought them here tonight. I’ll be glad to give them to you as a gift if you can solve a problem for me later.”
Lucien didn’t open the book instantly, but carefully checked the cover of the book first.
There were a few separate silver lines joining together in the end on the black cover, which formed the word, Arcana, right in the centre. Under the name of the journal, a line of words wrote “Volume 11, the year 392 of Saint Calendar”. There were parchment pages inside it.
From the content page, Lucien found there were twenty-four articles in the journal. The first one was Discussion about the Fifth Failure of Finding the New Planets. Lucien felt interested in it and started reading.
“The theory of gravitation proposed by Douglas could explain lots of force field spells, even most spells of the Astrology school. Besides, the three laws of planetary motion also derives from that theory, which is of great significance for guiding the field of fortunetelling.
“Based on this theory, we have created many new and powerful spells. Thus we can say, if there are two major columns supporting the classical magic system, the theory of gravitation could be valued as the most important foundation for one of the columns — force field study.”
……
“There is still one question remaining to be demonstrated: The theory of gravitation enables us to figure out many guiding formulas, and thus we know that the continent where we live in also belongs to a planet. The planet keeps rotating and at the same time revolving around the sun, so do the rest of the planets in the sky. Following the formulas mentioned above, we can also locate these planets.
“However, no one, not even the greatest sorcerer or sorceress, ever managed to reach the planets using the most advanced space magic, including me. Even we can calculate the coordinates of them, we can find none of them in the presumed places in space.
“When I was trying to cast the advanced space magic, although I could not reach the planet, I could feel the gravity of the target planet from my presupposed transit spot. The planets are there, but at the same time, they are not there.”
When Lucien found out that the planets in this world could tell destinies, Lucien was already quite surprised. Now he felt surprised again, and very confused.
