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More than ten minutes passed before Luo Wei finally lifted her head. Warm liquid trickled from her eyes and nostrils. Second time she'd bled from all seven orifices.
Her hands and clothes were caked in mud. She didn't dare wipe her face — she had no idea how many capillaries had ruptured inside, and the last thing she needed was bacteria finding their way in.
At least it wasn't a cerebral hemorrhage. Craniotomy surgery wasn't exactly thriving in this era. The doctors knew how to open a skull. Closing it was another matter entirely.
Luo Wei pushed herself upright with the net pole, her slender frame swaying in the cold wind.
High-level magic arrays would backlash just from thinking about their framework. To deconstruct one, she'd had to trick her own mind first.
In her previous life, before she'd known what Magic Runes even were, she might have memorized the patterns without a second thought. But now she knew. Getting back to that blank-slate state was a different challenge.
Difficult, though not impossible.
As the saying goes: a long illness makes the patient its own doctor. She'd spent so much time in psychotherapy in her past life that she was halfway to being a psychologist herself by the time she transmigrated. Hypnotizing herself might be a stretch, but a light psychological suggestion? That she could manage.
She worked on convincing herself: the school floor plan was just a map. An ordinary map. Nothing special. She was memorizing it purely to make the remaining twenty-eight nights of patrol easier.
The moment she thought about twenty-eight more nights, though, she didn't even need the suggestion. Her brain automatically shed the complex thoughts, leaving behind nothing but blank exhaustion.
When was this miserable stretch going to end?
With the haggard expression of someone who'd seen too much of the world, Luo Wei leaned on her net pole and shuffled slowly down the hillside.
Over an hour until dawn. One more sweep of the perimeter, then clock in at the main gate, and she could finally go back to the dormitory.
The academy's main gate sat directly west of the riding grounds. Walking the perimeter wall would take too long, so she cut straight through the academy.
January twenty-second. The moonlight was decent tonight.
The cobblestone path gleamed pale under it, and frost had settled in a thin white layer over the dead grass lining both sides of the road.
A wavering light caught her eye , something moving on the lawn's surface. She looked up. A candle was burning in the small window of the church's attic. The window wasn't fully shut, and the wind was pushing the flame around.
She'd been walking without paying attention. She was already at the main church.
Who was still up there at this hour?
The wind gusted. The attic window blew wide open, and the candle went out. Darkness swallowed the attic again.
Luo Wei tilted her head back. Her pupils widened.
The wind was still blowing. But the two inward-opening window shutters were slowly, deliberately swinging closed.
In the narrowing gap between them, she caught two faint points of blue light. And a pair of black hands , shaped like a person's, but wrong somehow. Something between human and primate.
The moment the window clicked shut, she felt it: dark elemental energy rippling through the air.
A Dark Magic practitioner?
Or a student with a dark-element affinity?
She glanced at the sky. Moon was still up. A few minutes wouldn't hurt.
She set the net pole down quietly, walked to the church's outer wall, and pressed her hand against the stone. Hard. Rough.
Gothic architecture was generous with its exterior detail , stained-glass mullions, carved reliefs, decorative buttresses running the full height of the walls. Plenty of places to grip. Plenty of places to stand.
Luo Wei rolled up her sleeves and started climbing.
Rock climbing in her past life, wall climbing in this one. Three minutes and she was level with the window.
Getting up there, she realized it didn't lead to the attic at all. It was a side corridor running along the top of the church's nave , which explained why the window was a narrow lancet style, small enough to actually open. She peered through the colored glass. A dim corridor stretched into the dark. At the far end: nothing visible. Pure black. Someone could be standing right there and she'd never know.
She didn't want to startle whoever was inside. She waited by the window for a while, listening. Nothing.
She was about to climb back down when she lowered her head and heard it , a creak.
The window yanked open from the inside. A pitch-black head shoved itself out into the night air.
[AH—]
A silent shriek detonated beside her ear. Luo Wei's head snapped up and she saw two clusters of pale blue flame where eyes should be, and her heart damn near stopped in her chest.
She never got a look at the face. The figure was already gone, rocketing backward into the depths of the corridor, trailing a string of panicked screaming behind it.
[AAAHHHH a MONSTER it's so SCARY so SCARY—]
[Scary... scary...]
Luo Wei's grip went slack. She almost peeled off the wall entirely.
Monster. Scary.
Who exactly scared whom here?
She grabbed the window frame and craned her neck inside. With the window open, there was just enough light to see: at the far end of the side corridor, a shadowy black figure was shaking like a leaf.
An undead spirit. Terrified. Of a person.
Luo Wei pulled out her magic wand, conjured a healthy flame, and angled it inside. "Who are you? Why are you hiding in here?"
The undead flinched. The fingers covering its eyes spread apart, just barely, and two thin slivers of blue light peeked through.
[Y-you — what kind of monster are you? Why have you come to our academy?]
"Our academy?" She studied it. "Who are you to this academy?"
The trembling eased, just slightly, as if it had picked up something from her voice , something that wasn't monster-ish.
[You answer my question first!]
"I'm not a monster," Luo Wei said plainly. "I'm a student here."
[A student? A magic apprentice?]
The undead lowered its pitch-black hands. Something shifted in its tone , a fraction more composed. A fraction more serious.
[How can a student be out at this hour, dressed like that? You've violated academy regulations.]
"I'm patrolling the perimeter line," Luo Wei said, eyes fixed on it. "I'm not dressed up. And I haven't violated any regulations." She paused. "Your turn. Who are you?"
Silence settled in. Then the undead turned around, putting its back to her.
[I am an undead spirit. Aren't you frightened?]
"Why would I be frightened? You were a person just like me when you were alive." Her gaze rested on its hunched back. "Will you tell me now? Who are you?"
Its shoulders moved. Its back curved tighter, like it was trying to fold into itself.
Just when she was certain it wouldn't answer, it spoke.
[My name is Wordsworth. When I was alive... I was a puppeteer.]
Luo Wei nodded. "Wordsworth. Puppeteer. Got it."
[And you? What's your name?]
"Luo Wei. Magic apprentice, junior division." She watched its spine curve even lower and looked away. "I still have the perimeter to finish. Goodbye, Wordsworth."
[Goodbye...]
Fabric rustled near the window. After a moment, Wordsworth turned around. The girl's slight figure was already gone.
He drifted to the window and watched her walk away. His dark hand moved along the sill, feeling into the corner on the right, and came back with a short candle stub.
It had been thrown away by someone downstairs, already burned low. He'd found it and kept it, thinking only that he'd like to see what the light looked like.
He hadn't expected it to bring him something brighter than that.
On the other side of the courtyard, Luo Wei was nearly at the academy square when it hit her.
She hadn't wiped the blood off her face.
"..."
No wonder Wordsworth had reacted like that.
Though , even with blood on her face, she couldn't actually look like a monster, could she?
Poor eyesight on that one. It really ought to see a specialist.
She picked at the dried blood crusted on her cheeks, straightened her back, and walked onto the square.
As long as you don't feel embarrassed, the embarrassment lands on everyone else. That saying was completely right.
Wordsworth had practically tried to fold his head underground back there.
It was genuinely strange, though. For an undead spirit, he had a remarkable range of emotion. Nothing like Patrick, whose voice always carried that flat, bone-tired quality whenever he spoke.
Maybe it was the profession.
Puppeteers were originally a branch of alchemy. More than a thousand years ago, when alchemy was still in its prime, their status was equal to any archmage's. Many alchemists of the era crafted doppelganger dolls , obsessively so. They wanted duplicates of themselves. Copies that could do the things they couldn't or wouldn't.
But dolls were still only dolls. They couldn't think. They couldn't speak. They required a puppeteer to move them at all, let alone stand in for anyone.
Then one puppeteer had a darker idea. He wanted to forge something that didn't need controlling , an ageless, undying puppet that could think and speak on its own. To get there, he killed a lot of innocent people.
After that, puppetry was reclassified as Dark Magic, and the profession quietly vanished from the continent. Alchemy survived, but only as artifact-craft. One narrow path.
Back to the point. Puppeteers, spending their lives in the company of dolls, developed a particular kind of loneliness. They talked to themselves. They imagined the dolls talking back. Over time, their inner lives grew rich and intricate. Most of them were terrible at actual human interaction , avoidant, reclusive, projecting cold indifference to the outside world. Underneath: a furnace. One spark and the whole thing went up.
She finished the last patrol circuit and got back to the dormitory just before dawn. She filled a basin and prepared to wash her face.
First, she glanced in the mirror.
Her hands started trembling.
Who was that? That wild-haired, blood-smeared creature staring back at her?
Oh. That was her.
Luo Wei made a small, wounded sound, threw the mirror aside, and shoved her face directly into the water basin.
She was never going near the main church again.
What she had imagined: two delicate trails of blood beneath her eyes. Lips a deep, dramatic red. Hair a little disheveled, yes, but carrying a certain disheveled elegance.
What the mirror showed: two thick streaks of dried blood running down from her inner corners, nosebleed channeled along her upper lip into a perfect handlebars-style mustache, seepage from both corners of her mouth soaking her entire chin.
And that wasn't counting the mud coating her head, her clothes, her hands, every fingernail packed black with it , the complete picture of something that had clawed its way out of a burial mound.
Unacceptable.
The psychological damage was significant. For the next three or four days, Luo Wei rerouted her patrols to avoid the church's side entirely, walking the long way around the outer edge.
She was afraid of running into Wordsworth again. Afraid he'd look at her and ask why she looked so different.
What was she supposed to say? That she'd washed her face?
Besides, after five or six consecutive all-nighters, the circles under her eyes had deepened to a spectacular degree. Skin pale, energy guttered, squinting every time she stepped into daylight like a vampire allergic to the sun.
Honestly, that wasn't much of an improvement over the blood-smeared night creature version.
The only reason she still dragged herself to the student council office was to dig up information on Wordsworth. The office was in the east wing of the main church, so that complicated things.
Outside the night she'd gone to rack up credits, the student council office was reliably quiet.
Professor Tobias's owl operated on its own schedule , sometimes napping on the desk, sometimes gone to hunt field mice in the fields outside. Whether it was on duty depended entirely on its mood.
When it went hunting, Luo Wei went browsing.
The archive room behind the student council office was packed floor to ceiling with old papyrus scrolls and parchment rolls, documenting every student, faculty member, and staff worker the academy had ever recorded.
Wordsworth had said "our academy." That meant he'd been here. His name would be in these files somewhere , assuming he hadn't lied.
His voice hadn't sounded old. He must have been young when he died. But his current form was strange. Most undead with physical remains attached to them; those without retained their living appearance. Wordsworth was neither. His body wasn't skeletal, but it wasn't a normal skin tone either. Something coated him , a layer of black, like oil, so dark that only the faint color in his eyes remained.
Even the darkest-complexioned living people still had white teeth. She wasn't sure he had teeth at all.
No way to judge how long he'd been dead. So she pulled the freshman enrollment lists, professor appointment records, and staff change logs year by year, and worked backward.
Four nights of searching turned up nothing.
On the fifth night, flipping through the roster from ten years ago, she accidentally dragged out the senior division registration forms from the same year.
One glance and she couldn't look away.
Right there on the form: a student named Wordsworth. Senior division. Alchemy apprentice.
Something flickered at the edge of her thoughts , there and gone before she could catch it. The maddening tip-of-the-tongue feeling of a memory that wouldn't surface.
She set the list down, frustrated, and hunted for the freshman enrollment records from twelve years back. But no matter where she searched, there was no registration form for any Wordsworth. As if the person had materialized at the academy out of thin air and then evaporated the same way.
She spread the entire cohort's materials across the floor and went through them page by page. Eventually, on a scholarship recipient list that the academy had posted publicly, she found a second trace: a name that had been blacked out with charcoal. The strokes were thorough, but not thorough enough , she could reconstruct the letters from the edges and corners of what remained.
His name.
She kept looking. Several more records, torn or overwritten. The erasure was deliberate. It just wasn't complete.
Wordsworth's existence had been scrubbed from these archives.
Why? Had he disgraced the academy somehow?
Something crackled in the back of her mind. The forgotten memory finally switched on.
Before last year's Divine Descent Day, Balc had mentioned an old story in passing. Ten years ago, a senior magic apprentice from Siria Magic Academy had abducted a death-row prisoner during the Demon-Purging Ceremony. The apprentice turned out to be a human-skin puppet, controlled remotely by an evil necromancer.
But Balc had also said — she remembered this clearly — that the headmaster had personally intervened. Caught the necromancer. Reduced him to ash with holy water.
If the necromancer was dead, what was Wordsworth?
A coincidence of names?
Luo Wei didn't believe in coincidences that convenient. Her gut told her the headmaster hadn't finished the job.
➤ Next: Winnie, You Can Participate Next Year
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