Fifteen Years a Doctoral Student
I killed my professor today.
The reason was absurd. She wouldn't let me graduate.
"Haa..."
The night wind was cold. It found the sweat soaking my back, and a shiver ran through me.
Fifteen years of graduate school had apparently worn my stamina thin. All this, from burying a single person. With no professor left to hound me, I told myself I would sleep until afternoon tomorrow. I slung the dirt-caked shovel over my shoulder and trudged back to the dormitory.
The room held not a shred of warmth. In the corner lay a spider's corpse of unknowable age, the floorboards creaked loud enough to hurt, and from the ceiling came the restless skitter of rats.
I tossed the shovel aside and dropped straight onto the bed. I had neither the will nor the strength to wash, or to eat. I only stared blankly at the ceiling and turned the years over in my mind.
When I entered the magic university at nine, I thought the road before me lay wide open. I was first in the entire arcane engineering division — overwhelmingly first, through four straight semesters. I had never paid a single coin of tuition, and I didn't even know what it cost. The classmates who had scorned me for my age fell silent the moment my early graduation was confirmed.
So my dream was to become an arcane engineer. My goal was the Black Magic Tower, the place every theoretical mage longed to enter.
That ambition had not changed by the time I graduated early at eleven and entered graduate school. I stumbled once during my master's and nearly got myself expelled, but I overcame even that cleanly, and laid a solid foundation as a theoretical mage.
The trouble began in the doctoral program.
Six years. Seven at the outside — that was how long I had expected it to take. Instead, ten years passed without my Thesis Defense so much as being mentioned.
It was not for lack of results. I had published dozens of papers as first author, and I had secured imperial collaborative grants with nothing but my own name on them. A magic tower had once bought a patent of mine for a sum beyond imagining.
In any other laboratory, I would have had time enough to defend twice over and still have years to spare. I spent that time alone in graduate school, all because the permission of a single absolute authority — the professor — never came.
I did not graduate.
Not from the day I enrolled at nine, and not by the time I turned twenty-six.
"Cough."
A dry cough dragged my eyes open. I had only meant to shut them for a moment, and I had fallen asleep. Sunlight slanted in through a gap in the curtains, and motes of dust danced in the beam.
"...Cough."
My throat was raw, so I coughed again. I hadn't had a single sip of water since yesterday. I raked a hand through my tangled hair and got up. In the corner, a shovel handle crusted with dirt and moss lay beside a liquor bottle. I had borrowed it. I would have to give it back.
I washed and got ready to go out, moving like a machine.
That was when a reply tone rose from the gray-white Communication Orb I had flung into the fireplace.
"Jin. Are you still asleep?"
"..."
The Communication Orb was one of the required arcane implements of the magic university. Its chief function was two-way wireless speech. Graduate students, of course, used it as nothing more than a professor's private hotline.
"Awake, I see. The humidity in your room has changed."
"...Professor Elia."
"If you are awake, come to my laboratory. The room is in utter disarray, and the laboratory is a wreck as well. Today is the day the undergraduate interns arrive, is it not? It will hardly do for you, the Lab Leader, to be absent."
"I thought I had killed you quite thoroughly. However did you climb out of the grave?"
"It rained in the night, you see. The mound of earth gave way. Next time, do take the weather into account when you set about killing me."
"..."
She said it as dryly as an executioner pronouncing a sentence of death.
"Jin. Should you be thinking of running, abandon the notion. This field is a narrow one. There is no magic tower that would have you, once you leave our laboratory."
"...I'll return the shovel and come in to work."
"Do bring the sunscreen when you come. The sun is rather fierce today."
"Yes."
Click. The light in the Communication Orb went out.
Dizzy, I sat on the edge of the bed and brooded. I had gone to all the trouble of killing her, and never once had it occurred to me that a night of rain would bring her back. Last time, at least, she had stayed dead a full week.
"Haa..."
Our professor is a vampire.
And so she does not die. She is immortal.