The Star Instructor
The homeroom professor of Class Gap.
At the man's words, Bihyung turned his head.
"A monster, sir?"
Real nice. Scare the room, why don't you.
Of all the words in the world, he had to pick that one.
For a half-yokai, it was an ugly word to hear. And look—even Hwang Mina, seated beside him, had a faint tremor running across the back of her hand.
"Well, what of it? Am I supposed to look at a brat who grew like that and call him ordinary?"
Class Gap's professor grinned as he said it, not the least bit interested in how the word had landed.
"So what is it, exactly?"
The light in the professor's eyes changed.
"Two weeks since enrollment. Two weeks, and he's already 3rd Rank..."
The cadets dragged in a sharp, empty breath.
They had felt it. Until this moment, not one of them had been able to put a name to what they felt. The verdict the professor handed down was more than enough to stun every last one of them.
"P-Professor, do you truly mean 3rd Rank?"
At one cadet's question, the professor answered with a lazy drawl.
"Yep. That kid's hit 3rd Rank. No question."
"Th-that's..."
"Hard to swallow, right? Honestly, I don't buy it either."
He fixed Bihyung with a look like a man pressing a point.
"When you enrolled, you were barely hanging onto 1st Rank by your fingernails. And you jumped two whole ranks in two short weeks? What kind of magic did you pull?"
"I only trained hard, sir."
It was the truth. Across the weekend, Bihyung had carved time out of sleeping and eating alike to spar with Dueogsi. Fighting Dueogsi, whose true body brushed the middle ranks, had jolted him in more ways than one.
...And somewhere in the middle of it, I picked up a heaven-sent chance besides.
He had been turning the problem over for a long while. Yin energy and yang energy. Before the two chose to coexist, in the instant they recoiled from each other, he had felt a power there. Could he use it?
In the midst of that questioning he had gained Yin-Yang Incarnation, and this time he had taken the Heavenly Time Scripture as well. He could hardly leave either of them untested.
The result—
Impossible. For now.
He had to catch the fleeting instant where yin and yang crossed, and hold it. The window was so brutally short that it simply would not take.
But maybe because I recognized it, my true body's rank rose.
A kind of enlightenment, if he had to name it. Keep driving toward that point, and he had the feeling he could seize the crossing itself before he ever reached 4th Rank.
"Hmm?"
The professor studied him as if the boy had just become interesting, then grinned.
"Fun. Come find me later. I was going to call you in anyway, on account of that matter."
"Understood."
Bihyung nodded, and the professor climbed onto the platform and cracked a yawn wide enough to split his face. Whatever interest had been there a moment ago was gone, rinsed clean.
"All right, hatchlings. Sun's up. Everybody sleep well?"
No one answered quickly. On an ordinary morning they might have replied at their ease, but they had felt the top cadet's presence only moments ago. Having recognized it, not one of them could claim to have been playing.
Nice.
Sensing the hunger to win in those children, the professor smiled where no one could see it and kept his face exactly as it was.
"You didn't slack off, I imagine. The one running furthest out front is already tearing along like a car with the brakes shot."
"......"
"You might decide you've fallen behind. You might even want to quit, and tell yourself it's already too late. But."
The professor stamped the platform once, and the tension choking the room vanished as if it had been washed away. A clean, upright dao power filled the classroom to the walls.
Those who cannot recognize their own lack, their own foolishness, their own laziness, have no right to look upon the ones running ahead of them.
"Don't forget the will to win you felt today. Carve the frustration into your chest. Do that, and the rest of you can reach that place just fine."
With that, the professor stepped down from the platform again and led the cadets off.
"Let's move. Regular classes start today."
"......"
For a breath, the children only stared at his back in silence.
"...Yes, sir!"
Then they kicked off from their places and followed him out. Watching them go, Bihyung turned it over.
Hah. A handful of words, and he's already got the whole class cooked and served.
Nothing like the way he looked. One hell of a teacher.
Where Class Gap followed their professor was the academy's indoor training hall. In modern terms, a gymnasium. Changed into athletic clothes, every one of them stood in ranks.
"Good. Today I'll lecture you on the theory behind some light arts. Prepared instructor, step forward."
Every head turned. They blinked like goldfish and searched the room. A prepared instructor? Where?
"Top cadet Shin Bihyung. You. I'm talking to you."
The professor snickered and pointed.
"Anyone else in here with the makings of an instructor, besides you?"
"...I don't believe I ever said I would, sir."
"A cadet, talking back?"
Where did he even pick up a way of talking like that.
Haa...
Bihyung swallowed the sigh and rose, stepping out in front of the professor.
"Cadet Bihyung. Up to what rank of art can you use?"
"Only the basics, sir."
"Huh? Why?"
The professor cocked his head, genuinely failing to follow.
"A kid like you ought to be able to bend even 3rd Rank arts to his use."
"The fundamentals seemed important, so I didn't learn anything else."
The truth was that he still hadn't learned them, because he meant to clear the derivative story The Researcher. Learn any art that wasn't a basic art, and that story could never be cleared. Not ever.
The professor seemed to have taken it a little differently. He looked at Bihyung as if the answer pleased him.
"Excellent."
"Sir?"
"Raising your rank is hard. But the reason exorcists want it raised that badly comes down to this. They want stronger techniques. They want to put out stronger power."
And yet, among the ones who cast the fundamentals aside like that, there is not a single one whose foundation holds.
"The basics are the pillar that braces you, and the ground under your feet, the higher you climb. Keep that mindset. Keep it a long time."
He turned and gave the other cadets the same words. Then he looked back at Bihyung and drew a single talisman from inside his clothes.
"Today's lecture is settled. I'll show you why the basics matter."
Face gone serious, he flicked the talisman.
It cracked into the floor, a yellow slip driven into the earth. The red script across it began to glow, and then the talisman sank into the ground and woke a low, steady tremor.
"Basic Wood Art. Vines."
Nothing more than breathing wood-energy into the ground below, sprouting a shoot, and drawing vines up out of it. A basic art.
"But every principle of Wood Art can be said to begin, in the end, from these vines."
He snapped his fingers, and the faint shaking stopped.
And yet the quiet that followed felt, for no reason he could have named aloud, exactly like the hush before a storm.
...It's coming.
Bihyung drove his Gongdan harder against the sensation climbing from below, and felt something writhing its way up from the very bottom. An instant later it burst through the floor.
An imugi—a great serpent on the road to becoming a dragon—reared up, its whole body wrought from a massive tree trunk.
"This is a 6th Rank Wood Art, the Wood Spirit Serpent. It can crawl beneath the earth, and it can surge up whenever you wish and attack and defend at the same time."
He rapped the imugi's head with the back of his hand.
"But to make this Wood Spirit Serpent, you have to pour wood-energy into the ground, same as that basic Wood Art just now. And you need the knack of raising vines worked into you, at least to a point."
While Class Gap's cadets stood lost in a middle-rank art, the professor smiled and stirred his fingers through the empty air. The Wood Spirit Serpent vanished. He set the demonstration aside and went on.
"It isn't only Wood Art. The foundation of every art bound to the Five Elements sits in the basics. Remember what the top cadet said, and remember what I said. When you hit a wall, it may be the thing that helps you."
Now then.
"Shall we have a look at our top cadet's skill?"
"......"
"You said you were drilling the fundamentals, didn't you? Then lay them out for me. The whole run of them."
At that, Bihyung unfolded the basic arts of the Five Elements.
First, fire.
Basic Fire Art. Flame Bullet. Fire spilled from his fingertips and turned to searing heat, condensed, and shot like a single round. The professor stopped it with his right hand alone and let out a low sound of appreciation.
"Hoh? This is a basic art? Tell me it was 2nd Rank and I'd believe you."
A natural result. The effect carried by the derivative story Path of the Apex.
The limit of every technique rises by one rank.
Until now he had never been able to use it properly. He simply hadn't had the energy.
In the fights so far, I forced something close to that power out of the principle of mutual generation.
Said the other way, if he had not twisted his whole body that far, it would have been impossible.
Not anymore.
Through Yin-Yang Incarnation, his dao power and his yokai power grew in real time. And through the Heavenly Time Scripture's Noon, he had swollen the volume of his yang energy. Bihyung could now fight on even ground with the upper edge of 2nd Rank without calling on mutual generation at all.
Next, earth.
The heat caught in the professor's grip was already dying, and the floor beneath it stirred.
"Hoh?"
Earth Wall. The floor shot up in a single breath, and the professor slipped it by taking one step back. The follow-up was still coming.
Metal.
A downpour of ore lanced out from inside the earthen wall. Droplets of water beaded along it, then sank into the ground, and a whip of vines tore upward. It happened in a flash, and the principle of mutual generation rode inside it.
This... looking only at his feel for the arts, he's past a first-year.
Put him against an upperclassman and limit him to basic arts, and he might still win. The kind of talent who put the thought in your head whether you invited it or not.
Even so. Still a little short.
A fierce seismic step blew every art apart into nothing, and the professor clapped.
"Not bad at all. You're doing more than enough to be worth the name of top cadet."
Praise or not, Bihyung's face did not brighten. He only turned, calmly, over what he still lacked. Watching that, the professor's smile deepened.
Well, look at this. Spots the problem on the spot, does he?
The boy looked as if he were chewing on it, and as if he had not yet found a decent answer. Of course he hadn't. The answer to the thing he was worrying over was time.
"Cadet Bihyung."
"Yes?"
"It's the broken harmony of the Five Elements that's eating at you, isn't it. Am I wrong?"
From the arts alone, he had read which element was lacking? Bihyung was quietly startled by the level of the man in front of him.
"...Yes. That's right."
"Fire, earth, and water—you can already call the fundamentals of those mastered."
That, too, was correct. The basic arts of those three attributes had already been driven all the way to master.
"So what's left is metal and wood?"
Bihyung nodded, unruffled. Just as the professor said, Metal Art and Wood Art still hovered around fifty percent proficiency. The weekend had not moved them far.
Once I got about halfway, especially, it started to feel stopped up.
Was this what they meant by a wall? Even with Mina's Versatility applied through harmonization, it would not come clean.
The professor looked at him, scrubbed a hand along his jaw, and tossed the words out as if they meant nothing.
"That's the face of a man who got cut off halfway through a dump."
This guy. Even the comparisons have to be—
"Keh heh heh... Kidding. I'm kidding."
He had watched Bihyung's expression rot in real time, and now he waved a hand.
"If you feel walled in, try working mutual overcoming."
"Sir?"
"You can use mutual overcoming, can't you?"
Of course he knew it. Hadn't Mina done it herself, back in the library?
"Good that you can. Then listen properly to what I'm about to tell you. This is something of a golden tip."
He gathered dao power in his palm, split it into two, and explained as he did.
"The principle of mutual overcoming is this. You take an energy that cannot become mutual generation, an energy that ought to be eaten, and you forcibly swell it, and you load the power of the previous art into it. That about right?"
"Yes."
"Then how do you do the 'forcibly'?"
"Well, obviously, by loading in a great deal of energy..."
"Bingo. But listen."
The clumps of dao power divided in his hands began to draw back toward one another.
"A mutual overcoming with real skill behind it can be done even when the difference in energy is small. Grasp the essence of the art, and that's enough."
He said it smiling.
"Say the energy you've got is a ten. Aim to put about five and a half into the attribute you want to grow, and four and a half into the overcoming attribute, and still make it work. Do that, and the wall you're stuck on might break."
Bihyung split his energy with immediate precision.
...This is hard.
The professor had told him to perform mutual overcoming while loading only a little more than half. With a margin that thin, it wasn't even close.
And yet—why?
Basic Metal Art proficiency has increased.
Basic Wood Art proficiency has increased.
Things that had refused to budge, as if a wall stood in front of them, had begun to climb steeply once more. There had to be a reason.
Whoa. No way.
The exorcists' star instructor is actually cracked.
Free practice for the cadets.
Watching them from the back of the training hall, the homeroom professor, Shinhoo, felt an uninvited guest drop down beside him.
"The children's level is quite high."
Shinhoo turned his head.
Hair as shaggy as a dog's coat, and a face creased in a loose, harmless grin. Taken all together, the man looked as if he couldn't hurt a fly.
"Aigoo. Well now. If it isn't the Instructor."
Instructor. Not a full professor of the academy, but a lecturer brought in from outside. Every exorcist belonged to Yeongwol, so outside was a word that sat a little crooked. Even so, instructors and professors knew how to tell each other apart.
And for good reason.
What are the family bastards plotting this time.
Most of the instructors were people with a line into the great families. Shinhoo stared, wordless, at the man who had sat down beside him, and the man smiled brightly and answered.
"The rumors about the top cadet and the second seat are everywhere. I wanted to see them at least once, so I came."
"What, thinking of scouting them? Ah. Can't do that yet, can you? So you came to lick them early and call dibs?"
Shinhoo was a man who had said both the sayable and the unsayable even to the Elder Council, and he offered the line with nothing held back. The other man only laughed and shrugged.
"Yes. Well... that isn't entirely wrong. It isn't a bad thing, is it?"
Fair enough.
Even so.
"All the same, don't go blowing empty wind into kids who still have growing to do. I'll ask you that much."
Nothing that touched the families, or anything tied to them, had ever ended cleanly. Shinhoo's eyes went cold on the instructor. The instructor laughed as pleasantly as before and nodded.
"Yes. I couldn't introduce half-grown children to a family either. I came to see just how extraordinary the real top cadet and second seat actually are."
As if to prove it, his gaze never once left Bihyung.
But the heart inside him was a little different from what had left his mouth.
So it's him. The one who blew apart the laboratory I went to such trouble to set up.
The anomaly the academy had brought to heel—Dream Within the Mirror. The instructor who had secretly undone the barrier art surrounding it settled his eyes on Bihyung.