95 - A Clue
“Why... why did you do that!”
Haru plopped down hard on the soft foam padding, unleashing her pent-up frustration. The brilliant illusion was gone without a trace. A starless night sky stretched overhead, filled only with the shrill chirping of crickets echoing through the silent playground.
“Why’d you end the magic like that...! I still hadn’t finished talking to Mom!”
She pounded the ground with her tiny palms. I pulled her to her feet, knowing it would only hurt her hands.
“It’s time to head back to reality.”
“No, I’m not going.”
“It’s getting chilly at night—you could catch a cold.”
“No, I said no!”
First things first, I had to get my friends back home. Haru refused to budge from the playground, throwing a full tantrum.
“I think I can fix your eyes.”
“...! Even the doctors couldn’t, so how could you...”
“You said you saw colors for a moment when I used aura on you before, right? I figured out the method.”
She still looked skeptical, but Haru willingly took my hand anyway.
We didn’t speak a word until we reached the front door of my house. Her ragged breaths came in bursts beside me. I’d always prided myself on not being the fittest, but Haru was even worse off.
Her inability to distinguish colors wasn’t just from the shock of losing her mother. I couldn’t bring the pill from inside Alchemist with me, but it had definitely emitted a mana wavelength like black magic. If that was true—and if her mother knew and gave it to her anyway—then that woman couldn’t have had all her marbles.
Back in my room, I sat Haru on the bed and dragged Yuna from my desk chair to sit beside her, facing her.
“I Ha-ru, what color is Yuna’s hair right now?”
“Gray... no, black...? Or gray...”
Yuna’s hair was still its unchanged fiery red strands. There was definitely something wrong with Haru’s eyes.
“Close your eyes. Raise your right hand if it hurts.”
I wiped the tears swelling around her puffy eyes and placed my palm over them, channeling my unique aura. But this time, I planned to use it differently from before.
“Ah... it hurts...!”
Haru grabbed my wrist immediately, letting out a groan.
“It hurts? Where, and how?”
“Hic... I don’t know. Nami, I’m scared... Can’t you stop? My head hurts so much...”
What I was doing was simply purifying with aura. There shouldn’t have been any element that could cause pain in this process. Yet Haru’s right hand trembled as she predictably complained of pain.
I gripped her hand tightly for now. We couldn’t stop here.
This confirmed the possibility of black magic. But in this world, black magic couldn’t exist in its pure form. With the ‘storage’ step that pulled mana from another dimension, spells couldn’t be cast through simple methods like human sacrifice.
That left one option: something like the magic I’d used to turn a ballpoint pen into an atomizer—imprinting to cast indirectly. They’d engraved a transmutation circle on the pill itself and activated it through bodily absorption.
3rd Circle Dispel: Imprint Release
Just in case, I cast a spell to reverse-extract the imprinted transmutation circle. Black letters and formulas writhed like snakes from Haru’s eyes, crawling up my arm. A tingling sensation surged through me, filling my right arm with runes and distorted circles like a tattoo.
I barely contained it with aura before it could spread through my body. As I let out a sigh of relief—
“What the heck is that?”
Yuna asked, staring in shock.
“Imprint magic. The content seems like... 6th Circle thought acceleration.”
Did Haru’s mother think this was just a pill to make her smarter? I couldn’t confirm the truth, and it frustrated me.
* * *
I laid Haru on my bed and asked Yuna to watch over her for a bit. I had to dispel the imprint temporarily stored in my arm before it faded.
“If Haru wakes up, come get me.”
“Haru’s not messed up anywhere else, right?”
“Yeah, I treated everything, so don’t worry too much.”
The reasons Haru couldn’t see colors or heard hallucinations were simple. At such a young age, she’d been hit with high-circle magic beyond her level, overloading her brain. The former was her brain’s processing areas being insufficient, encroaching on other senses; the latter was interference in her brainwaves.
Constant exposure to unrefined mana without an Aura Heart had thrown her internal balance way off. So the first step of purification was using her Aura Heart to remove mana impurities. The second was fully extracting the imprint and infusing my temporary aura.
While she slept, my aura was circulating from her head to her toes, repairing organs that hadn’t functioned properly.
Click.
The bathroom door shut, and I stood before the sink mirror, staring at myself. My hair was ridiculously long. Hiasen had cut it so carefully, but the illusion magic’s release had restored it all. This was why I hadn’t wanted to cut it...
Anyway, that wasn’t the issue. I decided to dispel the formula first.
It was a procedure I’d done to death before, so I didn’t even need to close my eyes to focus.
Golden aura flowed out, and the rune combinations on my arm began writhing. Aura—derived from mana, a probabilistic stacking substance. Like blood replenishing oxygen through the lungs, mana transforms via the Aura Heart to accept brainwave signals. In short, aura was best summarized as a ‘controllable artificial hormone.’
Unlike regular hormones, aura encompassed continuous secretion chains. For instance, thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) prompts thyroxine release, which boosts metabolism—a process aura collapses into one step.
But since aura derives from mana, it’s not a real substance. It just activates and groups existing inactive hormones in the body, without creating new ones. You could run 100m in 10 seconds, but humans couldn’t outpace cheetahs or Ferraris. Of course, exceptional aura control might allow short-range external emission, but that’s beside the point.
Honestly, in my opinion, humans being born with Aura Hearts is as miraculous as dragons wielding dragon tongue. Clear limits aside, the ability to enhance the body without permanent side effects or costs is a tremendous blessing in itself.
Who said human greed knows no bounds? Aura is easy to apply but rigidly limited. Mana, conversely, is hard to handle but boundless in potential. So people tried wielding mana like aura, springing up everywhere—and some paid with lives.
Magic that activates automatically without understanding principles... we once called it black magic in slang.
The layers of overlapping identical spells would take time. Erasing this tattoo was proving ridiculously hard.
The imprint I’d fully extracted from Haru’s head was the result of gradual injection via black magic. As the only magic mass-produced worldwide, imprints were more common in factories than on people. So if this pill’s magic wasn’t human-made, decoding the caster code might yield useful info.
Decoding resembled dispel but was trickier. Dispel brute-forces mana sums to ‘0’ regardless of dynamic or static equilibrium. Decoding only used static procedures.
Like unraveling a tangled thread, I reversed every casting step to dismantle the formula.
Decoding is the reverse of magic recording. The ‘subject’—written first in a circle—is the last remnant.
Korea Mana Power’s ability to tax individuals stems from tech decoding ‘subjects’ from storage processes.
“This is...”
Once the ugly tattoo vanished, leaving a single character on my hand’s back, I could only bite my lip.
Walpurgis
A whirlwind of thoughts flashed through my mind. Why does this show up here? Pure coincidence? Not even verified. Unlike human casters, machine subjects are named by users.
Yet I couldn’t shake the sticky unease. My heart raced on its own.
Why would illegal drug makers using forbidden 6th Circle magic—unpermitted for civilians—name the imprint subject Walpurgis of all things? Were they really involved? Or just a convenient name for a defunct group?
As dizzying hypotheses swirled, a knock sounded.
Knock knock.
“Hey, Nami, you still in there?”
For now, keep it secret from the kids. I still had precious little info.
1st Circle Cast: Clean
I erased the last character completely and greeted Yuna with a bright smile.