For Now, Let's Just Sleep
He had finished off the sunflower seeds and was resting in the cool wash of the air conditioner.
"So, about that."
["Hmm?"]
"What should we do from here on out?"
Gaeun looked at him with a serious expression.
["Well… there's plenty to do, but…"]
"Then—!"
["The problem is figuring out where to start."]
He had never taken on a disciple before. He had no idea how to teach someone properly.
A dozen necessary things sprang to mind, but arranging them in the right order felt strangely difficult. All of it would have to be done eventually—every last bit of it was essential—but which step would be the most efficient first move remained stubbornly unclear.
People always said that in moments like these, you should look back on how you yourself had been taught.
"Cheep… (Hmm…)"
Master, I just… did it?
It was this easy the whole time?
Why can't other people do this? Ow—why are you hitting me?
Not exactly useful advice.
["Tsk… or is it?"]
Maybe it was useful after all.
He gave Gaeun, sitting right in front of him, a long, assessing look.
Hmm… she did seem to have talent.
He thought back to Gaeun inside the Gate—how her understanding had shot up after casting magic only a handful of times.
Maybe it really would work?
A sliver of hope flickered to life.
["Alright. Done thinking. I've decided what we're doing."]
"Okay—so what should I do?"
["First…"]
"First…?"
He looked at her with the gravest face he could manage.
["Get some sleep. We'll do it tomorrow."]
"…Excuse me? You're joking, right…?"
["No? I'm completely drained. Not happening today. Tomorrow."]
"What? Crow Tit? Crow Tit?!"
["Tweet tweet. Crow Tit's sleeping…"]
Gaeun grabbed him and shook him side to side, trying to wake him up.
It was hopeless. He was far too exhausted—all that thrashing around earlier, refusing to be washed, had completely wiped him out.
His tiny bead-like eyes drifted shut, and the world went dark.
"Crow Tit, are you actually falling asleep?!"
Gaeun's voice calling from beside him grew farther and farther away.
Ah, whatever. You know—
Wasn't there something in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms about how you have to sleep today and act tomorrow if you want to conquer the world?
Something along those lines, anyway.
His logic was roughly the same.
"Cheep… cheep… (Zzz…)"
After a solid nap, morning arrived.
Gaeun and he were now inside a subspace he had created with magic.
"Wow… th-this was possible?"
["Right? There's almost nothing magic can't do."]
"It really does seem that way."
Above them stretched a sky as black as night, glittering with motes of mana that shone like stars. The whole place felt like standing in the middle of outer space.
Gaeun couldn't tear her eyes away from the scenery, utterly captivated.
At this rate she's going to start drooling.
Then again, everyone who came here for the first time wore that exact expression.
He had worn it himself the first time he stepped into the subspace he had made.
["You'll be able to make something like this too, eventually."]
"Really? I could make something like this?"
["If you work hard? It's not that difficult."]
Probably.
Opening a subspace for the first time was the hard part. After that, it got easy.
And if she kept at it, she would manage it someday.
["Anyway. Before we start—hup."]
A single book materialized out of thin air and dropped into Gaeun's hands.
It was a moderately old volume, well-used. Fingerprints and smudges marked its pages here and there, and a few spots were torn.
"What kind of book is this?"
["One I used to read."]
"A book Crow Tit used…"
["I think it's a pretty good one for a beginner mage."]
Whatever else you could say about his master, the man had known how to write a textbook.
That book was the one that had first explained the basic common sense of magic to him when he was starting out.
It truly deserved a title like Magic Even a Fool Can Understand.
["Someone at your level should grasp it easily."]
"It isn't hard or anything?"
["Not at all. Just read it like a regular book."]
"Ah… okay?"
There was one thing he had slightly overlooked, however.
His master had been an eccentric among eccentrics—strange even by his own standards—and he himself was a mage who had learned magic under that very strange human being.
Just as a one-eyed person in a village of one-eyed people never notices anything odd…
When everyone around you is strange, you stop recognizing strangeness for what it is.
"This is… easy, right…?"
["Since it's the first day, keep it simple. Just twenty pages."]
"…………"
["Hmm? It was originally thirty. I cut it down for you."]
"I-I'll do my best."
And that was how a two-eyed person, arriving in a one-eyed village, ended up convinced that they were the strange one.
Gaeun was losing her mind.
No—this is supposed to be easy…?
She had no idea what any of it was even saying.
The writing on the page was clearly Korean. Whether Crow Tit had translated it with magic or not, it was written in Korean.
Reading the letters themselves was no problem at all.
But—
Even when I read it, I have no idea what it's talking about…!
She was reading the book and somehow not reading it at the same time.
She desperately wanted to ask for something easier. But Crow Tit had handed her this one with the firm declaration that it was the easiest book there was.
Gaeun stared down at the open pages and thought.
Ah. So the path of a mage is this long and this treacherous…
Then again, what in this world was ever easy?
Every endeavor carried its own particular hardships.
"Crow Tit, I'm going to give it everything I've got."
["Hmm? Well, sure? Do your best…?"]
"Yes. I'll try to understand as much as I can."
Gaeun clenched both fists tight and steeled her resolve.
Fine. So what if she couldn't understand all of it?
She would give it her absolute best and take in whatever she could manage.
The fire in Gaeun's heart—moments from guttering out—flared back to life.
And so Gaeun sat alone, burning with renewed determination.
Watching her from a distance, the crow tit thought:
"Tweet. Tweet-tweet-tweet. (What is with that kid. She's scary.)"
One moment she was frowning, head bowed like all the fight had gone out of her—
The next, she declared she was going to push through, and then started reading with the focus of an entirely different person.
Looking at that, he couldn't help but wonder.
What was she?
"Tweet-tweet? (Split personality…?)"
Could she swap personalities depending on the situation?
Nothing else could explain a phenomenon this bizarre.
"Tweet-tweet, tweet-tweet. (The old sayings really are never wrong.)"
There was a saying, wasn't there? That every genius had at least one strange corner to them.
She was probably that type.
If a child with the talent of a great archmage turned out completely normal, that might actually be the stranger outcome.
At any rate, a few hours later:
"Crow Tit. I, uh… finished reading it."
["Oh, yeah? How was it? Did you understand?"]
"No. Honestly, I didn't get all of it—but I think I understood some of it."
Gaeun closed the open book and looked at him as she spoke.
"Reading this book, I got this kind of feeling."
["What kind of feeling?"]
"That with magic, precision matters—but that sense, intuition, matters even more. That kind of feeling."
["Hmm…"]
"Is there something wrong with how I understood it?"
["No, it's not that…"]
He couldn't help but be startled by Gaeun's unexpected answer.
Because—
["You understood it too well."]
"I-is that so?"
["Yeah. That was a twenty-out-of-ten answer."]
Gaeun's reply had struck at the very essence the book had kept tightly hidden.
This book—despite not being a novel—had a twist built into it.
The early pages opened with explanations about the precision and refinement of magic.
But the further you read, the more the text was designed to make you feel that something was off.
Because in the end, it concluded that magic belonged to the realm of instinct.
He had been speechless the first time he read it himself.
An academic text that somehow thought it was a novel.
Back then, he had seriously considered setting the thing on fire.
Well—he hadn't actually burned it.
Anyway.
["You're even more impressive than I thought."]
"Is it really that impressive?"
["Hugely. Enough that I'm glad I took you on as a disciple."]
Foreshadowing for the twist was scattered throughout the book as a kind of felt sense, woven into the text itself.
The sharper your intuition, the faster you arrived at the final conclusion.
And the final conclusion of this book was this:
Magical talent and intuitive ability are directly proportional.
In other words—the faster you guessed the book's ending, the greater your talent for magic.
And Gaeun had figured it out after reading only the early sections.
"Why are you looking at me like that…?"
["What, I'm not allowed to look? What's the problem."]
"It's just… a little creepy, I guess?"
["Nah. You're imagining it."]
So don't go running off anywhere, alright?