The hardness of mana crystals was enormous. They were practically indestructible in normal use.
These weren’t fragile ornants or decorative pieces. They should have been able to withstand anything Ren could produce, even with his abnormal reserves.
Should have.
The evaluator stood slowly, his expression with dropped jaw and mouth wide open showing genuine confusion. "That’s... How...?"
The words ca out strangled, disbelieving. In forty years of administering these exams, he’d never seen anything like this. Students failed to activate seals. Students made mistakes in the pattern. But breaking the crystal itself?
Impossible.
In the upper stands, sothing changed in the air.
A shift, subtle but unmistakable. The kind of change that ca when predators sensed wounded prey.
Jin Strahlfang straightened suddenly, his eyes gleaming at the recognized opportunity.
This was ’The chance’. The opening he’d been waiting for without knowing it.
It had seed that everything was lost with the genius brat. He was too abnormal. Too talented. Too perfect in his execution of every protocol. Watching him succeed exam after exam had been torture, each perfect score another nail in Jin’s pride.
But that abnormality, that excessive power, now transford into his downfall.
Ren only had three failures permitted before encountering enormous pushback, dozens of nobles could use those failures as leverage to force him to lose his candidacy for the most significant rewards.
Getting at least one, a failure, in this last exam was without doubt a victory.
And nine of the twelve months of the school year remained. They would have three more opportunities to force more errors. Three more exam periods. Three more chances to chip away at his perfect record.
But they had to seize the mont now.
Aldric, of course, saw the sa chance. His mind, trained by decades of political maneuvering, was already calculating angles and approaches. How to fra this. How to guide the narrative. How to ensure this mont of vulnerability beca permanent damage.
This was an unorthodox situation. It could go several ways...
It wouldn’t necessarily be automatically qualified as bad. If they took the crystal as "defective" and brought another that Ren didn’t break, they would have lost the best opportunity they might have all year.
They had to act. Fast.
Guide general opinion and especially the evaluator’s toward the ’correct’ conclusion: this was an obvious failure. The abnormal boy’s fault. Obviously.
It had never happened. So, "Only he could be the reason", that had to be the verdict.
"It’s evident," Aldric stood, his voice projecting with authority that cut right through the stunned silence, "that the student doesn’t have the necessary control over his ’enormous and aggressive mana’ to handle costly, no, invaluable and important artifacts."
The words were carefully chosen. Not attacking Ren’s power, which would be foolish. But questioning his control, his refinent, his worthiness to wield that power in a civilized society.
Jin stood imdiately after, like following the alpha’s lead. "A noble who cannot seal docunts appropriately cannot administer territory. This is precisely the kind of incompetence that..."
"The emblem clearly was defective," Min interrupted Jin, but his shout was imdiately drowned out by multiple voices rising in opposition.
"Defective?" An elderly man from the Blackwood faction stood, his face red with indignation at the suggestion. "These emblems are manufactured by an ancient civilization more advanced than ours. What can you know about them?! They’ve never broken even with Dragarion’s enormous energy, the probability that it breaks from the amount of power is..."
"Insignificant," another completed, standing as well. The nobles were rising like dominoes, each one emboldened by the others. "Which ans the problem is with the user."
The voices began overlapping, the auditorium transforming into a cauldron of opinions. The nobles who wanted to see Ren fail found their voice, speaking about inadequate mana control, about power without refinent, about the difference between brute force and technical skill.
About the danger of power without control.
It was a narrative that had been waiting for an opportunity to erge. All the resentnt, all the fear of this upstart who threatened their worldview, now had a target.
Min stood in the student stands, his face reddening with anger and frustration. "That’s ridiculous! Ren has the best mana control that..."
"Sit down, student," the evaluator ordered, though his own expression showed uncertainty. He looked lost, overwheld by the sudden chaos erupting around him. "This is... irregular. I need to consult with the other evaluators about how to proceed..."
His voice carried the uncertainty of soone facing a situation with no precedent. No guidelines. No procedure to follow.
The evaluators began approaching each other, forming small clusters of heated discussion. So pointed toward Ren, others toward the fragnts of the emblem scattered on the silver tray, others toward the audience of nobles who continued debating heatedly.
Their body language spoke of confusion, concern, and the kind of stress that ca from making decisions with massive political implications.
Ren remained standing on the platform, still looking at the tray with the crystal fragnts.
But...
His mind was on sothing else. The background noise didn’t register in his head.
The shouting nobles, the arguing evaluators, the gasps and whispers from the audience... all of it faded to white noise as sothing in the fragnts of the crystal captured his attention completely.
He picked up the pieces, holding them closer, examining them with his enhanced perception and the knowledge of soone who’d had ’Mooshito’s’ network and had spent months studying crystallization.
The internal structure was visible on the fractured surfaces, the mana patterns coded within the material revealed to him like an open book written in a language only he could read.
"Simple patterns," Ren murmured, so quietly that nobody nearby heard him.
Relatively simple, at least. For soone with his level of understanding.
It wasn’t like the truly complex artifacts he’d encountered. Those had insane codes, formations upon formations that generated effects like the rings that Ren was barely beginning to understand. They were masterpieces of arcane engineering that probably took hundreds of years and enormous groups of people to make.
But this...
This was just a simple password. A lock.
Not even a particularly sophisticated one.
The stone had the sa shape for all the "emblems" that were really just the correct energy form to insert in the doors of so ruins. Ren had seen that indentation that day when Harold tried to steal the ring that he himself ended up stealing unintentionally.
Those indentations were also in the first door of the royal castle he’d seen... but upon leaving, since when entering he’d been suffering too much to pay attention to architectural details on a door.
The only code these symtrical crystals had was one of the user’s mana with a simple rotation process that they’d standardized in this particular crystal.
The official kingdom’s "beginner practice password".
In the case of docunt sealing, the seal simply injected mana into paper previously imbued in a liquid susceptible to the excited mana of the crystal. The only true action was "activating the password" with the correct flow.
The supposedly complicated procedure was just that: learning a simple password that was produced by injecting mana. "Bureaucratic magic". Theater...
Ren’s perception, his new level of knowledge and control thanks to his fusions, and mainly his previous information that the fungus had transferred to him when opening that first door... the door he entered with Larissa as hostage, when Harold was doing his shenanigans before being obliterated...
The door he had opened without needing to use a seal like Harold did, but just by sending the mana mark in the correct form...
Gave him all the necessary factors to do sothing incredible.
"I can fix it," he said aloud.
The words cut through the chaos like a blade.
The evaluators’ debate stopped abruptly, heads turning toward the platform. The noble argunts faltered, voices trailing off mid-sentence.
His evaluator turned toward him, confusion evident on his weathered features. "Excuse ?"
"The emblem," Ren lifted the fragnts, light catching on the fractured surfaces and sending rainbow reflections across his face. "I can repair it."
The statent was so absurd, so impossible, that for a mont he didn’t react. The words simply hung in the air, too ridiculous to process imdiately.
Not all the evaluators heard, but those who did began passing the word. Heads bent together, urgent whispers spreading through the evaluation panel like wildfire.
Then, the laughter began.
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