Chapter 73 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 73: The Ship of Exile 07
According to the Spring Tower's curriculum structure, the first year after enrollment was not devoted to magic practice, but to a general foundational course covering the basics.
Lucita received a few pages of the course schedule, transcribed onto parchment.
The study load was not particularly heavy. The foundational required courses included the Origins of Magic, Magic Taxonomy, and an Overview of Magical Principles, along with genealogy, historical analysis, and even the standard noble education of music and fine art.
The students here had no desire to emerge after a few years of study as country rustics, out of touch with politics and the arts.
Lucita’s level was already at least equivalent to the intermediate class, perhaps even the advanced. But Astrid, conscious of the gaps in Lucita’s systematic theoretical education, wanted to fill them properly rather than letting her skip ahead. So Lucita was placed with the beginners to study foundational knowledge from the start.
Lucita was entirely satisfied with this arrangement.
It was precisely the opportunity she wanted: to see what stage humanity’s magical theory had reached in this era, and to cross-reference it with the knowledge she already possessed.
The enrollment formalities were essentially finished by late morning, and Lucita had formed a broad picture of the place.
The first day had no classes scheduled, so Lucita's visit to the Golden Buckthorn Garden concluded quickly.
She politely declined Lesley's repeated invitations to stay, and walked alone to the end of this quiet street district, boarding the afternoon public tramcar.
Lesley withdrew the gaze she had been holding and pulled the garden’s large gate shut.
A very strange person, she thought.
Coming home, she found a stonemason working on the lawn to the left of the entrance.
That stretch of lawn had been bare, with only a linden tree planted along the path near the gate. By now the brick-and-stone sheep shelter was half-built, and the flock tied to the tree watched with great curiosity.
As Lucita came through the gate, the sheep turned to look at her, bleating plaintively.
She rubbed the nearest one, Snowball, on its woolly head, nodded to the stonemason, and stepped inside.
The wooden furniture had been repaired by the carpenter. Miscellaneous household items had been gradually accumulated in bits and pieces. A dark blue square woven rug had been laid before the hearth at the entrance, and the long table in the living room was covered with a red-checked oilcloth.
A silver candlestick stood in the center of the dining table. A fruit dish held a few deep-red cherry tomatoes, looking rather solitary — fruit here was genuinely expensive.
A familiar yet unfamiliar melody drifted down from upstairs.
Lucita paused and looked at Violet.
"It’s Linnea. She’s been fiddling with that piano for two days. She finally managed to play something on it."
It was the melody they had heard on the Gloire. The Overwintering Bird.
The melody was incomplete. Linnea was clearly only playing the small section they had heard.
But it was very beautiful.
Unlike the calm, romantic quality typical of Irttat’s music, this piece carried a restless urgency. At its heights it sounded almost like the final cry of a thornbird before death; at its depths, like a pitch-black night threaded with snowflakes.
The shifts and its richly layered emotion held them captive.
Perhaps this is what human music sounds like, Lucita thought. She decided to look for sheet music from the human world.
February was the season of all things awakening, and the Spring Tower's courses began in this same spirit.
The Spring Tower’s magical tradition stretched back three hundred years, but the oldest magical texts it housed could be traced to the era before the Great Calamity. Their craftsmanship was exquisite, their theories profound, beyond the comprehension and reach of the present generation of mages.
The magic of the current era, compared to the glories described in those books, had already fallen into considerable decline.
What people did not know was that magic had been declining in waves, generation after generation. The Great Calamity of five hundred years ago had not been the first.
They were simply holding these treasures, pitiably, in the hands of a few great nobles, relying on a pathetic handful of “great personages” with magical talent, some dull, some rather clever, to conduct what little research they could.
After two sessions of "Origins of Magic," Lucita had already identified the problem: the break in transmission and stagnation in research were extremely serious.
They knew that magical elements were constant and self-regenerating throughout the world, but did not understand that using magic placed a drain on them. They understood that the awakening of natural magic required sufficient innate talent, but did not know that any ordinary person with a soul, through cultivating and tempering that soul, could bring even a faint latent gift to the surface.
Everything they knew appeared to have been pieced together from scattered fragments of ancient texts.
"Magic Taxonomy" was even worse.
They had entirely overlooked research-school magic and ritual magic as distinct branches. Their classification system covered only natural magic and its four elemental types: earth, wind, water, and fire.
Each person's affinity for each element was different.
In theory, a natural mage had affinity for all types, but because of those differences, students generally chose one element as their primary focus, which became the basis for the division into elemental streams at the intermediate level.
In this area, Lucita had already naturally reached what, for them, was the endpoint of cultivation. Much of what beginners struggled to grasp, she could see straight through to its essence.
After two days of classes, Lucita reached a conclusion: the most valuable thing in the Spring Tower was in their library, which housed many ancient texts.
Rather than wasting time on these secondhand summaries and diluted retransmissions, she would be far better served by going directly to the primary sources and working things out herself.
So Lucita immersed herself in the library.
The books on research-school magic were kept on the topmost floor, a place almost no one visited.
According to Astrid, anyone interested in research-school magic treated it as a hobby. But judging by the depth of dust on these shelves, not many people had such a hobby at all.
With almost no one borrowing from this section for years, the librarians had grown careless with cleaning. Dust had settled along the edges of the books; the streaks of wiping were visible on the shelves; and corners that hadn’t been reached lay buried under a thick layer of grime.
Lucita pulled out a volume, and the disturbed dust set her coughing.
She carefully opened pages so brittle with age that they were at risk of crumbling.
This was a book on the origins of spirit magic.
Unlike the straightforward practical handbook the merfolk had given her, this human-authored work contained a great deal of deep philosophical reflection and secondhand accounts regarding the nature of the spirit itself.
As for the founder of spirit magic, the book remained vague, saying only that the work originated from the research of a legendary psychiatrist.
Someone who had achieved such astonishing results without leaving her name behind... Lucita suspected the founder belonged to an earlier era, and that two, three, or even more subsequent disasters had washed her name out of the river of history.
She didn't dwell on this, and read on.
Spirit magic divided human consciousness into the surface layer and the deep layer, with the most superficial consciousness manifesting as behavior.
The field's origin lay in this physician's attempts to hypnotize patients, which produced many accounts that contradicted her patients' outward presentations. (Lucita noticed that the book's author was evidently also a psychology scholar, and expressed strong disapproval throughout the text of this physician's seriously unethical conduct, though daunted by the physician's authority as a founding figure, the later sections turned increasingly to self-doubt.)
If consciousness could be hypnotized, could it be modified? Could it be controlled?
The physician’s thinking branched outward from there. After more than twenty years of experiments, she achieved a number of successes, and from them arrived at an overlooked truth: the existence of spirit itself held boundless power.
Through a certain degree of training in self-suggestion, one could give substance to one’s spiritual force and exert influence over the things around them.
If two minds happened to resonate, then a form of hypnosis, instantaneous and requiring nothing external, could occur.
In pursuit of her truth, the physician designed countless experiments, some involving outright inhumane methods of psychological torment. She successfully destroyed the consciousness of several subjects, committing those unfortunate participants to psychiatric institutions.
Before the scandal broke, the physician published a work that shook the magical world profoundly: The Discovery of Another Kind of Magic (now lost), officially announcing the birth of spirit magic.
Her achievements and her crimes left her reputation deeply divided in the public’s eyes. Yet within the elite society that monopolized magic, she was praised almost as a living muse.
For several generations, an almost farcical pattern repeated itself across the field of magical scholarship..
The physicians engaged in psychological research, or the later students of spirit magic, invariably expended great effort exposing and condemning the founder’s misdeeds. Meanwhile, the faction that praised her and papered over her crimes was, of all things, composed largely of practitioners of natural magic.
But despite the great number of those drawn to spirit magic research because of their weak elemental sensitivity, very few achieved any meaningful results.
Several centuries later, people began to question the potency, and even the reality, of spirit magic.
Research-school magic always displayed astonishing vitality in the aftermath of disasters and at the start of a new historical period, before inevitably falling into irreversible decline as knowledge became monopolized once more.
From the look of things, this was another decline period.
Lucita emerged from the book with her head full of academic infighting, having extracted only scattered fragments of principle with considerable effort. She returned A Brief Discussion on the Origins of Spirit Magic to its place and grimly acknowledged she had chosen the wrong book.
She rummaged along the shelf and identified Analysis of Spirit Magic Principles — Introductory Level, and reached to pull it out.
The book was wedged too tightly. She pinched the corner and gave it a firm tug, and an entire row of books came tumbling down with a crash.
She stiffened in alarm.
These volumes were who knew how many years old. Their survival into the present was remarkable. The paper was so brittle by now that a fall like this...
She carefully picked up each fallen book one by one, smoothed them out, and placed them back out of the way.
As she was returning them, she noticed a small, crumpled thin notebook wedged horizontally behind the shelf.
Lucita thought nothing of it, probably something a librarian had misplaced during sorting. She took hold of the corner and slid it out.
When she looked at it, she realized it was not a printed book at all, but what appeared to be someone's personal notes.
She paused, intrigued, and opened it.
The notebook did not seem to have always been this thin. The first half of the pages had clearly been torn out, leaving ragged edges behind.
The first exposed page was a diary entry.
“13 October, 572 Overcast
Tickets went on sale today for Franka’s touring concerts in the nearby cities. Allison and the others were excited about going to queue together, but I couldn’t bring myself to share their enthusiasm.
Franka has already been banned from performing in Viktori, and has been forced to tour the surrounding cities instead.
I have to say, this is not a good sign.
They banned her performances in Viktori for no real reason. Do those people intend to stop there?
I don’t think so.
They’re afraid of Franka’s singing!
How can my friends be so optimistic? I can’t shake the feeling that something is going to happen…”
Franka was a familiar name. Lucita’s interest sharpened.
Was this not the musician who had composed The Overwintering Bird, mentioned by Lesley the apprentice who had come to meet her?
She was about to turn to the second page when the heavy door at the top of the floor facing this shelf let out a creak and swung open.
Lucita startled and looked up.
Motes of disturbed dust drifted in the shaft of sunlight spilling in. Lesley, who had worn that gentle smile all this time, stood quietly in the doorway, backlit, her expression unreadable.
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