Sunday, cloudless.
7:50 AM.
Sunlight filtered through the gaps in the curtains, drawing a thin golden line across the floor.
It fell right next to my pillow.
I opened my eyes in a daze, staring at the ceiling, and fell into deep philosophical contemplation—should I get out of bed right now or not?
Yesterday, I had spent the entire day wandering around the Royal Capital. As everyone had witnessed, I first accompanied Misha as we walked the most bustling street from end to end, then had an abortive confrontation with Alden in the cafe, and finally ran into Klaus at the magic materials shop.
Combined with the series of events in the afternoon, although I had resolved the matters weighing on my mind, it had indeed been exhausting for me.
By the time I returned to the dormitory last night, I didn't even want to move to wash up.
But compared to my sluggishness—well, probably because I had rarely left the estate over the past two years—Misha and Shirune were much more normal.
Misha had tossed and turned in bed for most of the night, constantly whispering to herself, “Lady Loris talked to me so much today,” and “That dress is really so beautiful.”
Although I know you're happy, hearing these heartfelt thoughts makes me really embarrassed too, you know?
“Cough, cough!”
“L-L-Lady Loris, you... you aren't asleep?”
“(Having been silent for a long while, I still couldn't handle the embarrassment and decided to pretend to be asleep) Zzz...”
Misha let out a soft sigh of relief.
The good news was that she left the room at seven this morning. The dormitory door gave a soft click as Misha tiptoed out, clutching her textbooks.
She went to the library to study. Since she hadn't touched her homework at all yesterday while accompanying me, her expression when she woke up this morning was clearly one of absolute determination. Before leaving, she had even left a note pressed on my desk:
“Lady Loris, I've gone to the library to study. If you need help with anything, you can come find me! —Misha”
Thanks for the offer, but there's no need.
At this moment, I set the note aside, picked up the milk and bread, took a few bites, and finished off my breakfast.
Then, I made the most important decision of the day.
Going. Back. To. Sleep.
It was a rare day off with no worries. At least for this brief moment, I didn't want to think about anything troublesome. Shirune wouldn't be coming this morning either.
When there were no classes at school, there was no need for her to attend to a lady like me, so she could finally do some of her own things. She mentioned wanting to check out the weapons shops in the Royal Capital and take the opportunity to tune her gear.
I had waved her off, telling her to go ahead. Since it was a day off with no classes, even if I lazed around in the dormitory without moving, no one would notice.
And since Misha wouldn't be back until evening, the dormitory belonged entirely to me during this time.
Scattered footsteps and voices drifted from the corridor outside. Some girls were giggling, likely the group that had agreed to go to the cafeteria for breakfast together;
A few thuds echoed from upstairs, as if someone was moving things early in the morning, but it soon quieted down. The entire building felt as if someone had pressed the mute button.
The sunlight crept another half-inch across the floor.
I pulled the blanket up to my chin, stared at the ceiling, closed my eyes, and cleared my mind.
—And then, thoughts of how to find a way to survive between Liliana's protagonist aura and this body's villainous fate in the future popped right into my head.
Dammit. Well, obviously, my path was fraught with difficulties.
Even a leisurely weekend came with its own worries.
Still, yesterday's matters had been properly settled. It should be impossible for Alden to get back on his normal route. Though for some reason, there had been no warning or anything from Providence this time. Perhaps it was because I hadn't affected his attitude toward himself? In any case, it was still quite confusing and required further study.
As for things further in the distance...
That was a problem for next week's me to worry about.
I would leave future matters to my future self.
Right now, I just wanted to be a slacker.
I rolled over once, then again. The pillow was comfortably cool, and the sunlight fell warmly across the blanket, feeling like someone was slowly painting my face with a small brush.
The maple trees outside the window rustled, and the air carried a faint, sweet scent of the leftover strawberries from yesterday.
Slacker. I was a slacker. A slacker didn't need to move, a slacker didn't need to think, a slacker just needed to lie down quietly.
And then, I fell asleep again.
When I opened my eyes once more, the sunlight had crawled from the pillow to the foot of the bed.
The dormitory building had clearly become livelier. The pitter-patter of slippers could be heard in the corridor, the laughter and chatter of girls drifted from the room next door, and someone downstairs was probably practicing magic, as the faint chanting of incantations could be heard, haltingly, as if they were stuck.
I stretched, pulling my arms out from under the blanket.
The sunlight fell on the back of my hand, warm and cozy. The dark blue and silver bell bracelet woven around my wrist swayed slightly, letting out a tiny, crisp chime.
I stared at the bracelet, zoning out for a moment.
Loris, oh Loris, how could you be so lazy?
Don't you want to see this continent? Don't you want to meet elves, silver dragon girls, and beastkin catgirls?
I patted my cheeks.
“Get out of bed!” I announced with grand enthusiasm at two in the afternoon.
Thank goodness I was alone. If anyone else found out that the famous villainous young lady was actually like this, my life would probably be over.
Maybe some netizen with an IP in Japan would comment, “My dear villainous lady, you wouldn't want anyone else to find out about your two-faced nature, would you?” and let out a sinister “hehehe.”
Come to think of it, it had already been over a week since school started.
Since I had some rare free time, I might as well organize the magic theory I had learned this week.
It wasn't that I was particularly diligent—it was just that keeping track of these things was like looking at a skill panel in a video game. Only by organizing my talent attributes and skill tree clearly could I feel secure.
After all, the best secret to surviving past eighteen was to make myself strong enough.
I pulled out my recent class notes.
Then, I flipped to the page with the bookmark.
The magic settings of this world were actually quite systematic, it was just that the textbooks wrote them in such an obscure way.
Take “mana capacity,” for instance.
Simply put, it was just how much mana you could store in your body.
Mana capacity used “Standard Magic Units (SMU)” as the basic unit of measurement. One SMU was defined as the amount of mana required to cast a standard basic Mana Bullet once.
For me, it was hard to understand what that actually meant, but if I had to describe it myself, my current mana capacity, if compared to water, would probably be about the size of a lake.
I didn't know if that was considered a lot.
As for the textbook's definition of Level Ten, there was only a floor, no ceiling.
It was described like this:
Level Ten refers to a mana reserve exceeding 30,000 SMU. A King-class spell, which requires an ordinary mage to exhaust all their mana just to cast once, can be cast over a dozen times in a row. As for entry-level spells like the basic Mana Bullet, they can be fired almost infinitely—the rate of consumption wouldn't even catch up to the natural recovery rate.
This was the theoretical limit of a human mage in terms of pure mana reserves.
...
It seemed I was incredibly amazing.
I stroked my chin thoughtfully and continued flipping through last week's notebook. These were exam points.
Since it was the first week of school, besides basic practice, it was mostly basic theory. For example, it explained that the essence of mana was a mixture of mental strength and life force.
The teacher said that this discovery of the essence of mana overthrew traditional magic theories such as “mana comes from bloodline” and “mana is a gift from the gods,” and also provided a scientific basis for mana training methods.
This sounded like something that definitely needed to be underlined.
It seemed this world used to have a faction that derived truth from practice.
Then, the textbook also addressed natural growth and plasticity.
A human mage's mana capacity has room for natural growth before the age of twelve, but the increase after reaching adulthood is often limited (usually only by 0.1 to 0.9 levels).
After the age of twelve, the plasticity of the magic circuits basically disappears with the onset of puberty, and the mana capacity tends to become fixed—I had to admit, this was the most scientific take on puberty.
Just like how secondary development in middle schoolers brings about secondary sexual characteristics.
Most likely, this was also the source of the traditional belief that mana capacity was innate and unchangeable.
However, I thought to myself—though this wasn't written in the book, it was my own experience—if one completely exhausted their mana pool to the point of dryness every day before the age of twelve and let it recover naturally, the capacity of the mana pool would gradually expand like muscle fibers through a cycle of “tearing and repairing.” Perhaps it could grow that way.
As for whether it could still grow now, I hadn't tested it, because at my current level, it was already very difficult to increase my mana reserves by draining my mana capacity.
...
Half an hour later.
I put down my pen and stretched.
The ink on the notebook hadn't dried completely yet, casting a damp reflection under the sunlight.
After organizing these theoretical concepts, I felt a bit more confident about my own strength. Now, it was time to practice. I hadn't done much practical combat practice in a while.
Since the academy's weekly test, I hadn't practiced the spells from the ancient texts for a whole week.
What was taught in class was entirely from the modern magic system: basic Mana Bullets, standard incantation chanting, and the stability principles of magic circuits.
These things were important, of course, but for me, my true trump cards were never in the textbooks.
It was time for Simplified Chinese to show its power.
I dragged the small wooden box out from under the bed.
Inside, a dozen or so hand-copied ancient texts lay quietly. The covers were made of brown leather that I had carefully wrapped, which gave them a very refined feel.
I had learned these spells before entering the academy.
The ancient texts from the Aldheim family's old library, combined with two years of hellish training, had allowed me to master several ancient spells before even stepping through the academy gates.
Of course, these things could not be exposed—a twelve-year-old noble daughter mastering ancient magic systems that had been lost for hundreds of years before even enrolling. If word of this got out, it would probably be ten times more shocking than having a Level Ten mana capacity.
So during this first week of school, I behaved obediently in class, learning basic Mana Bullets, using standard incantations, and pretending to be a freshman who was experiencing practical spellcasting for the first time, just like everyone else.
But now, I was the only one in the dormitory.
The door was locked, the curtains were drawn, and only the maple branches outside the window swayed gently in the wind.
I sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed like a martial arts grandmaster practicing their skills, spreading the hand-copied ancient texts around me.
Sunlight filtered through the gaps in the curtains, drawing golden lines across the pages.
“Alright.” I stretched my fingers, palms up, and spread my fingers slightly. “Let's start with the one I'm most familiar with.”
First, Growth Acceleration.
I closed my eyes and constructed the magic circle in my mind, a process I had repeated thousands of times over the past two years.
Ancient magic basically required no chanting or wands; the only guidance was imagination—imagining mana as water and seeds as land waiting to be irrigated.
A faint, emerald-green light lit up in my palm.
On the nightstand stood a small pot of mint that Misha had bought last week. I casually plucked a leaf from the mint stem, placed it in my palm, and slowly wrapped the emerald-green light around it.
The mint leaf trembled slightly in my palm.
Then, it began to grow.
The veins extended from the center to the edges, the emerald-green color deepening and intensifying. New sprouts emerged from the base of the leaf, curling and then unfolding. In just a few seconds, a tiny mint leaf turned into three or four, and fine, white roots sprouted from the end of the stem, wrapping around my fingers.
Seeing this, I quickly buried them in the soil of the mint pot and patted it down gently, letting out a sigh of relief.
I've gotten stronger again.
I might really be some kind of magic monster.
I thought to myself, lightly wiping the sweat from my forehead.
The second one was the water-attribute Clear Spring Spell. Considering it wasn't convenient to cast in the dormitory, I decided against it. It was meant to condense moisture from the air to form drinkable pure water.
Of course, shooting it out like Squirtle's Water Gun would be a different story.
As for the remaining wind and water attributes, as well as the defensive Earth Wall Spell, they were even harder to cast here, so I decided to leave them be.
Regarding the Mana Restraint and Mana Perception I had learned before, I needed to correct my understanding of the latter.
It turned out that Mana Perception wasn't about sensing the amount of mana, but rather sensing the level or talent of someone else's magic circuit... as well as detecting whether anyone was casting magic nearby. It seemed I had been a bit imprecise back then.
With that, the review was over.
I lay back on the bed and buried my face in the pillow.
The pillowcase had been washed a few days ago, still carrying a faint, clean scent of soap.
If someone were to pass by the window right now, they would probably see the famously villainous young lady of the Aldheim family sprawled on the bed in a posture so terrible that anyone who saw it would lecture her for three hours.
But today was Sunday, the universe's officially decreed day of rest. God said to rest on the seventh day, and I found this divine decree highly reasonable.
“Ah—so comfortable.”
I hugged the pillow in my arms and squinted my eyes. The sunlight turned my eyelids into a warm, orange-red hue.
The maple trees outside the window rustled, and the distant clock tower slowly chimed a few times. The tolling of the bell was long and drawn out, like waves washing over a beach, echoing between the stone walls of the dormitory building.
But after slacking off for just a little while longer, that anxiety about the future crept up again, like a cat crouching in the corner.
I would be joining the student council next week.
One after another, the male leads would soon arrive on the battlefield. Speaking of which, I hadn't really run into the Crown Prince this week, which had made my life a lot smoother, but that was about to end. Sighed, I really didn't want to go to school.
The quiet, black-haired swordsman; the handsome, dashing, and considerate Crown Prince; the polite and sensible glasses-wearing gentleman, and so on and so forth.
Oh, oh, you're about to be surrounded, Liliana.
I lifted my head from the pillow, rolled over, rested my arm across my forehead, and slowly closed my eyes. I had rested very well in this quiet dormitory today, so I wouldn't have to force myself to cheer up tomorrow.
I'll just play my role as the villainous young lady well.
Rate on N.U.
