The wind never stopped. It whispered across the white platform, soft but endless, humming faintly through the invisible barrier that separated them from the gray storm below. Time had passed since Instructor Ra'f vanished, leaving the students scattered across the wide expanse. They gathered in small groups — by race, by language, by familiarity — forming little worlds of their own.
Ares stood apart.
He crouched and touched the surface beneath his feet. To the eye, it looked like smooth stone, cold and perfectly carved. But through his sight, he saw something else — thousands of thin mana threads woven together in precise patterns, constantly degrading and reforming, breaking down and rebuilding as if alive. The whole platform was breathing.
"You really can create something like this with something so simple," he murmured to himself. "I can't imagine the level of mana required to hold this structure."
He looked up. The others had already begun working, talking, sharing spells. Groups of elves gathered near the edge, their bodies filled with the dreadful thing called modern mana. Dwarves hammered conjured blocks of stone, their laughter echoing through the air. The orcs and elementals formed their own circles farther away.
He decided to try the elves first.
They were elegant and quiet, weaving mana ribbons that shimmered like liquid glass. "Excuse me," Ares said, stepping closer. "About the weave Instructor Ra'f showed — what did you think of it?"
One elf glanced at him briefly. "It's foundation magic," he said with a polite smile. "A simple exercise."
"Simple?" Ares frowned. "It's decaying and rebuilding itself constantly. That doesn't look simple to me."
"Perhaps your eyes deceive you," the elf said softly, and turned back to his work. The others didn't even glance at Ares again. Their attention was absorbed by the threads in front of them, moving with quiet, practiced grace.
Ares lingered for a moment, then stepped back. They hadn't rejected him outright — they had simply looked past him. As though he wasn't worth paying attention to.He walked toward the dwarves next.
They were louder — hammering, shaping, laughing. The sound was comforting, grounded. Ares stopped nearby, watching them fit conjured stone together into what looked like a slide curving down toward the pillar's edge.
"This looks promising," he said, smiling. "Are you planning to slide down the pillar? Wouldn't the wind tear it apart?"
A stocky dwarf woman didn't look up at first. "Outer curve'll take care of that," she said, tapping the stone. "Wind'll slip right off—" She stopped when she finally saw him, blinking in surprise. "Oh. Didn't see you there."
"I was wondering if I could help," Ares said.
Her brow furrowed. "Not a good idea. You'll just get in the way. Dwarves know dwarven work."
The others chuckled, not unkindly, but the meaning was clear. Ares gave a small nod and backed away. The hammers resumed their rhythm, and he left them to it.
He wandered for a long while. The platform stretched vast and silent, with clusters of people scattered like stars — orcs, elves, djinns, beings of light. Every group moved with its own rhythm, speaking a language of mana and familiarity he didn't know but could almost understand.
His footsteps echoed softly. The world felt too large, too far away. Maybe the academy wanted it that way — to strip away comfort before the trials began. The wind beyond the barrier howled faintly, like laughter.
He sat near the edge and took out a ration block. It tasted like dust, but he chewed anyway. His mind drifted until a faint sound broke his focus — someone else eating.
He turned his head. Another human sat beside him, unbothered, casually tearing into a ration pack of his own.
Ares blinked. "You human?" he asked before he could stop himself.
The man raised an eyebrow. "As opposed to what?"
Ares laughed awkwardly and pointed to the other students around him. "Take your pick."
"Fair enough, human." The stranger smirked. "Kael Durnin," he said. "Lyra-7 System. Minor duchy under the Arcane Federation."
Ares tilted his head. "System? You mean… another galaxy?"
Kael nodded easily. "You're surprised by something like this?"
Ares didn't know what else to say.
"Family runs a merchant house. Magic traders, not mages. I'm the first one to have the honor of joining the Celestial Arcanum," Kael said, launching into the biography of his family's long list of honors and traditions. "We once sold a thousand-year-old elder beast to one of the Academy's trainers…"
What an elder beast was, or what a trainer meant, Kael didn't bother to explain — and Ares didn't want to break his momentum. By the time Kael finished speaking, Ares knew everything from the day he was born to the mole on his ass. Few things were left to imagination.
Ares stared at him for a long moment. He'd only ever known humans from Earth. The thought that others existed out there — scattered among stars — made something twist quietly inside him. "Guess I'll have to stop being surprised by things like this," he murmured, answering a question even Kael had already forgotten.
Kael's eyes glinted with curiosity. "And you? Where are you from?"
"Earth," Ares said.
Kael chuckled. "Never heard of it."
"No one here has," Ares replied softly. "We don't have magic."
"Must've been tough." Kael looked horrified.
Ares smiled faintly. "Hard to call it tough when you've never known better."
Kael laughed — not mocking, just amused. The silence that followed was easy.
After a while, Kael drew faint glowing lines on the stone with his finger. "Instructor said efficiency. But what's efficient about weaving millions of these threads?"
Ares leaned closer, watching. The flow was elegant but full of leaks — every pulse wasted mana into the air. "He did say we can use any form of magic," Ares offered.
Kael smirked. "Did you see that fool who tried opening a portal earlier? Nearly cooked himself. There's probably a mana blocker in here — selective one. Never seen something that filters spells, though."
Ares frowned slightly. "A mana blocker?" The idea was new to him, and for a moment, he just listened, quietly filing the words away.
Curiosity pulled him back to the weave. He shaped a small conduit, careful and slow. Mana trickled in, connecting motes of light. A thin brown line appeared in the air — a solid thread of stone suspended before him. He held his breath, waiting for pain. Usually, the conduit tore through his soul like fire, but this time, nothing.
He exhaled and smiled. Then he turned — and froze.
Kael was already raving about his genius plan of creating handholds instead of stairs, and in his experiments, blew apart the haphazard handhold he had just created.
Surprised by the sudden explosion, Ares's conjured conduit wavered and the stone line fell to the ground with a faint crack. The conduit remained intact, glowing softly.
He stared at it, confused. Why did it fail? Every spell had always ripped the conduit apart — but this time, it just phased out.
Kael didn't seem to notice. He was already forming a new spell. "See you at the bottom," he called, grinning. "If this doesn't kill me first."
Ares watched him step into the wind. Through his sight, Kael's spell glowed bright — beautiful but leaking energy with every second. The storm clawed at the shield, shredding it, tearing the edges faster than Kael could repair them. Then he was gone.
Five minutes later, Kael teleported back into the middle of the platform, drenched, shaking, eyes wide with shock. His clothes were in tatters. He collapsed beside the food crate, gasping. "The wind," he muttered. "It's so much worse."
Ares didn't reply. He dragged the unconscious Kael to a bed. He was unusually light. Then he began to practice again.
Hours passed. The platform dimmed as the barrier flickered under the endless sky. Ares tried to recreate the moment his stone had passed through the conduit — tried to understand the connection that kept breaking. Every attempt failed differently. Sometimes the weave collapsed. Sometimes the connection faded. The conduit held, but it held no conjured stone line.
When his will was stretched thin, he stopped. He closed his eyes and let his sight open fully. The world bloomed in color.
The elves' mana was silver, flowing like water — repulsive as any modern magic he had seen. They were scaling down the pillar using ropes and creating a wind shield around their bodies. Ares could tell at one glance this approach would not hold.
The dwarves' mana was purple, burning brightly like a forge. Instead of creating weaves, they were making artifacts that would cast spells when injected with mana. Ares was really interested to see how that mechanism worked, but he wasn't allowed near them.
The orcs were stranger — their bodies marked with faint green runes that shimmered under the skin, mana flowing through their veins like living circuits. Their spells didn't leak; they transformed energy directly, weaving it into strength. They didn't cast any spells — their bodies themselves were the spell. They moved down, braving the sharp cold winds with care and efficiency.
The djinns burned like raw light — pure elemental souls without flesh. The winds held little sway over them, so they simply flew down.
But among them all, Ares saw something else.Shadows.
Faint horned shapes curled deep within some cores — dark outlines clinging like parasites. Demonic imprints. One elf, one djinn, and a handful of others carried them. The dwarves were clean. The orcs shone pure, their runes bound directly to nature's mana.
Ares watched quietly. Beauty and corruption mixed together like oil and water.
He looked over at Kael, asleep near the food crates, faint mana light flickering around him as he dreamed.
The wind outside the barrier howled again — a hollow, distant sound. Ares turned his eyes to the storm below, the forest that waited beneath it all, and wondered if, in time, he would reach it.