"Observer's… Mark?"

[Yes.]

"Bland name for potent magic. Safe bet the runes are a tangled nightmare."

[Complexity is the tax on power, Jade. Standard for high-tier spells.]

"Says the dragon who hoarded knowledge and never taught me. Out here, finding any spell scroll feels like digging graves for pennies. Between lectures and bubbling flasks, spellcraft felt… quaint, almost a distraction. Collected a few neat spells, sure. But why weave spells and sweat when I can simply shred things before they blink?"

[Perhaps if your enthusiasm matched your ego, but as you noted… it would have been a distraction.]

"HEY! Weaponizing my own logic against me. That's a low blow, LOTTE! Confirmed you're a scaled sadist."

[Guilty as charged. Yet here you are, clutching an ancient grimoire you earned yourself. Focus.]

I just huffed and let the argument go, flicking back into my air sense. I'd edged a little closer to the warehouse just to check what the others were up to while I was gone. If one of them decided to wander out looking for me, I wanted a heads-up so I could cut the lesson short and intercept them.

The shapes carried on the air were clearer now—almost like there was something more at play than just currents. Not just motion. There was a structure to it. If I dug deep enough into my memory, I was sure I could slap a proper term on it. Likely some sort of spatial phenomenon linked to air… but that was a rabbit hole for another day.

Right now, my focus was on the spell Lotte just dumped on me.

Observer's Mark.

First one that clicked open after unlocking Xaleth's dusty grimoire.

Like all quantum-based nonsense, the spell was a headache wrapped in a question mark. Left me wondering how the hell it even functioned.

It let me tag a target and get an almost godlike overview of them—granted the spell lands, and their WILL stat doesn't laugh in my face.

From what Lotte explained, once someone was marked, I could observe them no matter where they were. And if my INT stat outclassed their WILL by a good margin, I'd even get predictive insights—basically playing 5D chess where I knew their next five moves before they even twitched.

Now that was a tactical nuke waiting to be unpacked. Definitely needed to confirm a few things.

"So, say I tag an enforcer with it. At the most basic level, I'd get a bead on which route he's likely to take during patrol, right?"

[That's the simplest application, yes. But remember—it's quantum mana. Everything's based on probabilities. Even him walking a path is just a possible outcome. Maybe he sees a scuffle. Maybe he's dragged into one. Maybe there's a 10% chance he dies, 20% he kills someone, 30% a street rat lifts his wallet. You don't get certainties—you get a spread of potential futures.]

I nodded. "So it's raw potential. I spin the dice… then cheat by reading the table."

[Exactly.]

"But those possibilities are already a weapon in themselves. If I see there's a chance he witnesses a brawl, odds are, something is going down on the route he'd take, yeah? Isn't that basically a kind of future sight? Not quite divination—but pretty damn close."

[Divination only whispers. This knows. It's more… surgical.]

I nodded. "Alright, scorch my retinas! Hit me with the runes!" I said, a little too excited.

Honestly, even if the scary future-prediction bit wasn't part of it, the fact that I could just tag someone and know exactly where they were at all times? That alone was horrifying. Well, for them. Not me. Anyone unlucky enough to get marked by this would have zero chance of slipping away.

The screen blinked. Runes flared into existence. One. Three. Five. Ten. Twenty. Fifty—HOLY SMOKING EMBERS, LOTTE, STOP!? This neural pyre would fry my cortex!

I could practically hear her laughing through the text feed.

[I warned you. You're not working with mortal-friendly material here. This isn't a scribble you slap together with a cheap wand and a chant. This is a dragon's spellbook. Did you really think just because your INT stat is high, it'd be a walk in the clouds? Foolish little hatchling. Now, get to it.]

I just sat there, wide-eyed, staring at what had to be seventy-plus runes swimming on the screen like they were daring me to make sense of them.

Each one needed to be studied, understood, mentally wrangled, then woven into the casting structure—correctly—and only then could I assign the exact amount of mana to each segment to make it all tick.

High INT or not, that sounded like pure magical migraine fuel. Smashing things with claws and explosions was just… simpler.

Honestly, old me would've lost her mind in glee over something this complex. And deep down, I still loved it. But lately, it all felt inefficient for a real fight. Too slow. Too clunky. I'd been prioritizing what kills fastest, what disables quickest.

[You'll only improve by working with it. You still have an unfair advantage, little hatchling—mana adores you. You won't know what you're capable of until you try.]

I nodded. Why whine? So it wasn't instant murder. Useless? Hardly. Recent chaos had warped me—judging magic purely by its corpse-per-minute rate. Efficiency over elegance. Speed over soul.

But that wasn't how it started. That wasn't what drew me to it in the first place.

I'd… sold my soul for slaughter-efficiency. Strayed from my first love: the art of the spell. The weave. The craft. Sure, it took effort, but the more I leaned into it, the more the system rewarded me. I would improve. Skills would sharpen. Organs would mutate for efficiency. That was the truth, right?

The System rewarded passion. Offered paths to master it.

So, I sat down, took a breath, and dropped into a meditative stance. Air sense still humming at the edges of my perception, I turned my focus to the runes. One by one.

Most of them were unfamiliar—symbols that represented abstract ideas like Quantum Coordinate, Entangled Infinity, and other headache-inducing concepts I'd only barely heard of. Luckily, Lotte was there walking me through them, breaking down each term in that matter-of-fact tone she always used when things got impossibly advanced.

And so, the real work began.

As I worked through the spell, part of my mind drifted—running calculations, weighing possibilities. The potential advantages of this thing were insane.

First of all: barriers? Physical, magical, mental? Irrelevant. From what Lotte said, the spell didn't tag someone's body or aura—it marked their presence in the world itself. That kind of targeting didn't care about walls or wards or anti-divination nonsense. If they existed, they could be marked.

Then there was the bit about supplemental spells—less complex support spells designed to enhance or piggyback off the main one. Sounded incredibly useful. And apparently, the second spell I unlocked from Xaleth's spellbook was one of those.

But of course, Lotte was being Lotte and refused to tell me what it was until I mastered Observer's Mark and could cast it in under ten seconds.

UNFAIR.

I earned that second spell! It was mine! She had to tell me! …but no. Classic Lotte—if she was gatekeeping, there was probably a reason. Still sucked, though.

So I refocused. Needed to get good with this spell first.

In a few minutes, I'd finished breaking down the rune structure. Had at least a basic grasp of each glyph—just enough to recognize, shape, and assign intent to them. Not perfect understanding, but enough to move forward.

Next step: casting sequence.

I began lining them up in a linear formation, locking them into spell brackets. First rune was Oblivion. Yeah, maybe that was paranoid (try prudent?)—but excuse me for being a cautious dragon. This was a seventy-rune spell. If it went sideways, it wasn't going to be quiet.

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[Initiate now, in the exact order.]

I nodded, my gaze snapping to a nearby tree. Perched there: a squirrel. Mostly. Vibrant flowers bloomed from its empty eye socket. Right. Not your garden-variety rodent then.

I pinged Lotte mentally. Target acquired. Floral edition.

[Realms within Parda fracture uniquely, hatchling. If instability plagues this zone—as you've witnessed—its fabric is likely… frayed. Perhaps torn. That creature is a leak. Another reality seeping through, warping the local wildlife. Still, fundamentally, it is a living entity. Marking it won't unravel spacetime. Probably. And if it does… well, improvisation builds character, no?]

She was probably grinning right now. With my luck, sure, even a squirrel might start a chain reaction of magical disasters. But whatever—I didn't see anything else worth testing this on. So the squirrel got promoted to test subject.

I lifted my hand and began weaving.

Violet mana coiled around my fingers, threads of it lashing out eagerly like it had just been waiting for a command. I moved slow at first—no reason to rush. The mana followed my will effortlessly, excited, obedient. My fingers flicked and darted through the air, tracing rune after rune. Soon they blurred with speed, but even then, it took me over three minutes to get through all seventy, placed and structured just right.

By the time I finished, the entire matrix was spinning around me—perfectly arranged, perfectly stable.

Final step: Mana infusion.

I had a decent idea of the flow ratios from what I'd read. The instructions in Xaleth's spellbook were surprisingly precise—thorough even—but knowing Lotte, she definitely held back some parts just to make my life harder. Wouldn't be her style if she didn't.

Even so, just one point of mana could power three runes. That was way more efficient than I expected. By the time I finished feeding the matrix, around 25 mana had been used up—not bad for a seventy-rune monster of a spell. It wasn't the kind of spell you could overcharge like a raw attack, but I did start wondering what might happen if I did overcharge it anyway.

Lotte, naturally, chimed in right on cue. Whether she read my thoughts or just knew me too damn well (I was 80% sure it was the former, 20% left for her being Lotte the all-knowing smug lizard), she cut in:

[Overcharging can be tactical. Imagine a target shrugging off your Mark. Mana fuels all resistance. Flood the matrix and overwhelm them. Same principle as blasting a shield apart.]

"Ooh, nasty. I like it," I murmured. "Could even tag a Gold Core someday."

[Feasible. In theory.]

And that would be a serious edge—if I managed to pull it off without them noticing. Which, yeah, was going to be incredibly hard even without Lotte pointing it out. But she'd mentioned supplemental spells before. Maybe one of them could let me do it so cleanly, they wouldn't even feel the mark land.

Tempting thoughts, but those were future problems. I had a task right now.

For a brief moment, I just admired the violet matrix rotating around me, glowing softly in the air. It was beautiful—orderly, stable, like symbols carved onto the world itself. And weirdly enough, I didn't feel mentally drained. I should have—I was juggling seventy active rune structures in my head, all buzzing with meaning and weight—but my brain wasn't buckling at all.

The cognitive boost from my rising INT stat was definitely pulling its weight.

With a flick of focus, I activated the spell.

And the world… shifted.

Suddenly, everything felt both distant and unnervingly close. Colors washed out, leaving behind a palette of muted grays—and then every living thing around me lit up in my perception. It was like my mind stretched outward in a sphere. Around 30 meters out, I could feel every single lifeform.

But then I realized—everything around me was alive.

Not just Flower-Socket Squirrel. The trees. The grass. The very soil pulsed with targetable presence. Was this the Veilwoods' sickness? Or was the spell just… this indiscriminately hungry?

Curiosity overruled caution, so I switched targets. Instead of the squirrel, I focused on a nearby tree.

The spell matrix picked up speed, responding to my intent. I spoke the command in my head.

[Observer's Mark.]

Colors bled back into the world. And in my mind's eye, a dot appeared—bright, but not blinding. Just… there. It marked the general location of the tree. Subtle. Simple. But unmistakable.

Testing time.

I shut my eyes and leapt around, twisting and turning through the air. But every single time, I knew exactly where that tree was. Didn't need to see it—I could feel its presence. I could sense the critters crawling across its bark, the way it stood out from the rest of the forest. It was distinct. Clear.

Then came the second part of the spell: the probability peek.

I wondered what the spell would show for something like a tree. What sort of possibilities could even exist for something so… stationary?

Instinctively, I fed five mana points into the dot.

And the tree burst into flames.

I blinked. It was fine. Completely normal. No fire. Not even a spark.

"What the hell," I started to say—

And then the entire tree exploded.

***

"NOT FUCKING AGAIN," Sergiy muttered, eyes narrowing as he stared toward the distant blast.

His hand hovered over his sword, tension crawling through his spine. Another explosion—loud, bright, and unmistakably not normal. What the hell was even going on anymore?

They had just finished cleaning up the scene from last night's bloodbath—half-shredded, half-eaten corpses of beastkin scattered across the area. Probably a gang war. Idiots, fighting in the middle of all this. Did they want the higher-ups to lock down the lower districts?

Judging by the look on some of his peers' faces, maybe they did. Sadistic bastards. Always eager for an excuse to crack skulls.

For once, Sergiy found himself agreeing with old man Vorak. Grumpy as hell, but he had a good nose for reading the wind. Everything had played out exactly as the old man had predicted—called the Vor'akh attack a smokescreen, said something bigger was festering under the surface. Even claimed the upper brass of Iron Pact was acting off.

And damn if he wasn't right again.

He'd even pointed fingers at that white-haired Drakkari in the Alchemy Tower. Said she was somehow tied to the growing anomalies.

But she'd died. Or so they said. Died defending the city. Maybe she wasn't part of the rot after all.

Sergiy actually felt for her. Especially after how the higher-ups twisted it—painting her as some unhinged traitor who triggered the whole disaster. Now they were offering bounties just to find her remains. The harder they pushed that narrative, the more suspicious he got.

He wished Vorak were conscious right now. The man's insights were something Sergiy had come to value more than he liked to admit. But the old guy had pushed too hard saving people during the chaos and was now completely out cold.

Sergiy's gaze drifted back to the smoke curling from the explosion site.

Veilwoods.

A cold shiver ran up his spine.

Please not there. Please not fucking there. But the sour dread in his gut confirmed it. It was always Veilwoods.

He gritted his teeth, lifting his flying sword. It hovered at his side, humming faintly as it synced with his mana.

The Veilwoods never meant good news.

He was just a fresh damn graduate. This wasn't supposed to be his kind of problem yet. Where was the rest of his squad? Where were the senior Pact members?

No one else was nearby.

So, jaw clenched and breath steadying, Sergiy locked his eyes on the distant smoke trail and launched himself toward it.

Because someone had to.

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