The air in Professor Flint's laboratory was thick with the scent of ozone and singed aura.

Dust motes danced in the lone shaft of moonlight slicing through the high, arched window, illuminating swirling motes of residual aura—a dull, ghostly blue against the perpetual gloom.

Eija, a third-year student at the Veridian Academy, adjusted her brass-rimmed spectacles, pushing them higher on the bridge of her nose.

The frames felt cold against her skin. She clutched a sheaf of parchment, its edges slightly frayed from repeated handling, and swallowed hard before stepping fully into the oppressive silence.

Professor Flint didn't look up from the massive obsidian table where he was dissecting a crystalline sphere that pulsed with faint, erratic light.

His silhouette was bulky, framed by the haphazard stacks of books and arcane equipment that cluttered every surface.

His movements were precise, almost predatory, his thick, scarred fingers working with unnerving speed.

"Professor," Eija murmured, her voice barely a breath.

Flint paused, the scalpel held mid-air. He looked up, his face a landscape of deep-set lines and a perpetual, weary scowl.

His eyes, the color of tarnished bronze, narrowed behind the flickering candlelight.

"Eija," he grunted, setting the tool down with a sharp clink.

"You're late."

"My apologies, Professor. I was running a final cross-reference on the Nexus Strain data—specifically, the entropic decay pattern you highlighted," Elara replied, stepping closer to the table's edge, careful to avoid kicking a coil of glowing wire.

She placed the parchment down, smoothing it with trembling fingers. "I believe I've found the key to stabilizing the feedback loop, but it contradicts the standard Veridian Equilibrium Model of Aura Retrenchment."

Flint leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table.

The deep shadows under his eyes seemed to deepen. "Standard models are for first-years, Vayne. Speak plainly. What have your ridiculous calculations coughed up now?"

"It's not about retrenchment—holding the aura back. It's about Redirection through controlled dissipation," Elara insisted, tapping a complex glyph on the page.

"If the individual channels a sufficient burst of wild-aura outward, it creates a momentary void in their personal aura-field. That void then acts like a magnetic inverse, pulling the unstable Nexus Strain not into the physical body, but into a transient anchor created by the initial expulsion."

She pushed the parchment toward him, pointing to a diagram illustrating swirling lines of energy. "The energy isn't balanced or retained—it's briefly tricked into flowing around the subject, like water around a stone, before being allowed to dissipate harmlessly into the environment. It removes the Nexus Strain without the fatal risk of internalizing it."

Professor Flint picked up the parchment. His eyes, though still sharp, scanned the equations with an intensity that made the air crackle.

A slow, almost painful smile stretched his lips—a rare and unsettling sight.

"Controlled dissipation," he echoed, his voice low, a sound like grinding stone. "You're suggesting that the most volatile aura strain we've ever encountered can be handled not with strength, but with a strategic surrender." He tapped the diagram with a nail.

"It's elegant… and utterly insane."

He looked up at her, a spark of something akin to grudging respect in his bronze gaze. "If this is true, Eija, it doesn't just rewrite our understanding of Aura Retrenchment. It changes how we fight entirely. The Council will call it heresy."

"It's physics, Professor," Elara countered, straightening her spine, a flicker of fierce determination behind her specs. "Dangerous physics, perhaps, but still true."

Flint gave a short, humorless chuckle. "Dangerous physics is the only kind worth studying, Eija. Now, tell me how you intend to create that transient anchor without obliterating the wielder's nervous system. Start with the energy requirements for the initial wild-aura expulsion…"

Before Elara could elaborate on the sheer energy demands of creating a transient anchor, a sharp rap echoed from the lab's heavy oak door.

"Enter," Professor Flint commanded, his voice impatient.

A nervous-looking studen, a clean-cut second-year poked his head inside.

"P-Professor Flint, Headmaster requests your immediate presence in his office."

Flint let out a sharp sigh, running a hand over his tired face.

"Alright. Thank you for informing me." He gave a dry smile, as the student nodded and left.

He gathered his things with brusque efficiency, sliding Elara's complex schematic into a leather satchel.

"Eija, take your research and go. We will revisit this Dissipation Theory tomorrow morning, precisely at the seventh bell. Do not, under any circumstances, speak of this to anyone. Not a soul. Is that clear?"

"Yes, Professor," Elara confirmed, already feeling the disappointment of their interrupted session.

"Good." Flint didn't wait. He moved out immediately, the door slamming shut behind them with a heavy, final thud.

Elara sighed and began collecting her tools—a delicate brass compass and a small slate tablet—from the corner of the obsidian table. The lab was silent again, oppressively so.

Just as she reached for her satchel, a flicker of light caught her attention, pulling her gaze toward the darkest rear wall of the lab.

There, usually hidden behind a tower of obsolete alchemical equipment, was a small, unmarked wooden door. It was not quite closed.

A gap, no wider than her thumb, revealed an insistent, throbbing crimson glow spilling into the gloomy lab.

"That door is never open." Eija thought, a knot tightening in her stomach. Flint was fanatical about locking every storage unit and cupboard before leaving.

Curiosity, a powerful and often dangerous impulse, completely eclipsed her caution.

Adjusting her spectacles, Elara crept toward the door. The air here felt different—thicker, almost metallic, buzzing with an unknown potential.

She gripped the cold, iron handle and pulled the door open the rest of the way.

What she saw stopped her heart.

The small, windowless room was not a storage closet, but a ritual chamber.

In the center of the dust-covered floor lay a magnificent, terrifying sight: a massive, perfectly formed runic circle.

The circle was inscribed in a deep, viscous scarlet pigment—not chalk, but something that looked unsettlingly like dried blood.

It was a complex, interlocking pattern that culminated in a powerful, seven-pointed star.

At the sharp tip of each point, flickering steadily, stood a tall, black candle, their wax pooled in oily, profane rings.

The intensity of the crimson light and the oppressive weight of the air left no room for doubt.

But the thing that made her almost yell out in shock, was the naked dead body of a young girl.

Her eyes opened wide, crimson patterns all over her body, her intestines pulled out of the stomach and laid bare.

This was the very third girl, that went missing a few days back.

This was no benign energy experiment. The runes were ancient, powerful, and utterly forbidden by the Academy Council.

This was dark magic.

Professor Flint, the stalwart researcher of the Veridian Academy, was engaged in something far beyond simple Aura Manipulation.

He was drawing power from the very sources he claimed to fight.

Eija backed away silently, her breath catching in her throat, her mind racing.

Eija, frozen by the sight of the scarlet ritual chamber, had only taken one shaky step back when she heard it: the slow, deliberate click of the lab door being secured.

Her blood ran cold. She spun around, her spectacles slipping slightly down her nose.

Professor Flint stood there, leaning against the now-locked door, not with the weary exhaustion of a scholar summoned by the Headmaster, but with an appalling calm.

He hadn't left; he had only waited for her to yield to her curiosity.

He chuckled, a dry, grating sound that seemed to scrape against the silence.

He shook his head slowly, a deep, weary disappointment settling on his features.

"Ah, Eija. Such sharp eyes," he murmured, stepping away from the door.

Elara stumbled backward, her hand flying to her mouth. She backed right up against the obsidian table, rattling a beaker of glowing fluid.

"P-Professor," she stammered, the word catching in her throat, "The... the runes. That's Forbidden Rites! Dark magic… you're using it!"

"Of course, I'm using it," Flint replied, his voice losing its human warmth, growing deeper and colder, like wind howling through a tomb.

"How else do you think I can fuel a new field of Aura Manipulation? The Academy's paltry techniques are dust, Eija. To master the dark, you must dine with it."

His form began to ripple, the very air around him distorting as the crimson glow from the hidden room intensified, bathing them both in an infernal light.

"You should have gone home, child," Flint whispered, and the sound was no longer quite human.

His eyes snapped shut, then opened, glowing a fierce, predatory crimson.

His pupils were no longer round but stretched into vertical, malevolent slits that pulsed like twin arterial wounds.

The veins on his temples bulged black, and the thick scars on his hands darkened and spread like rising blight.

Eija screamed, a thin, useless sound that was instantly swallowed by the lab's high ceiling.

She scrambled for a heavy tome to defend herself, but it was too late.

The corners of Professor Flint's mouth—his human mouth—began to stretch, the skin tearing with a wet, sickening sound.

The splitting didn't stop at his cheeks. It widened, distorting his jaw into a gaping, impossible maw that unhinged and dropped toward the floor.

Inside the cavernous throat, bathed in the scarlet light, was not flesh and tongue, but an endless, swirling vortex of darkness studded with infinite rows of needle-sharp, obsidian teeth.

The creature that had worn Professor Flint's face lunged.

A deafening roar erupted, the sound simultaneously sharp enough to shatter glass and deep enough to vibrate through Eija's very bones.

Elara, the young scholar with the sharp mind and brass-rimmed spectacles, barely had time for a final, horrified realization, that the monster she had sought to help was feeding on the very darkness she had hoped to counter, before the humongous maw closed around her.

There was a wet snap, a momentary burst of energy that overloaded the laboratory's residual aura field, and then… nothing.

The crimson glow remained, casting long, hungry shadows.

The creature that had been Professor Flint swallowed once, the sound a sickening crunch of bone and steel, and the oppressive silence of the Aura Manipulation Lab returned, leaving no trace of the third-year student, save for a single, discarded brass-rimmed spectacle lens glinting under the dark table.

"Guess I'll have to make haste, or else lord Rahukin's patience will grow thin. "

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