Other students noticed the funny way Theon carried himself as he rushed out of Amethyst court's dining hall. The rush was not the hurried stride of someone chasing a class but the brittle, off-balance gait of someone who had just realized the air itself might be trying to kill him. Then someone noticed the chef's smug smile. The smile was too satisfied to be innocent, too deliberate to be ignored. Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “She couldn't have poisoned him now, could she?” “Poison?” Her neighbor inhaled sharply, eyes as round as saucers, light flickered in her pupils, and her face turned pale, like a person suddenly remembering how easy it was to die at a table. She quickly sniffed her own bowl, trying to find any trace of something suspicious, because once the word was spoken, every bowl turned suspect. “Stop looking. She wouldn't harm us. Lots of people hate Theon. She would like to hurt him, not us,” The first girl continued to eat casually, as if she'd not scattered the

The sound terrified him. Why was his core making such a sound? It couldn't be what he thought... right?He temporarily discarded his thought of rushing to the toilet bowl and instead hurriedly sat down on the cold bathroom floor, his heart pounding a mile a minute as unease crawled beneath his skin. The rhythmic thudding inside his chest grew louder with every passing second, each beat feeding the dreadful possibility he desperately wished wasn't true.Closing his eyes, he inhaled slowly through his nose, forcing the ragged rhythm of his breathing into something steadier before directing his gaze inward. His consciousness soon arrived at his aegis core, and the sight that greeted him caused his blood to run cold. The once-pristine core now carried a faint reddish hue, as though it had been scraped raw or bruised from repeated impacts. Tiny ripples trembled across its surface, each one looking painfully unstable.His heart skipped multiple beats, his mind racing a mile a minute. He car

3.16 p.m. The following day.Droplets of sweat covered Theon's body, and the sweat was thick and stale. There were hints of blood by the corner of his mouth, and his torso, as if a wicked taskmaster had used whips to serrate his body, and the image was not far from the truth. His face was no longer creased in pain, he was inhaling and exhaling normally, and the normalcy was hard-won. The only indications of his previous suffering was his still pale lips, the tiny marks of dried blood on his skin, the raised welts on his body, and the torn shirt beside him. That shirt of his was looking like it had been through a storm. His stomach was no longer distended, and the relief of that was visible. Around him, visible wisps of energy could be seen circulating, and the wisps were calm now. In his meridians, a powerful wave of energy kept pushing forward, trying to break a bottleneck, and the push was insistent. Theon kept forcing it back, chanting ‘compress, compress’ in his mind, trying to

After Theon took a warm, long comforting bath, he dried his hair with air magic, and the drying was indulgent. Wore a bathrobe and made his way to the room, his steps unhurried and leisurely. He picked up the bag of food he'd carelessly tossed aside the previous day, a reminder of the chaos that went down here. Thankfully, the room was secure, a little mercy in the midst of yesterday's suffering. Otherwise, pests like ants, rats and roaches would have had a field day on his food, and the thought was revolting. He would have had to throw them away. The bread had gone cold, and some of the jam spilled, probably when he carelessly tossed it aside during his yesterday’s rush to the bathroom. He wiped it clean with a rag and set them out on a table, his movement were absentminded and filled with ease. Carefully, he chose food low in spirit energy, choosing to exercise caution and stay within the net of safety. His choice was mainly junk without spirit energy, that was what he considere

Theon stopped cold in his tracks, his brows knitting together in confusion as every instinct urged him to freeze. What the hell was going on? Wasn't this route supposed to be old, abandoned, and no longer in use? From everything the system had told him, this hidden passage should have been forgotten by history itself, left to decay beneath the academy for centuries without another soul remembering it existed.The paths inside were overgrown with weeds, their roots forcing themselves through cracks in the ancient stone as though trying to reclaim the tunnel for nature. Dust lay thick over the uneven ground, cobwebs hung lazily from the ceiling, and the stale scent of age lingered heavily in the air. Judging by the state of the place, no one should have walked through here in years. So how come there were people already using his potential secret exit before him? The contradiction immediately put him on guard.If there were other people familiar with this route, then using it in the fut