Mal's eyes cracked open.

  The first thing he noticed was the throbbing pain in his forehead. He felt as if somebody had taken a pickaxe to his brain, then followed it up with a healthy shovel slap to the forehead.

  The second thing he noticed was the brightness. Had someone cleaned the windows? And when did the sun get teleported right next to his dorm room?

  Not only that, but there was this smell. It was like someone had dumped medicinal alcohol all over his room.

  He lifted his hands up to his temples and pressed into them—

  His hands dropped to the side.

  It felt as if he'd done one of Philo's ridiculous training regimens, but somehow worse.

  He shut his eyes and tried to gather his strength. Every part of him wanted to just lie in bed for the next five days, but he knew that he had classes to attend.

  He got up into a sitting position. Each movement sent a throbbing pain up his spine. He'd never felt so weak before in his entire life.

  Of course he did. He had just removed an essential organ that was closely and mysteriously linked to the functioning of his physical body. What exactly had he been expecting?

  I really hope that my body will be able to compensate for the loss of the core, he thought. Because if I'm like this forever, I think I'm going to lose it.

  He took a few deep breaths, then stood up.

  Immediately, his legs collapsed and he grabbed the edge of his desk. He took another couple of deep breaths, then locked his legs as best he could.

  Globs of sweat the size of pearls dripped down his forehead and splattered against the wooden floor. Despite that, he remained standing.

  "Step one, stand. Complete," he muttered.

  He blinked hard. It was still so bright—his eyes were starting to adjust, but it was incredibly annoying. He stumbled his way over to the window, using the walls and bed as support. When he got there, he blindly reached out for the curtain before he realized that… there was no curtain.

  "Typical," he scoffed. "I already knew there was no curtain, what was I expecting?"

  He turned around to step away, and his eyes flickered open.

  That was when he realized that the light wasn't coming from the outside.

  Actually, it was coming from…

  The inside and the outside?

  Had Mal hurt his brain? Could it be that the side effect of the Shattercore infusion was some kind of mental damage? There was no other explanation for why he was seeing flickering flecks of white light floating around his room.

  He reached out and touched one of the flecks. It sent the slightest zap up his arm, like he'd touched something with static electricity. At the same time, he felt no physical sensation of touching anything.

  The fleck moved in response to him, but he registered no feedback beyond the zap.

  "What is this?" he muttered.

  Could someone have cast a spell? A prank of some sort?

  But why? And if this were a prank, it was an incredibly odd one.

  The answer hit him like a lightning bolt. A mysterious substance, found everywhere. Permeating the ground, the air, everything. Something that was closely linked to the physical world, yet also beyond it.

  He was staring at mana.

  He could see mana.

  A giddy laugh tore its way up his throat.

  To comprehend and see the form of mana itself was something that no wizard had ever managed to accomplish. Sure, some had claimed—but it had always been clear that they were lying, attempting to attract attention. The idea of seeing mana was soon relegated to the stuff of myths and legend. Nothing more than idle speculation. Not even S-rank cores, with all their power, were capable of such a thing.

  But this was what the witches had said. Increased, untold sensitivity to mana, something that had never existed before and would most likely never exist again.

  "I definitely wasn't expecting this, though," Mal muttered. "Scholars and academics would lock me up for the next 50 years if they knew of this."

  Which was why, of course, he wasn't going to tell a single living soul for as long as he remained on this planet.

  Already, his mind whirred with possibilities. In immediate, tactical combat, he would be able to see with unparalleled precision when an enemy was about to cast a spell. He might even be able to know exactly what spell they were trying to cast if his sensitivity was high enough. For research, he would have an entirely different perspective to creating items and potions.

  After all, many magical reactions were simply known for functioning the way they did because that's the way they did. But obviously, Mal might be able to figure out the reasons why those reactions were happening. And if he could do that, he would be able to create items and potions that nobody else in the world would even think of making.

  Then, his theory of resonance—he'd already proven that the basics of the theory were sound, as demonstrated by the creation of the Bramblevine bracelet. All he would have to do is continue to pursue that with the assistance of his hypersensitivity. With that, he'd make leaps and bounds in progress.

  Finally, he needed to look into witchcraft. It'd been witches who came up with this crackpot scheme in the first place, which meant that his new skills would probably be most applicable to that particular field of magic. Cassandra had been unwilling to help him, but he was sure that if he continued to comb over the library, he'd find an instructional book or two to help guide him on this path.

  But before he could do any of those things…

  He had to get to the front door.

  Mal forced himself there, then to the common room. Rolam, half-way through packing his items, looked over at him.

  “Oh, Mal, you’re up late—” His jaw dropped. “Are you okay?”

  Mal leaned against the wall. “Yeah, fine.”

  “You’re pale as a ghost!”

  Mal sniffed the air. What was up with all that damned grass?

  “Did someone cut the yard?”

  “No?”

  Wait… the smell… was it coming from Rolam?

  Individual mana signatures? But instead of having to cast a spell, I naturally sense it? Curious.

  “Let’s get to class.”

  Rolam frowned, then nodded. “If you say so.”

  Of course, each of his circle mates had been freaked out by his appearance. Nima had been horrified. Philo, when they'd met him at the classroom, had initially been annoyed over Mal vanishing during a scheduled training session. Then he saw how Mal looked and started listing off potential sicknesses that Mal could have.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Mal supposed that it was Philo's way of showing concern.

  Which was odd, given that Philo should hate Mal, but whatever.

  The most interesting reaction had been Lusia. She'd glanced at him, not a flicker of surprise on her face.

  "Do you need to be taken to the infirmary?" she asked.

  "No, I'll be fine."

  And that had been the end of the conversation.

  They’d all smelled different, too. Nima reminded Mal of the one time he’d visited a glassblower. A faint mix of arsenic and rotten eggs. Philo was all fire and ash, like burning timber. Lusia…

  Lusia smelled of nothing.

  The first class had been spellcasting. And, as expected, Mal was still able to cast extremely basic spells. He managed to figure out how to get around his broken core pretty quickly—what the people in the medical book had described was that they were writing their spell runes in the air. This wasn't literal, of course, but it got across what was happening. They were shaping the mana inside of themselves without the addition of a core. Slow, tedious, and absurdly difficult.

  Really, not much had changed in terms of his personal spellcasting ability. His former F core was so awful that it was comparable to his now broken, shattered core.

  However, Mal could sense that there was no opportunity for growth anymore. He would never be able to improve on any of his basic spells. And learning advanced ones? If it would've been nigh impossible before, it was just impossible now.

  He tried to ignore the faint flicker of sadness that had welled up inside him at the realization that advanced spellcasting was forever beyond his reach.

  He had no time to be sad, he was too busy avoiding throwing up from the amount of mana being tossed around.

  As it turned out, being hypersensitive to mana was very bad in an environment where you're surrounded by nothing but mana. The headache didn't go away all day. On top of that, a steady sense of nausea had been creeping up on him since the morning.

  Wow, shattering an essential part of your body results in adverse side effects, he thought. Who could've known?

  They finished with lunch, Mal doing his best to pretend like nothing was wrong. Based off of the furtive glances his circle mates kept making, it seemed that he was doing a terrible job of it.

  It's fine, he thought. Everything is fine, of course. I just need to keep it together.

  When lunch finished, he felt a tap on his shoulder.

  “W—we need to get going, Mal. Herbalism, remember?" Nima asked.

  Mal did a slow blink as his tired mind tried to catch up with what was being said.

  "Right," he said. "Herbalism, let's go."

  He stood up like a drunk man and caught himself from falling using the table.

  "A—Are you sure you don't need to head to the clinic?"

  "I'm fine," Mal said.

  Nima opened his mouth as if to argue, then shut it. "If you say so."

  The group headed out. Mal straightened his back as they walked and focused on making one step after another.

  He was hoping that he wasn't lying when he said that he'd be fine.

  As soon as Mal stepped into the greenhouse, the pressure that had surrounded his head instantly relieved. It was like there had been a full brass band playing next to his ear that had all put away their instruments at the same time.

  He took a few steps forward to see if it wasn't a fluke.

  The lack of pressure remained.

  He was still exhausted—dealing with an intense migraine for five hours straight tended to do that to you. And his headache wasn't entirely gone.

  But at the very least, it'd significantly diminished.

  It was then that he realized that it was no longer blinding. The white flecks that had accompanied him the entire time he'd been walking through the school were now gone. Instead, there were only a few green ones hanging in the air.

  If the white flecks were unaligned mana, then the green ones were probably aligned. Probably plant type mana.

  Mal wondered why there was so much less of it in the air. He would've thought that given all the plants around him in the greenhouse, there would be significantly more of it.

  He felt another tap on his shoulder.

  "Mal?" Philo said. "While Philo suspects that you're engaged in a most thought-provoking line of reasoning, you are aware that we need to engage in our normal class activities, yes?"

  Mal nodded. "You're right, sorry."

  "No problem, my apelike friend."

  Back to ape, eh? Well, no, it was a little bit better than that. Apelike.

  Mal walked over to the center of the greenhouse where several small brewing kits had already been set up. There was a mortar and pestle, a few dried branches with leaves on them, a gas burner, and a small jar.

  He sat down and picked up one of the branches.

  He blinked.

  Up close, he could now see that the branch was leaking a combination of green and brown flecks into the air. Not only that, but he could see the way that the green and brown flecks pulsed and moved underneath the surface of the leaf.

  He looked over at Rolam, who'd ended up sitting next to him. His branch had no such leakage.

  Before he could think any further on this, the smell of smoke and mana caught his attention.

  He took another sniff. The mana—water type mana? Why was there water type mana?

  He followed the faint line of blue flecks directly to Cassandra.

  "Good, you're all here," she took a drag from her pipe, then breathed out. A cloud of smoke came out of her mouth and worked its way up to the ceiling. "For today's lesson, I wanted you to practice harvesting leaves for infusions. I've been providing it to you before this, but obviously that isn't how it's going to work in the wilderness. You need to learn how to do it properly."

  There was a snort off to the side. Cassandra immediately honed in on the source of the noise.

  "Something funny?"

  Mal followed her line of vision. Hypode had a small smirk on his face.

  I didn't even know he was in this class, Mal thought to himself. I must've missed him all the other times.

  "Hypode, don't cause a scene!" a worried voice whispered.

  It was Emerald. Right, they were part of the same circle.

  Cassandra rolled her eyes. "If it's so easy, why don't you demonstrate for us?"

  "With pleasure," Hypode said.

  He grasped his hands around the leaf—not the stem of the leaf, the leaf itself.

  Amateur mistake, Mal thought. He hasn't been reading the textbook.

  Hypode pulled on the leaf and it ripped apart. He frowned.

  "It was just a fluke, let me do it again."

  Cassandra took a drag from her pipe and shut her eyes. "Be my guest."

  Hypode tried again. And again, then again. Each time, the leaf ripped apart in half. Eventually, his pea-sized brain grasped the idea that he should actually use the stem, rather than the leaf itself.

  "Nice job," Cassandra said. "You almost managed to leave the leaf intact."

  Hypode's face twisted up. "What are you talking about? I harvested it perfectly."

  "Look in your hand."

  Hypode scoffed and looked down.

  The leaf was crushed and multiple small tears had formed along the edges. He scowled. "It's still usable."

  "I had no idea that you were actually an expert in herbalism," Cassandra said. "My apologies for giving my inaccurate analysis. Next time I'll be sure to go to you when I need help brewing an infusion."

  At that, Mal couldn't resist a snicker. Hypode shot a glare directly at Mal. The frown slowly lifted into a smirk, like he knew something that Mal didn't.

  Now, what's with that expression? Mal thought. Doesn't matter. I'm sure I'll find out soon enough.

  "Now that Hypode is done demonstrating all the ways not to harvest the leaves of a Gentlegreen shrub, how about I show you how to correctly do it?"

  Cassandra showed the correct technique and went one by one, inspecting the students as they practiced.

  Mal already had practice with this kind of harvesting—he'd successfully done it when he was getting materials for the Shattercore infusion. One after another, each leaf came off with a simple twist. With each twist, brown and green flecks would come searing out of the point of severance.

  Mal frowned. There had to be a better way to harvest. So much of the mana was leaking out due to this particular technique. If Mal had not gotten so many extra ingredients for the Shattercore infusion, it might not have worked at all due to the sheer wastage from the normal method of harvesting.

  He tried a few different techniques. Slowly pulling, quickly pulling—nothing seemed to make much of a difference. The only thing that made a change was when he physically plugged up the hole by pinching the stem between his index and his thumb.

  Mal supposed that he could use string to tie off the stem, but doing that for each and every leaf seemed wildly inefficient.

  Besides, there was clearly a better way of doing it that he didn't know about, as demonstrated by the fact that every single branch that had been taken off and put in front of them wasn't leaking from where the branch had been cut.

  Well, except for Mal's. Even now, it was continuing to leak mana at the base where it had been cut off.

  "What exactly is interesting you so much about that piece of wood?"

  Cassandra had stopped in front of him and was peering down at his work. Her long jacket accentuated her gaze, making her look more like some kind of fallen angel there to take his soul.

  "Well, it's —" Mal tried to think of a valid half-truth. "It's cut differently than the others, isn't it?"

  "It is?"

  Actually, Mal had no idea that was the case. But that was the only thing he could think of for why his was still leaking mana at the base, whereas the other students' weren't.

  She leaned down and picked up the branch. She looked at the base of it and frowned. "You're right. In fact, this isn't even the right plant."

  Mal's eyebrows shot up. That explained why it was leaking both brown and plant type mana, whereas the other students only had plant type mana.

  "You have a keen eye, Mr. Patoal."

  Cassandra's eyes narrowed in a way that made Mal feel like he was an ant being observed by a human with a magnifying glass.

  "It was obvious, wasn't it —?"

  "No, it wasn't. If you hadn't pointed it out to me, there was no way I would've noticed."

  Mal found his breath catching.

  "Must've been a fluke," he said.

  "I suppose." She shrugged and looked around at the rest of the class. "You're lucky that you caught it. When ground up, this particular plant causes violent diarrhea from the fumes."

  Mal squinted his eyes at the plant. "Why exactly do you have that growing here?"

  "In case I need to make medicine for constipation."

  "Too much detail, professor."

  "You're staying after class. I need to confirm something."

  Before Mal could brook any objections, she moved to the next student. Mal considered ignoring her instructions, but she was also in potions tomorrow—he'd only be delaying the inevitable.

  It was fine.

  There was no way that she'd already figured out what had happened to Mal, right?