The gold rank cloud serpent flying through the night sky was a proud creature. It had been born at bronze rank and had climbed all the way to the peak of gold rank in only a single century. Still, the creature wasn’t satisfied. It knew that there were ranks beyond its current standing, but it felt something was missing.

  The serpent had hit a wall in its progress and required a grand hunt to break through the troublesome blockade on its path. And what could be a better hunt than the largest concentration of humans it had ever sensed?

  It wondered why its brethren hadn’t told it about the human settlement. Perhaps they had wanted to save the hunt for themselves? That must’ve been it! They were keeping things from the serpent! Unacceptable! Once I finish this hunt and ascend, I will show them their rightful place under my tail!

  The near translucent serpent, tens if not hundreds. of meters long in its entirety, snaked through the night sky. It was nearing the human settlement minute by minute, and was salivating at the mere idea of human meat. It was ravenous.

  However, a single speck of doubt lingered in the proud creature’s mind… Why hadn’t the dragons attacked this tasty group of humans? The serpent was proud, but it wasn’t delusional. The dragons were above it, but they hadn’t attacked. Why? Perhaps they haven’t gotten hungry enough? That must be it! It was the only explanation that made sense!

  The serpent steeled its resolve and sped up. It could now see the tiny lights of the hunting ground and licked its snout in glee. My ascension is near! Fear me!

  “The Final Declaration of a Coming Storm!”

  A mighty crash of thunder rang out in the darkness of the night, and the night returned to its prior calm. There had been no lightning, no growing storm. The only one who had felt the wrath of thunder was the serpent.

  The next adventuring party who patrolled the plains around the city would find a grand bounty indeed…

  When Valar woke the following morning, he didn’t feel rested in the slightest. The boy’s deep sleep had been plagued by frequent nightmares that soured his mood for the whole morning. Zeke sensed that during breakfast and stayed silent. That same trend continued through the whole day.

  Even though Valar was in a bad mood, that didn’t mean that he didn’t progress. He worked tirelessly to absorb all the knowledge the academy threw at him all while learning the rune of life at a frightening pace. As he learned and taught himself, Valar got back in the groove of studying and slept much better during the following night.

  On 2nd day, it came time to choose a couple additional courses in addition to the current ones. Apparently, the list of possible choices was vast.

  Beastlore, runic enchantments, combat techniques, physical fitness, cooking, logistics, finance and anything in between could be found within the course selections of the academy. Iron rank students were advised to pick two or three of these courses and run with them. Sometimes the students wouldn’t even get the time to fully study the courses, because they graduated from their main studies too quickly. It wasn’t common but not unheard of either.

  Valar was sure that he wanted beastlore. It was the obvious choice for anyone who even considered the career of an adventurer, as knowing what you were hunting could often be the difference between life and death. For example, fighting an umbral terror like the one Valar had encountered was much easier if you led it to a well-lit clearing. Dark magic tended to lose much of its potency in bright light. They weren’t easy targets even then, but at least you could fight them. Fighting an umbral terror in the dark or a shadowy forest… It was not a good idea.

  The course on beastlore was an obvious choice, but what else should he choose? He could take a physical course or something related to survival skills, but those topics didn’t really attract his attention. One thing was sure. Valar would never take a course like logistics or finance!

  He skimmed through the courses on the billboard. Luckily, Valar had become a much faster reader during the first week of the semester and was becoming much more confident in skimming through texts like these.

  First aid for non-life mages… No, it doesn’t make sense for me to choose that.

  Foraging magical ingredients and what to look out for in the forests… Interesting. A choice for sure, but I’m not sure if I’d like it.

  “Hey, Valar! Look at this!” Zeke yelled from a few meters away. He was reading one of the course notices on the other edge of the board. “Didn’t you know Viktor? He’s teaching a course!”

  Viktor is teaching a course? Interesting… “What’s it about?”

  “The title is An introduction to breaking the boundaries between affinities. What does that even mean?”

  “No idea, but it sounds interesting! Want to take it?”

  Zeke shrugged. “Nothing else seems interesting anyway. The first lesson is on 4th day, and it seems to only be one lesson per week anyways. I can fit that in my schedule.”

  “You have a schedule?”

  “Yeah, don’t you?”

  “Umm.. Yes?”

  On the following lunchbreak, Zeke helped Valar gather a schedule that helped him remember what he needed to do each day. It mostly consisted of lessons and training, but 5th and 6th days had something else. On 5th day Valar was supposed to go to the merchant district with Elaine. As for 6th day, Valar only wrote Extra lesson. Zeke threw him a weird glance but didn’t comment.

  With their choices made and schedules prepared, Zeke and Valar went to confirm their course choices to the entrance building. Mary was at the desk, greeting the pair with a friendly smile on her face.

  “Good day Valar! What can I do for you two?”

  “Good day to you too, Mary! We’d like to confirm our course selections,” Valar responded. “Here are mine.”

  He handed the clerk the slip of paper with his information and course choices and she quickly jotted them down on another paper. “Thank you. What about you… Zeke, was it? I think I recognize you from the other staff members’ descriptions.”

  “I’m that famous?” Zeke scratched his neck. “But yeah, I’m Zeke. Nice to meet you.”

  He handed her his slip of paper and they shook hands. “Mary, academy clerk and future student of the academy.”

  “Let’s hope that rings true! Have a nice day, Mary!”

  After choosing his courses, Valar spent the rest of his day training. And training. And training. Some would have looked at him weirdly if he told them how much he trained, but it wasn’t for naught. He was close to a breakthrough, and he felt it.

  On the evening of 3rd day, way past the normal time to go to bed, Valar sat on the windowsill of his room and trained. Each time he drew the rune, he felt it inch closer to completion. To perfection.

  Still, the last details were last for a reason. They were much more intricate and difficult than the others, and each small error cost Valar the whole attempt. He did not care. He had time.

  Valar was not going to stop training before he got the rune of life memorized perfectly. He was too close to call it quits, so he continued his endless monotonous grind for an indeterminate amount of time. How long it took didn’t matter. Who cared if he didn’t get any sleep? He would finally learn the rune instead.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Eventually, after hours of work, Valar got to the final detail of the rune of life. And what a detail it was. The connecting point at the middle of the leaf almost resembled a rune in itself, its complexity dwarfing everything else up to that point. Most students would have given up right there and left the rest for the coming day.

  Valar was not like most students.

  With the untiring efficiency of a golem, the boy drew the last detail over and over again. Every attempt required him to draw more energy from his gate, as his body was barren of free mana. He didn’t care. He was improving.

  Each other detail had taken under ten attempts. With this last one, Valar was well above attempt forty. Still, he was getting closer and closer. Just a bit more…

  As the first rays of the rising sun pierced the clouds, shining their light to the windowsill, Valar finally got it right. In front of his eyes hung a glowing green leaf of endless complexity. It just floated there, doing nothing, but it didn’t dissipate.

  Valar’s first attempts at the rune had dissipated in fractions of a second. They had improved with each iteration, going from one second to two, from two to four, and eventually to a full minute.

  The rune he had just created would last for a full hour.

  The last detail had brought everything together. Separate parts had been combined to a stable structure. It was stronger than its components would have suggested. The rune held harmony with itself, thus it didn’t dissipate.

  The element that would run out first was the mana Valar had poured into it, not its structural integrity. The rune itself was whole and stable, just like it was supposed to be.

  It was done.

  Valar let out a gleeful scream of triumph. He had beaten the pesky rune in under two weeks! His work on the rune of life was done! I can finally rest! Wait… Why do I see sunlight? I started in the early evening… Shit.

  Sure, Valar had grasped the intricacies of the most important rune of iron rank. That didn’t mean that he didn’t have a lecture in under an hour. The thirteen-year-old untiring student would be testing the voracity of his title during the coming day…

  “It really is not dissipating,” Zeke muttered. “Did you just learn the rune of life in under two weeks? You’re a madman!”

  Valar laughed with Zeke. Getting to enjoy your accomplishment with a friend made the whole point of accomplishing something much more enjoyable. Without Zeke, he would’ve already moved onto different things, but the dark skinned man was helping him feel joy for his achievement.

  “I did just that! According to Elaine, it should be easier to move on to the other runes I need after this one. Many of the intricacies are similar or even the same as this one. I can’t wait to show her that I did it! Only if I had gotten some sleep too…”

  “Wait, you didn’t sleep? At all?”

  “I just kind of trained and finally got it when the sun started to rise… It wasn’t really my plan.”

  Zeke laughed uproariously. “You really are something! Take a nap during the lecture. I’ll wake you up if Brynn starts to talk about something that’s actually interesting.”

  “Thanks, Zeke.”

  Zeke grinned. “That’s what friends do.”

  As it turned out, the lecture was a continuation of the past week's lecture on runes of shaping. It was the perfect time to get a good nap. At first, Arwen was against the idea of Valar napping during lectures. He was of the mindset that a good student wouldn’t sleep during lessons. The prince’s opinion shifted radically when he heard why Valar wanted to get some sleep.

  “By all means, nap away! You’ve spent the last who knows how many hours studying runes. Even better, you actually learned one! I won’t be waking you up, that’s for sure!”

  Needless to say, Valar did not learn about shaping runes that day.

  After his nap and lunch, Valar headed to the life magic lesson in the water tower. He wanted his breakthrough to be a surprise, so he didn’t announce it to the class. Instead, he started the lesson like any other.

  Contrary to the norm, Valar didn’t start training immediately, instead just looking around the classroom for the first few minutes. All the students had moved onto drawing their runes in the air by now. Green glowing leaves floated in the air of the classroom and dissipated as quickly as they came. They were at various stages of success, especially Julie’s leaf managing to hold its shape in the air for tens of seconds by now. She was well over halfway there. Valar suspected that she would succeed in a week, maybe two at most. That was an excellent pace.

  Elaine looked up from her book at Valar questioningly when he didn’t start training. When he noticed her gaze, he nodded to her and she returned to her reading. It was time for him to start…

  Valar drew his rune slowly. He was in no rush and didn’t want to fumble the rune right now. Even if he had memorized the whole rune, Valar could still make errors if he worked too fast. That’s what continued training was for.

  Still, he drew the complete rune relatively fast. To the other students, it wouldn’t have looked much different from the attempts Valar had drawn just a day ago. To him, however, it was completely different. The rune conducted his mana smoothly and didn’t break down with its passage. There were no weak points to break, after all.

  Valar smiled and sat down deeper in his comfortable chair. Now, it was time to wait.

  For the first few minutes, nobody realized anything. Valar’s past attempts had lasted for over a minute, so the sight wasn’t anything new. Elaine would have noticed the difference immediately, but she was busy reading and helping the students who weren’t doing well. That didn’t matter. She would notice eventually.

  Valar sat there, eyes closed, for a good fifteen minutes until he heard a gasp next to him. It was Julie. “Valar… When did you draw that rune?”

  Valar knew that the smile on his face was smug. He didn’t care. “Around fifteen minutes ago.”

  “How long will it last?”

  “Until its mana runs out.”

  “Oh! Congratulations!”

  Valar’s eyes opened with surprise as the young Livren Scion gave him an excited hug. It was nothing special—just a congratulation from a fellow student—but it meant a lot to him. He had already considered Zeke a friend before his congratulation, but he hadn’t considered that Julie could be one as well. Her congratulations were sincere and lacked the jealousy he had expected. She was simply glad for him, and that felt nice.

  “Did I just hear a congratulation,” Elaine asked from the other side of the room. She turned around and looked at Valar and Julie. “That’s a rune all right.”

  The professor of life magic appeared in front of Valar at gold rank speed. In the eyes of Valar and the rest, she simply vanished and appeared in front of Valar with a thoughtful look plastered on her face.

  Elaine inspected Valar’s floating rune of life with care. She muttered something, nodded to herself and finally grinned from ear to ear. “We have our first rune!”

  The only cheers she got were from Julie and Valar, Julie’s cheer being much louder. The other students were looking at Valar with gazes that he had expected to see. They were jealous.

  Elaine ignored the mean looks coming from the chairs behind her. “This means that you’ll start one of the other runes next week, Valar. Congratulations for learning the keystone of your iron rank spells! It’s a big achievement, even if it came earlier than usual. That’ll just mean that you’ll be out of the academy and doing actual work sooner!”

  The professor’s explanation didn’t help with the others’ jealousy. They were hearing sentence after sentence of praise for Valar. Of course that would make you jealous.

  Still, they weren’t idiots like Konrad Wendir. Nobody would actually try to do anything to the thirteen-year-old. Getting expelled was certainly not something any of them wanted. The most probable outcome was just that they would be talking to Valar even less. To him, that wasn’t even a consequence. They hadn’t talked to him before either, so…

  Valar hoped that Julie wouldn’t get flak for being friendly to him. She seemed like a genuinely nice young woman, and Valar didn’t want others’ jealousy towards him to cause trouble for her. Still, she would probably be fine. Julie was a social butterfly and a great student… And Elaine’s niece. Yeah, she would be fine.

  The rest of the lesson was spent in relative silence. Julie and the others were working with new fervor, and Valar didn’t have anything to do. Elaine told him to think about which rune he would want to learn next. He would have to read a bit on each before he could decide. Both the mend and protection runes interested him for different reasons, but he would have to choose one of them to learn first.

  Both of the runes would give him access to a spell, but mend was a rune that would give Valar access to a spell that gave him power to heal himself. The thought of self-healing was certainly tempting.

  Still, he had read about mend in the book about life magic. The initial spell he would get access to wouldn’t give him power to heal himself quickly—far from it. It was an iron rank spell, not a gold rank one. Even minor slashes like the ones Valar had gotten from Thomas Dremen would take minutes to heal when Elaine had apparently healed them near instantly. That being said, it was still healing, even if it kind of sucked.

  The other option Valar had was protection. Learning the rune would give him access to the most rudimentary versions of body enhancement. The spell would boost his durability to attacks marginally, but the protection wasn’t anything amazing. Elaine described it as ‘barely magical’. It would not stop an arrow, but an iron rank or unawakened human would hesitate to punch him in fear of hurting their hand.

  Still, Valar’s interest in the rune of protection was a simple one. Could I lessen the effects of the fire on my body if I used an enhancement spell?