I read through the legal texts quickly, committing the most important notes to memory, before putting them aside and working on elemental cloak. I had initially debated over which spell to work on, but I figured that Salem could probably help me with Dreamshield, given how similar it was to certain psychic knots he knew, and the fact that he actually knew the spell. I thought if I focused on drawing professor Caeruleum's power into mass energy barrier, I might be able to cast it in within a day. The only reason that was true, though, was because of the learning speed boost from the affinity, and the fact that two thirds of the spell was exactly the same as the rest.

In the end, I figured it would be better to direct that power to learning something completely new, rather than just nailing down a class assignment at speed. I'd be able to figure out mass energy barrier fast enough on my own.

I wasn't able to master elemental cloak in that one day, but I thought I'd made a decent amount of headway on it. It was hard to put exact percentages on how far along I was in a spell – I didn't know how hard specific gestures and words would be until I cast them, after all, but I knew that I'd gotten about a quarter of the way through shaping the ether circuit.

After class was over, I milled about for a short while in order to speak to professor Caeruleum, and as soon as they had a moment, I began pulling papers out. I had been working on my sealing affinity magic for a very long time now, but it was also ridiculously complicated. Fable had been helpful, but the older gentleman wasn't an expert in this sort of thing.

Professor Caeruluem likely wouldn't be an expert either. As I understood it, curse affinities usually had more in common with enchantment or necromancy than they did abjuration. At least, most curses were.

But sealing magic was usually abjuration. It clearly wasn't a one for one, as my own personal brand of sealing magic was meant as a curse, a punishment, one that required thematic transgressions in order to lay a curse stripping something away from someone else. I just hoped that it wouldn't be so far apart that processor Caeruleum would be unable to help me develop my sealing curses.

I wasn't confident, but I thought that sealing magic might just be the key to saving Yushin if the Traitor Wyrm attempted to slip inside her and turn her into an avatar. Especially because the more I learned about cultivation, the more I felt it was likely that the Avatar would be formed by filling an empty, freshly-formed perpetual core with divine power until it broke free, fusing with Yushin to transform her into an avatar. That was the standard path for cultivators to become nascent immortals, and it would pave a smooth path to turn Yushin into an avatar.

Yushin had insisted that the ritual she had seen wouldn't do that. I hoped she was right. But I also knew how hefty indoctrination could be. Perhaps if I had been stronger, I would have cut the Dreki family off completely after the duel, but instead, I'd allowed my feelings of familial relations to creep back in. I'd found some independence, but also let them back into my life, now that the woman who had lain my egg was–

"Emrys?" professor Caeruleum asked. I jerked, blinking and taking a breath.

"Sorry. I got in my own head. Do you think you could offer some advice in streamlining my sealing curses?"

"Ohh, interesting," they said as they started to look over the affinity magic. "I can see why you'd ask. There are definitely differences – look here, at this section that draws on negative emotions of parties involved for power. That's not abjuration. But a lot of the effects of the spell are pretty close to what I can do."

We spent a few more moments tossing ideas back and forth before they had to leave to go to their next course. They still invited me to join them in their office hours for more help, and I agreed that I would before I also left. I scarfed down a quick bite to eat before I sprinted to the faerie castle and met professor Toadweather in the solarium.

"Hah! You must find my company quite interesting if you're in a state like that. Though if you're interested in faerie folk, I do have a few nephews…" professor Toadweather teased, tittering with laughter as I burst in. I snagged the rag she tossed me and started wiping down the board.

"Got caught up in a conversation," I said. "Working on my affinity with professor Caeruleum."

"Affinity, affinity, affinity," professor Toadweather said in a sing-song voice. "Curses and hate and evil! Your affinity really is lovely."

"I wouldn't say it's hateful and evil," I said. "Well, maybe it's a little hateful. Curse magic especially, given… everything."

"Evil is subjectively objective, and also objectively subjective, while also being subjective and objective."

I stared at the professor, even as her frog let out an amused croak. I didn't know how I knew that it was amused, but I somehow did. Professor Toadweather threw a rag at me, and I snagged it out of the air. A moment later she flung a bottle of cleaner at me, which I caught in my other hand.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Wipe the chairs off," she told me. "They're realllyyyyyy gross. I know what happened here yesterday."

"Do I even want to know?"

"How could I know what you want to know? I guess I could read your mind, but I'm pretty sure that's illegal here. Also surprisingly difficult to get accurate information. People think lots of things that aren't inherently true or what they want."

"Do you know how to read minds?"

"Why, did you commit a murder? Oh, maybe you murdered your salami boyfriend."

"My… what?"

"You know. Bleaches half his hair. Smells like a bookstore. Lots of piercings?"

"Do you mean Salem?"

"I did say salami."

I said nothing in response, and since I didn't currently have any academic questions that I thought professor Toadweather would be able to answer, I just helped her set up the room for teaching, then took a seat. Professor Toadweather clapped and rubbed her tiny palms together, cackling.

"Third circle summoning!" she cried, waving her hand to animate her chalk. "This is the good stuff. It's some of the most useful for casting lesser contract spells, for one, and also some of the most generically useful monsters you can summon."

"Really?" the treefolk sitting next to me asked, rustling his branches. "Surely there must be more potent summoning spells at higher circles."

"Oh, definitely! But numbers matter. Quantity has a quality all to itself. If you have the power to cast a handful of sixth circle spells, it's not uncommon for the best use of your ether to be summoning a single powerful champion using a sixth circle spell, then summon a lot of less powerful monsters with the rest of your ether."

"It's the army principle," the girl who thought she had a dragon bloodline said. "If two nations are at war, and one has an army alongside powerful casters, while the other only has powerful casters, the army wins. Even in a single powerful mage against an army… the mage might not lose, but if the army can split up, it's hard for one person to be in multiple places at once. Even if they manage it, and manage to avoid sleep, they can't be in as many places as forty army units."

"Precisely!" Toadweather agreed. "There are instances where high enough numbers can kill absurdly powerful people, and times it goes the other way too. Third circle makes great fighters at your circle. If you become powerful enough, then they make ideal shock troops."

I nodded slowly. If I had been able to conjure a single entity strong enough to at least hold Gerhard off, then my swarm of lesser monsters would have finished him off. Even without one, they'd eaten a massive amount of his power.

"Which is why the rest of the semester will be dedicated to learning summoning spells to round out the armies you all will use to conquer the planet with!"

"I was hoping for some teleportation or object creation," one of the students muttered. "Or at least some negotiations"

Professor Toadweather rolled her eyes and smacked the student with a ruler. It was gentle, thankfully.

"Oh, bah. You'll be fine. You'll learn a lot more of that next semester. This semester is rounding out skills, next is about expanding them! Don't you want to learn to summon a steel crocodile?!"

She pointed at the spells on the board. I frowned and learned forward. There were six spells, not the four that I had expected. All of them were clearly standard summoning spells, with the contracts already built in, and I recognized the first four all being related to elemental magic.

"Nonstandard elemental planes!" the girl behind me cried out. Professor Toadweather shot her a surprised, but approving, look.

"Right again! These spells summon from a plane of metal, wood, lightning, and ice. I was not joking about the steel crocodile…"

She pointed at the first spell, and slowly went through it, summoning a massive, seven foot long crocodile, with glimmering steel-bright scales. In between the scales, I could see rusted traces, which looked like dried blood, giving the entire thing a dangerous, eerie look.

After that, professor Toadweather summoned what she called a flowering frog, a frog the size of a large dog with flowers sprouting all over its body, vines weaving in and out. Its pupils were normal enough, but instead of being round, they were shaped like lotus petals.

A lightning ermine came next, the weasel-like creature much bigger than they grew on earth, about four feet long. Its coat was white, with tinges of blue moving through it. Actually moving, at that, with occasional sparks of lightning flying off. Its mouth and claws were also filled with lightning that pulsed in and out.

Finally, she summoned a fox, only the size of an ordinary fox, but who seemed to be made entirely of ice crystals. It was slightly translucent, with a bright bushy tail, and the only parts of it that seemed organic, rather than crystalline, were the eyes and nose of the fox.

After she was done, she smiled and leaned back against the board. Clearly, she was prompting someone to ask about the final two spells, but was willing to take the bait. I eventually raised my hand.

"What about those other two?"

"Well, isn't that an interesting and totally random question? Why would I do that? They're not a part of the course, and they're not part of your grade. So why would I put spells on the board? I shouldn't, should I? That's too many spells for delicate student brains!"

"Sure, but the spells are there anyways. So what are they?"

"Well, hypothetically speaking, they could be used like so…"

She slowly went through the gestures and chant, and I quickly took down notes about the spell. An instant after she completed it, a dog the size of a horse, with three large heads, materialized. Rather than wait, she launched right into the next spell, and conjured up a pure white, fuzzy moth the size of a horse, with glowing purple-gold energy forming around its antennae.

"To summon either a cerberus or a lytemoth, from elemental planes of shadow and light. Both exceptionally difficult for third circle summoning spells to manage, but also powerful beyond normal limits. But nobody needs to learn them. At all. Got it?"

Everyone muttered their agreement, and professor Toadweather smiled, before tapping the first spell again.

"Great! Let's start breaking down this spell array, then…"

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