Chapter 297 — Camille and Santis

Every day he prepared lessons, taught classes, explained the mysteries of the magical world to the children, checked on the students' progress and their homework. Then he clocked off, returned to his dormitory, and prepared the next day's lessons. At mealtimes he went to the dining hall to eat with the academy's teachers and discuss the students' progress along the way. Now and then the poor performers left him thoroughly exasperated, but more often he was delighted by his students' improvement. Sometimes students even brought him gifts—mostly pastries they had baked at home, or pretty stones they had fished out of the river. The latter happened rather more often.

At first he had not known what to do with them, but now those pretty stones filled the windowsill of his dormitory.

Santis loved life on the Cecil domain.

No scheming and intrigue as in the royal capital, no suffocating oppression as in the mage towers, no sneering mockery and backstabbing from higher-ranking nobles and higher-ranking mages. This was a place where he could feel at ease—even if it lay on the frontier, even if the lords of the capital regarded it as "a wasteland only a fool would go to." But Santis felt that no place could make him more comfortable than this.

Let the lords of the capital keep their narrow views and enjoy them; better that they stay away.

Santis tucked his teaching kit under his arm—a set of drafting tools, a textbook, a lesson plan, and a box of wooden rune "blocks" for demonstrations. Apart from the textbook, everything was his own work. He walked out of the main teaching building, taking in the scenery of the academy as he went.

The snow that had fallen a few days earlier had already been cleared away by the students and the groundskeepers. Even in the coldest season of winter, the Cecil Academy was not quiet: Santis saw domain residents heading to night school in groups of three or five, making their way toward another building. They were workers who had just come off shift. Ever since more and more factories on the domain had made "reading and counting" the standard for senior workers, the number of people voluntarily coming to night school had only grown.

After all, only those who could read and count could easily learn to operate the machines in the factories, could understand the complex tasks the foremen assigned—and workers who operated machines earned nearly twice as much as illiterate laborers who could do nothing but haul sacks and carry bricks.

A flash of arcane light suddenly appeared in his field of view, and Santis came to a halt without thinking.

It was the most powerful caster on Camille's domain—the mage from the ancient empire of Gondor.

As a second-tier arcanist, and one raised in the mage circles of the royal capital at that, Santis tensed up out of pure habit.

After confirming that the ancient mage really was drifting toward him, Santis hastily drew a deep breath to steady himself and offered a greeting: "Good afternoon, Master Camille."

"Mr. Santis, we have met—it was when the lord brought me on a tour of the academy," Camille said, coming to a stop before Santis and getting straight to the point. "I would like to discuss something with you."

"Discuss something with me?" Santis froze for a moment, then nodded in flustered haste. "Of course, of course, no problem at all. Please, go ahead."

"I need some assistants to help me with a rather important magical research project."

"Ah... what?" Santis froze for a moment, then froze even harder. "You need assistants... then surely only a mid-rank or even high-rank mage would be qualified to serve as your apprentice..."

"From what I know so far, the mages of this era are mostly fools. Once their thinking has set, mid-rank and high-rank are equally useless to me," Kamel remarked bluntly. "Let me ask you—in the mage circles of your royal capital, do you know any friends like yourself?"

(Stepped out for a trip, just got home...)