The librarian's eyebrows raised. "You read the pamphlet. No one reads the pamphlet."

  Mal didn't respond. He had no idea what pamphlet she was talking about, this was all just knowledge that he’d gained from his time in the future.

  She blinked and shook her head from side to side.

  "Sorry about that," she said.

  She turned to the right and picked up a wand from off the desk. She made a few quick flicks through the air and the tip of the wand flashed gold. She frowned. "Nothing. That term either isn't here or wasn't indexed by the search spell."

  Mal looked down and thought for a second. He looked back up. "Try two keywords: Shattering and core. Add in 'shattered' as a variation for 'shattering'."

  "Gotcha." She made another set of flicks with her wand, this time, the movements subtly different. She shook her head again. "No luck."

  Mal clicked his tongue. He put both of his hands on the desk and tapped one of his fingers against the wood rapidly.

  "Try…" He paused. "Just try 'damaged core'. No variations, nothing fancy."

  Her wand flipped through the air once more. She opened her mouth and Mal prepared for another failure.

  "You're in luck. Not one, but three different books have that term."

  The woman took a piece of paper and wrote down three sets of letters and numbers. She handed them to Mal and he took it and quickly read it over.

  "Thanks," he said.

  "No problem. Best of luck with whatever you're researching."

  Mal quickly located all three books and found a section in the back with a table and some study materials.

  The first book was, unfortunately, more or less useless, and he was able to quickly determine that it was a quack work that would be of no help to him whatsoever. The second book was a little bit more helpful, being a more legitimate medical text. It touched on the various conditions related to magical core damage. It talked about hollow cores—those who had a non-functional core from birth—warped cores—those who had cores which were unreliable due to the malformed geometry of the cores—and finally, they talked about fractured cores.

  Unfortunately, the last one, the one that looked most promising to Mal, was also the one that the book had the least amount of information on.

  It mentioned that the survival rate of those who experienced such a thing was almost 0%.

  It also touched on the magical abilities of those who survived—they reported having extraordinarily high sensitivity toward mana, to the point where it was physically painful for them to be around too much of it.

  Interestingly, it was shown that they still passively generated mana from the interior of their bodies.

  Unfortunately, their progress was forever locked and they were unable to cast anything much more complex than an Arcane Sphere. And frankly, it'd taken an enormous amount of work just to get to the point where they could summon that.

  But why would Cassandra be interested in him if he was one of those people? Could it be that fractured cores were a different thing entirely from shattered cores? That the latter was something else that actually had value?

  The third book was most interesting of all because it wasn't a medical book—it was a study into traditional witchcraft. The book was dated. According to the back, it was 300 years old. Still in perfect condition due to the dozens of preservation spells that had been put onto it.

  If wizards today had a passive distaste for witchcraft, the author of this book found it and its practices absolutely detestable. He repeatedly seemed to imply that witches were subhuman and made wild claims about them consuming the flesh of babies.

  But eventually, Mal got to the part that he'd been looking for: a study into fractured cores.

  Apparently, there was some sort of myth or tradition among witches about those who have broken their cores. According to the writer, the heart of witchcraft was about denying the self to connect with the world. Therefore, somebody who had no "metaphysical interior," as it were, would be the ideal practitioner of witchcraft. Granted, the writer dismissed it as a ridiculous pagan belief, so Mal wasn't sure he was paying the proper amount of attention.

  But what was being said here did seem to line up with what Cassandra had said. Her dismissive attitude toward cores—according to the book, what she said made perfect sense in the witchcraft tradition. A core was an obstacle. It got in the way of your connection with the outside world.

  The writer, surprisingly, acknowledged that there was a degree of truth to this. He stated that in his own experience as an E-rank core, he found that there were certain things that he could sense that those with stronger cores couldn't. He was more able to notice when others were about to cast a spell, and even sometimes predict what spell they were going to cast. Therefore, someone without a core would be the most sensitive out of them all.

  It clicked in Mal's head. This was why his mana-smelling scent was so strong, and why it was even stronger now that he was in the past. It was all because of his F-rank core.

  He continued reading. There was an almost messianic tone to the way that the writer described the witches' discussion of someone with a broken core. They believed that such an individual would be able to find the rarest of herbs, to learn the abilities of magical beasts. It got into even wilder speculation with stuff about them communicating with the plant life. This all culminated into the broken-cored-one making a contract with the spirit of the planet and becoming her apostle to bring about a new golden age.

  Mal found that last half to be pretty ridiculous. It was obvious that all of that was almost definitely superstition and prophecy. But all myth had at least a degree of truth, right?

  He double-checked the medical book to confirm something. All of the individuals who survived had been F-cores.

  However, the medical text didn't mention anything about witchcraft. But then again, why would it? In all likelihood, Mal was probably the only one in the world who knew all of these disparate pieces of information.

  He double-checked the third book. At the very bottom of the page, the author described the ritual that the witches had passed down in order to "create" someone with a broken core. It had apparently been tried a handful of times in the past, but had always resulted in the death of the practitioner.

  The ritual itself was full of an enormous amount of fluff, but the author noted that there was an actual recipe hidden underneath the nonsense. The recipe was simple, almost disturbingly so. Mostly just common ingredients, save for one: a rare leaf from an ashen-colored tree with gnarled roots and a sulfur-like smell.

  The leaves that Mal had taken just a few short hours ago seemed to weigh inside his satchel like a ton of bricks.

  There was no way. Just through sheer luck, he’d picked the one ingredient that he would've normally never been able to obtain.

  Eternus had to be screwing with him.

  He wrote down the recipe on a piece of paper and put it into his satchel. The only problem was that it described a brewing process that he didn't fully understand how to do. It described creating a kind of oil, which Mal didn't feel comfortable messing with. However, Mal strongly suspected that he could concentrate an infusion of the brew and that would achieve a similar effect, especially given how weak his core was anyway.

  Yeah, his core was weak, which he thought would make it easier to break.

  He stopped his thoughts in their tracks. He wasn't seriously thinking of giving this a shot, was he?

  But then again, he didn't have a lot of other options.

  Dark magic was out for obvious reasons. Trying to develop his core normally and simply practicing magic would take too long. If he waited too long, invasions and incursions would wreck the school and he would be powerless to do anything about it.

  Witchcraft, as far as he knew, wasn't actually harmful to him mentally. It wouldn't turn him into a raging monster. And he would have a clear path to power that he didn't have now. He might even be able to convince Cassandra to teach him.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  But at the end of the day, wasn't all this just myth? He had no idea if this would actually grant him power. It was a total gamble. And if he was wrong, the consequences could be devastating. At best, he'd end up with a non-functional core and become hypersensitive to magic. At worst, he’d just die.

  He stood up and gathered the books, then set them on a tray to the side. The librarian would put them away properly.

  He went for the exit, a plan hatching in his mind. He would gather the ingredients and make the brew. It would probably take at least a week or two to finish concentrating the infusion anyway. In the meanwhile, he would gather more information and confirm whether or not there was any validity to these claims. He’d run tests on the potential power of aligned magic—he'd already come up with an idea for a simple item that took advantage of aligned magic, involving Bramblevine and elder root.

  And if, in two weeks, it turned out that the myths had some truth to them…

  Well, he’d just take this whole sequence of events as a sign from Eternus.

  When Mal exited out of the library, he was immediately hit by the orange glow of the setting sun. He winced. He'd not only skipped lunch, but potions class and dinner too.

  Of course, he wasn't concerned about missing material and becoming uneducated. He could probably recite the major principles of potion making directly from memory. But it would attract unnecessary attention if he was disappearing and skipping classes for long periods of time. Plus, he really didn't want to end up talking to some student disciplinary committee or something.

  Mal was about halfway back to the dormitory when he heard a scream and a slap.

  I should probably go check that out, he thought.

  He walked over to one of the buildings where he heard the noise from and opened up the front door. In it, a red-faced Rolam was rubbing his cheek while a young lady ranted faster than Mal could understand.

  "—And if you ever come back, I'll stick my wand up your—!"

  She looked over at Mal, let out a muffled scream, then slammed the door shut. Mal looked between the door and Rolam, the question in his eyes clear. Rolam sucked in a breath and raised a pointed finger toward the sky. He then immediately deflated and dropped his hands down.

  "Yeah, I probably deserved that."

  "What exactly did you do?"

  "Well," Rolam said. "I ran into her outside the building and we struck up a conversation. It was a perfectly pleasant one, and I'm afraid my mouth got the better of me, because I complimented her. Repeatedly."

  "What's wrong with compliments?"

  "Well, apparently women don't like it when you say they have cow-like eyes."

  Mal raised an eyebrow. "I'm gonna take a guess and say that all of your other compliments were of similar quality."

  "The quality… decreased as I started to realize what a dishonorable fool I was making of myself," Rolam said. "I followed her from behind while she tried to walk away and called her rear end honorable in front of her friends." He paused. "I think they may have gotten the wrong impression, hence why she was rather mad at me."

  This guy isn’t very bright, is he? Mal thought.

  The two stepped outside of the building and walked toward the shared dormitory.

  "So where were you?" Rolam said. "And what was it that Cassandra wanted to talk to you about?"

  Mal waved him off, adopting a faux casual tone. "It was really nothing. She just wanted to talk more about some of my questions and answer them. I ended up going to the library and forgot about potions and lunch."

  "I see. Yeah, we were all a little bit surprised when you didn't show up."

  Mal quickly thought of a different conversation topic to pivot to. "Where did you even get the compliment about cows from? I don't think I could have thought of that in a hundred years."

  "It's a classic line from a most honorable play in my homeland!" Rolam drooped over. "As were the rest of my compliments. I'm not sure why she took it so badly."

  "Your homeland. Which is presumably an Elven country with an entirely different cultural tradition from Chama?"

  Rolam opened his mouth to respond, then stopped. "You know what, that actually explains a lot."

  The sun was nearly set now, the last rays hitting the tops of the buildings.

  "Why are you here anyway?" Mal said. "I know you said Exodi's the best in the world, but even that's a little bit strange. In my experiences with elves, they're kind of…"

  "Arrogant? Boisterous? Certain that they are better than all the tiny humans with their pathetic magics and weak cores?"

  "Yeah, that," Mal said.

  Rolam chuckled, his pointed ears twitching with the motion.

  "I think you don't know something, Mal," Rolam said. "I'm not a full-blooded elf. I'm a half-breed."

  Mal had kind of forgotten. Or, at least, he hadn't considered it relevant. It never hit him that as a half-elf, Rolam would face discrimination among full-blooded elves.

  "So you weren't allowed into the Elven university?"

  "Yep," Rolam popped the P at the end of his word. "Rejected by my own old man. Pretty messed up."

  "Your father? What does he have to do with anything?"

  They arrived at the dormitory door. Rolam's expression became neutral, hard to read.

  "I think I spilled enough of the beans about myself for today," he said. "And it's already getting late."

  Mal could read the dismissal for what it was and nodded. "Yeah, let's head inside."

  The two stepped into the dorm room.

  After Mal had explained where he'd been to Nima and Philo, they all retired to their rooms. Mal wasn't intending to sleep, however. Luckily, Lusia had left the herbalism textbook, along with the rest of his textbooks, in his room. He would have to thank her later… not that she would accept his thanks.

  Mal reached into his satchel and pulled out some Bramblevine and elder root. He set them on the ground, then reached up and scratched the back of his head. It was one thing to basically theorize about the subject and come up with something smart, it was another thing to actually put those ideas into practical application. Not only that, but he was working off limited information. He was trying to work with aligned mana, despite the fact that he had no idea how to work with aligned mana. He had no idea how to do anything.

  Okay, he thought. Let's start with first principles.

  Resonance. His personal aligned mana, if properly "keyed" to either the mana in the air or some type of magical structure, was capable of manipulating it. This was proven by the Bramblevine. He thought back to the situation with the steel-aligned mana infecting his own magical structure. The two had resonated. As such, the steel had wrapped around his own arcane sphere and enhanced its power.

  Initially, he thought that it was the steel-type mana manipulating his own mana structure. But now, he was considering that perhaps it always started with himself. What had actually happened was perhaps that his arcane sphere had happened to resonate with the steel-type mana in the air, and he'd unconsciously maneuvered the steel-type mana into his sphere, creating that strange hybrid spell. Again, this was all guesswork, but he needed some place to start. If he found something that proved him wrong, he would change his assumptions. But for now, this felt like the most consistent answer.

  Secondly, his core wasn't involved in both of those cases. He simply moved mana that was already within his body outward. Mal supposed he could've tried passing it through his core, but it seemed like his idea of resonance didn't require a significant amount of mana to work. Aligned mana would resonate regardless of how much mana Mal was manipulating.

  Maybe, he thought. The next step is experimentation. What other magical things can I resonate with?

  Mal took a deep breath through his nose. At all times, there'd been a faint current of plant-type mana in his room. It hadn't particularly mattered, so he hadn't paid much attention to it. But now, he was wondering if it was an opportunity. One of the planks on his floor was loose. He gently pulled it up and set it to the side. Underneath, flat dirt stared back at him. He took another sniff. Earth-type mana. Not a lot, even less than the plant-type. It smelled of rich, broken-down fertilizer.

  He pressed his fingertips to the dirt and concentrated on extending his mana outward. He imagined a tuning fork and linked the image to his mana. For the next ten minutes, he attempted to adjust the frequency of his mana.

  Finally, the dirt shivered and a small root sprung out from below the dirt. Mal narrowed his eyes and adjusted the frequency by the slightest of margins. In response, the root turned by a fraction of an inch. Mal experimented with this for a few minutes before he nodded to himself.

  "Experimentation success," he muttered. "Theory of resonance seems to hold up.”

  But making roots wiggle around wasn't really much of anything at all. He thought back to his previous theory about external manipulation. He was doubtful that it would work—the rules governing aligned mana seemed to be completely different from those that governed unaligned mana. Still, he thought it was worth the shot.

  Okay, maybe I can use some runes to direct the aligned mana around? But what would I scratch the runes onto?

  It would have to be something with inherent magical energy.

  He took out some elder root and pulled a knife from one of the suitcases. He carefully scratched out an extremely basic rune that roughly meant encirclement. He was hopeful that, since it was a plant that he was cutting the marks into, then the rune would apply to the plant-aligned mana in a local radius. He also inscribed another rune that would select a target based on intent.

  Alright, let's give this a shot.

  He reached out and touched the item with his mana, resonating it to the rough frequency of the elder root. A blast of fire and wind exploded out of the elder root. Mal staggered back, the root slipping out of his hand. He kicked the root and suffocated it of oxygen, leaving nothing but a dried-up husk of detritus.

  Well, Mal thought. That didn't exactly work.

  Mal slowly scratched his chin. If he could resonate with roots in the ground, what was to say that plants could resonate with each other? And if that was the case, what was stopping him from creating an item made of plant that resonated with other plants naturally?

  And what would happen if he manipulated the smaller item? Would it, then, create a sort of chain reaction? By manipulating the smaller, would he be able to affect the larger?

  Now that was an interesting idea. There was no reason why it would be impossible. The question was how he would get the smaller item to hit the right key to resonate with the world around him. Mal suspected that the key was not runes, given the fact that there'd been a massive explosion and he nearly set his dormitory on fire. What was he doing when he was actually changing the key of his mana? When he was changing its frequency? It was hard to describe. It was some strange combination of intent and something similar to changing the size of a tuning fork.

  But how exactly could he do that with a plant? How would he change its frequency?

  What if I added a second plant to edit the frequency?

  But what?

  The plant in his satchel felt unusually heavy.

  Mal interweaved elder root with Bramblevine, carefully minimizing the number of times that he touched it to avoid triggering the Bramblevine's defensive response. By the end of it, he had a small bracelet made of the two materials. He touched it with one finger and let his mana reach out and touch the Bramblevine.

  The roots on the ground wiggled. And then thorns popped out of their sides. Mal's jaw dropped. Had he actually just managed to—?