Su Cheng quickly finished her dinner, from the rye bread with sauce to the wine-stewed mussels and clams, as well as a large piece of charcoal-grilled fish belly, before tilting her head back to drain her glass of iced citrus wine.
"I'm done!" she said.
The blond boy sitting across from her hadn't eaten much at all. He just poked at his sea lettuce salad with a fork, looking at her rather strangely.
"You only look a bit heavier than me," he said, tilting his head, "but your appetite is much bigger than mine. How do you do it? Were you born this way?"
Su Cheng shook her head silently. "My eating habits are actually terrible. Don't learn from me. It looks like I eat everything now, but when I read, I might not eat for two or three days. If I have things to do, I'll forget to eat too..."
He raised an eyebrow slightly. "Is that so? I wouldn't do that, considering the servants would bring the food right to me."
Saying this, he pickily took a couple of bites of asparagus and a tiny piece of caramel pudding. He even scraped off the crushed roasted almonds, declaring that he liked their flavor but hated their texture.
"Alright," Gerald stood up. "Let's begin. The more you understand, the more you can help me—"
The servant who had cooked the meal cleared the table and washed the dishes as fast as possible.
Su Cheng walked a few steps away from the dining table but couldn't help looking back.
"What is it? Do you still want something else to eat?" Gerald asked in confusion. "If you do, I can have him make it. However, he's finishing his shift and going home soon. His children are about to return from the shop, and he still needs to prepare dinner for them."
Su Cheng blinked. "No, I just felt that I had a really wonderful dinner and wanted to thank this gentleman—"
"Oh," Gerald casually pulled out a gold coin and tossed it to the grateful servant. "My friend likes your cooking. Here's your bonus."
The servant was overjoyed and thanked him repeatedly. "If this esteemed mage wants anything else to eat, please just give me the order!"
"...Nothing else, hurry and go home."
Su Cheng said helplessly, and then was dragged by Gerald toward the basement.
They passed through a slightly dim stairwell. There were only a few steps before they reached the room below.
The basement was located entirely underwater. The walls were made of thick coral reefs, coated with a resin-like protective layer.
Three of the walls had windows made of crystal, allowing a direct view of the colorful schools of fish swimming outside and the quiet, dark green seaweed.
In the center of the room was a smooth, cold, and polished obsidian workbench. The surface of the stone table was engraved with several small magic arrays, as well as some grooves for placing containers. Scattered across it were beakers, glass tubes, and crucibles of various sizes, along with a few mortars and pestles.
Gerald casually tossed out two small flames, lighting two magic crystal candles. The entire room instantly brightened.
"...That book from earlier, I saw you read at least up to the fourth chapter. So I won't repeat the previous content. Let's go straight to the basic exercise mentioned at the end of the first chapter."
As he spoke, he picked up a special quill, dipped it in ink specifically used for drawing magic arrays, tested the shade on a piece of paper, and handed it over.
"Draw it yourself. Do you remember it? If you forgot, you can copy it from the book, it doesn't matter. Draw the magic array across nine floor tiles."
"Mhm," Su Cheng took it somewhat nervously. "I still remember..."
The stone tiles on the floor were quite large, probably one-meter squares. She carefully drew out that strange magic array.
It looked like a twisted spiral, yet also like a forcefully flattened cube. It was a typical pattern that caused optical illusions.
Its lines seemed to intersect internally, yet simultaneously appeared to extend toward some impossible position.
Su Cheng felt her head swell as soon as she finished drawing. "...Is this okay?"
"Close enough," Gerald nodded in satisfaction. "Stand on it, and then close your eyes—"
The ink solidified quickly and wouldn't smudge even if stepped on. She carefully stood on it, recalling the contents mentioned in the book.
The moment the world before her eyes plunged into darkness, someone held her hand.
The other person's movements were very gentle, barely using any force. "...Alright, take three steps forward."
Su Cheng was about to follow the instructions when she suddenly fell into a state of disorientation, as if she was no longer sure which way was forward.
Her sense of direction and position was being confused by some kind of power.
A slight pressure came from their touching hands.
Their body temperatures were quite similar, making the sensation of their overlapping fingers feel somewhat subtle. He merely gave a gentle tug and didn't apply any more force.
It seemed it was just to provide a directional cue.
Su Cheng took three steps forward and heard him say again: "...Take two steps to the left, and then continue one step forward."
She completed this series of movements in a daze.
"Alright, imagine your current position—you should have returned to the starting point."
Gerald suddenly said this.
Su Cheng: "?"
Even though she was dizzy and disoriented, she knew that on a flat surface like this, moving forward, left, and forward again could not possibly return her to the starting point.
"Don't think about whether it's logical," he squeezed her hand. "Distance is just your physical sensation. Use your reason to understand this concept—here and there are merely different facets on a single crystal. Your mind is your location, so you can shuttle through these spaces."
Su Cheng constantly recalled the contents of the book and the magic array beneath her feet.
Soon, she began to lose the ability to distinguish front, back, left, and right. Her consciousness seemed to plunge into the deep sea, where every direction was filled with dark, pitch-black currents that continuously dragged her downward.
A bizarre sense of dissonance coiled around her, making her feel as if her very soul was detaching from her body and entering some strange, abstract dimension.
She saw that magic array again.
This time, it was no longer a pattern drawn on a flat surface, but a completely three-dimensional image surrounding her from all sides, with every node and line incredibly clear.
She shuttled through the image, completely abandoning the concept of direction, merely moving according to the logic of the array.
It was a very strange and wonderful feeling.
She wasn't driving bones and muscles, but traveling through pure consciousness. The whole world seemed to have lost its gravity, and she could appear anywhere at will.
Then she saw a door appear in the distant front.
Or perhaps it was a door.
Su Cheng wasn't sure how else to describe that entity—because It wasn't a structure made of wood or metal and embedded in a wall.
It had no frame, because It was the boundary itself.
It had no handle, either, because the action of opening held no meaning for It.
It was some flowing concept, an open network, and a compressed void; It was constantly folding reality, as well as countless interlacing alien realms.
It was a concept that transcended the realm of comprehension. That door was like a passageway connecting to everywhere, and also like a partition wall blocking the perception of space.
When she gazed at that door, she felt as though she were being sucked into an abyss, her memories, emotions, and will being stripped away.
Su Cheng wanted to struggle, only to realize she had no body with which to do so.
A moment later, she felt a pushing force.
The world before her eyes quietly shattered.
She saw the obsidian table and crystal windows again, as well as the crisscrossing bronze pipes on the ceiling. Everything in the basement remained unchanged.
"Hmm... it seems you've truly grasped the basics."
Gerald's voice came from beside her.
Su Cheng suddenly felt that something was wrong.
She instinctively tried to turn around to speak face-to-face with him, but found her body stuck.
To be precise—
Her lower half had completely merged with that heavy obsidian table.
Su Cheng: "?!?!?!?!"
Su Cheng: "...Alright, the books did mention similar accidents, so now I need to figure out how to get myself out of here, right?"
For novice spatial magic casters, failing to gauge teleportation distance and ending up with separated body parts or merging with walls and furniture was a relatively common accident.
But it wasn't too terrible.
"Yeah," the blonde youth walked a half-circle to stand in front of her. "It's good that you teleported out. Don't worry. If it really comes down to it, I'll just smash the table—"
"Are you sure you won't smash me to pieces too?"
"Given the strength of your battle aura, you'll be fine. The stone purity of this table isn't very high. Since it gets damaged often, I've already replaced it several times."
He said nonchalantly, "Besides, your body is still intact; you're just completely stuck inside it. Right now, there's a hole in the table that perfectly matches the volume of your lower half, you know? So don't panic. Spatial magic is very sensitive to emotional turmoil; it will confuse your perception. It's fine if you destroy a building, but if you merge with someone else's body like this, that person will die."
Su Cheng: "...Then you shouldn't be saying things like that."
Gerald blinked. "I saw that you looked calm on the outside, but your heart is actually beating very fast."
"Because I am a little nervous."
"Oh, sorry," the blonde youth fell silent for a moment. "Then give it a try? Also, you might have lost control a bit just now. What were you thinking about earlier?"
Su Cheng didn't know what she had been thinking about either. Her arms were still free, so she held her head and sighed, "I just saw a door—"
"What?" Gerald looked at her in shock. "You saw Him?!"
His eyes, steeped in a gloomy, overcast forest green, revealed an unconcealable envy. "Y-you already saw it?"
Su Cheng stiffened under his stare.
However, there was not a trace of jealousy or malice in his eyes, only pure envy, devoid of any negative emotions.
She wasn't entirely sure if this was a disguise or genuine.
—If this was the future God of Jealousy, would he harbor hatred toward her for showing some superior talent and kill her one day?
Although the book only described him as being jealous of his older brother's beauty, and when she interacted with him, he seemed to only care about that as well.
The power of the God of Purity should be stronger than his, but he didn't seem to care about that.
A jumble of chaotic thoughts rolled through Su Cheng's mind, but she realized she should get out of the table first. With a flash of a thought, her entire person vanished.
For the caster themselves, the sensation of this teleportation was quite magical.
It felt like briefly entering another world.
Or as if everything before her eyes had simply been compressed.
Thus, she was able to cross the distance, suddenly appearing a few meters away.
Bang!
Her forehead collided with Gerald's.
The blonde youth sucked in a breath, though it seemed more out of surprise than pain, and he instinctively reached out and wrapped an arm around her waist.
His build looked slender and thin, and he didn't seem much taller than her, but his body was as hard as a steel plate, easily supporting her weight with a single arm.
"Alright," Gerald comforted in a low voice. "You succeeded. You've done incredibly well. Why don't you rest for a bit?"
Su Cheng leaned against his shoulder and caught her breath, also feeling slightly exhausted. "No..."
She couldn't very well say 'I'm afraid you'll smash me to death with a hammer while I'm sleeping.' "I want to read a book for a while, and go out to buy some snacks. I feel so hungry."
"Oh, that's normal. If you really faced that entity, the energy consumption would be massive."
He let go of her. "There are quite a few restaurants around here. I can take you."
Su Cheng took a step back to recover. "Alright, thank you."
It was now completely nightfall, yet the streets were still quite lively. Some small vendors had set up stalls, cooking various seafood barbecues, meatballs, wraps, and so on.
Walking through the bustling crowd, Su Cheng had just taken a breath of the fresh, moist air when a piece of paper suddenly flew into her face.
Thinking it was a flyer, she originally wanted to dodge it, but noticed a portrait drawn on it.
Su Cheng instinctively caught it in her hand.
It was a wanted poster.
And a wanted poster from the Silver Moon Empire, no less.
Su Cheng stared with conflicted feelings at the familiar, beautiful face on it.
Gerald glanced at her. "Oh, isn't that the musician who murdered the Empire's Count?"
