“Why do you think the professor gave us Silver Moon Grass?”
At Yurika’s question, Yustia kept her eyes forward and quickened her pace.
“It could have been a warning that even if we use something like this, we won’t be able to win a battle against her. Or it could truly have been the price for coming to find him—he may have told us her weakness.”
I drew close to Yustia’s side and asked,
“Why didn’t you tell him honestly? If it was the professor, he might have known something about a student named Aive. We might have gotten a more certain way to break through her.”
At my words, Yustia stopped walking and turned her head.
Her calm gaze settled on me.
“That would be too dangerous a gamble. We don’t know what kind of relationship that professor has with Senior Aive, or what stance he takes toward Imperial. Information is like a double-edged sword. The very fact that we’re investigating that woman could end up reaching Imperial’s ears instead.”
She seemed to choose her words for a moment, then shifted her gaze to the glass bottle in Yurika’s hand.
“And even if it was a question disguised as a battle, we still gained something certain from it. We now have a way to block that senior’s poison, even if only once. Now we just need to find a way to use that single opening to create a victory in the battle.”
Her steps began moving forward again.
“Now let’s go to the actual library. We need to find out what kind of poison Taesan was hit with, and I think we should study poison-attribute spirits as well.”
Following behind her, I recalled the faint foreign sensation still lingering on my wrist.
That chilling feeling.
“I have bad memories of libraries, so I’m kind of scared to go.”
“Ailex? The one who unfolded the domain summon called Leviathan’s Table. You don’t need to worry. The same thing won’t happen this time. We’re not going to an outside library now, but to the central library within the academy.”
She turned her head forward.
“We won’t be caught defenseless like we were back then. I’m already working on countermeasures against Leviathan as well.”
Crossing the academy’s magnificent garden beneath the sunlight, we arrived at the entrance of the central library, a massive stone building.
When we pushed open the heavy oak doors and stepped inside, the distinctive scent of old paper and ink rushed over us.
A quiet stillness flowed between the bookshelves packed so densely they seemed to reach the ceiling.
“Yurika, look for third-year advanced course materials related to spirit arts in that section over there. I’ll check the botany and toxicology side.”
“Yes! Understood, my lady.”
At Yustia’s instruction, Yurika nodded and disappeared between the shelves.
“Mr. Taesan, come with me. You need to remember exactly what form that poison took and what it felt like.”
The interior of the library was enormous.
From the first floor upward, its structure was divided into levels along spiral staircases, and each section was thoroughly organized according to attribute.
Fire, water, earth, wind, and even the various derivative attributes beyond them.
A heavy smell of old parchment and mana mingled in the air.
Without hesitation, Yustia cut through the complicated shelves and headed deeper inside.
“You’ve only been enrolled for two weeks, but you move around here like you know it inside out. Have you been here before?”
“No. This is my first time in the academy’s central library too.”
“Then how do you know the way?”
“The arrangement of archives in places that handle spirit arts tends to be similar.”
Her finger lightly traced the air as she pointed out the structure of the shelves.
“To minimize mana interference, attributes that counter each other are placed as far apart as possible. Like water and fire. And the poison attribute is usually arranged near the natural systems that handle life force, or near alchemy. Because it’s highly dangerous, they prefer a well-ventilated and isolated structure. If you can read the structural flow of mana, you can roughly grasp where everything is.”
“I see.”
As we approached the poison-attribute section, there was more there than just books.
Inside transparent display cases, samples of actual poisons in various colors were exhibited alongside detailed illustrations of the bizarre plants and animals used as their ingredients.
From purple mucus to red powder, and even murky liquids whose forms were impossible to identify.
A pungent air that made it unpleasant to even inhale weighed heavily over the section.
“Senior Aive is a spirit mage who controls spirits. So it’ll be faster to look among things that react to special mana rather than physical toxicity.”
Yustia skimmed past the display cases and headed to a shelf filled with thick leather-bound books.
Her fingers quickly swept along the rough leather surfaces.
Soon, she pulled out several heavy books and placed them on a wide reading table nearby.
“Please describe in as much detail as possible what it felt like when the poison spread last night. The nature of the pain, the speed at which it spread, and every change in your breathing.”
“Hmm… First of all, there was no pain.”
I recalled that chilling sensation.
“It just felt like something cold was piercing through my skin. And there was this foreign sensation, like it was spreading faintly through my blood vessels. There were no symptoms like shortness of breath or muscle paralysis at all.”
“Infiltration without pain or paralysis…”
Yustia’s brows narrowed.
She began turning through the enormous book, comparing the symptoms of countless poisons with mine.
Each time a page turned, only the rustling friction of paper filled the quiet library.
“This isn’t it. Neurotoxins come with an immediate reaction. It’s not corrosive either…”
Her eyes read through the dense writing on the page at a rapid pace.
I stood beside her and silently looked down at illustrations of grotesque insects and poisonous plants.
How much time had passed?
Yustia’s hand, which had been irritably turning pages, stopped at one page.
“I found it.”
Yustia’s fingertip stopped on an illustration in the enormous encyclopedia.
“By poisoning an ordinary summon…”
Yustia’s fingertip stopped on an illustration in the enormous encyclopedia.
Her gaze quickly swept down the page.
“Is this it?”
The illustration she pointed to depicted a sleek insect spirit with a pale green glow.
“A venom-type spirit summon. Unlike ordinary insect summons, its defining characteristic is that it poisons the target with a green venom without leaving any external wounds.”
Yustia’s finger traced down the dense text beside the illustration.
“It says that when injecting venom, it doesn’t wound the surface of the skin, but seeps in as if permeating it, leaving no trace. That’s why rejection reactions like pain or paralysis don’t occur immediately. You said that when that woman touched you under the pretext of treatment, there was only a sense of something foreign, and no external wound at all.”
She lifted her eyes from the book and looked up at me.
“Is this it? Mr. Taesan, please confirm it.”
I carefully examined the description of the green spirit in the illustration.
The cold, unpleasant foreign sensation that had remained on my wrist,
and the feeling from when Aive had stroked down my arm came back to me again.
“Yeah. That’s it. It felt like it just seeped in without a single wound.”
“But according to this spirit’s characteristics…”
Yustia’s finger slid to the lower part of the page.
“It says it takes a considerable amount of time to refine and fully inject the venom. In other words, the casting time is long. In that case, it normally shouldn’t be much of a threat to you, Mr. Taesan, since you can knock out a spirit with a single punch. There’s no way you would give her that opening.”
She lifted her head from the book and stared straight at me.
A doubt flickered in her eyes, as if something didn’t add up.
“Ah… if it’s that.”
I slowly retraced my memories of the park last night.
“That woman had taught a defensive spell to the freshman.”
“A barrier?”
“Yeah. It withstood my first punch. Of course, the golem was shattered to pieces with the second punch… but there was time when it endured that one attack.”
“That was when that woman approached me and said I hadn’t burst the barrier in one blow. Maybe in that brief instant, that gap between my attack being blocked and my next strike landing…”
“She completed the groundwork to inject the poison during that short span of time.”
A sharp gleam appeared in Yustia’s eyes.
She pressed her lips together and glared heavily down at the book.
A moment later, as though the puzzle pieces had finally fallen into place, she smiled.
“In that case, this is actually good for us. We received Silver Moon Grass, after all. And Senior Aive doesn’t know that. That woman must believe the trap she set is working perfectly. She would have finished calculating that as long as she withstands the first blow, she can inject the poison in that fleeting opening.”
She lightly tapped the illustration in the encyclopedia with her fingertip.
“We’ll use that calculation against her exactly as it is. The very moment Senior Aive deploys her poison, certain of her victory. We’ll use the Silver Moon Grass to suppress the poison’s spread, then seize that opening created by her carelessness and end everything with the second blow. We’ll make that arrogant trap she’s so proud of become the very noose that strangles her.”