The magic practice room held the afternoon light.
There were three windows. Light entered through each at a different angle, and where those beams overlapped, they made a faint grid pattern on the floor. A crystal orb sat on every table, and the orbs touched by the light gave off their own hazy colors. The practice room was quiet. About twenty-five students sat at their respective tables, and only the instructor’s voice flowed steadily on.
Minjun sat with an orb in front of him.
Today was basic output practice. Drawing out magic and placing it into a crystal. Confirming what had been placed inside by the light within the orb. That was all. It was not a difficult assignment. They had already done similar things in four previous classes.
But Minjun still had not fully grasped how far Isabel’s body could go. It was right to be careful. Not to stand out. Only about average. That had been his strategy so far, and it had been working well.
The instructor demonstrated. It was a method of not placing both hands on the orb, but lightly setting them beside it. He said it was like placing one’s consciousness onto the orb. If one allowed consciousness to flow like water, the orb would receive it. Minjun listened to that explanation and lowered his eyes.
The orb trembled faintly.
Minjun did not see it. The sensation had not come to him yet. He had simply been sitting and waiting when he felt something move inside his wrist. It felt like a thread being pulled and water flowing downward at the same time. It was an unfamiliar sensation. He had no memory of ever feeling anything like this before.
There was no such sensation in Isabel’s memories, either.
And then it burst.
The light did not come from the orb. It came from Minjun’s hands first. His entire hands turned red. That redness spread to his wrists, to his forearms. The entire practice room was bathed in red light. It was a cold and vivid color. Not fire, but rather something closer to its opposite—a clear, coolheaded red.
It lasted for about three seconds.
During those three seconds, one sound rang out in the practice room. The sound of a crystal orb rolling off a table and falling. That was all. The instructor’s explanation stopped. The students’ faint whispers stopped as well. Silence came.
Minjun looked down at his hands.
The light was already sinking away. Starting from his fingertips, it vanished slowly, like a retreating wave. His skin was the same as usual. Nothing had changed. But it was already too late.
‘What is this? Did I do that?’
He raised his head.
Every gaze was directed this way. More than twenty students. The instructor, too. All of them were looking in the same direction. Minjun received all those gazes with Isabel’s face.
‘Ah. If this were a company, it’d be like accidentally sending a mass email during an all-hands meeting.’
The instructor walked between the tables. His expression was complicated. There was surprise in it, and something else beneath it. It looked like professional interest, or perhaps not. He stopped in front of Minjun.
“Stay after class,” the instructor said.
Minjun nodded. There was nothing else he could really say.
Class resumed. The instructor went back and continued his explanation. The students’ gazes gradually dispersed. But they did not completely scatter. Minjun simply sat there, feeling those lingering gazes. In front of the orb, with both hands placed on the table. This time, doing nothing at all.
It took another twenty minutes for class to end.
The bell rang.
The students stood. There came the sound of bags being packed. Footsteps gathered toward the door. Minjun remained seated. He waited while the instructor briefly spoke with a few other students. In the meantime, the practice room emptied. The angle of the light shifted slightly. Evening had drawn a little closer.
Then he heard a sound.
“Isabel.”
It was a voice. Minjun turned his head.
It was Chloe Armand. She was not standing by the door. She had already come into the practice room. Three desks’ distance away. The usual Chloe approached cautiously. As if measuring the gap, confirming each step one at a time. But her steps now were different. There was speed to them. It was a gait that seemed as though thought had come after movement.
Minjun noticed it.
Chloe came right beside the table. The distance was closer than usual. The width of a single shoulder.
The crystal orb was still on the table. Chloe’s hand reached toward it. It was not clear whether she meant to take the orb or do something else.
That hand touched Minjun’s sleeve.
It did not seem intentional. Chloe’s hand stopped. It remained touching for one second, then withdrew. But Minjun felt it. The warmth transmitted through his sleeve. Body heat with a single layer of cloth between them. Even after it disappeared, it felt as though warmth remained in that spot.
‘Even when handing over documents, there was never anything like this. This is a matter completely unrelated to work efficiency.’
Chloe picked up the orb. She held it in both hands. “Are you all right?” she asked. Her voice was low. It sounded less like a question than a confirmation.
“Yeah,” Minjun said shortly.
Chloe looked at the orb. The inside of it was still glowing faintly. Like the afterimage of red light. Chloe’s eyes lingered on the orb, then shifted toward Minjun’s hands.
She was looking at his hands.
Minjun knew that. But he did not move them.
“What did it feel like?” Chloe asked. Her voice was low again. A voice at a distance where neither the instructor nor the other students could hear.
“I don’t know,” Minjun said. It was an honest answer. “It just felt like it exploded.”
Chloe nodded. As if that was enough. She did not ask anything more. That restraint was strangely comfortable.
Footsteps sounded from the hallway.
It was Sylvia Kant. She was standing near the door of the practice room. Not having opened the door and come in, but simply standing outside it, not even leaning against the doorframe. She held a small notebook in her hand. The buttons of her uniform were fastened all the way up. Her expression was neat. But her eyes were looking this way.
At Minjun and Chloe.
At both of them.
Minjun felt that gaze. He did not know whether Chloe felt it. If she had, then she gave no reaction, and if she had not, then she had simply missed it.
After a moment, Sylvia opened her notebook. She took out a pen. She wrote something down. From where Minjun was, he could not see what she was writing. It did not seem to be much. One line, or perhaps two.
After writing it all down, Sylvia closed the notebook. Then she walked away. Down the other side of the hallway. Her footsteps were steady and quiet.
Minjun listened as that sound grew distant.
The orb on the table still held light. In Chloe’s hands. It looked as though the orb was growing a little warmer as it received Chloe’s body heat.
Minjun looked at that orb. Then he looked toward the window. The light had lowered a little.
‘At any rate, one thing’s for sure: I’m getting called in by the instructor today.’
Thinking that, Minjun took the orb back. It was an orb that had come from Chloe’s hands. It was warm.
He decided not to think about whether that was the orb’s own warmth or not.
---
That evening.
Minjun looked down at his hands in his dorm room.
They were the hands from which light had burst during class that afternoon. Red light. Though he had not intended it. Isabel’s body remembered Isabel’s magic. What the body knew and what the head knew were different. Minjun still did not know how to handle this sensation of the body reacting first when his mind knew nothing.
He opened and closed his fingers.
It was the side Chloe’s hand had brushed against today. She had not tried to grab him. It had been the motion of receiving the orb. Just their fingertips briefly on the same surface of the orb.
That was all.
That was all, and yet the warmth had been different.
It was something different from the orb’s own temperature. Body heat. Chloe’s body heat had rested on the orb and then crossed over to Isabel’s hand. It took time for it to cool.
‘I must be tired, so my senses are getting oversensitive.’
He settled it that way.
Beyond the window, the dormitory garden was visible. The trees swayed slowly in the evening wind. The sky, not yet completely stripped of light, remained for a short while before gradually darkening.
Minjun closed the curtains.
The warmth in his hand was still there. Deciding not to be conscious of it, he sat on the bed. Silver hair flowed down over his shoulders. He had gotten a little used to this weight now. Only a little.
It took time to fall asleep.
---
Chloe did not take out her crystal orb that night.
There was no reason to. She had done enough in practice today. When she briefly held the same orb as Isabel, the light inside the orb changed. Chloe’s light and Isabel’s light mixed within the same glass. The professor had called it a channeling reaction. He had said it was rare.
While listening to those words, Chloe tried not to look at Isabel.
Isabel was expressionless. She might have been flustered. There was no way to know. It was still difficult to read fluster from Isabel’s face.
Outside the window, it had grown completely dark. Chloe opened her hand and looked at her palm. It was the hand that had held the orb. The surface Isabel’s fingers had touched. Now there was nothing there. Of course there wasn’t.
She bit her lip lightly.
Tomorrow, Isabel might sit in the same seat. In the dining hall. It had been three days. She would probably come. Probably.
Whether the surface of the orb Chloe’s fingers had touched had been warm that night, or cold. She tried to remember, but she could not. She did remember the fact that she had tried to remember.
Living as Isabel was still unfamiliar. But little by little, ever so slightly, the edges of that unfamiliarity were changing.