As I walked down the street lined with research labs, I saw a blackened building.

It was Fritz’s laboratory.

‘So Teacher Gail’s husband finally…’

Alchemists wearing gloves and masks were incinerating Fritz’s experiment logs and equipment.

Fritz’s broken desk, with its drawers sticking out like tongues, was awaiting its turn to be burned.

Unlike the top drawer crammed with experiment logs and odds and ends, the bottom drawer was full of things uncharacteristic of Fritz.

‘Aren’t those all dried dandelions?’

Flowers I had seen on Teacher Gail’s desk too.

I never knew Fritz, who was sensitive to even the slightest variable, had such sentimentality.

As I turned my head, I saw Bolton standing there with a complex expression. He must have been thinking of Fritz too.

“Let’s go, Bolton.”

Rukna linked arms with the gloomy-looking Bolton and led him to the dock.

Bolton, who could be lively but also easily dejected by small things like this, was like a big child.

“I still don’t understand why senior did that. It feels awful knowing I may never understand why he betrayed the master.”

“Shall I sing you a song?”

Rukna was quite confident in her singing, having won a street karaoke contest in her past life.

“Alright. Let’s hear a verse.”

As Bolton nodded with a smirk, Rukna began to hum.

Instead of the song she originally intended to sing, an unfamiliar melody flowed out automatically.

The familiar tune was similar to what she had heard in her dream.

Just then, a small lab door swung open and someone irritably complained, “Didn’t you see the warning sign prohibiting humming!”

The next door opened too, and a fight broke out with someone yelling, “You’re the noisiest! How dare you raise your voice when you haven’t even written a doctoral thesis yet?”

“I’m sorry.”

Rukna apologized, bowing her head, realizing the alchemists’ attachment to their experiments.

Suddenly, a hand appeared and lifted Rukna’s forehead, which had been facing the ground.

As she looked up, she saw Matian backlit by the setting sun.

His student uniform was still splattered with blood, but his face looked cleaner, as if he had quickly washed somewhere.

“Your head bows too easily, Rukna.”

Leaving behind an admonition that didn’t sound like one, Matian pulled Rukna’s hand away from Bolton’s arm and held her wrist as he strode forward.

“Hey! How long are you going to hold that brute’s hand?”

Bolton, who was following behind them, finally grumbled in frustration.

He thought Matian would let go after a while, but it seemed he was intent on holding hands all the way to the military academy.

“That Matian is a funny guy. It’s weird for men to call each other pretty, but holding hands like that is natural?”

“Ah.”

Only then did Matian release Rukna’s wrist in embarrassment.

He hadn’t meant to hold it like this, but seeing Rukna arm in arm with Bolton had made him feel uneasy, causing him to act impulsively.

The pale skin was more delicate than a young lamb’s, and even a light grip had left red marks.

“You really squeezed that brute’s wrist, didn’t you? It might bruise by tomorrow.”

Saying to be thankful he was a great alchemist, Bolton took out a round ointment container from his pocket.

Matian intercepted the ointment container midway and said, “Thanks.”

“Hey, what are you doing now?”

“Wasn’t this for me to use?”

Matian pointed to the long wound below his neck. It was clearly a more serious injury than the marks on Rukna’s wrist.

“Huh? When did you get hurt? I couldn’t see it earlier because you were covered in blood. Did you let yourself get hit on purpose?”

Embarrassed that he hadn’t noticed his friend’s injury from the start, Bolton cleared his throat repeatedly.

It was indeed very rare for Matian to return injured from a battle with someone.

“The Red Eagle I missed at the end used a strange technique.”

“What kind?”

“Hallucination-type black magic.”

Matian opened the ointment container and applied it to the area around his wound.

“That worked on you? What kind of hallucination was it to affect you?”

Matian didn’t give a specific answer to Bolton’s question. He only briefly glanced at Rukna before looking away.

Then he applied the medicine to Rukna’s wrist where the red handprint was. Seeing this, Bolton exclaimed, “Wow.”

“You know what? This is the first time since enrollment that you’ve shown concern for someone else’s injury. You’ve been really strange lately, you know?”

“As if it’s new. It suits you well too, Bolton.”

“What does?”

“The new eye.”

Matian pointed at Bolton’s artificial eye with a smirk.

“Y-You only noticed that now?”

Bolton’s face flushed red once again as he snorted.

‘That Bolton guy always reacts like that to anyone with a decent face.’

Rukna, who was holding out her wrist to Matian, clicked her tongue.

“You just noticed my injury too, so why are you acting like that?”

“Is that why you pretended not to notice my artificial eye earlier?”

“That’s not it.”

Matian vaguely replied as he finished applying the medicine to Rukna’s wrist.

The sensation of the body-warmed ointment being gently applied by his fingertips was quite embarrassing.

Rukna relaxed her fingers, which had been tightly curled towards her palm, and greeted him.

“Th-Thank you.”

Then she walked ahead of Matian with hurried steps.

The cadets who had arrived at the riverside first were enjoying their rest by the bank.

Even Chad, who had shown suspicious behavior throughout the assembly, was taking a nap comfortably on a flat rock.

As Rukna passed by, the seated cadets tapped her leg.

“Hey, Rukna Golden. I heard you saved the Grand Sage? Thought you’d be useless, but you’re quite capable, huh?”

“But why is your face so red? Did you see a mermaid you fancy on the way?”

Rukna responded to the frivolous questions with a nod and found a quiet spot.

Her heart was still pounding. To try and calm her racing heart, she picked up a pebble from the ground and scratched her name onto a large rock, as if doodling.

As she completed each letter, her embarrassment seemed to fall away like the stone dust.

After that, when Matian arrived, the cadets immediately surrounded him.

“Matian, I heard your final feat was amazing? They say you were covered in blood, is that true?”

“To think such a thing happened while we were clearing the central tower!”

“Is that wound from the black magic used by the Red Eagle executive? No, I’m not happy about it, it’s just interesting to see you injured for the first time.”

The cadets bombarded Matian with questions.

Matian answered each one with a gentle smile while looking around.

His blue eyes quickly found Rukna standing by the river in the distance.

The small ears poking out between the round back of her head and platinum blonde hair. Her reddened ears looked like ripe harvest fruit…

“I wonder what it would taste like to bite them.”

He accidentally blurted out while answering the cadets’ questions.

“Huh? You could taste the black magic?”

“Ah, sorry. I was thinking of something else. What was the question again?”

Matian kindly lent his ear to the cadet.

Contrary to his attitude, his blue eyes couldn’t leave Rukna, who was carving her name on the rock.

Gail, the school nurse at the military academy, lived in a small rented room near the school.

Although her teacher’s salary wasn’t generous, she could have easily afforded a better room, but Gail loved this place that was just big enough for her.

Gail, who arrived at work earlier than others, leaning on her staff, pulled back the infirmary curtains and opened the windows.

As the old hinges creaked outward, fresh morning air flowed in, purifying the room that had been filled with the pungent smell of medicine.

‘I wonder if it’s over by now.’

She thought of her husband’s face as she felt the incoming breeze.

‘Fritz, what choice did you make?’

Gail fiddled with the head of her staff where the Philosopher’s Stone had been embedded, then sat down on a makeshift chair.

And she closed her eyes.

Although she couldn’t see ahead with her eyes open, she lowered her eyelids because she felt ashamed to face the rising sun.

Gail was a mermaid born underwater and had been alone from birth.

There was no particular reason she settled on the Island of Wisdom, which she had reached by chance while swimming against the current.

It was a kind of whim, and that’s how she became an alchemist.

Gail had outstanding innate talent.

She was a rising star who grew without knowing failure, to the extent that alchemists considered her as the next Grand Sage to succeed Kuran.

Her exceptional growth began to falter when she repeatedly failed to create the Golden Elixir.

‘At this rate, I might even damage the Philosopher’s Stone I received from Lord Kuran.’

The Philosopher’s Stone was a precious item that could only be used with the Grand Sage’s permission and was a great help in synthesizing substances as it allowed one to see through their essence.

‘He must have given me this precious thing because he believed in me… I’m beyond hope.’

In despair, Gail shut herself in her lab and became a recluse.

That’s when she met Fritz, an alchemist of human origin.