Nearly five hours later, I returned to my room feeling like a rag that had been rung out one-too-many times. I gratefully accepted a cup of hot tea from Rea, took a long sip of the scaldingly-hot liquid, my tongue and throat protected by my circulations, and then deposited the remaining tea on my desk before collapsing bonelessly onto my bed.

I groaned into the soft sheets, my body aching with bone-deep exhaustion even as my mind was still racing with plans and ideas. Weeks of stress and anxiety had coalesced into a steady, throbbing ache behind my eyes that grew and shrank but never truly subsided. It had been a long, long few weeks.

The mattress shifted under me and I felt Rea, her familiar presence a comforting glow in the back of my mind, sit down by my feet. “Master?” she asked softly. I could almost hear the rest of her question catch in her throat, her shy, humble smile flickering behind my eyes.

“I’m fine,” I mumbled into the sheets. “Just. Tired. Thinking.”

“Okay, Master. Sorry, Master.” She made to stand up, but an invisible tendril of force caught her shoulders and pulled her back down onto the bed. I was perhaps a little less gentle with her than I intended, my mind not quite fully focused on the pure mana manipulation, but this felt easier than opening my mouth to command her.

She didn’t resist as the tendril roughly dragged her over to my side. I lifted one arm and she slipped under it, letting me silently pull her into my side. Rea was wonderfully warm and soft against my side, her bare skin protected from the chill air of my room by a circulation I’d shown her after the third time I’d caught her shivering in the early morning. I could feel her mana brushingly gently against mine, a light pink glow that was just as obedient and welcoming as its source.

I exhaled slowly, feeling a weight I hadn’t really realized I’d been carrying lift off my shoulders. Not for the first time I considered how lucky I’d gotten with Rea. Her presence had significantly improved my ‘home’ life at the Academy. Beyond just the work it did, there was something incredibly soothing about having someone close to me who was completely loyal and also far removed from the struggles, intrigue, and competition of Avalon.

I loved Lea, but there was so much of my life I just couldn’t share with her. Miranda and my second-year girls had the opposite problem. I certainly cared about them, but they were just… too close to too many of the stressors in my life. They had their own classes, their own research, and their own training to worry about. Furthermore, even after three years of mostly loyal service and despite her newly reinforced bond, I still wasn’t completely comfortable around Miranda. Our first year at Avalon together had left a permanent mark on me, and the memories of my ambush and desperate struggle with the man-eating girl were just as clear today as they had been back then.

Rea had none of those problems. Each day I came back to my room to find her waiting for me, a smile on her face, a cup of tea in her hands, and her eyes filled with nothing but fervent loyalty and obedience. She was a dedicated student, an enthusiastic assistant, and constantly strived to be the very best servant she could be.

Since her binding, I’d grown much more familiar with the mechanics of soul-binding rituals, and that knowledge only highlighted how wonderful my darling Rea was. Her initial personality must have been incredibly submissive, meek, and obedient to result in the girl nestled under my arm. Furthermore, some more testing had revealed that she had a natural affinity for the Emotion spell-form, which often dealt with mind-affecting magics such as sleep spells and more complex psychological effects. I wasn’t completely sure, but it seemed reasonable to me that her affinity had helped make the ritual’s changes take hold of her mind as quickly as they had.

“You're a wonderful pet, Rea,” I whispered, my voice muffled almost to the point of inaudibility. “Don’t tell Miranda, but you’re definitely my favorite.”

Rea did not respond, but I didn’t particularly want her too. My grip around her shoulders tightened, squishing her into my side until I could feel her warm breath tickling my cheek and the hard point of one of her nipples digging into my armpit.

Mana poured slowly out of my skin, wrapping around Rea until she was fully enveloped in it. She felt so tiny like this, her core a flickering point of light inside her chest, flimsy strands of delicate pink extending out of it and spreading throughout her body. I could have torn it all apart with a thought, Rea’s bound soul offering no resistance to my mana as it flowed over her, or simply pressed down on her with the full weight of my much more developed mana core until it all gave way under the pressure. Of course that would have been a tragic waste. Instead, I simply held her with my body, mind, and soul, her life a loving balm that warmed me from the inside out.

We lay there in silence for several minutes before my mind inevitably began to drift back to my last class of the semester. That had certainly been an intriguing few hours that had raised a number of fascinating ideas that I couldn’t wait to test out when I had some more time on my hands.

My presentation had gone about as well as I could have hoped. I’d spent the first few minutes outlining the theoretical portions of my work, discussing a number of potential ways to shape the mana in a pure mana manipulation shield and their relative strengths and weaknesses.

Some were based on classic shield spells, but created without the use of any spell-forms to refine the mana. Others I based on material we’d discussed in Professor Meadows’s class, using principles of geometry and crystal structures to optimize for various forms of strength. Yet others I had designed based on theories of mana flow I’d learned from books, classes, and experience.

Then I moved on to what the bulk of my paper had been focused on; the specific shield I had eventually settled on for my own use. I briefly outlined how I had refined a number of the initial designs and combined certain principles from the more successful attempts into a cohesive whole.

Per Liam’s advice, I conjured an illusionary image of one segment of my shield, expanded by roughly fifty times until you could see the thin interlocking strands of woven mana that gave the shield its strength and transformed what was otherwise an overly-elaborate bubble into a strong defensive barrier.

Finally, I finished the presentation with a small demonstration. First, I created the initial shield that had started me down this path and had saved my life near the start of the semester from a rampaging demon, pointing out a number of obvious flaws in its construction and how much mana it consumed.

Then, I showed one of my intermediate designs, interlocking circular panels of whirl-pool like mana that I had based off of one of my personal favorite classic shield spells. It too had its pros and cons, but ultimately it wasn’t nearly as effective as it could have been.

Finally, with less than a minute left in my presentation, I showed off the finished design I had temporarily settled on. It was a very complicated piece of pure mana manipulation that had taken me a lot of practice to get just right and I was very proud of it. I was pretty sure that my audience was impressed, by the fact that I could manage something like it at my age if nothing else, but it was hard to know for sure. I answered a few brief questions and then it was time for the next student to present.

By the end of it, I could feel sweat beading on my forehead and my legs felt like the shock-absorbing gel I’d used in my exam earlier that morning. Having more than a dozen archmages staring directly at you for a quarter of an hour was terrifying. Still, Liam’s quiet congratulations and the small smile Professor Rainer gave me as I tried to walk calmly to my seat left me hopeful that I’d done well.

The next few presentations had left me feeling almost confident. Their work wasn’t terrible, but it was much grounded in what we’d discussed in class with a lot less outside experimentation and refinement.

The first fifth year had designed a slightly different way of training initial mana perception in children, one of the biggest hurdles dividing a mundane person from becoming a mage. According to his presentation, he’d tested it out on a number of test subjects and it had proven to be slightly more effective than some of the standard techniques we’d discussed in class near the beginning of the year.

I was… dubious of his results. In his own words, he’d only had five test subjects to work with and, even then, not all of them succeeded faster than average when using current methods. Furthermore, his method utilized mana flaring, something that most mages apparently couldn’t manage, meaning it was of limited utility for anyone without a highly trained mage willing to help them. Still, it wasn’t an uninteresting idea.

The other fifth-year’s work was probably the least useful of all, to the point that I had stopped taking notes half-way through his presentation. I was ninety percent sure that the conclusions he’d come to were simply inherently flawed, as was his experimental technique. He couldn’t even finish the demonstration he’d prepared without everything collapsing down into ambient mana.

The next presentation was much more interesting, but still nothing exceptional. The first sixth-year had created a dozen different mana-batteries using a range of different unorthodox and very cheap materials. None of them proved to be particularly good mana batteries, barely better than a piece of quartz with some containment runes carved into it, but the work that had clearly gone into them showed an astounding mastery of artifice. I certainly couldn’t have pulled it off. Assuming she managed to graduate next year she was definitely going places.

The last three presentations however had thoroughly put to rest my hopes of getting one of the top grades in the class. I’d already seen Liam’s paper and the amount of work he’d put into it, but the other sixth- and seventh- years had also done some incredible work.

The sixth-year’s contribution to the class was a general-purpose dispel that had evoked a hum of interest from several professors. I wasn’t sure what exactly about it was so special, but it certainly seemed to be rather effective. At the end of her presentation the Myrddin told her to ‘come see him in his office’ over the break. That was as close to an active endorsement as I’d ever heard about him giving and was probably going to be all over the school by the end of the day.

Kyrak, the other seventh-year in our class, had done something much more relevant to my own areas of interest. Taking The Myrddin's demonstration of high-level magic suppression as an inspiration, he had replicated it using something that was half way between a ward and a ritual circle. Essentially, he had created a space that sucked in mana from anything inside its bounds and used it to power a high-end suppression ward.

It wasn’t exactly a novel idea in and of itself, and his final design worked very differently from the principles that Ivius Ambrosius had discussed in class, but some of the tricks he’d come up with were absolutely fascinating. Specifically, I found the mana siphoning his ritual used was particularly clever and very applicable to several of my own projects. Instead of actively sucking in mana, he instead created a sort of low pressure zone within the bounds of the circle that passively drew in mana from its target to fill the vacuum. That mana was then siphoned into a battery and used to strengthen the effect.

Based on some very loose projections, if I incorporated those ideas into my typical magic-suppressing collar design I might be able to double their effectiveness, if not more. Theoretically, it might even be a much more economical way of keeping my cows contained. At the moment, I had to keep them completely restrained at all times and absolutely covered in magic-suppressing enchantments. If I could fully replicate certain portions of his design, I might even be able to use the two elves as mana-batteries, producing much more mana than required to keep them contained. That might allow me to pursue entire avenues of research that I had never considered feasible due to simply only having so much mana to go around.

Finally, Liam’s presentation was exactly what I had expected. He had spent the semester designing and incrementally improving on a technique for determining a person’s mana affinity. I wasn’t sure why he’d decided to put so much time and effort into something like that, but it did explain how he’d known that Rea didn’t have a water affinity all those months ago.

There were two ways I knew to reliably find someone’s mana affinity. The first was a long, annoying fourth-circle ritual. The second was using a specially designed magic item, but this test required the target to manipulate their own mana meaning it was only useful for already trained mages. There were other ways of course, but those two tended to be the most standard.

Liam had concluded that both were clunky and inefficient, and had decided to design his own. The spell he had eventually created wasn’t perfect, but it was much better than anything comparable that I’d ever come across. It created a passive shell that used several complex principles of mana interaction that we’d discussed in class to compare the mana of mundane humans and weak mages against a pool of general samples and then reported its findings to its caster. The spell didn’t work on any mage over about third-circle, but it had the massive advantage of working on someone who hadn’t even begun their journey as a mage.

Even more impressively, the spell could do all that and was only fourth-circle, meaning even I could cast it with a bit of practice. As complicated as it was, I had expected that it would be sixth- or seventh-circle, but Liam had put a lot of effort into ensuring it was as easy to cast and accessible as possible.

Overall, I was pretty sure that the sixth-year girl was going to be our class’s highest scorer, probably followed by Liam and Kyrak. After that, I really wasn’t sure. It really depended on what Professor Rainer and his fellow graders found more or less impressive. Still, for my first ever such presentation, I felt like I’d done pretty well for myself. I’d learned a lot, improved a lot, and ultimately that was the most important thing. Class performance mattered, but only so much as it contributed to my overall survival. As much as I hoped to excel, sometimes doing good enough was plenty if it didn’t kill you.

At some point I must have dozed off. I awoke hours later with Rea still pressed up against my side, an adorable smile of contentment on her sleeping face.

I gently pulled away, moving silently to avoid waking her up, and looked around my room. Daphne was hanging up on the wall, her toes just barely brushing the ground as she strained to keep some weight off her arms and neck. She was gagged, blindfolded, and surrounded by a special sound dampening ward that blocked out everything including her own heartbeat and breathing. Hopefully Rea was almost done with her, with any luck I could finish binding her this weekend and get her back home with plenty of time to spare before the portal moved.

Next my eyes landed on my two elven cows, their bodies stretched taught by their bonds and glistening with a thin sheen of sweat. Judging from the buckets, scattered tools, and the small carpet positioned directly behind Verdan, Rea must have been working on them when I’d arrived and dropped everything to greet me.

That was another thing that would require my attention over the break. Even disregarding the potential improvements I could add based on Kyrak’s work, the current setup I was using for the two elves had been roughly thrown together and really needed a revamp. Their bonds did a good job keeping them from escaping, but the way they held their legs splayed out to the sides and their chests suspended above the floor both took up far too much room and made it awkward to access the milking equipment. Furthermore, while Rea never complained, I had seen just how awkwardly she had to position herself when she was harvesting the two elves and just how much of their valuable juices trickled down their thighs and dripped onto the floor and then had to be discarded each day.

Finally, I glanced briefly at the growing pile of notebooks, loose papers, and references scattered across my once orderly desk. Everything else in my room was kept meticulously clean, but I had ordered Rea not to touch my desk and it was becoming increasingly cluttered with every passing day. That would need to be dealt with soon, it was already becoming difficult to find space to actually work at my desk, much less find specific things that I needed. So much to do, so little time, and that was discounting the many, many things I had to deal with that weren’t in my room. Brenda, Lea, Briella’s family, the Earthshadows, Seatamer…

I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Still, it was going to be manageable. One thing at a time. I was done with the semester, I was alive, and I was stronger than ever. So much had happened in the past five months and I had grown immensely in magical power, connections, wealth, and resources. Whatever came next, I would face it and overcome it. I would accept no other outcome.