Chapter 42 – A Spark in the Classroom
The sun crested over Aldemar with a golden glow, casting long beams through the dormitory windows. Elara stood at her desk, fully dressed, hair braided back with surgical precision, and notes neatly sorted in a leather-bound folder. She'd prepared for days. Countless diagrams, layered explanations, fallback plans in case something went wrong. Her first day as a professor had arrived.
She felt ready.
More than ready—she was confident, focused, and even a little excited. After all, her weeks with the new R&D recruits had already given her a taste of real instruction. She knew she could do this.
Still, as she turned to grab her instructor's robe, Sylv's voice broke the morning calm.
"You know," Sylv said, brushing her silvery hair, "the students you're teaching today aren't inventors. They're learners. They have two more years ahead of them for a reason."
Elara paused, then nodded. "Point taken. I'll keep it simple. No resonance cascade lectures."
"Please don't melt the classroom on day one," Lyria chimed in as she passed by with a slice of toast.
"No promises," Elara muttered with a smile.
With that, the three made their way through the academy corridors, Elara's heels tapping out a steady rhythm that echoed like the calm before a storm.
Room 4A was already full when they arrived.
Every seat in the auditorium-style classroom was occupied. Elara recognized the layout—standard for larger theory classes—but what stood out was the silence. Every student, second-years by uniform color, was facing forward in perfect quiet.
She stepped up to the lectern.
For a moment, she let the room breathe.
Then she turned—and her eyes immediately found someone out of place.
In the back-left quadrant, surrounded by a two-desk radius of empty seats, sat a striking young woman. Her skin bore a bronze-metallic sheen that caught the morning light in strange angles. Glossy black-blue hair tied into a strict braid. Gold eyes with vertical pupils. And just under the edges of her uniform, Elara could make out faint patterns of scales along her shoulders.
Dragonkin.
Rare. Extremely rare. Especially in a human academy.
But it wasn't just the scales. This girl radiated something else—tension, strength, challenge. Like a coiled spring.
Elara took it in with a blink, mentally filing it away. For now, she had a class to run.
"Good morning," she began, voice steady and clear. "My name is Elara Wyrmshade. Yes, that Elara Wyrmshade. Yes, I'm younger than some of you. No, I don't care. You're here to learn. I'm here to teach. Let's begin."
A ripple of nervous chuckles spread across the class. Some looked surprised, others intimidated. But all were listening.
Elara launched into her first lecture: mana transfer efficiency. She began with the basics—mana capacity, innate flow resistance, and how distance and material type affect transfer rates. It wasn't glamorous, but it was essential.
Thirty minutes in, she had everyone's full attention.
"Now, different materials act like pipes for mana," she explained, sketching rapidly on the chalkboard. "Some are leaky, some are smooth. The difference in efficiency matters. A lot."
She paused.
"Any questions so far?"
A few murmurs. Then—
"Yes, Miss?"
Elara turned toward the raised hand.
It was her.
The Dragonkin girl.
"Kaelira Drakar, Miss Wyrmshade," she said formally, her voice deeper than expected, with a clipped precision. "Why are you speaking as if mana can be passed from one object to another? Shouldn't a chant be required? To ask the ancestors for permission to move it?"
Elara blinked.
The room was quiet.
She processed the question. Then slowly exhaled.
Oh.
She glanced at the class. "Raise your hand if you didn't understand what I meant by mana transmission between objects."
Hands went up.
Lots of them.
Elara scanned the room. At least eighty percent. The rest looked too smug or too shy.
"Alright," she said. "Let's reset."
She walked to a supply cabinet and pulled out a set of props: a small mana battery, a simple lamp, a few conduits, and a smooth grey stone.
From her belt, she drew her engraving stylus and etched a quick infusion rune into the stone's surface. A familiar quiet hush fell over the class.
"This," she said, holding up the battery, "is empty. Kaelira, would you confirm that for us?"
Kaelira hesitated, then nodded. "It's empty."
Elara connected the infusion rune to the battery with a mana conduit.
"Now, please feed mana into the rune."
Kaelira stood, walked down, placed her hand on the stone—and gasped.
The battery glowed faintly.
"Check it now," Elara said.
Kaelira did.
"It has mana."
"Exactly. Mana can move from source to object, without spirits or chants. Through designed channels."
Next, Elara connected the battery to the lamp.
The bulb flickered, then lit brightly.
After half a minute, it dimmed.
"Battery's empty again. Lamp's empty too. Confirm?"
Kaelira touched both. "Yes."
"Now," Elara said, retrieving a different piece from the cabinet, "observe."
She engraved a Solar Rune on a polished metal plate, connected it to a conduit and the lamp, and held the rune into the sunlight by the window.
The lamp glowed steadily.
Gasps spread through the room.
"This," she said, "is a basic E.W. Solar Lamp. The concept only works if you understand transmission losses and material properties. If you overdo it, things go... wrong."
She adjusted the solar rune—feeding it raw mana.
The lamp flared, blazing like a tiny sun.
Several students yelped and shielded their eyes. The air shimmered.
Then—click—Elara disconnected the circuit.
Silence. A stunned silence.
Sylv and Lyria, from the back row, simply grinned.
Half the class had already pulled out paper, scribbling diagrams and notes at frantic speed. One boy was copying the rune pattern so fast he tore the page.
Kaelira slowly returned to her seat, saying nothing.
For the rest of the lesson, she never spoke again—but she never looked away.
The remainder of the day forced Elara into an unexpected but necessary adjustment. After the solar lamp demonstration, she quickly realized just how far removed her own thinking was from that of her students. They weren't ready for the advanced theory she'd prepared. Not yet. So, she pulled back—drastically.
Instead of continuing with high-level transmission calculus, she spent the rest of the day going over what she had once considered self-evident: what mana is, how it flows naturally, what a conduit actually does in practical terms, and why certain materials behave differently under magical stress. She took out basic props, let the students handle each one, and broke things down to their rawest concepts. She walked through the very foundations of magic-based engineering like she was back teaching her R&D recruits on day one.
To her surprise, it felt good. Slower, yes, but more fulfilling in its own way. And her students responded. They stopped staring like awestruck fans and started leaning forward like apprentices who wanted to know more.
By the time the final bell rang to signal the end of class, the room felt different. Not just attentive—engaged. And none of them moved. They lingered at their desks, whispering excitedly, comparing sketches, mentally replaying the morning's lesson.
Sylv and Lyria made their way down the aisle, arms crossed, smirking like they'd expected nothing less.
"Told you not to melt the classroom," Sylv teased.
"I didn't melt anything."
"Almost melted Kaelira's brain," Lyria added. "You see her face? I thought she was going to challenge you to a duel."
Elara chuckled as she packed her things. "Not today. Maybe in a few weeks."
"Or days," Sylv said with a shrug.
As the students finally began filing out—still sketching, talking animatedly, redrawing every diagram and rune they'd seen—Elara allowed herself a quiet moment of reflection. Lowering the lesson level had been the right decision. What she had once assumed was basic knowledge had clearly never been taught to these students in detail. But now, they weren't just overwhelmed—they were engaged.
Elara felt it.
That quiet certainty.
This was the right path.
She was no longer just building inventions.
She was building understanding.