In class, time crawled. Ninety minutes stretched like a century, a parade of sun and shadow that refused to end. On break, time fled. One blink, and hard-won leisure slipped through his fingers like dry sand.

Lingchen Yao dropped his bag on the chair, lined his course books on the shelf, then slumped back, breath wheezing like a tired bellows.

“Who said college isn’t exhausting…”

He muttered, voice hollow as an empty hall. Four dawn starts a week crushed him, and Friday he still worked for a professor—round it up, that’s five dawns. The agent-track class was a grindstone. Breaking out of the crowd wasn’t a door; it was a cliff.

Eye Orb, though, lived easy. He drifted out in daylight like a lazy cat and drifted back at dusk, fiddling with mysteries no one asked about.

Xun Xun came in with takeout, pity in his eyes like soft rain. He patted Lingchen’s shoulder, then feasted before his screen. The smell hooked Lingchen’s scattered soul like a fish on a line.

Lingchen gripped a file and began carving at the wooden tabletop, returning to the quiet center of himself like a stone in a pond. Only while carving did stillness settle. He heard the wind comb the window, leaves swaying like dancers—and Xun Xun chewing like beetles in dry bark.

It felt like Xun Xun existed just to ruin scenery. Lingchen wanted to deck him, then swallowed it. Roommates are a necessary evil, a pebble in the shoe that never leaves.

“Hey, Yao, Mentor Moon Owl’s looking for you.”

Lingchen checked the time. At this hour, why Moon Owl? Did she find evidence from last time? No. He was careful as frost. Even if he slipped, Eye Orb fixed the mess.

He shrugged on a jacket, body heavy as wet cloth, and dragged himself out again. Complaint surged like a low tide, then ebbed. He thought of Chen Xiaoyin from the Mutual Aid Society, of Qianchun with lost parents. His own life was quiet and steady; there wasn’t much to curse.

“It’s nothing urgent,” Moon Owl said, voice cold as winter glass. “Chen Xiaoyin asked the guard to pass a note. I ran into it and brought it. Also, a few words. What my grandma said—don’t take it to heart. I don’t need an agent.”

Her face was a keep-out sign, sculpted by frost. She looked like the white-haired girl from noon, the resemblance cast from the same mold. Moon lifted a strip of black hair wrapped in white, the wind flicking it across her cheek like a brushstroke.

“What are you staring at?”

“Nothing… You look like the white-haired kid from today.”

The name Illusory Glass was a switch. Touch it, and Moon Owl’s scales lifted. She cut him a glance. Mana bled from her like cold mist, pressing Lingchen’s chest flat. His hidden Mana and Abyssal Aura almost burst up like steam.

“Where?”

Inside Jiuqiong University, the only white-haired girl was Illusory Glass. Today, Illusory Glass should have stayed home. Did she slip out? How? Where would she run?

Moon Owl tossed him a small object and strode off toward the mentor’s residence, wind at her heels. Lingchen looked down. A rustic wooden coffer sat in his palms. A white note on top read: Reply by phone when received.

Chen Xiaoyin had messaged him during class tonight. He’d forgotten like a cloud drifting past. Now he was doomed to her nagging storm.

He wasn’t old yet. Why did his brain feel like a rusty hinge?

He typed a quick reply and added a Magic Maiden Crimson heart emoji, saying he’d received both item and message.

He was about to lock his screen when replies fell like a sudden rain. You’re young and already rebellious. Don’t ignore your elder’s texts. I thought you were in trouble. Even if you’re busy, reply. Once you enter society… and on it went, like a kettle that wouldn’t stop boiling.

Lingchen dug at his ear, let the words wash past like wind through reeds, and skipped her “junk texts.” After a while, Chen finally stepped into the point.

“Director Grandma said the box was left at Yunyang Orphanage by your birth parents. She wanted to wait till you graduated, but there was an accident.”

Lingchen’s thumbs rattled the keys. His face tightened like storm glass. He hadn’t been born there, but he’d lived at Yunyang Orphanage eight or nine years. His roots ran deep as old trees.

“What accident?”

“Someone came to make trouble. They claimed they wanted something left there eleven years ago. Grandma feared it would go wrong. She meant to have Hao Wenqian pick it up, but I was closer, and the Mutual Aid Society had a new task, so I delivered it.”

“When I arrived, Sister Hao had already floored them. Her fists were more convincing than their mouths. I called the police before I left. She’s probably giving a statement now. I’m heading back, just in case.”

Lingchen pictured Hao Wenqian leaning by Yunyang Orphanage’s rusted gate, four or five rough men sprawled like sacks under a gray sky. The image sat heavy as iron.

“Grandma said she doesn’t know what’s inside, but anyone eyeing your parents’ things isn’t a good person. It’s dark, and there are many kids. If they force it, we can’t risk it. Someone’s behind them. Once won’t be the last. So Grandma decided to give it to you early.”

Lingchen nodded. A few normals couldn’t stop Hao Wenqian. She was a body-enhancement type, First Symphony. Paired with general magic, a handful of thugs were straw in the wind.

They chatted about small things—Did you eat? Are you under pressure?—throwing pebbles into calm water. Then Lingchen carried the coffer back to the dorm.

He sat, hands soft as a healer’s, and opened the box. Inside lay nothing but a square of blood-red cloth, like a small sunset folded flat.

“Is there nothing here? Or did someone take it?”

He messaged Chen again. She relayed Director Hao’s words. The item remained, but it wasn’t in plain view.

He fiddled for five or six minutes, a moth worrying at a lamp, with Eye Orb’s help nudging his hands. Without it, he’d have wasted much more time.

The coffer had two layers. He lifted the cloth, pried up a foam board, then toggled a switch hidden in the corner. Only then did he find what his parents had left.

A single ancient Key lay on the red cloth, rust-speckled as old armor. Inside that humble body, Mana swelled like a sea.

Eye Orb’s stare widened, fixed on the Key. He couldn’t fathom how a simple Key held such vast Mana without tearing itself apart.

“Looks like ordinary metal,” Eye Orb said, voice slow as dusk. “To hold this much Mana, normal metal can’t do it. I’d guess there’s a special substance inside, sheathed by a ring of metal.”

He glanced at Lingchen and remembered the wooden carving on Lingchen’s table the first time he visited. Same idea, different scale. The carving’s Mana was a whisper; the Key’s was a storm.

“Another problem—the Key is tiny. Normal Magic Tools have small storage. Take a half-Magic Tool handgun; a normal person fires two or three shots, then reloads.”

“But this Key’s Mana could power fifty shots… maybe a hundred. It’s… craftsmanship on the level of gods.”

Awe thinned his voice. He flicked a look at Lingchen and, in that silence, seemed to glimpse a cause for Lingchen’s parents’ deaths.

Lingchen had guessed too. His face dimmed like a lamp in fog.

Outside, wind whooshed along the eaves. Ink-dark clouds sank low, ready to tear open with rain. Then the breath rose, pushed the night’s shroud aside, and revealed a bitten crescent of moon.

Lingchen threaded the Key on a cord and hung it beside his necklace, metal cool as river water on skin. He rose, opened the cabinet, and brought out the wooden carving his parents had left him.

Ever since becoming a Magic Maiden, he’d felt a residual Mana hum from that carving, a thin echo like a distant bell. Seeing the Key now, he knew the source—something inside, quietly radiating Mana.

But the two carvings had no seams. And they were the last things his parents left. His heart balked at the blade.

“Two items, that’s all,” Eye Orb said, words sharp as flint. “Do you want the one who killed your parents, or do you want to cradle wood and ache forever? Your dream still walks, right? Are you ready? How laughable…”

Lingchen flung him out the door without ceremony, a gust tossing a leaf. When Eye Orb steadied and looked back, hesitation was draining from Lingchen’s face like color in rain. Lingchen’s fist closed on his tools. Eye Orb knew.

“You’re right…”

Lingchen set the faceless carving on the table. He worked with chisel and hammer, each strike precise, each ring bright as a temple bell.

His dream had looped for years, a wheel grinding his thoughts thin. His parents’ deaths stuck like thorns. His memory of them lived in the dream. He wanted answers—why they died, what his dreams had tried to show him.

Those carvings were once simple ornaments, two quiet guardians on a shelf. Now they were keys in their own right, value multiplied a hundredfold.

The price was simple. He might never look at them whole again.

“They live in the dream, don’t they?”