Controlling Destiny - 13 Déjà Vu

Ultrix searched through his pantry until he finally found what he had been looking for.

Cooking oil! Excitedly, Ultrix drizzled a bit of the oil over his hand and snapped his fingers. Instantly his entire hand burst into flames.

[This is awesome!] Ultrix thought to himself.

However, the next second he smelt an interesting aroma.

“Wait, what the heck?!” Ultrix cried out loud as he realized that the smell was his hand slowly marinating under the ignited cooking oil.

Quickly running to the water basin, Ultrix doused his hand into the water over and over again until all of the fire went out.

Looking at his slightly burnt hand Ultrix swore under his breath.

[Seems like my fire tolerance does indeed have a heat limit.] Ultrix thought with a disappointed face.

Meanwhile, outside, the 2 pupils from earlier looked at each other again.

“Hey, did you smell something just now?” one asked.

“Yeah,” the other one replied casually. Looking at the time on his token he realized that it was already nearly dinner time. “Well, we did quite a bit today,” he said. “Let’s go grab something to eat.”

Meanwhile, Ultrix’s appetite was pretty much ruined. Realizing the ‘fragrant aroma’ was probably his hand, he had almost thrown up any of the congee that was still in his stomach from earlier.

Thinking back on the books that he had read, Ultrix tried to remember if there was any information on strengthening the body. However, it seemed as if there was not a lot of information on it.

The best way that he could find was about people staying in environments that had strong energies with their affinity. For example, a snow user would meditate on a really cold mountain or at the bottom of a frozen lake.

However, Ultrix was done with experimenting like that. After all, he did not want to end up being barbequed just yet.

After much thought, Ultrix decided to turn in for the night. He was not hungry yet and he felt like he was getting tired from all of the experimentation he had done all day.

That night, he tossed and turned dreaming about being stuck in a boiling pot of oil.

“Cocka-doodle-doo!”

Ultrix woke with a gasp. [Damn, that was a terrifying dream.] Ultrix thought to himself.

He was wet from sweat and his cotton shirt was soaked. Quickly cleaning himself up for the day, Ultrix took a quick shower and had a humble breakfast of bread and fruit jams.

Making sure all of his things were in order, Ultrix walked out the door to go to class. He had a lot of questions he wanted to ask, so he did not want to waste much time.

One of the first things that Ultrix noticed about his classroom was that there were not many seats. He was not too surprised because he already came from a small classroom background, but it was still slightly shocking when he realized that there were only 2 other pupils besides him in the room.

“Hey, you must be Ultrix, our new colleague!” one of the pupils said when looking up from his work.

“Uh, yeah, that would be me,” Ultrix replied awkwardly. He did not have many social skills and his voice sounded monotonous.

“Hey, hey, no need to be so serious!” the other pupil said with a grin. “We’re all colleagues here, so there’s no need for formalities and whatnot.”

Ultrix managed to stop shaking and tried his best at a smile. However, what came out was probably more like a grimace than a grin.

Luckily for Ultrix, the other two pupils didn’t seem to notice, or perhaps they just did not care.

“That’s more like it!” The first pupil said. “My name’s Oras, and this here is my friend Cridium.”

“Nice to meet you,” Ultrix replied flatly.

“Nice to meet you too,” Cridium replied for both.

At this point though, the atmosphere kind of became awkward again and a little tense, and soon Cridium and Oras went about their own business again.

Grabbing the only other available seat, Ultrix sat down as well and stared blankly at the blackboard.

Soon, the door opened once again and this time an old man walked through.

“Hello, class.” He said in a formal tone.

“Good-day, instructor Ignis.” Oras and Cridium responded in unison.

Turning to Ultrix, instructor Ignis nodded slightly. “You must be Ultrix,” the instructor said. “I’ve heard a lot about you. As you probably have figured out by now, I am Ignis.”

“Nice to meet you, instructor Ignis,” Ultrix replied politely.

“Now then, let’s not waste any more time on formalities and get right into today’s lesson.” Instructor Ignis said.

“Today’s lesson will be on the essence of runic circles, or as some may call them, magic circles, or magic arrays.”

“As you all probably have known, magic circles have many key elements that require them to. . .”

Instructor Ignis babbled on and on about the fundamentals of magic circles for some time, however, Ultrix steadily grew more and more bored as the lecture went on.

Having already read a few dozen books at this point from his library, Ultrix kind of knew a lot about the fundamentals at this point.

Besides, he did not need the circles anyways, as he had already managed to implement them into his body circulation, a skill that even instructor Ignis might not have been aware of.

Noticing that Ultrix seemed to be paying very little attention to his lecture, Ignis’ mood began to sour, and his expression darkened visibly.

“Ultrix,” Ignis said abruptly as he stopped mid-sentence in his lecture. “You seem to be distracted right now, is my lecture not beneficial to you?”

[This-] Ultrix thought awkwardly to himself. [How can I say your lecture isn’t beneficial to me if you said it yourself?]

Deciding against offending the instructor on his first day of joining the class, Ultrix did the bright thing and decided not to admit the truth. “No, sorry instructor Ignis,” Ultrix lied.

“Your lecture has been very interesting, I just seemed to have been thinking about how I could apply it to my everyday activities.”

“Oh?” Ignis said with mock enthusiasm. “If you are already adept at creating magic circles and are already thinking about real-life application, would you like to show the other two pupils how to do something simple?”

“I’m sure we can all benefit from your experiences.” He ended, with a mocking tone.

[Ah,] Ultrix thought awkwardly once again to himself. [It seems like I’ve already landed myself into quite the pickle on the first day of class.]

While Ultrix did want to show the class that he did not even need to use the magic circles, he had a good feeling that this incident would probably cause some pretty major problems.

[Heck,] Ultrix thought to himself, [even if I was in a story I doubt the plot armor could stop some terrible catastrophe from happening if I revealed my cards too early.]

With such thoughts in mind, Ultrix simply casually walked up to the front of the desk and quickly drew a few rough runics on the parchment using nothing but the magical energies around him.

“There, I’m done,” Ultrix said.

“Is this a joke to you?” Ignis was furious.

“You did nothing but move your finger across the paper!”

“If that is drawing a magic rune, then what have I been doing my whole life? Creating art?”

“This. . .” Ultrix wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. He had not even done anything extravagant yet and somehow the instructor was already clueless as to what was going on.

However, he did not need to respond as moments later, the parchment promptly combusted into flames.

“Ah?!” The two pupils and the instructor were all at a loss for words.

They had never seen someone perform a runic drawing without even using a medium.

Luckily for their dumbfounded brains, Ultrix quickly explained that he had ‘drew’ using the magicules in the surrounding environment.

Chuckling awkwardly to himself, Ultrix decided this would be a great time to excuse himself from the class. He did not have anything further to gain from staying there, and he wanted to go read some more books from his library.

“Just wait a moment!” The instructor called out after Ultrix.

However, Ultrix did not hear, or simply pretended not to hear. At this point, he had already walked out of the door and was headed back to his dormitory again.