The Cursed Extra-Chapter 107: [2.55] The Professor Who Sees Too Much

"The smartest man in the room is the one pretending to be the dumbest. The second smartest is the one who notices."

***

The Theoretical Mana Foundations classroom was weird. And I don’t mean quirky-professor-with-a-cat-collection weird. I mean the walls bent at angles that would make any architect cry into their blueprints. Crystals in the ceiling broke light into rainbows that slid across every surface like the room was showing off. The air had this static charge to it, the kind that made my arm hair stand up and refuse to sit back down no matter how many times I smoothed it.

Professor Laurana Delacroix stood at the center of it all, looking like she’d walked straight out of an elven fairy tale and decided mortal fashion was beneath her. Her silver hair floated around her shoulders. Not blowing in a breeze. Just... floating. Like gravity had looked at her and said "you know what, never mind." Tiny points of light scattered from each strand, and her violet eyes had this soft glow that reminded you she’d been alive since before your great-great-grandmother was a thought in anyone’s mind.

"Axiomatic Dissonance," she said, her voice reaching every corner of the room without her raising it even slightly, "represents the fundamental scarring that occurs when reality’s mathematical framework is bent."

Her pale hand passed through one of the floating equations. The thing rippled like she’d dropped a stone in a pond, then reformed into something twice as complicated.

"Every spell cast leaves traces in the aether. Every skill activation creates resonance patterns. Every manipulation of magical energy, no matter how small, inscribes signatures upon the fabric of existence itself."

I kept my head down. Shoulders hunched. Quill moving across my journal in patterns that meant absolutely nothing. Classic overwhelmed-idiot posture. I’d gotten pretty good at it over the past few weeks.

Around me, my classmates suffered in their own ways. Marcus Vellum had checked out three diagrams ago. His eyes had gone glassy, locked on the window where the training grounds called to him like a siren song. Thomlin Ashworth sat ramrod straight at his desk, quill a blur as he copied down every single floating equation. Page after page of symbols he definitely didn’t understand but planned to beat into his brain through pure repetition. Even Fen looked ready to murder something. Her wolf ears had gone flat against her skull, and those golden eyes bounced between the formulae like she was watching the world’s most frustrating tennis match.

Here’s the thing though.

I understood every word.

Every equation.

Every terrifying thing hiding in those pretty light shows.

The cosmic joke of my situation would’ve been funny if I wasn’t the punchline. In my previous life, before a truck decided I needed a new career as an isekai protagonist, I’d been Alex Chen. Engineering student. Not top of my class, but decent. More importantly, I’d spent three years learning how forces and energies played nice with physical systems.

What Laurana was teaching? It was magic, sure. But underneath all the mystical window dressing, I could see the bones of it. Conservation laws. Resonance theory. Cause and effect. The universe’s eternal bookkeeping. My inner nerd wanted to sit up straight, pull out a fresh notebook, and start asking questions that would probably get me burned at the stake.

But I couldn’t do that.

Kaelen Leone was supposed to be a joke. A charity case who got into Veilhaven Academy because his daddy wrote a big enough check. The kind of guy who struggled with basic mana circulation, not some freak who grasped advanced theory on the first listen.

So I kept my notes meaningless. My expression stayed stuck on "confused and slightly constipated." The perfect mask for the perfect loser.

"The most fascinating aspect of axiomatic dissonance," Laurana continued, and her violet eyes started their sweep of the classroom, "is that certain high-level skill interactions can create what we term ’transference echoes.’ Moments where abilities undergo migration between individuals through methods that should be theoretically impossible."

My pen stopped.

Oh no.

Oh no no no no no.

She’s talking about Skill Plunder. My cheat ability. The thing that literally nobody should know about because I’ve been so careful and—

"The mathematical signatures of such events would be quite distinctive," she added. Her tone stayed light. Casual. Like she was chatting about the weather and not describing exactly how my stolen powers worked. "A fundamental rewriting of the target’s skill matrix combined with a corresponding acquisition event in the recipient. Of course, such phenomena remain purely theoretical. No documented cases exist in modern magical literature."

I didn’t believe her. Not for a second.

Her gaze moved from student to student. Slow. Analytical. The eyes of something that had spent two centuries poking at the fabric of reality and hadn’t gotten bored yet.

And then those eyes found me.

They stopped.

Just for a moment. Maybe half a second longer than they’d spent on anyone else. But when you’re hiding a secret that could get you dissected in a lab somewhere, half a second feels like an eternity.

I kept my face blank. Maintained the slump. Let my hand tremble just slightly on my quill.

Nothing to see here. Just a useless waste of a desk who definitely can’t understand what you’re saying. Please look away. Please please please—

The bell rang.

I have never loved a sound more in either of my lives.

Students exploded into motion around me. Notebooks slammed shut. Chairs scraped against stone. Everyone moved for the door with the speed of prisoners who’d just heard their sentence got commuted.

I moved faster.

Twenty feet to the door. Fifteen. Ten. My satchel bounced against my hip. Almost there. Almost safe. Almost—

"Student Leone."

My foot caught on absolutely nothing. I stumbled, grabbed the doorframe, and slowly turned around with what I hoped looked like terrified confusion rather than guilty panic.

"Y-yes, Professor?" My voice cracked. Half genuine fear, half performance. At this point, I couldn’t tell which was which anymore.

Laurana hadn’t moved from the center of the classroom. The floating equations still orbited her like planets around a star. Her violet eyes had lost none of their glow.

"A word, if you please."