Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 156: Research

The first stop was the library.

Why the library?

Eastiel’s description of his experience in this mirrored reality had been a clue in itself. He’d described it as a piece of metacommentary on the world’s very fabric. A dizzying mix of all of his identity, his essence, bent and refracted through a simple prompt.

Eastiel, but a bully, in a high school setting.

Everything else, he’d said, the common facts of his life, his memories, his relationships, were poured into this new mold, filling up the blanks itself. His memory and logic had rushed in to rationalize the prompt, to build a consistent history around it.

That explained the amplification. In the real world, Eastiel at eighteen had been formidable, respected, a young king-in-waiting with the same aura of dangerous potential that Arkai had carried at his own age.

Here, filtered through the lens of ’bully,’ those same traits were distorted, magnified into notoriety. His natural leadership became faction-building. His fierce protectiveness was read as possessive aggression. The world had built a reason for the fear.

If that was the case for Eastiel, then the same principle would apply to the newest variable.

Oathran’s character, the ’Mysterious Transfer Student’, had been added to the simulation. It stood to reason the world’s history had been subtly, or not-so-subtly, bent to accommodate his mystery, to fill in the blanks around his sudden arrival.

There would be a paper trail, however faint or fabricated. There would be a context crafted by the narrative to make his presence feel organic, even as it screamed of anomaly.

Of course, library research wouldn’t be her only play. She needed live intelligence, the kind that moved through gossip networks and privileged channels.

At lunch, after the laughter had died and the strategic gleam had entered Angela’s eyes, Cecilia saw her opening.

"Angela, you want to find out about the transfer student, right?" she asked, her tone casual, as if the thought had just occurred to her while poking at her dessert.

"Yeah, kinda," Angela shrugged, though the glint in her eye betrayed her deep-seated need to categorize and control every element in her environment. "You want to know too?"

Cecilia mirrored the shrug. "Since the headmaster was the one who recommended him, why don’t we try to find out from that angle?"

It was a logical suggestion, pointing the princess’s considerable resources toward the most obvious point of pressure.

Angela’s eyes narrowed. "Something’s fishy." She leaned forward slightly, her voice dropping. "You don’t usually get curious about people except you think there’s some disaster coming."

It was an astute observation. Angela’s own ’tingles’ were about utility and control. To find talent to exploit, allies to bind. Cecilia’s ’tingles’ were different, tuned to a stranger frequency. She sensed wrongness. Disturbances in the field. Imbalances. Things tilted unnaturally, threatening to tip over.

"Not disaster," Cecilia chuckled.

Angela studied her for a long moment, suspicious. Yes, she was curious, and yes, there was also this inherent trust of their long friendship. But still. Suspicious. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Finally, she conceded with a slow nod. The mystery was intriguing, and if Cecilia’s peculiar radar was pinging, there was something there worth uncovering. "Okay, I will give you updates."

The first alliance was forged.

After lunch, after the conversation that set Angela’s network humming, Cecilia moved to her next class, her mind already partitioning itself.

One part absorbed the lecture on advanced mana-channeling theory. The rest was sorting through the social architecture of Scholomance Athenaeum, data she’d compiled during her previous scenario with Eastiel.

The academy divided its senior year into seven classes, split between two core departments.

The Force Magic Department, emphasizing physical enhancement, kinetic energy manipulation, and combat arts. It was where raw power and passionate will found their home.

Angela, despite her regal poise, was its top student. It was also Arzhen’s domain. They shared a class.

Its opposite was the Vision Magic Department, the realm of traditional magic. This was where Ruby naturally reigned as the top student. Her class was a gathering of the most psychically gifted, including Nikolas.

There were three classes for each department, making six.

Which left the seventh class.

The Unique Magic Department.

This was the catch-all, the repository for talents that defied easy categorization, for magic that was singular, peculiar, or hyper-specialized.

This was their class. Eastiel was here because his prodigious, almost symbiotic control over the raw elements was considered a ’unique’ affinity, not just standard Force or Vision magic. Cecilia herself, in this world’s logic, was placed here for her telekinesis and precise mana control, a rare and focused discipline.

Stevan was here too, his ’unique’ magic still an unknown quantity she’d have to uncover.

And now, Oathran Alicei, the blank-slate transfer, had been deposited into this same class. The Department of Anomalies. Of course.

As the final bell for the period released her, Cecilia turned her steps toward the one place where the whispers of the world were pressed flat onto pages, where history, even fabricated history, was forced to sit still and be examined.

The massive, ironwood doors of the Scholomance Athenaeum library groaned inward under her hands. The air inside was several degrees cooler, thick with the scent of parchment, old leather, and the faint, ozonic hum of preservation wards.

Her shoes made no sound on the deep, burgundy runners that led between endless shelves soaring up into shadowed vaults. Floating orbs of magelight drifted like lazy fireflies among the upper galleries.

She walked past the familiar sections. Elemental Theory, Historical Thaumaturgy, Noble Genealogies...

Her gaze was sharp, looking for the more obscure shelves.

Well, not obscure.

Just... uninteresting.

Because who, in their right mind, would voluntarily immerse themselves in the library’s complete collection of ’Regional Trade Agreements of the Northern Principalities, 300-350 AE’ or ’A Comparative Analysis of Seventh-Era Masonry Techniques in Lower Iondora’ in a single sitting?

Only a madwoman. Or a woman on a mission that transcended sanity.

Cecilia was, for the purposes of the Scholomance Athenaeum library, both.

She had claimed a large, scarred oak table in a secluded nook bordered by shelves labeled ’Obsolete Legal Precedents’ and ’Meteorological Anomalies: Catalogued.’

And the main keywords she’d have to find were...

"Dragons".