69novels Chapter 130: I want to see more!
Chapter 130: I want to see more!
He needed time, stability, and silence to understand the sheer depth of the power now resting beneath his skin.
The adept title was a perfect shield—an impressive, joyful achievement that explained his sudden change in demeanor without drawing the eyes of dangerous people.
With a deliberate flick of his fingers, Noah cut the flow of his mana.
The long, thin icicle didn’t drop to the floor; it simply dissolved back into a harmless puff of white vapor, the freezing temperature in the air evaporating into the natural warmth of the hallway.
He patted Amelia’s shoulder gently, guiding her to step back just enough so he could look past her. He turned his gaze toward his mother, intensely curious to see her reaction.
Evangeline hadn’t moved an inch from where she had stopped.
Her right hand was still pressed firmly over her mouth, her fingers trembling slightly against her skin.
She wasn’t looking at the empty air where the ice had just been; she was staring directly into Noah’s eyes, her chest heaving as she kept gasping in short, ragged bursts of disbelief.
It was as if her lungs couldn’t quite decide how much oxygen a moment like this required.
"That’s..." she muttered, her voice cracking as she finally lowered her hand, her lips trembling. "That’s... great news!"
She took a slow step toward him, her boots no longer dragging against the floorboards but moving with a sudden, urgent light-footedness.
Noah watched the expressions flicker across her face, reading the complex lines of her forehead.
He knew exactly what had been going through her mind just moments before.
When he had first stopped her in the hallway, his face pale and his voice tight with an intensity he rarely showed, she had braced herself for the absolute worst.
She had thought it was going to be another terrible piece of news regarding the academy—perhaps a formal notice of permanent expulsion, or some other bureaucratic disaster that would definitively seal his fate in the academy.
But instesd, the reality was a complete inversion of her fears.
It turned out the news wasn’t a confession of ruin at all. It was about how he had dismally broken through to the next magus rank, shattering the ceiling that had kept him trapped!.
The very suspension that was meant to be his downfall had somehow become the quiet backdrop for an unbelievable triumph.
Noah nodded, his chin dropping in a slow, deliberate movement as he swallowed a hard gulp.
The lump in his throat felt as solid as the ice he had just conjured, the residual adrenaline of the moment making his collar feel suddenly too tight.
He looked at his mother’s face, which was still frozen in that beautiful, fragile expression of pure relief, and then down at the top of Amelia’s head.
He knew the atmosphere was lighter now, filled with a sudden warmth that hadn’t existed in this house for months, but the weight on his chest hadn’t entirely vanished. If anything, it had simply shifted shape.
’Now it’s time to explain... the more complicated parts...’ he thought.
He had to make an impossible leap look like a stroke of rare, hard-earned fortune, and doing so while keeping his core secrets safe was going to require every ounce of restraint he possessed.
As the thoughts raced through his mind, Noah shifted his focus back to his other and sister.
Meanwhile, Amelia’s gaze was still fixed on his hand, where the icicle had been merely seconds ago.
The bright, tearful wonder that had illuminated her face a few seconds ago vanished, replaced instantly by a deeply downcast expression.
Her lower lip pouted outward by a fraction of a millimeter, and her eyebrows knitted together in a display of profound disappointment that only a child could muster so fiercely.
She looked up at him, her small hands dropping from his shirt to her sides, her shoulders slumping as if she had just been robbed of a prized possession.
"Why..." she muttered, her voice carrying a distinct, heavy whine that echoed softly in the quiet corridor. "...did you stop the spell? I want to see more!"
Noah couldn’t help but smile at her, the sheer innocence of her greed breaking through his lingering anxiety.
The contrast between his internal calculations and her simple, unadulterated hunger for the spectacular was a grounding comfort.
He looked down into her wide, expectant eyes, the corners of his own crinkling with genuine amusement.
"Really?" he said, his voice light, teasing her just enough to draw her out of her pout.
He knew exactly where that look came from. Looking at her now, it was like staring into a mirror of his own past.
Similar to him when he was her age, Amelia was also deeply, irreversibly fascinated with magic.
He remembered the absolute obsession with the logic of elements, the way he used to collect discarded textbooks just to stare at the diagrams of mana pathways.
Amelia had that exact same fire in her eyes—the kind of curiosity that didn’t care about the politics, the rankings, or the crushing social weight of the magus hierarchy.
To her, it was simply beautiful. It was a world of endless, impossible color.
It was only unfortunate that she was a normal human.
The thought brought a familiar, quiet ache to the back of Noah’s mind, a shadow that always lingered whenever he watched her chase the sparks of his talent.
Unlike him, Amelia had been born without the internal architecture required to channel the world’s hidden energies.
She possessed no mana veins, no mana core, and absolutely no ability to awaken an element and become a magus.
In their society, that distinction was a invisible wall, a dividing line that dictated a person’s entire trajectory before they even reached adulthood.
She was destined to view the wonders of the arcane from the outside looking in, forever dependent on the creations of others, her own deep fascination destined to remain an unfulfilled dream.
Noah’s smile softened, turning into something more protective, more determined. If she couldn’t touch that world herself, the least he could do was bring a piece of it to her.
He closed his fist for a brief second, drawing upon a completely different corner of his internal reserves.
This time, he didn’t call upon the heavy, silent cold of the frost. Instead, he reached for something violent, erratic, and sharp.
When he opened his hand again, a series of bright, crackling sparks appeared on Noah’s palm.
The sound was like dry twigs snapping in a sudden fire. The sparks didn’t fly outward into the room; instead, they began to orbit each other, pulled inward by the invisible gravity of his control.
Within the span of a single heartbeat, the erratic currents formed a perfectly spherical, vibrating lightning ball that hovered just above his fingers, casting a restless, dancing glow across the walls of the hallway.
Amelia gasped again, her hands flying back up to her cheeks as her eyes widened to their absolute limits.
The disappointment that had clouded her face just moments before was instantly vaporized by the brilliant violet light reflecting in her pupils.
"You can actually cast spells with your two elements!" she muttered, her voice breathless, a mix of awe and a sudden, shocking realization that she seemed to have entirely forgotten until this exact moment.
Her reaction made perfect sense, even to Noah.
After so many years of Noah being stuck at the apprentice magus rank, she had basically forgotten he had two elements to begin with.
Dual elemental awakening was a rare, celebrated gift, but when a caster lacked the power to advance, it became a mockery—a cruel joke of nature that gave a person two paths but no strength to walk down either of them.
For years, Noah’s lightning and ice had been nothing more than faint, useless flickers, completely overshadowed by his inability to progress past the most basic novice exercises.
He had spent so long looking like a failure that his family had naturally stopped thinking of him as a dual-element prodigy. They had simply thought of him as Noah, the boy who couldn’t break through.
But now, seeing a perfect, stable manifestation of his second affinity right after the first, the reality of his dual nature returned with the force of a physical blow.
Noah watched her eyes dance along the crackling arcs of the lightning ball, enjoying her wonder for a final, brief moment.
However, he knew he couldn’t keep up the spell for too long, or else they might start to suspect that he was hiding his true power from them.
He then cancelled the spell, and the lightning ball soon vanished into thin air.
The violent snapping sounds died out instantly, the blue light collapsing inward until it was nothing more than a tiny, fading point of static that dissolved into his skin.
The sudden darkness left the hallway feeling dimmer than before, leaving her disappointed again as she let out another small, deflated sigh, her eyes tracking the empty space above his hand.