[[Skill 《Mirror of Words (Voltsppiegel)》 Confirmed]] [[Combat Application Potential: Zero]] [[Overall Evaluation: Failed]] A voice called his name from beyond the screen, and Alva was pulled back to reality. No—there was no screen. Just the examiner, a man, writing something on parchment and sighing. That was all. "…That concludes it. Next applicant." The murmur returned to the great hall of the White Tower Hall in Bluegen—a three-story stone building used as the venue for adventurer certification exams. It wasn't murmuring, though. It was laughter. Low, suppressed laughter rippled like waves from one end of the hall to the other. Alva kept his gaze lowered, feeling his fingertips unconsciously trace the back of his right hand. There was a faint incantation scar there. The mark left on the skin of someone who had learned magic—the usage scar of the word-spirit core, the internal organ that controlled magical power through incantation. Its presence should have been proof that Alva definitely "possessed" something. And yet. "A word parrot, huh." "Just mimicry, isn't it?" "Can you even call that a skill?" The voices didn't belong to any specific person. They seeped out from the entire hall. With roughly twelve hundred applicants crammed into this venue, someone was always speaking somewhere. Alva's ears picked up fragments of those words whether he wanted to or not. The test itself was simple. The examiner would perform an attack spell incantation in Old Laren—the ancient language that formed the basis of modern speech and still served as the foundation for incantation magic. The applicant would respond using their own skill. That was it. What Alva had done was repeat the examiner's incantation word for word, perfectly. The pitch, the intonation, the intervals of breath—not a millimeter off. Then flames indistinguishable from the examiner's magic were reproduced by the words that came from Alva's mouth. Identical heat, identical range, identical form. That was Alva's skill: 《Mirror of Words (Voltsppiegel)》. The ability to perfectly mimic another's incantation and reproduce the identical magical phenomenon. Rather than using words as a "vessel" to carry meaning, words themselves served as a "mirror" to reflect—that was the principle it operated on, or at least that's how Alva understood it. The examiner had frozen at first. Then, after a moment, his expression became confused. And then—he sighed. (…I knew. I knew it, but…) Even as he thought this, something cold spread slowly through Alva's chest. He never got used to the feeling of something he'd known becoming reality. The problem wasn't simply that he "could mimic someone else's magic." It was that he was evaluated as lacking originality. While he possessed a skill, using it always required another's incantation to come first. When the other applicants mocked him as a "word parrot," that's what they meant. The form of the skill was complete, but he couldn't initiate anything on his own. Like a parrot repeating human words, he could only iterate—that was the ridicule. Incidentally, the applicant right before Alva was a large young man who looked supremely confident. From the moment he began his incantation, his voice boomed, and the surrounding applicants took a step back from the sheer intensity. It was a high-power flame spell—《Annihilation (Vernichten)》, he thought. But the young man stumbled badly on the third verse, breaking the continuity of the sounds. The magic backfired. It was small-scale, but sparks scattered, and the young man singed his own eyebrows— "Ow, hot!" —and was disqualified with that pathetic cry. For a moment, a strange atmosphere mixing laughter and relief flowed through the great hall. Even Alva's mouth corners relaxed just slightly. But now he didn't have the luxury of remembering that. --- When Alva stepped outside the White Tower Hall, an early autumn breeze brushed his neck. The city of Bluegen was wrapped in the clamor befitting the kingdom's capital. Market voices carried from the direction of Leve Square, and somewhere a carriage's wheels struck cobblestones. Magical lamps glowed at street corners even in daylight, their pale blue light illuminating the pedestrians passing through. Alva slipped through the crowd and entered an alley. There, he received the transfer notice. The paper was thin, and the contents were brief. 【Frontier Reassignment: Greyghost Village, Immediate Departure】 The Laren Kingdom's adventurer certification exam had a custom of not keeping failed applicants in the capital. Those who failed the test were effectively sent out to remote areas far from the royal city under the pretext of "frontier reassignment." There was a pretense of replenishing personnel in villages near the border where tensions with the empire continued, but the reality was closer to exile. He'd heard rumors of this before the exam. Greyghost. A village eight kilometers inland from the border, located in the western foothills of the Kalt Mountains—the mountain range that formed the border between the Laren Kingdom and the neighboring Tassen Duchy in the kingdom's northwest. Even from the nearest major city of Falken, it took four days on foot. The word "exile" appeared nowhere on the notice. But the meaning was the same. Alva leaned his back against the stone wall of the alley and folded the transfer notice. His father's voice echoed in his mind. His father had been a linguist—or more precisely, an unlicensed linguist who conducted his own language research outside the Royal Language Institute. From the moment Alva could remember, his father had lived in a small room surrounded by ancient texts in Old Laren. That room, where the scent of medicinal herbs and old paper mingled. The margins of his father's old books were filled with annotations. Among them, one line was written in unusually thick strokes. —Words are not vessels, but mirrors. His father believed that words didn't carry meaning. They reflected it back, he believed. So Alva believed too. So when he was granted the skill 《Mirror of Words》, he thought it was the very essence of how he should live. (But a mirror… it just reflects, doesn't it?) The examiner's words were carved into his ears. "Combat application potential: zero." A mirror creates nothing. It only reflects. If you put it that way, it's certainly true. Was his father's words a fantasy? Or was it just that he hadn't understood them correctly? In the first place, was his "mirror" even— "Hey, you heading to Greyghost too? On the cargo wagon?" A wagon had stopped. The driver, a man with an unfriendly face, looked down at Alva. Alva tucked the transfer notice inside his coat and climbed into the cargo bed. --- The four-day journey was terribly long. There were two other passengers in the cargo bed. A middle-aged merchant and a young man accompanying him. They made normal small talk for the first day, but things changed around the second night. Alva realized for the first time on this journey that he had a habit of muttering incantation fragments when he fell asleep. Unconsciously, Old Laren words would start rolling around in his mouth. Sometimes they were fragments of the examiner's incantation, sometimes words he'd read in his father's old books, or sometimes just meaningless sequences of sounds. On the morning of the third day, when Alva woke, the merchant and his companion were sitting at the edge of the cargo bed. They'd created a clear gap between themselves and Alva. "…Um, did I do something wrong?" "No, nothing." But they wouldn't meet his eyes. Well, he supposed that made sense. He understood the feeling of not wanting to sit next to someone who muttered spell-like things in their sleep. Alva smiled wryly and hugged his knees at the edge of the swaying wagon. As the Kalt Mountains drew closer, the air became drier and clearer. On clear days, the white peaks of the mountain range were visible beyond the horizon. Beyond those mountains was the Tassen Duchy, the merchant had said. There were rumors of gray-silver smuggling routes passing through there, though the kingdom officially denied it—Alva had overheard the merchant telling his companion such things. (Gray-silver… I've heard of it.) Gray-silver—a special ore that was only produced in the frontier regions around the Kalt Mountains. It had the property of disrupting the phonemic structure of regular incantation magic. Incantation magic was established through a precise combination of words and magical power, but when gray-silver drifted in the air as fine particles, the "coherence" of those phonemes would break down, causing unintended magical backfires or misfires. That's why it became a smuggling target—as a tool to create places where regular mages couldn't use magic. He didn't know anything beyond that. Now he didn't think he needed to know, so he closed his eyes. --- They arrived at Greyghost at dusk on the fourth day. The moment they entered the valley, something changed. The quality of the air was different. The color was different. A thin gray haze drifted through the air. Not fog. Much finer particles scattered the light. The tilted sun's rays refracted through it, and the entire village took on a color as if viewed through a thin filter. White things appeared gray, and green took on a bluish tint. (So this is… gray-silver particles.) Alva descended from the wagon and began walking down the stone-paved road. Stone buildings lined both sides, but they were all decaying. Walls were blackened, window frames were rotted and warped. He'd heard this village once prospered from silver mining, but now it was nearly a ghost town since the ore veins dried up forty years ago. And then—the villagers' skin. Several people he passed had black patterns running across their faces and hands. They looked like capillaries bulging beneath the skin, but the color was wrong. Like ink had been poured under the skin, a deep black. Their expressions were vacant, their gazes downcast. When Alva looked at them, no one returned his gaze. They exchanged only the bare minimum of words and hurried past. Near the village entrance, an old man was coughing violently. His back was hunched, his waist bent, one hand pressed against a stone wall. Probably in his seventies. His right arm was withdrawn into his coat sleeve, unused. Alva paused for a moment. He hesitated whether to speak to him. But the coughing continued. Three times, four times, before finally subsiding. Slowly, the old man lifted his face, but didn't turn toward Alva. Keeping his face averted, he spoke in a low voice. "Be careful with your words here. …This is a village where words become poison." That was all. The old man said nothing more and disappeared into the alley, coughing. Alva remained in that spot. (Words become poison, huh?) Was it a metaphor? Superstition of the frontier, or a peculiar way of speaking unique to this isolated village? But—the strange specificity of the phrase "words become poison" caught on something. Become poison, not "words are harsh" or "words are scarce," but become poison. Alva had spent his whole life thinking about words. He'd pored over his father's annotated books, analyzed the structure of incantations, and constantly questioned whether words "carried" meaning or "reflected" it. That's why the choice of expression bothered him. What it meant for words to become poison. And if gray-silver particles in the air disrupted the phonemic structure of incantations, then couldn't something abnormal happen here just from speaking words normally? The old man's violent coughing and the black patterns running across the villagers' skin overlapped with that thought. (…Well, finding lodging comes first anyway.) His stomach was empty. --- The Gray Cauldron Inn was located slightly outside the village center. An old stone building that served as both a general store and lodging. The sign