Late at night, Kyon crawled out of the bushes. He stretched himself till his bones cracked and flexed his neck muscles. First thing first, he stumbled to the hot water spring to have a drink and get washed. He had been dreaming about taking a bath recently. Given the latest events, in his nightmares. This time he huffed and puffed around the hole in the fence for about 10 minutes to make sure if the young lady emerged from the water she would be exclusively dead.

He was almost in perfect health. He had grown new teeth. His bones had been healed. All his internal injuries had been cured. He could go to the war if the need arose.

Kyon made himself look more or less good and sneaked into the bushes closest to the mansion. It never hurts to observe and explore. Even if Anna, Dinah, and even more so Juno, were still sleeping, he couldn’t be too careful.

And indeed... When he saw the beefy guard strolling about the mansion, his happiness knew no bounds. If he had been inside, they would have easily found him. It’s not about seeing or hearing, not at all... Kyon knew that the guard wasn’t taking a walk around the house. He was scanning the area with pure energy. In his case, a shaggy and tenacious slave could be noticed even through the wall!

{Yeah, caution is everything…} - The young scout thought with a sigh of relief.

Kyon spent the next night in the ambush watching the house. He found out that one guard covered the perimeter every two hours including the second floor. After that, he returned to his post. Fortunately, the park wasn’t involved in his itinerary.

The night after that, Kyon updated his information with an accurate schedule of the rounds. The guard took on the inspection strictly on schedule. Therefore, during the breaks, Kyon could go wherever he wanted and he jumped at that opportunity.

It was his outing number two, day number three or night number three to be more precise. Kyon knew the mansion more or less well from the previous scouting. He wasn’t interested in the most of it. He could and had to explore the uncharted territory.

And here he is inside the mansion again. First thing, Kyon got into the bathroom and snatched a hairpin. It might always come in handy. He identified by the measured breathing the room downstairs where the maids were sleeping. He decided to go upstairs and found a row of doors that could be opened only with a formation. He could hear quiet sniffing behind some of them. One belonged to Marina. The young lady was generous enough to allocate a separate room for her new friend. The other sound came from the little demoness herself.

While Kyon was hanging around near the doors to the girl’s bedrooms, wondering where to go further, he heard quiet steps downstairs. His heart did a double somersault right into his stomach. The guard must have started another round in an hour, not in two! That’s a fine kettle of fish. Kyon was sure this time he couldn’t slip away unnoticed. Scanning is a powerful thing, after all!

While his mind was rushing around his skull in panic, searching for a way out, his keen hearing detected the toilet door open. Kyon could hardly hold back a moan of relief. It was just a maid who went out to do some "night errands!” His heart reluctantly returned to its rightful place but first, it strictly warned him: another stress like this and it would refuse to work under such nervous conditions.

Kyon lurked in the darkness. It was too early to relax. Only when the bedroom door slammed behind the maid, he decided to step out of the shadows.

The next moment Kyon felt an indistinct soft poke in his back. His heart cursed and demanded resignation but when Kyon turned around and met Juno face to face, it stopped altogether.

Kyon's eyes hazed over. He felt a sense of futility growing inside... He had just swapped one hell for another. Death herself had found him. There she was, the little one, rocking from side to side and squinting blindly. Synergy immediately clicked him on the nose forcing him to delay the farewell to his life and use his brains. The girl was sleepy! Apparently, she had just woken up at the call of nature. Probably she couldn’t make head or tail of the situation. She was still half asleep!

This time Juno poked her nose in his chest where his heart wasn’t beating anymore and had, apparently, brazenly left for the unconscious. She looked so cute when she was rubbing her sleepy eyes. Then she opened her eyelids, looked at the slave, rubbed her eyes again and when she looked again into the darkness the boy was gone. She shook her head, puzzled, and went to the bathroom.

In a split second, Kyon glided like a shadow into the nearest corner unlit by the moon. He counted her steps with a sinking heart: a step, a step, a step... When, by his count, the girl was in the right room, he jumped out of the mansion and literally dived into the saving thicket of bushes. – {Did it really work!?}

Juno emerged like a sleepy little bird from the toilet and froze for a moment in a stupor: what did she just see?! She glanced around, enraged like a fury... {That’s pure nonsense... Am I imagining things.} - She agreed on that and carelessly returned to her room.

That’s how Kyon has survived due to the impossibility of his existence.

Meeting sleepy Juno had notably messed up with his nerves. The dear little angel was a death messenger for him and, at the same time, an object of his revenge. This time everything worked out alright. Kyon glanced around and whispered a sincere "thank you" to heaven, just in case. What if there really was someone up there.

The next night Kyon was cautious. A bomber only gets to make one mistake, after all... He was lucky enough not to “blow up" and he shouldn’t meddle with fate anymore. Ideally, he should steer clear from the damned (literally) mansion. But his only hope for salvation was there. He had no choice but to try and find at least something useful. Where do normal people keep everything useful? That's right, in a dusty storeroom.

The lock was simple, uncomplicated. All he needed was a couple of seconds and a bent hairpin. The door opened with a quiet creak. Following his voice of reason and mild paranoia, Kyon carefully locked it up from the other side and only then looked around.

It was not unexpected that they kept a working inventory inside: mops, rags, all sorts of useless tools... There also was a huge dusty (like everything else, anyway... what an irony, no one cleans the cleaners’ storeroom!) bookcase filled with leaflets of instructions for servants. Kyon, hungry for literature, eagerly attacked his prey and “swallowed” a good half of the books in just half an hour. He reached for another book and... He nearly swore out loud. It happened to be a typical “switch”, an opener!

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The bookcase slid to the side with a quiet screech opening the descent to a deep basement.

{A secret passage!} - Kyon exclaimed quietly trying to believe his own eyes. He made sure there was no activity outside, gathered all his courage and went downstairs. There must be something valuable, that’s for sure. They would not hide an ordinary room behind the whole system, right?

The descent did not take too long. About ten meters below, Kyon could see rows of bookshelves lit by dusty crystals. There was no treasure, no money, no "secret laboratory." It was a sheer disappointment for all sorts of plunderers and marauders. But definitely not for Kyon: {Books!}

He ran through the section titles with a frenzy: history, alchemy, herbalism, commerce, enchantment, formacy, reference books, fiction, and so on, and so forth...

Kyon was delighted. He grabbed the first available book on alchemy and flipped through it with pleasure memorizing each line. Truth to be told, he did not find any particularly valuable or secret information but he didn’t expect much. In fact, the library was not a family heritage. There were no cloudy stones with formations, no techniques or miracle recipes. There was only publicly available information like laws, patterns, concepts, principles, and canons, as well as detailed descriptions of herbs, animals, stones, metals, etc.

It’s rather unusual to hide a dusty storehouse of books behind a bookshelf. Who could come up with that? Maybe it was just a whim? Or did the owner of the mansion want to set a trap for his children? Like in forbidden (hidden) fruit is sweet.

Given his informational hunger and the absence of any other means of learning about the world, Kyon didn’t complain. He could learn some general concepts so that he wouldn’t make a complete fool of himself if anything popped up. Kyon was staring greedily at the shelves marked "History"... {No... It definitely won't help me right now.}

His eyes lingered on the section of formacy. It was what Martin and Flitz did. Formacy was valued in this world almost above all else. He got interested in this science when he was in the mine. A lot of curious things could be found among formations: a searching formation, a family formation, a passport formation, a subjugating formation, formations in cloudy stones, a sound transmitter formation. And that’s only what he had personally seen. To put it short, it was an interesting and most importantly, widely practiced science!

He cast a longing look at the piles of other books and made up his mind. He nodded to his own thoughts. He would be back some other day. They had to wait. He opened the first manuscript and plunged headlong into the world of formations.

Kyon’s eyes were burning with interest and a thirst for knowledge. He took one book after another, studied it, memorized, pondered over, juxtaposed the information, looked past any falsehood or inaccuracy, figured out what he could make out of it... His head worked at 120%, Synergy was not idle, either. It kept obligingly warning the boy the dawn was close. Unfortunately, the reading session was over for the time being. Kyon put the opus aside with a sigh. (The title was “The searching formation and the ways it should NOT be used.” It was impossible to put it down!) Then he went upstairs. He had to tinker with the “handle-opener" on the backside of the bookcase but he was lucky to find the necessary inconspicuous book pretty quick. Kyon quietly left the mansion and had some rest in the bushes that had become so dear to him.

During the next three days, he made nightly raids into the hidden basement library.

The science of formations turned out to be the foundation of modern humanity and not only that. Slaves, servants, workers, family members, investigators, sect members, citizens, all of them have a formation that displays their rank in the hierarchy, as well as their position, specialty, affiliation, age, sometimes location, the status of being alive / killed / poisoned / ill, stage of development, sometimes even shopping list! Certain functions such as alive / dead / location identification require a point of data accumulation that will receive a signal created by the spatial attribute. There was an information center in the mine. Martin, for example, connected Kyon’s formation to a mercury mirror. As an option, it could be another person, a group of people of a certain status, position, etc. Each respected family must have a center that receives information about all family members. There they can find out who is where, who’s been killed, poisoned, who’s raised the stage of development to control them as much as possible.

The formation is essentially a passport with embedded information about a person.

Formations come in different functions, for example, for analyzing air temperature, humidity, pressure. They can record sound, a visual image: an analogue of a bug, a camcorder, a camera. That’s why the framed photo in Flitz’s office was so strange. It was created by a visual formation.

Formations can be defensive and attacking but these require some resources to create, usually money, sometimes key-spheres, some assets, sometimes something else.

Formations differ in quality. They are conditionally divided into “E”, “D”, “C”, “B”, “A”, “S” ranks, where “S” is a brilliant piece of genius work done by a high-grade formacist. The higher is the rank of the formation, the more compact, uncomplicated, effective and clear it is. It wasn’t the first time Kyon had heard about the rank system. It was used everywhere. People were ranked by numbers: 1st rank, 2nd, 3rd and so on. Everything not connected with people was ranked by letters: “E”, “D”, “C”, “B”, “A”, “S”.

When applying a formation, the formacist creates a slot - the void inside which the formation is placed. It’s essential not only to put the content inside but also protect / hide it from the others who could detect it on the spiritual level.

The very core of the formation is often connected with something (the info-center, an object, a person...) It’s often necessary to have a spatial attribute to give orders at the distance, to find a person by the searching formation, to transmit sound information, etc. The body of the formation consists mainly of pure energy, the most basic element on the planet.

Formations can be created without a spatial attribute. For example, it’s possible to create a subjugating formation that responds to a specific voice, not to the superior formation, just as Flitz did with Kyon.

The boy was happy to notice that creating formations closely resembled writing the program code. He used to be quite a computer whiz in his world. Creating the code, endless optimization, setting the properties of the formation you need... He was back in his element.

He could set absolutely any properties with his programming skills! He had discovered the essence of that bizarre magic in the books he read. He needed to practice it on someone, no way around it. He’d love to experiment on Juno but not yet.

Formations are a kind of bridge to the energy of the world. They assign certain properties, nature, and behavior. That’s why the world, or rather the energy, gets to work according to your rules, according to the rules of the formation.

Kyon was right: the local energy has internal memory.

It was frustrating to find out the following fact: the more developed the person in сomparison to the formacist, the more energy the applied formation should contain. However, it was nice to know that the more the formation optimized, the more energy each code line needed. It means, the chance of success only increased. Optimization was his path.

He came up with a brilliant idea: he should make his unique formation. The reason wasn’t to gain a skill or an illusional advantage in something but specifically to take revenge on Juno. Kyon rubbed his hands. He trembled with excitement so pleased he was with his insidious plan. The fate itself had brought him to the library, no doubt! {Alright, nasty girl! Just you wait!}