Mei Ruan: April 27th, 20XX

“Why would you scare me like that? You could have gotten hurt!”

Instead of shrinking into himself and looking around nervously like Aruna often did when I caught her causing trouble like this, Cai stared me straight in the face and let out a toothy grin. I quickly undid the spell and watched as he let himself fall onto his arms and flip himself up right.

Although it would have been a tough maneuver to flip upright in the air, I couldn’t believe that he could support his entire body weight so casually on his arms alone. That wasn’t to say that I couldn’t probably replicate the maneuver, but I’d never had cause to try.

Cai was so physically competent that I couldn’t help but remember that his father had been a high-ranking goblin. Esmeralda would often make oddly antagonistic comments on the subject, but she had mentioned nothing about how it showed up in Cai’s behaviour.

I made a mental note to remind him to scale it back a bit. Being so competent in moving without one’s wings could just be an odd talent, but that, combined with his background, would let way to a host of rumours that he didn’t need to hear.

Cai shakily bobbed forward and backwards as he stabilized himself before shaking his golden curls into a shiny halo around his face.

“You would never hurt me-”

He cut himself off in the middle of the sentence and the bright smile temporarily dropped off his face, but it returned just as quickly as it had disappeared, and he finished his statement.

“Not while you’re in your right mind, anyhow.”

While I figured out how I felt about being teased over the past, he flipped around and fluttered toward the miniature obstacle course. I shook off the annoyance and decided to take joy in the fact that he’d chosen not to hold a grudge over the matter.

No matter which way one turned it, I was in the wrong. Taking a bit of teasing every now and then wasn’t the worst punishment in the world.

But he was most definitely more comfortable around me than he had been not too long ago. I wondered what triggered the change, but I doubted I would ever get an explanation. Mayhaps one of his caretakers had put in a good word for me? But I couldn’t imagine who would do such a thing. The Gagnon sisters simply bore with me, as I was the best option to marry the prince and protect the prestige of the throne until a new generation of royalty appeared. Esmeralda might have done so, but I doubted Cai held her opinion in any sort of high esteem.

“Mei!”

He successfully drew my attention to the contraption and the dolls that I had played around with earlier.

I was still surprised he’d liked the testing courses the students at the academies used enough to ask me for the blueprints, but I was more shocked at what he had done with them. It was impressive enough that he’d thought to scale it down to fit into a small section of the courtyard, but that he’d taken it a step further and had encouraged the royal engineers to turn the already sophisticated machinery into a device that solely trained magic control.

It was something so beyond imagination that seeing it here made me wonder why no one else had come up with this before.

Then again, a fairy’s control over their magic, regardless of how much magic they could actually control, was always a source of pride. I was sure that asking any fairy to use a tool to fine-tune it would be enough to get challenged to a duel.

Using magical tools was always associated with the witches, and as silly as it was, if I hadn’t seen the potential completely acted out through Cai’s whims, I wouldn’t have even considered that anything based on witch sensibilities would be helpful to a high-ranking fairy like myself, never mind a royal.

“Mei! Would you mind helping me start it? I forgot to ask them to take out the annoying part of it, needing an active magic supply to run.”

He slightly deflated but didn’t give me time to console him before running over to the engineers to ask them to redesign my state-of-the-art machine. But then again, the engineers at my Ruan Duchy were certainly incomparable to the hidden geniuses that were bound to the castle.

I put a hand into a notch in the contraption and tried to push a pure stream of magic into it, but after a moment, I was forced to pull out my wand. Even though it was moderately sized, it still needed more magic than the larger one it was based on.

Before Cai had appeared, the engineers had told me that he often visited their workshops and had effortlessly done test runs for the machines without his wand. I hadn’t thought much of it back then, but after seeing how much magic it needed to even start, I grew worried.

I stabilized the amount of magic I needed to send into the machine and returned my attention to Cai, who had settled beside the row of puppets and was busy drawing a spell in the air. I couldn’t see magic until it had manifested in the air as a spell, as the capacity to see magic in its natural form was a royal-specific trait, but even then, it didn’t manifest in every royal.

More importantly, it definitely should not have manifested in the half-goblin prince.

As well, the way he moved his fingers around and seemed to nudge the lines into the proper place seemed almost surreal. He had a scroll beside him that he looked to for reference, but from what I could see, the title of the work was much too advanced for someone of his age.

After a few more seconds, he waved the spell toward a puppet and fluttered backwards as it croaked and scratched to life. Similar to my actions in the past, he had it run through a few movements in the air, but his actions diverged from mine when he quickly created another spell and channeled it through the puppet.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

I could only watch in horror as the puppet took to the air once again and manifested a magic bomb.

He temporarily broke focus and looked to me; at first, I thought nothing of it, but his face tensed and he quickly drew out his wand and resumed his activities.

It took a moment for me to place the sinking feeling in my stomach but seeing the wand all snapped it into perspective.

It was a beauty of a wand that caught my breath as I recognized its materials.

The wand was a construction of Marian heartwood and the silk of an Auronea Malizesider.

Marian heartwood could only be sourced from the heart of the Marian heart tree. They were an ancient species that contrasted their lovely names by being a notoriously vicious species. Their hearts were valuable wand material because the tree’s special trait was its potential to become indestructible. The stronger the magic that sourced it was, the more impossible it was to break it in the middle of a battle.

The Auronea Malizesider was a golden eight-legged beast that was known for its incredible magic amplification capacity and its ability to bounce back spells. Its silk carried similar tendencies and could bounce back a simple water ball spell as a flood to the assailant.

It was an incredible wand, by any definition, and those were the only materials I could identify. I was sure that none of its other components would lose out to the two I could see, but that led the question of why Belpheobe would have crafted such a powerful and pricey material into a wand. Never mind a wand for a prince that under normal circumstances would never inherit the throne.

On top of the spell that Cai had used earlier, he thickened hundreds of magic strands to the point I could see them with my bare eyes, and attached them all to the puppet so he had control of every joint and non-existent muscle on its body.

I blinked a few times as the threads sewed themselves into a suit of armor around the wooden puppets, and it took on the visage of a golden fairy. The features on it looked somewhat familiar, but I didn’t bother trying to identify them. The whole thing was so perfect that it looked almost grotesque, and it left me with an uncomfortable feeling.

He quickly led it through the machine, manipulating it with his magic alone and having it cast spells as if it was an independent warrior.

It ended up finishing with two minutes on the clock; terrible by comparison to our results on the real thing, but downright terrifying when measured by its own feats. I tried to estimate how well I could do with this, but I doubted I could beat the prince’s results by much.

Even if I genuinely put forward an effort, I wouldn’t be able to manifest that much magic through the puppet and would have needed to send in supplementary spells from outside to help the puppet pass the course.

“Well? What did you think?”

Cai bounced towards me as he released his magic from the puppet vessel and failed to witness the puppet collapse into itself. I didn’t know what material that they’d used, but I was sure it would have been something with an incredible amount of magic conductivity. The fact that it couldn’t withstand constant pressure from the prince’s magic was just another line to add onto my worries about him.

He had the nerve to hold a bashful expression on his face, despite having accomplished a feat that I doubted many of my peers could. At the very least, Aruna would have to dedicate at least a half-century to get onto this level, and even that was because her father was a witch and could offer some advice on the topic. The incongruity between his reaction and his accomplishment made it seem disingenuous, but I trusted that he just didn’t know how amazing he was.

I wondered why neither Esmeralda nor the Gagnon sisters had alerted him to his gifts, but until I found out, it wasn’t my place to interfere with their rearing methods of a royal. At the least, even if Esmeralda had only entered the castle in Belpheobe’s era, the Gagnon sisters had been here since the times of Heloise, Cai’s grandmother.

“it’s little more than a toy right now, but I couldn’t think of any ways to make it any more challenging. But even if I had managed to make it more challenging, I don’t think I would have been able to run it.”

I removed my wand from the machine and replaced it in my holster.

“No such thing Cai, this is incredible. How did you come up with such an idea?”

He seemed pleased by my comment, but it was also clear that he thought I was just saying it to make him happy.

Once he likened it to a toy, I could see the similarities between this and the children’s toys that had recently risen in popularity. As the witches made efforts to create bonds with the fairies, a lot of merchants had taken to carrying toys that acted as physical manifestations of spells. All the young children would need to do is push their magic into it and watch as the result popped out. Aruna’s father had created one that created magical flowers that glowed in the dark for her when she was younger, but she had quickly lost interest when she’d learned how to make the spell on her own.

Those toys were harmless enough in their own right, and had even amused me to an extent. But what Cai had done?

The comparison was almost insulting.

And the type of spells that he’s used were just ridiculous.

Both their intensity, sturdiness and interactions were something that was difficult for me to acknowledge had come from a male fairy. Even one as Royal as Cai.

Male fairies were just simply less compatible with magic than females were. It wasn’t due to any more or less resources that were given to them, but was just a biological fact. An unfair advantage that had been written into all of our genes. If I added on the fact that he was half goblin then things made even less sense.

And even if I admitted that his magical prowess was to be expected from a royal, that didn’t change the fact that he had fainted from magic exhaustion less than a month ago. Although the spell he had used to restrain my magic had been high leveled, it was still much less intense than the magic regimen he had just put the puppet through.

If he kept growing like this, he might even be able to compare to his mother’s magical feats and while the late queen had not been one renowned for her magic, it had still been one of many stars on her belt.

Yet, despite all the facts in front of me, I couldn’t find a way to make them logically make sense.

Unless….

When the late queen had passed, she had used a wish to give him all of her magic before she died.

I shook my head and tried to rid the thought before it grew roots and became a conviction, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

Usually, when a fairy died, their bodies would disintegrate into magic, and the surrounding land would be rejuvenated. This was even more potent when a royal died. All the existing magic would be purified, and every fairy would feel a significant rise in their abilities.

This hadn’t happened for a long time, seeing as most Royals simply went into a long rest when they felt it was time for their children to have children of their own, but it should have happened when Belpheobe passed.

Although there had been a wave of magic and we had all felt the intense depression that came with the loss of a royal, it hadn’t been nearly as potent as it should have been for a Fairy as powerful as Cai’s mother.

The fact that the final wave of magic had been so weak had been a topic for the scholars to investigate and discuss for many years, but the final conclusion was that most of that magic had been lost or dissipated in the failed transfer process, on their way to the human world.

It was a conclusion that had been reached after much research and deliberation by the world’s most intelligent minds.

But looking at Cai now and how easily he interacted with magic, I had to acknowledge that there was a large oversight on their behalf.

It was something worth investigating, but I would not be the one to investigate it. Until the proof was put right in front of my face and I was forced to accept it, I would just continue to attribute all of this to the natural affinity the Royal class had to magic, and I would continue to think that Cai, no, my fiancée was simply a prodigy.

After all, the alternative was just too terrifying to think about.