Sera sat on a protruding flat rock, tears gleaming at the edges of her eyes.

The Frozen Grass piercing through the snow beneath was as abundant as ever, swaying gently in the wind, oblivious to the sadness of the girl sitting among them. When she heard the crunch of snow beneath my feet, she quickly wiped her tears away and turned around, putting on a brave front.

“I think my throat is getting better. We should gather as much honey as possible before I go to NorthStar,” she said with a bright smile.

In my eyes, Sera was too kind for her own good. She couldn’t stop worrying about how the villagers would survive once she left for NorthStar Academy — the best magic academy in this world. After all, she was our only Songstress.

Without a word, I took out the Sound Amplifying Crystal and tossed it to her. She caught it easily, tilting her head in confusion.

“What’s this, big brother?”

“A temporary solution to our problems,” I replied, some part of me answering eagerly like a child anticipating Christmas.

This was the first step toward solving our village’s struggles in the long run.

Sera tilted her head again, her eyes filled with even greater confusion. Maybe I should have explained it better.

“What does this do?” she asked, tossing the crystal lightly between her hands like a cat playing with a ball of yarn.

“Try speaking after pouring Mana into it.” A demonstration would be far better than any explanation.

Sera hopped down from the rock, activating a body enhancement Skill to protect herself from any potential accidents. Accidents that might, or might not, happen.

In my humble, yet correct, opinion, using a Skill for this was unnecessary. However, considering the previous Karl’s inventions were infamous for exploding, her caution was justified.

After double-checking the crystal, I was confident it was safe to use.

Once Sera finished preparing, she poured Mana into the crystal and spoke. “Hello.”

Nothing happened. No explosion, which she clearly expected, and unfortunately, no intended effect either.

“Put it closer to your mouth,” I instructed. The crystal failed to pick up her voice since she held it, quite literally, at arm’s length.

Sera glanced at me suspiciously before slowly raising the crystal closer to her mouth. By “closer,” I meant she moved it from a fully extended arm to a barely bent elbow at a forty-five-degree angle.

I sighed at the sight of such blatant distrust and walked toward her.

“Give it to me if you don’t want to do it,” I said, holding out my hand.

“No way!” she exclaimed, clutching the crystal and turning away. “I won’t let you.”

“It won’t explode.”

“You said that last time too.”

Stubborn girl. I shook my head at her odd way of showing care.

It’s a simple microphone. Nothing’s going to happen.

Sera took a deep breath and, after what felt like an eternity, finally brought the crystal close to her mouth. Overcoming her fear of explosions, she spoke into it.

The crystal didn’t explode, which was a relief.

However, the result was far from perfect.

The crystal unleashed a supersonic blast directly into my face, rattling my brain and probably rupturing my eardrums. I stumbled back, dazed, as the realization hit: the crystal worked. It just needed a serious adjustment to its volume output.

Meanwhile, Sera, similarly shaken, froze for a moment before collapsing to the ground. Her eyes shrank to dots, and she clutched her ears, rolling around in pain.

“Why do you hate me, brother?” Sera lamented, her voice muffled as she lay sprawled on the ground.

“You’ll be fine,” I said, patting her back once she stopped rolling.

Shrugging off the ringing in my ears, I picked up the crystal Sera had dropped and began modifying it. With my ridiculously small amount of Mana, I identified the Runes responsible for the volume output.

It wasn’t the Runes that resembled a tree branch. Nor was it the Runes that looked like a lamppost.

After some trial and error, and another supersonic attack, I finally found what I was looking for — a Rune that moved like waves with droplets attached to its ring. Adjusting the height of the waves downward was enough to reduce the volume.

“This should do it. Try this, Sera,” I said, holding the crystal out to her.

I looked up, only to see heaven and earth switch places while everything else spun sideways.

“Huh?” I muttered, disoriented.

Sera’s face swam into view, filled with panic as she poured Mana into me. Her lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear a word she was saying.

*Ding

[Full body restoration activated]

A warm sensation coursed through my veins, stopping the sky from spinning.

I got up and thanked Sera, only to receive an earful about how I must never do that again. It seemed I had overestimated the amount of Mana in my body. Forming a Qi Core was becoming more urgent by the second.

“Repeat after me: I’ll never use that much Mana ever again,” she instructed, puffing out her cheeks.

“I’ll never use that much Mana ever again,” I repeated obediently.

“Swear it to the Guardians,” she demanded, her cheeks still puffed out.

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It was amusing to see someone as muscular as Sera still manage to look cute. Maybe it was just my brotherly instinct talking. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that she’d just mentioned a clue.

“The Guardians?” I asked.

She squinted at me. “Big brother.” Her tone carried a warning edge, perhaps thinking I was hesitating or unwilling. Truthfully, I was more curious about who or what these Guardians were.

I’d noticed a recurring pattern across worlds: if there were god-like beings or actual gods, they often held the key to understanding what threatened that world. Myths and legends often played a huge path in finding a path forward.

“I swear to the Guardians,” I said, knowing I needed to get out of this predicament first. Searching for more information about these beings would come later.

The gap between those who used Mana and those who didn’t was vast, an abyss ordinary men couldn’t cross. Her demand was technically impossible, but I intended to keep my promises. I wasn’t going to rely on Mana much anyway, Qi was the right path for me. So, technically, I didn’t lie.

“Good,” she said, nodding in satisfaction.

Sera took the crystal and, after learning from her earlier mistake, poured Mana into it cautiously. This time, she sat on the ground and blocked her ears with her hands, using her feet to hold the crystal steady.

“Don’t do something like this when you go to the academy,” I sighed.

“What’s that? I can’t hear you,” she replied smugly before whispering into the crystal. “Hello.”

Her voice vibrated through the crystal, which amplified it to just the right level — about twice as loud as her normal voice. This time, it worked perfectly.

“This is great!” she exclaimed, her face lighting up. “I can sing without straining my voice now.”

I stared at her throat. That obnoxiously familiar feeling surfaced again. If it was truly what I thought it was, then this world was in far deeper trouble than I had anticipated.

Confirming my hypothesis just got bumped up to the must-do list.

“It’s only a temporary solution,” I said. “We need to heal your throat. And this thing still needs improvements before we can leave the village without worries.”

“Eh? You’re coming with me, big brother?” she asked, tilting her head.

“Yes,” I replied with a firm nod.

“But you didn’t enroll in the academy. You didn’t even get recommended.”

“I can enroll later. According to plan, once we arrive at NorthStar, we should have two weeks before the semester begins.”

If there was a magic academy hailed as the best in the world, then the fated ones would undoubtedly be there. Especially in the best class — S-Class, First-Class, or something along those lines. It was cliché, sure, but patterns like this were hard to ignore. With my knowledge, I was certain I could score perfectly in the entrance exams. I had done it before.

Sera scratched her cheek awkwardly. “The student enrollment period ended three months ago.”

…Well, shit.

*****

“Meat Bees,” I mumbled as we crouched in a bush just a stone's throw away from their hive.

Before us stood a hive as massive as a double-story house, with countless bees buzzing in and out.

They resembled honeybees at first glance, but their heads were the size of basketballs, and they behaved more like vulture bees. Their enormous mandibles looked ready to shred meat into small chunks and haul it back to the hive to make honey.

If I study their patterns and figure out how they turn meat into honey... I paused, dismissing the thought. No, that would take too long.

I didn’t know how much time I had before the end arrived. In some worlds, it had come right after I woke up. In others, it had taken over a hundred years. The best course of action was to solve the problems in front of me as quickly as possible with the tools I had, then move on to the next.

Ideally, the solutions I created would be sustainable in the long run.

I opened the mission log again to check if anything had changed.

[Quest: Helped the fated ones save the world]

[Condition: Restore Harmony through the power of culture]

There was no countdown to the end of the world this time. That much was certain. Considering the condition involved culture, I was confident I had plenty of time. Culture wasn’t something that could be established easily or quickly after all.

“I’ll keep watch. Be careful, young master, second miss,” Lucy said, pulling two hidden daggers from her Victorian maid dress. How she managed to hide those knives while keeping her dress so impeccably fluffy was a mystery.

Sera gripped her Nilde firmly — a szabla gifted to our family as a token of friendship by the Frost Elf.

The blade had been passed down through six generations of our family. Forged from Elven steel and tempered in Frost Fire, it was a masterpiece with three azure lines running along the curved edge. The hilt, wrapped in soft yet durable Snow Hare leather, ensured the wielder’s grip wouldn’t slip. Enhanced with toughening, slashing, and self-repair Runes, it was one of the greatest treasures the Xanderson Clan had ever received.

The Elf who crafted it was likely still alive. Six generations to us was barely over half a lifetime for an Elf. With an average lifespan of five hundred years, they had time on their side. We, on the other hand, didn’t. No one in our clan had ever lived past fifty — a curse in exchange for the ability to steal life force. Or so the story went.

“Ready,” Sera said, raising the Sound Amplifying Crystal.

Our roles were clear. Sera would keep the bees in a daze with her song, I would collect the honey, and Lucy would keep watch and pull us out if things went south.

Lucy conjured a shadowy rope and tied it securely around our waists.

“Two tugs mean proceed with caution. Three tugs mean retreat immediately,” she reminded us firmly.

We nodded in unison and began.

Sera poured Mana into the crystal, and her bright and velvety voice, amplified by the crystal, rang out. The melody carried by the wind, drifting toward the massive beehive and weaving its spell over the Meat Bees.

“♪ We reached beyond to the stars,

Chasing what should never meant,

We touched the core of a law,

And left it ripple and then fall,

We tried to hold the thread tight,

Yet what we took changed all our lives, our lives,

I hope you learn from the broken,

And hear the songs we once sung,

When the winds start to fall,

We hope you rise above the tides,

‘Cause that’s what you can, that’s what you can,

When the storm came through,

Oh, when the storm came through, ♪”

There’s something about this song. A clue, perhaps. I thought as we treaded carefully toward the hive.

The bees didn’t attack us, which meant the first step in solving the village’s long-term problem was a success.

I kept my eyes on the dazed bees as they fluttered around, ignoring us as if we were nothing more than air.

One of them, however, stopped directly in front of us and clicked its mandibles. The sound was sharp, like scissors in a tailor’s hands, ready to cut through cloth, or a doll’s head. Its ferocious, almost mindless compound eyes stared at us.

Sera tightened her grip on her szabla. She kept singing, her voice unwavering, but her gaze remained locked on the bee, not daring to blink.

Fortunately, the bee eventually ignored us and flew away.

Interesting.

Sera’s singing didn’t make us invisible to the bees. Instead, it likely altered their perception of us, making them see us as part of the hive. That was my hypothesis, at least. But I still lacked enough information about this “Harmony” to be certain. More testing would be required.

We exchanged glances and nodded before moving closer to the hive.

Once inside, we were greeted by countless hexagonal cells stacked into towering walls. These walls kept the freezing wind out, leaving the hive’s interior noticeably warmer.

In the farthest corner of the hive, a massive Meat Bee as large as a pickup truck lay resting, likely the queen.

The wall on the left brimmed with a gooey substance of an ochre hue. As soon as I caught a faint lavender-like aroma wafting through the air, I knew we had found what we were looking for, honey.

Setting down the wooden box, which was nearly as tall as me, we began collecting the honey.

Our hands moved methodically as we worked, ignoring the few bees nearby that were busy digesting leftovers into fresh honey just twenty steps away. Surprisingly, the gooey substance wasn’t as sticky as I had anticipated, making it much easier to harvest.

Before we could finish filling the box, I felt three distinct tugs on the shadow rope connecting us to Lucy.

Sera and I exchanged a glance. Without a word, I closed the box and hoisted it up while Sera took the lead, charging out of the hive.

We were barely an arm’s length away from the hive’s entrance when a beastly roar echoed through the woods — the unmistakable roar of the apex predator here, the Bearowl.

*Ding

[Harmony has been disrupted]

What followed the System’s message was the ominous hum of a thousand wings, rising like a storm. A wave of bees surged toward us, their mandibles ready to shred us to pieces, digest us, and turn us into honey.