“Black Lion Castle?” Eugene asked.

Eugene’s eyes twinkled brightly as he lifted his head. Across from him, Cyan was chewing on some food — no — on air. With his mouth half-open and his hand lifting empty spoonfuls of air up to his lips, Cyan looked like he had lost half his wits.

This was all because of the book that he had received from Eugene. Three days after his return to the main estate, Eugene had finished writing the book for Cyan by hand — no — by magic and had gifted it to him.

“...That’s right,” Ancilla was the one who had answered Eugene’s question.

While glaring at her son, who had gotten lost in his book during their meal, Ancilla was holding back her desire to reprimand him. As his mother, she was pondering whether she should support her son’s growth or severely criticize him for trying to eat mouthfuls of air while reading a book at the dinner table.

Ancilla decided to just ignore him for now, “...I had thought that the Council of Elders had gathered at the Black Lion Castle in order to prepare for your Coming-of-Age ceremony, but it seems they were waiting for you, as they have invited both you and Cyan to visit the Black Lion Castle.”

“Ho… Ohhh… Hmmm…” Cyan distractedly replied while pursing his lips.

His reply wasn’t meant to show amazement at Ancilla’s words. Instead, it was a reflection of how absorbed Cyan was in the book, even though it made him feel like his head was spinning.

Cyan asked himself, ‘Isn’t this just nonsense? Is something like this really possible?’

In the book that Eugene had written for him, unlike what Cyan had expected, there were no explanations of parrying or other combat techniques.

Instead, the only things listed were ways of stressing one’s ‘Core’ to the point of hellish torture. More specifically, spreading the mana extracted from the Core throughout the body and then circulating it, with the Core acting as the heart and mana as blood. Then, when you had become so familiar with this that you could maintain it unconsciously, you needed to move your body with just your mana, not the strength of your muscles.

This was similar to the outdated physical style of mana training scriptures, which had been...