After delivering his cold beratement of Mark, Ulrich’s lingering patience was spent. He was eager to move forward with the purpose of his visit. He curtly ordered Ceres upstairs, and the young elf quickly followed, scurrying up the wooden steps in his wake.
His last two examination sessions took place in a designated study room on the second floor. By Ulrich’s strict demand, neither Ceres nor Mark was ever allowed to enter the room when he was not present. It was his private place, modified for his study of the Thornbreath.
Upon crossing the threshold, the scale of Ulrich’s work became evident. A massive desk dominated the center of the room, filled with towering stacks of leather-bound books. Every spare inch of surface was covered in scattered parchment, all covered in dark ink and Ulrich’s beautiful handwriting.
These were his rare worked logs, documenting every known theory about the Thornbreath and cross-referencing them with his own original magical equations and spell blueprints. Even the complex theorems he eventually deemed failures were neatly stacked in the corner, kept just in case a discarded idea might hold the missing piece to the puzzle later on.
Ulrich was indeed actively attempting to treat the Thornbreath.
If any scholar from the grand academies had heard of his endeavor, they would have laughed until their ribs ached. The affliction was universally classified as incurable. The Elves, with their boundless mastery over nature, would have openly mocked the arrogance of a human attempting to solve a curse that their oldest elders could not even understand entirely.
Both Mark and Ceres had found his promise difficult to believe. Yet, standing in this room, surrounded by hundreds of pages of maddeningly complex magical theory, it was impossible to think the Count was writing mere gibberish. Ulrich was really serious, and he looked so confident that even Mark and Ceres took him seriously and believed he could.
Walking behind his desk, Ulrich rolled the sleeves of his tunic further up his forearms, his crimson eyes already scanning the final lines of his latest equation. He tapped his finger against the parchment once, then raised his gaze to Ceres, who was standing nervously near the door.
"Your clothes," he said.
She was wearing a woolen traveling tunic. Ulrich had given strict instructions during their first session regarding her attire. The magical examination process caused rapid spikes in body temperature, and the fabrics only induced suffocating heat and panic. He required her to wear something thin and light, clothing that would offer zero resistance to her breathing.
Remembering his previous reprimand, Ceres nodded quickly and rushed out to her bedroom. Two minutes later, she returned wearing only a simple, knee-length linen shift. It was very thin, certainly not the modest attire she was used to wearing, but she knew from experience how uncomfortable the examination would become. Light clothing was a necessity, not a choice.
Without needing to be told, she hurried over to a long, rectangular wooden table positioned in the center of the room. She climbed up, laying on her back, and fixed her unique eyes nervously on the plaster ceiling.
Mark stood near the head of the table, his posture stiff. As always, he kept a respectful distance, but his presence served as a silent, encouraging anchor for a nervous Ceres.
Seeing that she was in position, Ulrich did not waste another second. He stepped up to the side of the table and hovered his open palm directly over her abdomen.
Immediately, the air between them hummed with ambient mana. A luminous circle of eight glowing runes flared into existence beneath his palm.
Veinsight.
It was a common spell utilized mainly by Witches to inspect the health and alignment of a fellow coven member’s internal Tree. However, Ulrich had deconstructed and rewritten the magical formula to suit his exact needs. He had sharpened the spell’s focus, transforming it into a microscopic lens designed specifically to hunt for the parasitic thorns buried deep within Ceres’s mana veins.
As the spell took hold, Ulrich’s crimson eyes began to glow with a faint, eerie red light. A brilliant, three-dimensional mental map of Ceres’s internal Tree materialized in the air above her chest, rendered in lines of pulsing silver and diseased, rotting black.
"Mnn..." Ceres whimpered, biting down slightly on her lower lip.
As the magic washed through her, a strange, invasive discomfort reached deep in her bones. It truly felt as though Ulrich’s eyes were piercing straight through her skin, brushing against her very soul. It was a bizarre, overwhelming sensation, a mix of a phantom, ticklish pressure, and a terrifying vulnerability that she could never quite put into words.
Ulrich remained perfectly still, his glowing crimson eyes locked upon the glowing projection of Ceres’s internal Tree.
The image hovering above her chest was frustratingly blurry, the details swimming in a haze of imprecise magic. It was not an accurate diagnostic tool by any measure, but that was entirely by design. This was only his third session with Ceres, and Ulrich refused to cast high-tier, highly accurate spells upon her yet.
For the past two sessions, he had essentially been casting ’dummy’ spells, harmless, low-impact weaves of magic meant solely to acclimatize Ceres and her unique physiology to the foreign intrusion of his mana. He had to be methodical. If he allowed impatience to dictate his actions and leaped several steps ahead, a sudden surge of unfamiliar magic could shock her system, inadvertently triggering the very curse he was trying to study.
Today was no different. He was not actively looking for a cure within her body; he was simply testing how her flesh and her veins reacted to different combinations of basic runes.
He was making virtually no direct progress on the Thornbreath itself during these physical examinations. The towering stacks of research on his desk were not derived from scanning Ceres, but from cross-referencing ancient texts regarding a Witch’s internal architecture and the delicate, elemental constitution of an Elf. During these two-to-three-hour sessions, his only goal was to map her body’s tolerances, figuring out exactly which specific frequencies of magic she could endure without spiraling into pain.
If he wanted to properly dissect a curse as lethal and reactive as the Thornbreath, he could not use standard medical magic. He had to forge new, custom-made spells perfectly tailored to Ceres’s unique, contradictory biology.
Naturally, he had not bothered explaining this grueling process to Mark or Ceres. The old man and the terrified girl naively believed he was actively searching for a cure at this very moment. But Ulrich knew better. He could hardly decipher a five-hundred-year-old mystery using a blurry map and an eight-rune spell. The greatest healers in the capital utilized matrixes of over fifty runes, casting several simultaneously, just to mend shattered bones. And those legendary healers would never dare lay a finger on a host carrying the Thornbreath.
After roughly twenty minutes of silence, Ulrich noticed Ceres’s breathing finally steady into a calm rhythm. Her body had accepted the presence of Veinsight.
It was time to push the boundary.
Without breaking his concentration, Ulrich raised his left hand alongside his right. A second magical circle flared into existence, this one burning with the light of ten distinct runes.
Mana Echo.
It was an auditory spell designed to let him physically listen to the resonance of her mana. By tracking the dissonant, scratching sounds of her magical flow, he could theoretically pinpoint the exact locations where the parasitic thorns had strangled her veins. If his eyes were rendered useless by the blur of the low-tier visual spell, he would rely on his ears.
Yet, just like the first, it was merely a basic-tier spell, offering only muffled, chaotic feedback. But once again, finding the thorns was not the true objective today. The goal was to force Ceres’s delicate body to bear the weight of two active spells simultaneously.
It placed a significant, immediate burden on her system. If she could not handle two weak spells now, she would never survive the overwhelming pressure of the high-tier, multi-layered matrixes Ulrich would eventually need to cast to dissect the curse later.
Looking down at the table, Ulrich watched as Ceres’s chest heaved. Her breathing immediately turned rapid and shallow, her small hands clenching into tight fists at her sides as she fought to endure the invisible weight settling over her heart.
Ulrich cursed inwardly.
The Thornbreath was truly terrifying, not only because of what it did but also how it defended itself, threatening even its host.
Two basic spells were already pushing Ceres to her limits.
That fact alone signaled the long path ahead of them. Ulrich knew the process would be exhausting, but he was very patient. This was only their third session. He had three full years before he was scheduled to take a teaching position at the Academy. By the time that day arrived, Ulrich was confident he would have advanced a lot in his progress.
Regardless of the strain, Ulrich maintained the delicate balance of the two spells for another hour. He stood perfectly still, watching calmly until Ceres finally managed to fight through the crushing pressure, her breathing slowly returning to a steady rhythm.
Her resilience was impressive. Thinking for a moment, Ulrich decided it was time to push the threshold slightly further. He prepared a third spell.
This one was significantly stronger, a Rank 2 spell weaving together over twenty runes. However, this spell was not designed to pry any deeper into the rotting architecture of her chest; he would never risk such an aggressive intrusion so soon. Instead, it was an anesthetic weave meant to dull her physical sensations. He needed to gauge her reaction to sensory deprivation, checking to see if the magic could effectively numb the pain of the curse without triggering a panic response.
As the third circle flared to life, the temperature in the room plummeted.
"Hah... i—it’s weird..." Ceres gasped, her voice suddenly spiking with slight fear. She tried to lift her arms, her eyes wide and panicked as she stared at her own hands. A frightening, icy numbness was rapidly crawling up her limbs, completely severing her connection to her own body. "I just... I can’t feel...!"
Recognizing the immediate onset of panic, Ulrich did not hesitate. With a flick of his wrist, he shattered the spell, instantly canceling all three layers of magic.
The glowing runes dissolved into the air, and the oppressive weight vanished from the room. Ceres lay against the table, completely drenched in cold sweat, her chest heaving with ragged gasps as the sensation rushed back into her limbs.
"Calm down," Ulrich said. He leaned over the table and pressed the palm of his hand against her flushed cheek. "Steady your breathing. Breathe slowly. Look at me."
Ceres, still gasping for air, obeyed. She locked her wide eyes onto the freezing crimson of Ulrich’s gaze, forcing her lungs to draw slow breaths until the hammering in her chest began to subside.
Once he was satisfied she was no longer hyperventilating, Ulrich gently brushed the damp, sweat-soaked bangs away from her forehead.
To Ceres, the touch felt tender, a rare, gentle gesture from the terrifying Count, which made her heart skip several beats against her ribs. But in truth, there was no affection behind the movement. Ulrich was merely moving her hair aside to closely examine her right amber eye, checking the dilated pupil for any signs of sudden flares from the Thornbreath since that right pupil of hers had shown reactions to it previously.
Finding her pupil clear, he withdrew his hand and stepped back from the table.
"We are done for today," he said, turning his back to her.
He was cutting the session slightly shorter than he usually preferred, but it was the logical choice. He had seen exactly how her body reacted to three simultaneous spells, and the result was clear. The sensory-dulling spell had been too abrupt, too heavy for her. He would need to deconstruct the formula and rework the rune combinations until he found a weave that numbed her pain without inducing claustrophobic terror.
As Ulrich walked away, moving toward his desk to gather his notes, Mark immediately rushed forward.
"Are you okay, Ceres?" Mark asked as he gently patted her damp hair.
"Y—Yes..." Ceres nodded weakly, still trembling slightly from the fading adrenaline.
She turned her head, looking past Mark’s protective frame to watch Ulrich. He was already walking toward the door, preparing to leave without another word. She opened her mouth, wishing to say something, to thank him, or perhaps just to ask if she had done well, but the words caught in her dry throat.
In the end, she simply watched the door close behind him.