As soon as he closed his eyes to sleep, Villin found himself within a massive room. The room was about a kilometer in length and width, red candles were floating above the ground in a multitude of locations, lighting everything up just enough to be able to see.

The floor was nearly filled with white and red runes, at the very least there would be ten-thousand of them, probably many more. The magical energy within the room was extraordinarily dense, it felt as if the entire room was a massive magic crystal due to how dense the magical energy was here.

Villin crouched down to look at the runes on the floor, every now and then he would recognize one. There were a few that had to do with stealth, these were probably meant to hide the massive magic array. Other than that he noticed a few long-range runes and some that should be used for detecting or searching for something.

If the runes he recognized were the only ones there Villin would probably assume it was a teleportation array, but it was many times too large to be something like that.

In the middle of the massive magic array, was a stand holding a crystal ball, the sight on the ball kept changing a multitude of mountaintops and large caverns appeared, he was completely immersed in the crystal ball which showed location after location that he got immensely surprised when the entire array suddenly activated. The previously dim room was now brightened up by an extremely bright light. Villin instinctively took a few steps when he noticed the light didn’t seem to affect his eyes. Just as he was about to look at the crystal ball once more, a small door on one side of the room opened. An old man in fully black robes entered the room and looked at the magic array that had brightened up with an excited expression.

The man was bald but had a long gray beard that reached all the way to his feet, his mustache had long curls in them, and overall, his face looked quite comical.

The stranger ran straight for the crystal ball, running right by Villin “Finally! It’s time, I have to contact the headmaster, this will get me enough resources to allow me to increase my strength once more! He looked at the crystal ball while somewhat trembling from the excitement, yet when Villin looked, all he saw was a flat piece of farmland with some crops growing atop of it.

Before he could do anything else he felt something tugging on his eyes, a moment later, he woke up. Villin looked around him in a stunned matter, he was laying in his bed.

Last time he had a weird dream, he didn’t think it was anything else, that wasn’t the case this time around. He could feel the magic density in the air, the energy emitted from the magic array. He held his head as he thought back to the dream. He had no idea who the old man with the massive beard was. The black cloak wasn’t an indicator and even though his looks were extremely distinct, he could hardly go around asking if anyone had seen the man.

Nonetheless, whatever it was, it was unlikely it had something to do with him, right? If it was some sort of event that caused a Magus’ mind to go to another place, it would probably be relatively random. Following this logic, he decided to leave it be for now.

For now, he had to focus on increasing his strength as much as possible since the tournament was in twelve days. If he did his best in the combat class today he might still be able to get another spell that suited him so he had already decided to go all out with that.

Since it was Wednesday, the first class was wandless magic. He was easily the best in this class since he had continued to train cut and crease occasionally and so he got to focus on something else.

In order to make sure he’d get the spell in the combat class he decided to save Reverto and Drowse on his glove. The latter in particular would be changed soon since the wandless application wasn’t that useful since he’d get him himself as well, he decided he would change it with Fireball as soon as he could.

This took a bit but once he saved these two there were still ninety minutes remaining. He knew this shouldn’t be enough to learn Fireball, a spell that wasn’t only eleven nodes long but was also technically a derivatory spell since one of the nodes had already changed from the original. Even though he was right in the way that he wasn’t able to cast it yet within the remaining time, he did find out something interesting.

When he started awakening the nodes required he got an idea. Instead of attacking the nodes with his own magic energy, he simply used a bit of energy to connect with a bunch of nodes he had already awakened. But instead of taking in the energy they gave him, he redirected it to the unawakened nodes.

After some practice, he could make decent pathways between nodes, and when he sent their energy over to an unawakened node, they would clash. In essence, this meant he no longer had to spend any of his own magical energy on awakening nodes. As long as he didn’t need to sap energy from the nodes and as long as he wasn’t casting spells he could just awaken nodes. This nearly completely removed the problem of node awakening as it surely wouldn't be long until he would have awakened all Light-Grey nodes using this technique. 

When the class finished he had gotten pretty close to casting the spell, managing to connect nine of the nodes, including the one that wasn't on the original path. 

Since it was Wednesday they would be attacked once more when they entered the Combat Classes. Villin found Kayley and another highly skilled student and went to walk in with them, he was determined to get just one more spell today!