I trudged after the princesses. They stepped gracefully into the mirror, its surface rippling like water. I had just reached out my hand to follow them when suddenly...

  TICK.

  The sound of the clock was incredibly loud and sharp. In that exact second, some guy sprinted past me, panting heavily.

  "STOP! STOP!" he yelled at the mirror. "Damn it! Not again!"

  And following the tick, the surface of the mirror shifted from watery to solid. The guy skidded to a halt right in front of it and slammed his fist into the frame with all his might.

  "What happened?" I asked lazily. "Passageway closed for lunch?"

  He looked at me like I was an idiot. "Are you new or something? When the clock does that damn 'tick', the mirror changes its teleportation point. To a random one! Every half hour, it leads to a new place. Now, to get to the first building, I'll have to run all the way around the Academy or wait for the next switch! Aaarrghhh!"

  The guy cursed angrily and stepped away from the mirror.

  I looked at my schedule, then at the mirror. I was far too lazy to solve the riddles of the local sorcerers. I walked over to the window. How convenient—we were flying right over the massive roof of the main building.

  I opened the window and simply stepped out. Freefall is always fun, especially when you know how not to turn into a pancake at the end.

  I landed on the stone masonry of the roof softly, barely bending my knees. I walked up to the door and pulled the handle. Locked.

  "Listen here, door," I knocked on the wood. "Looks like I'm running late for class. Open up, be a pal. Otherwise, I'll have to break you down, and repairs are expensive these days."

  The door thought about it for a moment, and then yielded with a creak.

  I ran down the maintenance stairs. Alright... Room 111... 114... "Again? Where is one hundred thirteen?"

  I stopped in the middle of the corridor and looked up. Of course. The door with the number 113 was proudly displayed right on the ceiling.

  I jumped up, grabbed the handle, and pulled it toward me. The moment I crossed the threshold, gravity smoothly and very politely did a somersault. I landed on the "floor," which had been the ceiling a second ago.

  I walked all the way to the back and took an empty seat in the last row. Strange. The back rows were empty. It seems everyone in this Academy is a pathological overachiever and loves sitting right under the teacher's nose. Whatever. Better for me.

  The classroom, contrary to my expectations, was packed to the brim. Dozens of students, yet the back rows remained suspiciously empty. The second I sat down, snickers rippled through the rows. Students turned around, pointed fingers in my direction, and giggled.

  "Look, a newbie. A dead man walking," drifted back from the front desks.

  I didn't get the joke until the door opened. Walking into the classroom was something wearing a heavy, hermetically sealed suit resembling the diving gear of ancient times. Through the murky glass of the helmet, you could see there was no flesh inside—instead, a sentient gas swirled there, shimmering with neon light.

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  "Greetings, students..." he hissed.

  The voice was so quiet it sounded like the rustle of dry grass ten kilometers away. Now it was clear why the back seats were empty. If you didn't have hearing aids or magical sensory enhancement, you were basically watching a silent movie back here.

  But that wasn't a problem for me. My senses were used to picking up even the movement of dust motes. However, I had no intention of actually listening to him anyway.

  The cloud-teacher began methodically writing something on the board. The letters shimmered and instantly vanished. When he finished, a stack of papers on his desk lifted into the air. They scattered across the room and landed squarely in front of each student.

  A test. I lazily scanned the questions: How to identify a cursed object? How to detect sentience in an inanimate object? Methods of defense against a magical contract? Blood oaths: key stages and fatal errors? What is manipulation and its types?

  I pondered: is it even worth trying? I twirled the paper in my hands. Something about it was off. The texture of the paper felt too... alive.

  I channeled a tiny drop of mana into the parchment. Just to test the reaction.

  The result exceeded expectations. The paper instantly flared up under my fingers. But not with normal fire—thick, acrid black smoke poured from it, within which the written answers briefly appeared. A second later, the paper turned to ash right on the desk.

  A hissing laugh echoed in the silence of the classroom. The spacesuit-teacher slowly walked over to my row.

  "You are the second in this cohort to notice that," he hissed from behind the glass. "Seventy points."

  I looked at the handful of ash. "Why not a hundred?" "If you had managed to stop the process of the paper's destruction, I would have given you a hundred. But you simply sat and watched as your test was destroyed. In a real battle, your indifference would have cost you your life."

  The gas-teacher let out a sound like a whistling kettle and floated on.

  Class ended. Alexia and Lianel had some new form of torture listed on their schedules, while I had an empty block. "Well, see ya, losers," I waved at them cheerfully and was the first to bolt out the door.

  I stepped out onto an open terrace and froze, surveying this architectural madness. I needed to systematize the data, otherwise I risked spending the rest of my time here just trying to find the cafeteria.

  Alright, let's count: The First Building—stands on the ground. The Third and Fourth Buildings—float in the air. I watched their movements closely. It seems they complete a circle over the Academy in about an hour. But it's not that simple: sometimes they accelerate, as if playing tag, or change their trajectory, and sometimes they freeze, messing up all calculations. The Fifth Building—that's the one tilted at a forty-five-degree angle. The Sixth Building—a legend. They say you can only get into it via teleport, but the coordinates of the entry point are constantly drifting. No one knows exactly where the building itself is located at any given moment.

  Inside the buildings, there was even more chaos. Classrooms swapped places, corridor walls either slid apart to turn a room into a hall, or compressed it to the size of a closet. Decoy doors cheerfully announced that a laboratory lay beyond them, but in reality, it turned out to be a broom closet.

  "Too much movement," I muttered, rubbing the bridge of my nose. "Too. Much. Movement."

  Apparently, this Academy was designed by an absolute sadist. The system was created specifically so that even the laziest hermits were forced to run, navigate, and—oh, the horror!—communicate with those around them. No fixed groups. No familiar routes.

  And the "surprise lessons" marked with question marks? That meant you had to do your homework for all subjects in advance, because you never knew which master would pop out from around the corner in the next hour.

  And the cherry on top of this insane cake—the clocks. I tracked the hands on the main tower. Time lived its own life there. Sometimes it flowed normally, then suddenly switched to a decimal system—one hundred minutes in an hour. The speed of the ticking changed; an hour could pass in thirty minutes, or vice versa.

  "This problem needs to be solved somehow," I told my reflection in the window glass. "If I don't solve it, I'm going to turn into a racehorse."

  I sat down on the parapet, watching the Third Building slowly block out the sun. So what to do? Draw a map? Calculate algorithms?

  I yawned so hard something clicked in my jaw. "Alright. For now, I'll just sleep. Maybe my brain will figure it all out on its own in my sleep, so I don't have to make my legs work."