I stepped outside, ready for a grand construction project, and immediately suffered my first crushing fiasco.

  "Well, here we are," I muttered, examining the facade. No bricks. The walls of the Academy were monolithic, cast from some eerie compound resembling a mix of stone and solidified mana. My idea with the "replacement" crumbled to dust faster than I could pull out the first beacon.

  "Alright," I thought. "Manual labor builds character... or something like that."

  I took to the air, levitating at the level of the fifth floor. I had to carefully carve small niches straight into the monolith, insert my bricks in there, and smooth over the surface with magic so the wall looked intact. Fine work, requiring concentration, of which I had about zero at three o'clock in the morning.

  I descended to the fourth floor. I had just taken aim at the next section of the wall when a window right in front of me swung open with a clatter.

  I was asleep, having a very pleasant dream. And suddenly—vibration. Subtle, persistent, right at the headboard of my bed.

  I bolted upright. Someone behind the wall? I instantly boiled over with anger, but I felt neither a threat nor anyone's aura. Emptiness.

  I sleepily crawled over to the window and yanked it open. Our eyes met.

  "What?!" I squeezed out, blinking my eyelashes. "What?!" simultaneously echoed the guy hanging in the air.

  "Greg? What did you forget out here at this hour? Peeping?" I squinted, trying to make him out in the dark. "Or decided to retrain as a cat burglar?"

  He hesitated, still holding some strange gray rectangle in his hand. "Umm... At first glance, it might seem like I'm doing something wrong. But I have an Idea."

  And he began to inspiringly outline his plan to me, complete with a "living map," beacons, and floor tracking. I listened and barely held back laughter. "He-he-he, silly boy," I thought. "He doesn't even know that they sell ready-made transit maps at the shop by the gates for a couple of silver coins." But, of course, I wasn't going to tell him that. It was far too interesting watching this serious "genius" at work.

  I leaned on the windowsill, resting my head on my arms. "Listen, Greg... can I come with you? I can't sleep anyway."

  He looked at me like I was an annoying nuisance. "No."

  I yawned sweetly, stretched, and made the most innocent face I was capable of. "What a pity. Because I could scream right now. Really loudly. I'll scream your name and call the guards, complaining that some boy is peeping into the windows of decent girls. Imagine the scandal?"

  Greg's face under the mask (or what I could see of it) twisted comically. I smiled slyly, feeling pure delight, and simply flew out the window, hovering next to him.

  "Fine, alright!" Greg exhaled in defeat. "Just don't be a burden. Here, take these." He shoved a whole stack of his bricks into my hands. "I'll finish this building, and you do the one next door. One on each floor, right in the corner. Can you handle it?"

  "You wound me," I winked at him. "Consider the job already done."

  It seemed this night promised to be much more fun than I had planned. A map is boring. But engaging in illegal magical construction with the "man from the fairy tales"—now that's our style.

  I flew off to complete the assignment. On the second floor of the right building, something went wrong. The moment I carved out a piece of the monolith and pulled it out, space seemed to shudder. I felt thin, taut threads of mana leading deep into the building. As if I had pulled the pin from a grenade.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  "Whatever," I thought, quickly shoving Greg's brick into place. "We'll figure it out later."

  I finished with the other floors and returned to Greg. He was hovering in the air near the First Building, his fingers rapidly weaving a web of mana, connecting invisible threads between the bricks and his map.

  I landed nearby, dangling my legs over the cornice. "So, Alastia," Greg didn't turn around, focused on converging the lines. "I noticed one serious inconsistency. Where the hell is the Second Building? I scoured the entire territory with my eyes, but it's simply not there."

  I snorted. "The Second Building is a legend for tourists. It's temporary. It only appears for one month at the very end of the year. It's not for lectures, but for skills testing. You can fight magical projections of great warriors of the past in there. They say no one in the entire history of the Academy has ever made it past the third floor."

  Greg froze for a moment. "And how many floors are there in total?" "Six."

  He nodded thoughtfully, made a final pass with his hands, and his map on his lap flared with a soft light. In that exact second, a familiar grinding sound came from the direction of the girls' dorm. The sixth floor of the right building smoothly detached from the structure and flew toward the floating islands.

  On Greg's sheet, a tiny drawn rectangle shifted synchronously. "Oh, yes!" he exhaled. "The system works." He immediately started rapidly sketching something else, making notes: "my room," "cafeteria."

  "Now we have to figure out the doors and mirrors," he muttered. "The mirrors are more important right now."

  I didn't argue. I just jumped down onto the grass and stretched out on the soft turf, staring into the bottomless night sky. Greg drifted down beside me a couple of minutes later. He also lay on his back, hands behind his head.

  "Look, look!" he pointed upward. "That cloud looks like a..." "SH-H-H!" I pressed a finger to my lips. "Quiet. Can't you see I'm enjoying the silence and nature." I closed my eyes, soaking in the sounds of the night. "Listen to the breeze blowing. Watch the clouds floating. Do you hear the leaf falling on the other side of the courtyard? The bugs jumping in the grass?"

  He fell silent. We lay there like that for about thirty minutes—just two teenagers on the grass in the middle of a crazy Academy. The silence was strange (how can silence be strange?).

  At some point, I realized that his "emptiness" next to me no longer seemed unusual. It felt... peaceful. As if it wasn't a person lying next to me, but Time itself, which had decided to take a day off.

  I rolled onto my side. Greg was still hypnotizing the stars, as if trying to read them. "Listen, smart guy," I called out. "Do you have any kind of plan for tracking where a mirror will spit you out in the next second?"

  Greg broke into a joyful smile. "No. Not a single idea."

  "Wonderful," I sighed. "Listen to my thought: all the glass here is connected into one network. They are like... nodes in a spiderweb."

  Greg jumped up abruptly, nearly hitting me with his elbow. "YES! EXACTLY! YOU'RE RIGHT!" He started spinning in place excitedly, searching for something in the dark. "That's it, Alastia, get up! Grab my hand."

  I touched his palm. A second—and we were sucked into space. We materialized inside one of the academic buildings, right in front of a massive full-length mirror-portal. Greg immediately started pacing the corridor, muttering under his breath: "Alright, if mirror 'A' leads to mirror 'B', and half an hour later—to mirror 'C'... and all this changes according to some method... then we get nothing out of this. The logic is a dead end."

  I couldn't hold it in and snorted. "Are you serious, Greg? What profound conclusions! However did you come up with such a complex thought? Your intellect is truly terrifying."

  Greg ignored my mockery. He stepped right up to the glass and lightly tapped it with his fingertips. "Oh... o-o-oh! I saw it! Do you see it?"

  I peered closely at my reflection. "What am I supposed to see, Greg? My own displeased face?" "Mana threads, dummy!" he touched the glass again, sending a slight ripple across it.

  "Are you... Greg, are you messing with me?" I stepped closer. "What threads?" He looked at me like I was mentally ill. "What do you mean? How can you not see it? You have demon blood flowing in you, and your eyes seem to match." "So what?" "What do you mean 'so what'?!" Greg threw his hands up. "Demons are the best at sensing mana, and the higher ranks are capable of seeing it physically. That's your basic racial trait!"

  I froze. Seeing mana? I had heard of such a thing, but it was considered a talent on the level of legendary heroes or very ancient beings. "You say it so casually..." I muttered.

  Greg poked the mirror again. "Come on, focus. Funnel mana straight into your eyes. Focus on the structure, not the picture."

  I gritted my teeth and did as he said. My eyes began to prickle unpleasantly, the world lost its color for a moment, turning gray. Greg touched the glass a third time.

  And then I saw it. The thinnest, ghostly line, shimmering with a delicate purple light, pierced the mirror and vanished somewhere deep into the wall. It lasted only a second before my eyes began to water unbearably.

  "I think... I saw it," I exhaled, rubbing my eyelids.

  Greg sighed in satisfaction. "There we go. And now—the search for the center. We need to find the place where all these 'little threads' weave into a single knot. That is where the center of this damn game of hide-and-seek is located."