Reincarnated as the Only Male in an All-Girls Magic Academy!
Chapter 38: Adept Stage!

Chapter 38: Adept Stage!

Ren’s eyes flew open like a switch had been flipped, and the moment he sucked in a breath, it felt like inhaling lightning.

His vision spun wildly before stabilizing, and for a few seconds, he had no clue where he was. The white ceiling, the scent of fabric softener, the gorgeous damsel in front of him—it hit him all at once.

"Dorm room?" he whispered, blinking a few times in disbelief. The last thing he remembered was the forge, the crystal, the loom doing ballet, and then, darkness.

He tilted his head slowly, trying to shake off the dizziness, but the moment he moved, his skull felt like someone had swapped his brain with a nuclear reactor on the verge of meltdown.

And then came the heat. Not the kind that made you sweat, but the kind that made your bones itch.

It crawled along his spine, up through his skull, and settled right behind his eyes. Every part of his mind felt like it had been dipped in liquid fire.

Before he could groan or curse or process any of that, a slight movement caught his attention across the room.

Lia was sitting on her bed in a lotus position, her entire body unnaturally stiff. Her long hair clung to her forehead, drenched in sweat.

Her brow was furrowed so deep it looked like she was trying to crush a watermelon with her thoughts, and her jaw was clenched like she was wrestling something invisible and dangerous.

She looked like she was about two seconds away from turning into a volcano. "...She’s probably breaking through too," Ren mumbled, eyes narrowing, but that was as far as his concern could go.

Because his own body wasn’t exactly throwing a welcome party either. A second later, his back arched and his breath hitched.

It felt like something inside him was about to explode. Not metaphorically, literally. He clutched his temples as if that would stop the pressure from building, but it was like trying to hold back a tsunami with a sponge.

His thoughts scattered, colliding like fireflies in a jar. "I need to break through. Now." There was no time to analyze, no time to breathe, just instinct and survival.

He forced himself to lay on his bed since he was definitely not mirroring Lia’s position, and then he shut his eyes tight.

His breath came in shaky pulls, but his focus was sharp.

Somewhere in the mess of pain, pressure, and panic, he found that molten core inside his mind, the place where his consciousness pooled like a stormy sea.

That was the epicenter. That was the key. His thoughts reached toward it like arms in the dark, and he latched onto the sensation.

His goal was clear. He had to expand his mental range to reach past that invisible one-meter barrier that had been anchoring his mind to his body.

The Adept stage was right there, just outside his reach, like a delicious scent wafting from behind a locked door. But he couldn’t touch it. He couldn’t grab it.

He was trapped in his own skull, in his own tiny mental cell. Every time he tried to push outward, it felt like crashing into a wall made of glass and iron.

It didn’t matter how smart he was or how well he understood the theory—this wasn’t about logic. It was brute force. It was pressure versus pressure.

"Come on... come on..." he growled mentally, his inner voice no longer calm but almost primal. The pain intensified like hot nails scraping the inside of his skull.

Most people would’ve tapped out by now, screamed or cried or passed out cold, but not Ren.

His stubbornness was like a living thing. He refused to be caged. "Just one meter. Just ONE METER!" His focus deepened. He tightened his mental grip, poured every ounce of his attention into breaking that barrier.

It felt like trying to punch through diamond. Sweat rolled down his cheeks. His teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached.

The inside of his body was screaming, but he shoved all that aside, funneled everything he had into that one simple command; Break. The. Wall!

Time became meaningless. It could’ve been five seconds or five hours. He was too deep to care. His entire being was like an arrow pulled back to maximum tension, his mind screaming for release.

The Loom shimmered just beyond the veil. He could feel it mocking him, taunting him, dancing just outside his cage.

And then... Crack!

It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t dramatic. It was a tiny sound, like snapping a twig. But in that single sound, the whole world shattered.

The pressure vanished. The barrier melted. His mind exploded outward in every direction. It was like the lid of a pressure cooker being launched into space.

He gasped sharply as the mental cage shattered into nothingness, and suddenly, he could feel the Loom in full.

He could witness the beauty and majesty Loom in full clarity. A thousand threads whipped around him like they had been waiting, like they had missed him.

The Loom welcomed him with open arms, and Ren laughed.

He did it. He succeeded. Adept Stage. He broke through.

And all it took was almost frying his own brain like an egg.

Just as the final ripple of his mental breakthrough faded like a sigh across still water, the room trembled slightly, like the floorboards were reacting to a second heartbeat in the air.

Ren’s eyes flicked to Lia, who was still rooted on her bed in a lotus pose, her brow carved deep with frustration, her fingers twitching as if she were squeezing something invisible.

Sweat poured down her face like she’d just run a marathon through a sauna, and for a second, she looked like she was losing the battle.

Her aura surged outward, pulsing with raw mental energy that briefly made Ren’s skin tingle. Then suddenly, like a balloon finally popping, BOOM!

A blast of invisible force burst out of her mind, shaking the walls and sending a breeze of spiritual power across the dorm room that ruffled Ren’s hair like a strong gust from an open window.

She gasped, her eyes flying open fully this time, brilliant with clarity and triumph. "I... I did it! Hah! I broke through!"

Ren gave a faint smirk, already leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, calm as a lake in winter. "Took you long enough."

That was all it took.

"What!?" Lia snapped her head toward him like a hawk spotting a field mouse. Her cheeks puffed up instantly.

"Took me—? I broke through literally a second after you! Don’t act like you’ve been an Adept for ten years!"

Ren raised one brow. "Still later than me."

Lia’s jaw dropped open, a mixture of disbelief and pure, childlike betrayal. "Ugh! I knew I should’ve bought the higher-grade lucid dreaming potion instead of the mild one! Stupid potion vendors and their smiling faces and—!"

She plopped onto her back dramatically, arms stretched out. "I wasted nearly half my IP bonus on herbs and mental boosters just to make sure I’d beat you, and then you still got there first without even trying!"

"I did try," Ren replied calmly. "I nearly melted my skull."

Lia grunted, arms crossed now as she pouted hard enough to power a wind turbine. "You don’t look like someone who melted anything."

"I do on the inside."

She flopped over onto her stomach, letting out an exaggerated groan into her pillow before flipping her hair back over her shoulder with a dramatic flair.

"Whatever. At least I hope I beat Mirabella. Pretty sure she’s still at the Beginner stage."

But the moment she said that, a thoughtful shadow crept across her face. She sat up again, eyes narrowing slightly.

"Actually... I don’t think she’ll stay at the Beginner stage for long. I’m sure she’s going to break through to Adept soon too."

Lia chewed her lip, her confidence wobbling. "She was already insanely strong before breaking through. If she hits Adept, her power’s gonna be ridiculous."

Ren nodded slightly, his expression shifting into something more serious. The giddy lightness of his breakthrough quickly faded as reality settled in like a heavy cloak on his shoulders.

What came with it wasn’t panic or even nervousness, it was something far heavier.

Understanding.

For all the wild joy he’d felt bursting through into the Adept stage... this was just the beginning. The real game didn’t even start until now.

The Adept stage wasn’t just some power-up with a new name. It was a whole different battlefield. A whole different set of rules.

The difference between a weaver who had just stepped into the Adept stage and one who had mastered it... was like comparing someone holding a sparkler to someone holding a fireball in their fist.

Mental range. Mental power. Two concepts that sounded simple. But they were the heart of everything that came next.

Mental range... that was easy enough to grasp on the surface. It was the distance a weaver’s mind could reach into and manipulate the loom.

Before breaking through, his range had been stuck at one meter—a tight little bubble around him where he could connect to the threads, pull them, and use them in a weave.

But now? His range had expanded. He didn’t even know how far yet, but it already felt like his mind had more space to breathe, to stretch, to hunt down the exact threads he wanted.

But it wasn’t just about breathing room.

Mental range directly decided how much power a weave could hold.

If two weavers tried to cast the exact same weave, let’s say, a flaming spear, then the one with the larger range would win.

Why? Because they had more threads to work with. More fire threads pulled from a wider radius meant a denser, deadlier, hotter spear. Simple math.

It was like cooking a stew: the guy with more ingredients and a bigger pot was going to serve a more powerful dish.

Then came the second factor.

Mental power. And this one... this one was tricky. Subtle. But deadlier than the first.

Where range was about how far your mind could reach, mental power was about how deep your mind could sink into the loom.

The loom wasn’t just one flat world of threads floating in existence. No, it was layered. Like an onion made of reality. Or like a staircase, where every level held denser, purer, more ancient versions of the same elements.

The first layer was like surface-level stuff: the basics, the normal threads any weaver could pull on. But the second layer? That was where things got crazy, and there were even more layers after that.

Also, the only way to reach these deeper layers was through pure, crushing willpower, intense meditation and most of all, higher grade mental seas.

A weaver with high mental power could dive past the first layer and start gathering threads from the second, even third layer.

And threads from those deeper layers didn’t just carry more power, they were fundamentally better. Stronger. Sharper. Faster.

Weaving from the second layer of the loom was like forging a sword from divine steel instead of scrap metal. It was a cheat code. A trump card.

But that wasn’t even the scary part.

The scary part... was Suppression.

If two weavers were standing side by side, trying to cast a weave from the same element—say, water—and they both reached for the same threads from the same area and layer of the loom, the one with higher mental power would automatically win.

Why? Because the loom chose the stronger mind. It let the more powerful will pull the threads, while the other weaver was left with nothing but silence.

Suppression meant dominance. It meant if you walked into a room and someone stronger was already weaving your affinity at the same layer, you were out of luck.

Your mind would be shoved out of the loom like a fly from a banquet.

Ren exhaled sharply.

That was the world he had just entered. A world where raw understanding, raw reach, and raw power determined whether you could even cast your weave.

The days of struggling to form a simple spatial lock were over. Now he was stepping into a war of mental titans, and he was barely crawling.

Still, his eyes gleamed with a determined light.

He had his range. He had his power. And most importantly, he had opportunities—opportunities that came from evolving his Chaos Mental Sea and connecting to the loom like never before.

But Mirabella was coming. And if she’d been terrifying before reaching Adept...

She was going to be a monster now. She had a huge backing after all!

Ren cracked his knuckles and whispered under his breath, "Time to close the gap. Fast."

Then he got up, left the dorms and walked straight to the training areas, mind already churning with plans.

Because if he didn’t improve his prowess now, didn’t learn to suppress and out-weave his opponent, then next week?

He’d be the one watching from the floor.

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