Villainous Instructor at the Academy
Chapter 200: Ashes remember names

Chapter 200: Ashes remember names

I knew the moment I saw the rune.

The Blooming Chain—an old mark. Ancient. Forgotten, perhaps, by the pampered sons of modern nobles, but not by me. Not by anyone who’s stared into the black tongues of altar-flame cults and heard the words they chant when they think no one’s listening.

They were watching now.

And worse, they remembered.

I didn’t sleep that night. Not out of fear. Fear is useful—motivating, grounding. This was something else.

Anticipation.

Because if they came for Felix, they’d learn something important: I don’t let anyone touch my students.

Not anymore.

The Academy’s Quiet Rot

By dawn, I was already in Vaughn’s office. The bastard had the audacity to look half-asleep, robe askew, hair a mess.

"Lucian," he grunted, pouring tea. "You know it’s not technically a crime to let me sleep past sunrise."

"Check the archives. Pull every file flagged with the Blooming Chain rune. All of them."

That got his attention. He straightened.

"You’re serious."

I didn’t answer.

He didn’t ask again.

An hour later, we had a spread of documents thick enough to fill a war table.

Old names. Burned villages. Sacrifices recorded in dry, clipped script—like cataloging livestock. And always the same pattern:

The cult appears after a noble house collapses.

A survivor emerges with blood ties severed.

Then come the offerings. The bindings. The recruitment.

Felix wasn’t just a curiosity. He was a summon. A flare to draw every ash-cloaked lunatic out of the woodwork.

Vaughn exhaled. "You think they’ll come here?"

"They’re already here."

The First Warning

That evening, the gates were breached.

Not with force—no explosions or battle cries. Just a whisper, a flicker, and suddenly half the guards were unconscious, blood seeping from their ears.

I found the intruder in the Rune Archives.

A woman.

Tall, veiled, barefoot. Her fingers were charred at the tips—burned from too much casting, too little care.

She didn’t attack.

Instead, she bowed.

"Professor Drelmont," she said softly, "I come as emissary. We mean no harm to the boy."

I moved closer. "And yet you break into the Academy and bleed my staff."

"They live," she said. "But it was necessary. We couldn’t risk interference."

I drew Severance.

"You just made a worse risk."

She held up her hand. A slip of parchment unfolded mid-air, dancing on wind she did not summon. My eyes caught the sigil stamped in wax.

A contract. Old magic. Forbidden, in most circles.

"Let the boy choose," she whispered. "If he refuses the chain, we will not pursue him. But if he accepts it..."

Her eyes gleamed like wet obsidian.

"...then even the gods must kneel."

I cut the spell in half before she finished blinking.

She vanished, of course. Smoke and mirrors. Theatrics.

But her message remained.

Back to Class C

The next day, I walked into class with a blade on my hip and blood on my gloves.

The students noticed.

Julien smirked. "Rough night, Professor?"

"Do I look like I want small talk?"

Leo muttered, "He’s in execution mode again..."

I stood before them. Silent. Watching.

Then I pointed at Felix.

"You’re getting a bodyguard."

He blinked. "What?"

"Say thank you and shut up."

"But I—"

"Thank you," Garrick interrupted, stepping forward.

I raised an eyebrow.

"You?" I asked.

"He needs someone strong. I’m strong. And I don’t ask questions."

Felix looked... weirdly touched. Then panicked. Then touched again.

"You’re not going to, like... follow me into the bath, right?"

"No promises."

Julien leaned toward Mira. "Do you think this counts as a love triangle or a bodyguard sitcom?"

"Both," she said, chewing a rice cracker.

I pinched the bridge of my nose.

Future corpses. All of them.

Far below the continent of Sūyara, beneath stone temples and forgotten bones, twelve figures gathered in a circle.

Their voices were one.

"The boy has awakened the ember."

"The pact is sundered."

"The flame must be tempered... or devoured."

And in the center, suspended by rune-bound iron chains, something stirred.

A heartbeat.

Slow.

Hungering.

The day after the intruder left her message, the Academy felt different. Not visibly, not to the students still playing at being soldiers and scholars. But beneath the bricks and wards, something had shifted.

The staff held meetings behind closed doors. The wardmasters reinforced sigils that hadn’t glowed in decades. Rumors trickled in from the outer posts—missing scouts, mutilated animals, strange dreams. The kind of signs that meant one thing in the old language of empire and ruin.

The cult was moving. And they were already too close.

I stood on the old bell tower before morning classes began, staring out over the frost-dusted roofs of Noctis Ardentis. From up here, the Academy looked peaceful. Strong. Almost untouchable.

But I knew better.

Everything burns, eventually.

And I’ve lived through too many fires to pretend otherwise.

Felix’s Decision

Felix didn’t come to class that morning.

He showed up at my office instead—eyes hollow, uniform rumpled, carrying a sealed letter and the contract parchment the intruder had tried to give me.

He didn’t speak right away. Just stood there while I poured tea.

"Read it," he finally said, dropping the contract on my desk. "Tell me what it actually says."

I unfolded the parchment.

The language was ritualistic, archaic. Crafted to bend oaths and blur lines. The kind of thing that fed off ambiguity and blood price. But I’d read worse.

"It offers you protection," I said slowly, "in exchange for ’voluntary severance of ancestral bindings.’ That’s fancy cult-speak for cutting yourself off from your family. Not just politically. Magically. Spiritually. It makes you... unclaimed."

"Which means they can claim me instead," he murmured.

I nodded.

Felix sat down.

"I don’t want to go back," he said after a long pause. "But I don’t want to be owned by anyone. Not my family. Not them."

I studied him.

He was shaking.

But he wasn’t breaking.

Good.

"I’ll help you sever the ties," I said. "On your terms. But after that... it’s war."

He looked up at me.

"War against who?"

"Whoever tries to chain you next."

The Enemy Moves

That night, one of the outer rune wards flared red.

An alert.

I was at the breach in under a minute. Vaughn met me there, sword already in hand, breath fogging in the cold.

"What do we have?" I asked.

"Runners," he said grimly. "Three of them. Marked with the Chain."

"Dead?"

"Two. The third swallowed his own tongue."

I knelt beside the corpse. The body was young—couldn’t have been older than twenty. His hands were covered in ink—ritual glyphs that reeked of blood magic and something older.

Older than even I remembered.

Vaughn crouched beside me. "They weren’t here to attack. They were probing. Mapping."

"They’re planning something."

"Yes."

A pause.

Then he added, "And it’s not just them."

I glanced at him.

Vaughn looked sick.

"There’s something else," he said quietly. "One of the students filed a report. Cassandra."

I froze.

"What did she say?"

"She saw a man in her dreams," he muttered, "standing over the Academy with a broken crown. She said he smelled like salt and fire. And that when he spoke, she heard her own voice answering back."

I stood slowly.

This wasn’t just the cult.

This was older.

This was something that remembered the Drelmont name.

And in the Deep...

The chained creature opened its eyes.

Twelve figures knelt.

It did not speak with words. It unraveled them.

And far above, in the high peaks of the Frostwind Wall, a bell that hadn’t rung in six hundred years began to toll.

Doom does not arrive screaming.

It arrives remembering.

The ritual had to be done in silence.

No wind, no voices, no memory. The Ancestor Severance Rite was older than the empires buried beneath Sūyara, and twice as cruel. It required not just separation—but rejection. Of blood, of name, of every thread tying you to where you came from.

It wasn’t just exile.

It was disowning yourself.

Felix stood in the center of the rune circle, barefoot and bare-chested, the symbol of House Dorne carved across his back in fading ink. He was pale. Gaunt. But not trembling.

I stood outside the circle, with Mira and Wallace watching from the shadows. Vaughn was there too, blade in hand, in case the ritual drew unwanted attention.

Which it would.

They always do.

"Once we begin," I said, "there’s no turning back. You will feel everything. And you’ll remember none of it clearly."

Felix looked up. His eyes were glassy, but firm.

"I’m tired of living someone else’s fear."

I gave a grim nod.

Then I placed the first cut across my palm.

The circle lit.

The ritual began.

Inside the Severance

What happens during a Severance is not supposed to be seen. Even less so by an outsider. But I wasn’t just a witness.

I was the blade.

Felix dropped to his knees as the runes ignited, reacting to his bloodline like a lock resisting its own key. I whispered the Unmaking Words, old Drelmont syllables taught only to those who trained in spiritbinding and bone rites.

His skin began to glow.

Not with mana.

With memory.

Images swam above him—his childhood in the Dorne marshes, the strict lectures, the cold estate, the servants who never made eye contact. A boy kneeling by a frozen river, sobbing into his knees. A father’s voice, flat and biting: You are the shame that cracked our name.

Then the spirits came.

Ancestral echoes. Ghosts tied to his lineage, half-formed and furious. They emerged from the runes like smoke—wailing, clawing, pleading.

One reached for him.

He screamed.

I stepped in.

My voice boomed with force: "Begone, old rot. You fed on his weakness. Now he devours yours."

The specter burst like glass.

The circle shook. The air turned copper. Felix collapsed forward, breathing like something had been torn out of him.

Because something had.

The bond was broken.

And he was free.

Aftermath

He lay in my quarters for hours, unconscious but safe. Mira stayed with him. She didn’t speak, just watched him with a strange intensity, like she was waiting for him to either wake up or stop breathing.

Wallace brewed a stabilizing tonic. He didn’t say much either.

Even Vaughn seemed shaken. "You know what this means," he said once we were alone. "Without a House, he’ll be targeted. Politically. Magically. He’s exposed."

I nodded.

"He’s also no longer a pawn."

"Then what is he?"

I stared into the hearth. The flames crackled like whispers.

"A choice," I murmured. "One that shouldn’t have survived this long."

Elsewhere:

In a forgotten place beneath the Veyra Mangroves, a figure stirred in a cocoon of bone and roots. A thousand moths flew from its mouth.

"She has severed the line," it croaked. "He is no longer bound."

Another figure, faceless and veiled in bark, turned.

"Then the Red Wound will open sooner than expected."

Cassandra’s Eyes

Two nights later, Cassandra knocked on my door.

Her face was pale. Her hands shook, though she tried to hide it beneath the sleeves of her academy coat.

"I saw him again," she said. "The man with the broken crown."

"What did he say this time?" I asked.

She didn’t answer right away.

Instead, she pulled something from her pocket.

It was a tooth.

Old. Cracked. Still warm.

"He said it was mine," she whispered. "And that it hadn’t finished growing yet."

Search the lightnovelworld.cc website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.