The walk to the market had been pleasant at first but a few minutes after they departed the pavilion the sunlight had gotten stronger and Joohyun had to wonder why Yerim insisted on walking rather than taking a coach, especially since—on foot—the market was thirty minutes from the pavilion.

When questioned about her insistence, Yerim kept her eyes on the cobbled road and tilted her head, mouth pressing into a thin line before she said: “The coaches only go one way—where it’s fastest—“ She shrugged, throwing a hand back dismissively—“It’s a bit boring seeing the same buildings and shops and trees all the time.”

Joohyun eyed Yerim, and nodded slowly.

After a moment, Joohyun asked Yerim an unrelated question, and Yerim was quick to answer. Conversation flowed easily between the two of them then.

One of the many topics they had spoken about was the fundamentals of spell casting. Yerim explained her technique to Joohyun, and claimed—jokingly—that her technique was the best and better than all of the techniques taught at the academy. Joohyun laughed alongside Yerim at the claim, but it also had her wondering to herself: why couldn’t she do Yerim’s technique—the one she had been trying to learn since she came to the capital?

Internal Energy had been discovered not more than a few hundred years ago, and humans have had their fair share of disasters in their attempts to learn more about it through skirmishes with other nations and alleged experimentation on citizens. Thus the independent academia and scholars became a nation’s greatest assets. Joohyun wondered then if Rophen’s scholars were lacking in some way.

The way she was taught to control Internal Energy in Rophen was to pre-emptively lead the energy to her arm just before casting the spelling by being aware of how it naturally flowed in her body—the building of one’s awareness needing separate practice for mastery—after which she would need to draw in a quick breath to force the energy to circulate suddenly, rapidly, in its natural channel flow, and build power before surging through her arm and out of the wand.

Joohyun hated that technique. It exhausted her and often left her with a stabbing pain all over her body if she went on with it for too long. And yet it was the only technique she could fall on every time she failed to execute her new one.

Yerim’s technique meanwhile involved circulating the energy flow at a consistent pace at all times during combat. Power naturally built up over time as Yerim would steadily increase the speed of the energy’s circulation throughout a fight.

It frustrated Joohyun that she couldn’t circulate her own energy flow the way Yerim could despite having built up the awareness that should have allowed her to do so. Her frustration would turn into indignation when she realized that Yerim would beat her in a prolonged fight, and that not even her strongest spell would work against Yerim because of the fact that Yerim’s energy would have already been circulating faster and longer than hers.

Unpleasant thoughts she had buried came back momentarily.  Suddenly she was shifting the blame for her own inadequacies again.

Joohyun glanced at Yerim beside her. The girl was happily talking about the queendom’s history. Her hands moved about as she explained historical events and theorized about political secrets that could be plaguing the queendom and she was even making faces to herself. She turned to Joohyun with a bright smile, and Joohyun c