Chapter 72
On the cursed island academy, the system of earning points was not simply an academic structure it was the foundation of survival itself. Every student was required to contribute to the island's self-sustaining economy by hunting Malignants within designated sectors. that is why the largest Mechant in the island is affiliated to the academy and that is the Rune forge headed by Rume Ironbark , The cores extracted from these creatures served as both currency and proof of competence.
They could be exchanged for equipment upgrades, access to restricted resources, academic privileges, and even temporary clearance into higher-risk zones. In this system, inactivity was equivalent to regression, and regression eventually led to removal.
However, Nille's situation was different from the very beginning.
Unlike most students who entered through standard selection or sponsorship, Nille arrived carrying an unusually large pre-assigned debt tied directly to the academy's internal governance system. This debt was not financial in the ordinary sense, it was a controlled obligation established by the Second Dean as part of a deliberate structural experiment. The Second Dean's philosophy was simple and uncompromising: true value is revealed only when an individual is forced to sustain their own existence under pressure.
In Nille's case, the debt functioned as both burden and test.
It ensured that he could not remain passive.
It ensured that he could not rely on background status, external support, or time alone.
And, most importantly, it ensured that he would either adapt, or eventually abandon the academy and return home.
For reasons not yet revealed to him, Nille was placed in a condition where survival required constant participation in the Hunting Grounds. Every core he collected, every mission he completed, and every encounter he survived directly reduced his debt. This placed him in a fundamentally different position compared to ordinary students. While others hunted for advancement, Nille hunted for continued existence within the system itself.
The Second Dean did not expect Nille to be a capable student, and even more inconveniently, he did not expect his luck to be so persistently strong.
From the very beginning, Nille's first month on the cursed island seemed to have been adjusted and was designed to be harsher than the other Students, almost deliberately complicated.
The structure of the academy, the Hunting Grounds, and even the behavioral flow of Malignant encounters were all somewhat manipulated to push him toward breaking points. Yet, strangely enough, Nille never perceived it that way.
To him, everything he faced was simply the natural consequence of his own choices. He never once considered that the system itself might be adjusting around him, or that the Malignants he encountered were influenced, subtly guided, or distributed with intent. In his mind, none of that mattered. His only focus was simple and unchanging, paying off his debt.
He struggled, not because he lacked ability, but because the academy demanded immediate adaptation from every angle. The Hunting Grounds were unstable by design, Malignants displayed evolution patterns that defied standard classification, and even routine encounters carried layered risks that were absent from academic explanations.
Nille constantly found himself balancing two lives at once: attending classes during structured hours, then immediately shifting into survival operations in the Hunting Grounds just to maintain progress. It was not a matter of comfort or pacing, it was a continuous requirement to keep moving forward without pause.
At times, he considered asking his classmates how they managed it all. How they structured their schedules. How they optimized hunting efficiency. Whether they understood deeper mechanics behind the system they were all living in.
But every time he formed the intention to ask, something interrupted him. A sudden announcement. A redirected class activity. An unexpected incident requiring immediate attention. Or another emergent situation pulling him back into action before the question could ever leave his mouth.
It began to feel as if the academy itself refused to allow him stillness long enough to reflect.
Even ordinary conversations rarely survived long enough to develop. Every attempt at normal interaction was disrupted by timing, circumstance, or coincidence, each one pushing him back into motion.
Unbeknownst to Nille, this was not accidental.
The Second Dean's system was not only designed to test ability, but to eliminate stagnation entirely. Every student was kept in a cycle of action, decision, and consequence, ensuring that growth could not be postponed.
For someone like Nille, already bound by a debt-based survival condition, this structure compressed his window for hesitation even further, forcing constant forward movement whether he recognized it or not.
And so, while other students progressed through guided exposure and gradual development, Nille advanced through something far less forgiving. His path was not carefully walked, it was continuously enforced, shaped by pressure, timing, and relentless expectation.
This was why Nille's status secretly stood apart from the other students, though none of it was publicly visible. To the academy population, he was simply another first-year struggling beneath debt and survival requirements. But the moment his student registration number—7211770—began repeatedly appearing on the city-wide bulletin signboards tied to hunting contributions, abnormal achievements, and sector activity records, the attention of the upper structure quietly shifted toward him.
The Two Deans saw it.
Several elders noticed as well.
Even the monitoring systems attached to the Hunting Grounds began flagging unusual progression patterns linked to his number.
Yet despite their awareness, none of them directly interfered.
The academy was bound by ancient laws older than the island itself, rules established to prevent elders, deans, and higher authorities from directly controlling a student's path, choices, or personal growth unless absolute necessity was declared. Observation was permitted. Manipulation through environmental structure was tolerated to a certain extent to determine if the student was using prohibited spell or artifacts that might destabilize the law on the hunting grounds opening, and direct open intervention toward any student's life was forbidden, especially if the student
Nille, however, already knew that this place was aware of his existence, but he remained completely indifferent to it. He neither cared nor paid attention to the fact that many of his actions, achievements, and survival patterns were already being quietly observed from above. To him, it was irrelevant, not something worth wasting even a single thought on.
Even less aware was the fact that one of the individuals observing him most closely was Osamu Tsukuyomi.
And Osamu felt no pride in the fact that the last surviving trace of his youngest son now existed within Nille.
If anything, it only reminded him of a decision he had never truly accepted.
The Tsukuyomi bloodline had served the Moon Goddess for countless generations. Their clan was forged through spiritual warfare, curses, rituals, and relentless hardship. To them, strength was not admired, it was expected. Weakness was something pressure was meant to erase.
Osamu himself remained alive and healthy despite his age, sustained by the lingering blessings of the Moon Goddess. In contrast, his youngest son had died years ago, leaving behind only a single blood connection.
And that bloodline had been passed onto the child of a common Filipina woman.
To Osamu, that fact carried no emotional weight. No hidden affection. No sense of family attachment.
Only lingering dissatisfaction.
To Osamu Tsukuyomi, Nille was not a cherished descendant carrying on the family legacy, but merely the lingering result of a son whose decisions he had never respected nor accepted.
In his eyes, if Nille truly possessed Tsukuyomi blood, then overcoming hardship should have been natural. Survival should not require comfort or guidance. Struggle itself was supposed to shape him.
And so, from the shadows, Osamu quietly pulled certain strings, not enough to violate ancient law directly, but enough to make Nille's path significantly harder than normal. Adjustments to assignment rotations. Increased pressure within sector recommendations. Delayed conveniences. Minor structural inconveniences designed to test endurance rather than kill.
To Osamu Tsukuyomi, none of this was cruelty. In his eyes, it was simply evaluation. The Tsukuyomi bloodline had always been tempered through hardship, and pressure was the only method he truly respected for measuring worth.
The incident involving the Drake, however, was different. That situation had never been orchestrated by him, nor was it part of any deliberate test. Yet Nille's survival forced Osamu to reconsider certain assumptions. The boy had not escaped through mere fortune or coincidence. He had endured because of his own judgment, instincts, and decisions in the face of death.
That realization became increasingly difficult for Osamu to ignore.
Slowly, despite his own stubborn reservations, he began paying closer attention to Nille. Not as an unwanted remnant of his son's choices, nor as a burden tied to an unapproved bloodline, but as something far more uncertain, a possibility he had yet to fully understand.
Because despite the pressure placed upon him, despite the hidden Subtle manipulation surrounding his action within the hunting ground environment, and despite being forced into conditions meant to wear him down, Nille continued moving forward without complaint or resentment.
And to Osamu Tsukuyomi, that stubborn persistence resembled the old Tsukuyomi bloodline far more closely than he was willing to openly admit.
Nille casually shifted his stance as the crowd around the announcement board began to disperse. Beside him, Lin slowly withdrew her hand, the brief moment of quiet contact dissolving back into normal distance without acknowledgment. They did not draw attention to the separation; it happened naturally, as if nothing unusual had occurred at all.
As they began to move with the flow of students leaving the lobby, Nille spoke inwardly to Nyx.
"Did you manage to get any information about the enchanted bulletin board?" he asked. "I still can't remove my student number from the ranking display."
Nyx responded after a brief pause, her tone calm but definitive.
"The security system governing that board is beyond my access range," she explained. "It is embedded within the academy's closed monitoring network. I cannot interfere with it directly."
Nille exhaled quietly, glancing once toward the distant lobby display still glowing faintly behind them.
"…So I'm just stuck on it."
"Correct," Nyx replied. "However, you were wise enough to register using only your student number, like most hunting participants. That limits external identification exposure."
Nille nodded slightly as he walked.
"That doesn't really make it better."
"It prevents worse outcomes," Nyx corrected. "You are not the only student using the Hunting Grounds to earn currency. Many of them rely on the same system of cores, trade, and ranking conversion."
That made Nille pause for a moment in thought.
He remembered it now, the constant movement of students around the Rune Forge Merchant facilities. Crowds gathering to sell cores, exchange materials, and purchase equipment. It was not just him. The entire academy economy revolved around that cycle of hunting and trading.
"…Right," he murmured. "I forgot it's not just me doing this to pay off debt."
A faint silence followed.
Nyx then spoke again, slightly more precise.
"My authority is limited to open systems," she said. "Anything within closed or core-controlled infrastructure is inaccessible. The academy contains multiple sealed regions where information flow is intentionally restricted."
Nille listened quietly as they continued walking out of the lobby area and into the connecting corridor.
"So there are parts of this island even you can't see," he said.
"Yes."
That single answer was immediate.
No hesitation.
No uncertainty.
Just fact.
Nyx continued, her tone steady but final.
"You will have to accept that certain areas of this cursed island are beyond both your control and mine, for now."
Nille didn't respond right away. He simply kept walking, processing the reality without resistance. There was no frustration in his expression, only quiet acknowledgment.
"…Yeah," he finally said. "I get it."
And as they moved deeper into the corridor, leaving the announcement behind them, the academy's structure felt once again larger than what either of them could fully observe, filled with systems, boundaries, and sealed layers of information that even Nyx could not reach.
Long before the academy ever existed, and long before it was ever called a "cursed island," the land was known as the Domain of Eternal Radiance—an ancient territory once ruled by the Immortal Sun Queen, Himiko.
She was not merely a sovereign, but a vessel of divine solar authority. Her rule was absolute, sustained not by armies alone, but by boundless spiritual energy that flowed through the island like living veins of light. The land itself once responded to her presence. Forests aligned with her will, rivers reflected her judgment, and the skies remained clear under her command.
But immortality does not preserve peace.
It fractures it.
When conflict eventually reached her throne—whether born from rebellion, betrayal, or forces that sought to challenge divinity itself—the Sun Queen did not fall. Instead, her rage manifested into something far greater than war. It became a perpetual storm, an endless convergence of spiritual turbulence that shattered the balance of the island. The skies darkened. The land twisted. And the once unified domain collapsed into unstable layers of overlapping reality.
From that collapse, the island did not die.
It divided.
Twelve distortions of space emerged where the original realm had fractured, each one stabilizing into what later generations would come to call the Twelve Open Realms. These were not separate lands in the traditional sense, but segmented layers of the same broken world—each carrying a different resonance of Himiko's shattered authority and the lingering spiritual echo of her curse.
Some realms preserved fragments of the original world's structure, resembling controlled environments where energy flows remained partially stable. Others became hostile zones where reality itself bent unpredictably, spawning Malignants and corrupted entities formed from residual spiritual overflow. A few remained neutral, acting as transitional layers where passage between regions was barely possible.
Over time, these fractured spaces were forcibly contained and studied by those who survived the island's transformation. The academy structure that exists today was built upon this containment effort, not to restore the island, but to survive within it. Each "sector" became a regulated access point into one of the Twelve Open Realms, controlled through artificial gates and monitored passages.
The Solitary Gate, the Hunting Grounds, and all subsequent sector designations were not natural formations.
They were human attempts to impose order on a world already broken beyond its original shape.
Yet beneath all of this remains the same truth:
The island is still alive with Himiko's lingering will.
The perpetual storm surrounding it is not merely weather, nor natural disaster—it is the unresolved wrath of an immortal ruler who refused to allow her domain to be escaped. The storm does not simply block passage outward; it erases attempts at escape, distorts direction, and bends reality back toward the island's center.
And so, the Twelve Open Realms continue to exist within this trapped world—fractures of a once divine kingdom, now repurposed into zones of survival, experimentation, and judgment.
No one truly enters the island freely.
And no one leaves it by accident.
Only those who understand the structure of its broken realms can survive within it long enough to realize the truth:
They are not exploring a world.
They are moving through the remains of a shattered god's domain.
Nille sat in a secluded section of the academy garden, far away from the main walkways and observation paths where students usually gathered. The area was quiet, surrounded by tall stone arches covered in faintly glowing rune vines that filtered sunlight into soft, fragmented patterns across the ground. In his hands was an old reference book he had borrowed from the restricted academic archive earlier that day.
He was not reading it casually.
He was studying it.
The pages detailed something far older than the academy itself—the structure of the island, the formation of the Twelve Open Realms, and fragmented historical accounts of the cursed storm surrounding the domain. As he read, the information began to connect with what he had already experienced inside the Hunting Grounds, slowly forming a larger picture that even his practical encounters had not fully revealed.
At the same time, across the academy, an official announcement had already been made.
Classes and structured lectures were temporarily suspended.
Not due to emergency.
Not due to failure.
But by tradition.
This was an established academic cycle known as the "Independent Pursuit Period."
For generations, since the early formation of the academy on the cursed island, it had been recognized that structured teaching alone was not enough for survival in a world fractured into unstable realms. The first and second years typically relied heavily on lectures, guided instruction, and controlled exposure to the Hunting Grounds. But once students reached higher levels, particularly the third and fourth years, the academy shifted its expectations entirely.
Instead of being taught, students were required to seek.
Knowledge, experience, resources, and understanding were no longer delivered through structured curriculum. They had to be discovered independently within the island itself.
This tradition had been repeated for many years, long before Nille ever arrived. It was not a new policy, nor a temporary adjustment. It was a foundational part of the academy's philosophy, one that reflected the belief that true adaptation could only occur when students were removed from guided safety and forced to confront the island's reality directly.
The third and fourth years were already familiar with this cycle. They had lived through it before. For them, this period was not confusion, it was preparation. A structured absence of structure. A controlled release into uncontrolled environments. Many of them had used this time in previous years to enter deeper sectors, refine hunting efficiency, explore sealed knowledge zones, or engage in personal advancement outside normal restrictions.
And now, they were doing it again.
For newer students, however, it often appeared chaotic at first. The sudden disappearance of lectures and instructors could feel like disorder or instability. But in truth, it was part of the academy's long-standing method of survival education, one that assumed the island itself would never become stable enough to rely solely on classroom learning.
Nille, reading quietly in the garden, was only beginning to understand the weight of that system.
The book in his hands did not merely describe history. It reinforced a pattern he was slowly beginning to recognize: everything within the academy was structured around pressure, removal of safety, and forced adaptation. Even absence itself was a form of instruction.
As he turned another page, the description of the Twelve Open Realms aligned too neatly with what he had already experienced in the Hunting Grounds. It was no longer just theory. It was confirmation.
The island was not a place that students simply studied.
It was a place that required them to continuously prove they deserved to remain within it.
And somewhere beyond the garden's quiet stillness, the academy continued to function exactly as it always had, unseen, unchanging in its philosophy, and silently pushing every generation of students toward the same inevitable conclusion: learn to adapt on your own, or be left behind by the island itself.
For the first-year students, the Independent Pursuit Period initially felt like an unexpected gift. With lectures suspended and structured classes placed on hold, many of them finally saw an opportunity to breathe, to test what they had learned in real conditions rather than controlled environments. Excitement spread quickly through the dormitories and training halls as small groups began forming plans, organizing hunting teams, and discussing routes into the lower sectors of the Hunting Grounds. For some, the goal was simple survival practice. For others, it was ambition, the chance to break into the "100 Spiritual Rankings" and establish their names early within the academy's system.
many students were now grouping among those they see capable of hunting with them, a few students in class A1 were Lin Yue Meiying. was part of who are known to have a Spiritual Level of 3 up to 4 were seen and officially confirmed by the academy , and they were considered gifted, and a few on them were at that class , and Lin Yue Meiying was among them, but her true level hasnt been confirmed yet, her still were based of her teachers assessment.
the initial assessment was conducted at the japanese embassy by the liaison officer and evaluator under the Cultural Integration Division of the Institute per country ,this was the same assessment that gave Nille the 2 million debt before joining the academy without his knowledge, as his spiritual energy blew up and destroyed the assessment department and injuring the staff and personnel.
Nille's official records, however, told a very different story, one that was deliberately incomplete. Access to his full evaluation data was restricted at multiple administrative levels, a classification usually reserved for individuals whose spiritual readings exceeded normal academy calibration ranges.
What little could be inferred from his entry profile suggested an anomaly: a spiritual level that had already reached the two-digit threshold despite being registered as a first-year student. In a place where most entrants were still stabilizing their foundational energy, such a reading was not merely unusual, it was disruptive to standard classification systems.
The fact that he had been transported to the cursed island under such conditions was, in itself, a quiet confirmation of intent. Within the academy's unspoken logic, no one of that profile arrived by accident. Whether as a student, an asset, or something closer to a monitored variable, his presence implied that higher authorities had already accounted for him long before he ever set foot within the gates. To be placed here meant he was either being cultivated, or contained.
Nille himself, however, remained largely detached from the weight of that hidden classification. Whether he was being cultivated or contained did not change the immediate reality in front of him. What mattered was the present cycle, debt, survival, and controlled progression through the Hunting Grounds. The larger implications of his existence within the academy system existed in a space he did not yet fully access, nor actively question.
Instead, his attention naturally shifted toward the movement around him.
Among the first-year cohort, discussions were rapidly forming into structured plans. With the Independent Pursuit Period in effect, several groups had already organized a five-day expedition into the lower and mid-tier Hunting Ground sectors. The intention was not reckless exploration, but deliberate application of everything they had learned so far, combat fundamentals, spiritual sensing, group coordination, and resource extraction techniques. For many of them, this would be their first true test outside guided instruction.
The goal was simple in concept, but demanding in execution: survive the five-day rotation while maximizing core acquisition efficiency and practical combat experience.
For students studying shamanism and spiritual disciplines, this was especially significant. Theory alone had always been insufficient within the academy's philosophy. Spirit control, curse recognition, and Malignant behavior analysis only became meaningful when applied in unstable environments where outcomes could not be predicted through textbooks. This was precisely why the academy allowed no, required, such unsupervised periods to exist.
Nille observed the preparations quietly from a distance, noting how quickly the group dynamics formed. Some students took leadership roles immediately, assigning routes and responsibilities. Others followed, eager but uncertain, relying on shared confidence rather than individual certainty. A few remained hesitant, clearly aware of the risks but unwilling to be left behind in a system where inactivity carried its own consequences.
In contrast, Nille did not join any group discussion.
Not because he lacked awareness, but because his approach to hunting had already diverged from theirs. While they viewed the five-day expedition as a structured learning opportunity, he viewed the Hunting Grounds as a continuous system of obligation and return. Group coordination, while valuable in principle, introduced variables he had deliberately chosen to avoid.
His debt did not pause for group schedules.
And neither did the environment he operated in.
Still, as he watched the students prepare, he understood their perspective. For them, this was growth through experience. For him, it was continuation of an already established routine, one that simply carried heavier consequences the deeper one went.
Around him, excitement and uncertainty blended together as departure times were discussed and supply lists were finalized. The academy did not guide them further. It simply opened the path and allowed them to walk it.
And within that silent permission, each student made their own decision about how far they were willing to go.