On his way, he crossed paths with Myria. Without hesitation, she bluntly asked him to admit who he truly was.
He responded by asking how he could be anything other than the so-called inferior everyone labeled him as. She conceded that would make sense, if not for his ability to command all eight spirit arts effortlessly. Not even most demi-humans were capable of that.
Jin shrugged and told her it was not that complicated, comparing it to switching tabs between different wavelengths. Of course, he knew it was more complex in practice than it sounded.
She requested that they continue this conversation somewhere private. Once alone, she repeated her question about who he was. This time he claimed he was simply a human who had been placed in cold sleep beneath Kodama Village for a few million years.
To humor him, she asked what he had supposedly done before hibernation. Jin answered honestly that he had served as a special forces agent for his country. Even though millennia had passed, he remembered those days vividly, as if they had happened only a few years ago.
Curious, she pressed further, asking why someone who fought for his nation would be sealed away in cold sleep. He felt sad admitting that he had failed his mission. He had honestly thought that if he pushed himself hard enough, he could protect everyone. But in the end he had failed, and lost it all.
He also confessed that becoming a professor had not been random. He needed the influence of the Alton family.
Moving on, he asked her where they were headed. She soon led him to a dusty, run-down room, explaining that it used to be a storage space where instructors kept their teaching supplies.
On one of the shelves, an owl statue immediately caught his attention.
He asked what her real reason had been for bringing him here. So Myria admitted that she had been investigating the strange empty space located right next to the storage room. It was far too large to simply be unused, which made her certain it was hiding something important.
Without wasting a second, Professor Jin casually reached out and grabbed the owl statue. She side-eyed him in confusion, wondering why he was petting a dusty old decoration. The moment he twisted it slightly, the bookshelves slid apart, revealing a hidden passage leading deeper inside.
He calmly congratulated her on being correct about the existence of a secret room. Myria was left speechless, unable to understand how he had solved the mechanism so quickly. Jin coolly explained that he had noticed the owl was the only clean object in a room buried under thick layers of dust.
After that, he told her to remain behind while he went in to investigate the suspicious chamber alone. Surprised, Myria firmly stated that she would be accompanying him. He reminded her that there could be a dangerous invader inside, and that he might not be able to protect her. The blonde made it clear her skills were not to be underestimated. She confidently claimed she stood leagues above everyone else in her class, with only her brother possibly surpassing her skill.
Hearing that, he decided to take her at her word.
The two of them carefully descended the decrepit staircase, which stretched far deeper than either of them had expected. Myria quietly appreciated how convenient it was to command light so effortlessly in total darkness. Jin joked out loud that the place felt like the perfect dungeon for monsters to spawn in a fantasy game, leaving the girl confused by the reference.
Curious again, she brought up his backstory once more. She asked whether he already had a suspect in mind, since hunting down threats was supposedly his specialty. He could not help feeling amused at how quickly she had accepted his unbelievable story.
As a small reward for her trust, he revealed that he had a strong suspicion Lord Rudman might be involved somehow.
She immediately asked why he was so certain. Professor Jin explained that while the man appeared charismatic during lectures, there was something deeply unsettling about him when he was alone. In those quiet moments, he gave off the air of someone plotting something. Jin said this kind of behavior was often seen in people whose real nature was completely different from the image they showed the world. On top of that, he found it pretty obvious that the man was far too observant for a teacher.
Myria admitted she had originally suspected Lord Gita instead, but Jin dismissed her theory, pointing out that someone with zero control over his emotions could never orchestrate anything truly sinister. To her surprise, he even went as far as to say that the wrinkled old man was probably decent at heart.
At last the two reached the bottom of the staircase, which opened into a massive dust-filled hall. Myria's eyes widened in shock at the enormous labyrinth hidden directly beneath the academy grounds.
Suddenly Jin stopped walking, because he was just as stunned. Not even in his wildest imagination had he expected to find Kagura's laboratory hidden in a place like this.
When Jin looked at the doors protected by nanomachines, which people of this era would simply call spirits, he became certain that this must truly be Kagura's laboratory. Myria grew nervous, because even though she had been searching for a long time, she had never managed to discover this massive door that had been hidden beneath the academy the entire time.
Jin explained to her that ordinary people would need a special access key to open such a door. He remembered how Hakama had inherited the key back in Kodama Village, and he believed that someone in this place must have inherited a similar key the same way. However, Jin already knew that he himself automatically held full access. So he calmly raised his hand.
The lock system immediately recognized him as the individual with the highest level of authority and unlocked the door for him. As the large gates slowly opened, Jin wondered whether the one trying to overthrow the rulers of this country might also be someone who had access to this place. Myria, meanwhile, still stood there stunned, unable to process that something like this had existed right beneath their academy all along.
She then asked Jin whether he truly had not needed a key, and Jin casually remarked that ancient humans were special in that regard. Myria began to believe that Jin's words might be true, and quietly followed him deeper underground into the hidden lab.
Inside, they discovered several Corruptors locked inside large metal cages, and strangely, all of them remained completely calm, without showing any sign of going wild.
Jin remembered the Corruptor the bandits had locked up earlier, and recalled how it had also stayed unusually quiet until the moment it was finally released. However, the thing that troubled him most was the question of how anyone could transport such massive Corruptors all the way into a place like this without being noticed.
Myria admitted that her brother's suspicion about this academy might have been correct after all. She proposed that they stay hidden and wait quietly, because whoever had caused this was certain to return to the area eventually, giving them a chance to ambush the culprit.
Jin, however, told her that instead of standing around and waiting, they should quickly seal the academy and deal with these Corruptors first. Myria argued that they could not allow the mastermind behind this plan to escape, but Jin explained that protecting the students had to come first, because if these Corruptors started rampaging it would put every life in the academy at risk. When he mentioned that her brother would probably make the same decision, the girl finally agreed with his approach.
Jin added that he had a bad feeling about all of this, and that whenever he got that feeling, his instincts usually turned out to be correct. He said he would investigate the laboratory a little further himself, and asked her to go back up and bring her brother, so the academy could be placed under curfew and the students protected.
After sending her back to the surface, Jin moved deeper into the underground facility, hoping to discover some useful clues.
Meanwhile, on the surface, the skinny lord was being mocked for losing to the new tutor. Even so, he still called Jin an inferior species and blamed him for ruining his reputation. The headmaster walked over to Lord Gita and told him to stop making strange movements, because the students were starting to feel uncomfortable. He was publicly humiliated by the headmaster before she asked about Lord Rudman, who had been missing since that morning.
The headmaster felt overwhelmed, and the fat man's absence only made her more worried. Just then she noticed a dark cloud forming above the academy, and wondered what had just happened.
Myria, meanwhile, was rushing toward the surface. But as she came out through the door, she found herself face to face with Lord Rudman, the fat man who had been missing since the morning, now wearing a purely evil expression that showed clearly he was up to no good.