Aria, however, cut right through their laughter. She leaned entirely across the table, her hands gripping the wooden edge. Her green eyes were sparkling with intense, uncontainable excitement.
"Please continue," Aria practically begged. "I want to know what really happened in the canyon!"
Celia nodded, setting her teacup down. "I will tell you the Adventurer's Association's version of the story now. This version is the collective report from the Association's proctors and staff, starting from the exact moment when Kian went missing."
The five girls all leaned in, completely hooked.
The warm afternoon sun filtered through the huge glass windows of the Hidden Origin clan house, casting long shadows across their wooden table. The quiet clinking of distant tea cups faded entirely, leaving only the soft and captivating sound of Celia's gentle voice.
"The morning after the scary manager delivered the exam notice," Celia began. "the Adventurer's Association staff went to Kian's office to deliver the official paperwork. But when they arrived, they saw the office door was completely locked and the windows were dark. Kian Astor was gone."
Celia lowered her voice, building the drama. "The regular staff members absolutely panicked at first. They spent the entire day searching the nearby taverns and asking the local merchants if they had seen him. Nothing. It would be incredibly humiliating for the Imperial Capital branch if one of their most famous Level 6 Adventurers simply ran away from a promotion out of sheer cowardice. The rumors alone would damage the Association's reputation. Sweating and trembling, the staff rushed back to the Association's Building to report the terrible news to the Branch Manager, expecting him to explode in anger."
Celia smiled warmly, her eyes crinkling at the corners. "But the Manager didn't panic at all. When he heard Kian was missing, the big, scary veteran just smiled. He looked at his panicked staff and told them, 'Don't panic. He did not run away. He is preparing. He must be undergoing secret training right now to ensure his absolute victory.'"
Celia took a slow breath, letting the anticipation build at the table before she continued. The five girls leaned in closer, completely captivated by the real story.
"Six months after the exam was announced," Celia said softly, "the assigned Association proctor was setting up his observation tent at the entrance of the Whispering Canyon. The exam was not supposed to start until the following morning. But as he was hammering a tent peg into the dirt, he looked up and saw a young man walking down the empty road."
Celia smiled, her eyes crinkling. "The proctor immediately recognized Thousand Strings. He was absolutely amazed. In his official report, the proctor wrote that Kian arrived a full day early, looking incredibly focused and entirely unbothered by the heavy, dangerous mana leaking from the canyon. The proctor briefed him on the objective: find the high-density Spatial Gate inside the canyon and seal it shut. Kian just nodded silently and walked straight into the dark gorge without a hint of fear."
Aria's eyes sparkled. She could perfectly picture her hero walking fearlessly into the shadows, a lone warrior facing the darkness.
"Eight hours passed," Celia continued. "The proctor waited nervously by his tent, expecting to hear the loud explosions of a massive battle from the high-level Spatial Gate. But the canyon was completely silent. Then, right as the sun began to set, Kian casually walked back out."
Elen held her breath. "Was he injured?"
"Not at all," Celia shook her head. "He didn't have a single scratch on him. His clothes were perfectly clean. He wasn't sweating, and he didn't even look out of breath. He just walked right up to the proctor, shrugged his shoulders, and casually said, 'I didn't do it. I failed the exam.'"
The Archer slammed her hand on the table, a huge, triumphant grin spreading across her face. "See! I told you! He was just acting humble! He was totally messing with the proctor!"
Brielle nodded in agreement, fully buying into the humor story now. "If he fought a high-level gate monster, his clothes would be torn and he would be covered in dirt. If he came out perfectly clean, he obviously used some kind of high-level trick to end it instantly."
"Exactly," Celia said, validating their excitement. "The proctor rushed back to the capital and handed the failure report directly to the Branch Manager. But the big, scary veteran just laughed out loud. He completely refused to mark it as a failure. Instead, he ordered an elite team of tracking Mages and Thieves to go to the Whispering Canyon and see what really happened inside."
The table went completely quiet. Aria gripped her teacup, waiting for the big reveal.
"When the tracking mages arrived at the canyon a few days later," Celia's voice dropped to an intense whisper, "they were completely terrified. They didn't just find an empty canyon. The primary Spatial Gate he was supposed to seal was gone, yes. But when the Mages cast their wide-range scanning spells, they discovered something absolutely impossible."
Celia paused, looking at each of the girls. "Every single hidden Spatial Gate in a fifty-mile radius—over a hundred dimensional tears that the Association didn't even know existed—had been permanently erased from the world."
"What?" Elen gasped, nearly dropping her cup. "A hundred gates? At the exact same time?"
"That's impossible," the Mage of the party whispered, her face pale. "To close just one low-level gate without fighting the monsters head on takes hours of concentrated mana. To close a hundred high-level gates scattered across fifty miles... you would need an entire army of elite Mages casting simultaneously."
"The tracking Mages thought the exact same thing," Celia nodded. "They rushed to the center of the canyon to figure out what kind of monstrous spell could do that. They expected to find the area completely destroyed by a massive battle. But there were no scorch marks. No slashed rocks. No spilled blood. There was just a smooth, perfectly round crater in the dirt."
Aria's heart beat fast. The thumping in her chest was so loud.
A perfectly clean victory, she thought in absolute awe. He didn't even need to draw a weapon.
"At the very bottom of that crater, they found the only piece of evidence," Celia explained, tracing a small circle on the wooden table with her slender fingertip. "It was the melted remains of an incredibly old, completely obsolete Gravity Crystal, and a cheap, shattered Mana-Mirror."
Brielle tilted her head, clearly confused by the combination. "A broken mirror and an old crystal? How does that erase a gate?"
"It is about resonance and recursive reflection," Celia said. Her voice dropped into a hushed, academic reverence. "A Gravity Crystal naturally pulls physical matter. But when the lead tracking Mage analyzed the microscopic fractures in this specific old crystal, he realized the cracks had completely altered its frequency. Instead of pulling rocks, the flawed crystal pulled raw, ambient dimensional mana. It acted like a starving lung, sucking the canyon's energy inward."
Celia paused to take a slow sip of her tea, letting the heavy implication sink in.
"Normally, a damaged crystal pulling that much dense energy would just violently explode," Celia continued, setting the porcelain cup down softly. "But Kian had surrounded it with the shattered shards of the Mana-Mirror. According to the Association, the shards were positioned at mathematically flawless angles in the dirt. When the crystal pulled the canyon's mana inward, the mirror fragments instantly reflected that crushing gravitational force outward, bouncing the pull endlessly back and forth between the broken glass."
The party's Mage gasped, her hands flying to cover her mouth. All the color drained from her face as her professional understanding finally caught up.
"An infinite feedback loop," the Mage whispered, her vocal cords tight. "The mirrors created a geometric net of expanding gravity. When that invisible net touched the first Spatial Gate, it grabbed the edges of the dimensional tear and violently yanked it inside out. The collapsing gate released a massive shockwave of energy, which fed directly back into the mirrors, instantly expanding the vacuum's radius to catch the next gate."
"Exactly," Celia smiled, nodding at the terrified Mage. "To intentionally calculate the exact refractive index of shattered glass, and to predict the exact microscopic flaws in a rotting crystal so it doesn't just detonate... that requires a mind capable of processing numbers faster than a falling raindrop. If he was off by a single millimeter, or if one shard of glass was tilted a fraction of a degree, the feedback loop would have blown the entire mountain range into dust."
"That is insane," Elen breathed out, her hands shaking slightly against the table. "He played with an explosive dimensional chain-reaction just to finish a job faster?"
"The Association was entirely stunned," Celia nodded. "They asked him to close one gate, and he flawlessly erased a hundred using pure, terrifying intelligence instead of brute force. And the most frightening part was that he did it while keeping his clothes perfectly clean. When they asked Kian about it, he just denied it and said someone else must have done it while he was taking a nap."
"He really doesn't care about fame," Aria whispered, her voice trembling with emotion. She pressed her hand against the silver pendant on her chest. "He did the exact same thing for my village. He just fixes the impossible and walks away."
"The Branch Manager assumed Kian was just being incredibly humble," Celia continued. "But the Association's higher-ups were completely obsessed with how he pulled it off. They decided to investigate exactly where Kian got those brilliant, highly specific magical tools. They wanted to know who crafted a cracked crystal and a broken mirror with such deadly, perfect precision."
Brielle leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table. "I bet he bought them from a legendary craftsman!"
"That is exactly what the Association thought," Celia laughed softly. "They checked all the high-end auction houses and the famous magical workshops in the capital. But no one recognized the cheap, obsolete items. The materials were too low-quality for any famous craftsman to use."
"So where did he get them?" Elen asked, completely hooked on the mystery.
"The investigators finally gave up on the rich districts," Celia said. "They started searching the run-down, dirty markets in the lower slums. Finally, after days of asking around, they found an average poor merchant selling junk out of a wooden cart. And when they showed him the pieces of the broken mirror, the poor merchant immediately recognized it."