The Sin System: My Wife is Envy

Chapter 50: Life with her

She was already outside when I stepped out, standing near the tree line in the red dress, watching the dark forest.

"You do not have to come," I said.

"I know." She fell into step beside me.

The training sequence ran the same as every morning. She watched without commenting through the run and the first two spell sets. When I brought up Hell’s Fire she said: "You are holding it too tightly."

I kept the flame where it was.

"The grip. You are treating it like something that needs to be contained. It sustains itself. You are spending mana on control the flame does not require from you."

I loosened the structure around it.

The flame burned the same. The mana cost dropped by roughly a third.

"Fire affinity," she said, before I asked. "Among others."

She said it as a fact, no particular weight on it. I filed it and kept going.

On the walk back she was half a step behind me and slightly to the left.

She found the kitchen herself.

The cook took one look at her and found something to do on the other side of the building. Anastasia moved through the kitchen with the confidence of someone who had been planning this specifically, and I sat at the table and let it happen.

Twenty minutes later she set a plate in front of me and stood on the other side of the table and watched me eat.

"It is very good," I said.

She looked satisfied. She pulled out the chair across from me and sat with her hands folded on the table.

"You are staring," I said.

"I am watching."

"Is there a difference."

"Staring implies I am not thinking about anything. I am always thinking about something."

"What are you thinking about."

"Whether the recipe needs adjusting."

I looked at the food.

"It does not."

"Good. Then I am thinking about something else."

She did not elaborate.

After lunch I spread the academy letters across the desk.

Three of them. The formal acceptance. The uniform specification, which ran to four pages. The packing list.

Anastasia appeared in the doorway while I was working through it.

She looked at the papers. Then at the stack of books I had pulled from the lower room.

"What is the academy," she said.

I looked up.

She said it the way she asked everything—directly, no performance around not knowing.

"An institution," I said. "Students go to learn cultivation, magical theory, combat application. It operates under the imperial arcane institution. I have a place in the intake three days from now."

She absorbed this.

"You study there."

"Four years."

"With other students."

"Yes."

She looked at the packing list.

"You are leaving in three days," she said.

"Yes."

She was quiet for a moment. I went back to the list. She stayed in the doorway.

"I have never been to an academy," she said.

"They did not exist in the same form when you were sealed."

"No." She looked at the acceptance letter on top of the pile. "What did you study there. Before you were here."

"I was not a student. I built things. Interactive environments. Software."

She did not know the word. I could see her deciding not to ask and filing it for later, which was the same thing I did with things I encountered that had no immediate framework.

"The academy," she said again. "It is a large building."

"Several buildings. A campus. Library, training grounds, dormitories."

"Dormitories."

"Rooms where students sleep."

She looked at the window.

"I have not slept in a room that was not a cave in two hundred years," she said.

I put the packing list down.

I had not thought about the next three days from her side of it. She had been free for one morning. She had corrected my spellcasting and made breakfast and stood in the east corridor watching birds cross the courtyard. She had asked why people knocked on doors and why servants hurried. She had been doing all of this in an estate she had never seen above the library floor.

The academy was going to be considerably more complicated than an estate.

"Come with me," I said.

She looked at me.

"To the academy."

"Students bring companions. It is not unusual. You would not be enrolled. But you could come."

She was quiet for long enough that I thought she was going to decline.

"I do not know what the current world is," she said finally. "I know what it was. Two hundred years ago. I know what I could hear through stone and what I could read in the Keeper’s journals. That is not the same as knowing."

"No," I said.

"I would not know what things were called. What was expected. How to behave in a large number of new situations."

"Also true."

"You are not making a persuasive argument."

"I am not arguing," I said. "I am inviting."

She looked at the window again.

"The library," she said. "The academy has one."

"Several."

"With current materials. Not two-hundred-year-old records."

"Current acquisitions. Updated every term."

She was quiet again.

"I would need to know things before I arrived," she said. "So I did not do something wrong immediately."

"I can tell you things."

"Many things."

"We have three days."

She looked at the acceptance letter.

"Tell me about the academy," she said.

I pulled a chair out from the desk.

She sat down.

I started at the beginning.

That evening I was two hours into explaining the current imperial structure when she stopped me.

"Why do people hurry," she said.

I had been talking about term schedules.

"The servants," she said. "All day. They move as though they are slightly behind something."

"Habit. Most people learn a pace and keep it."

"Did you."

"Probably."

She considered this.

"At the academy. The students. Do they hurry."

"Some of them."

"Why."

"Examinations. Training sessions. Social obligations."

"Social obligations," she repeated.

"Events they are expected to attend. Meals with other students. Gatherings organized by the student council."

"You will have to attend these."

"Some of them."

"And I."

"You are not enrolled. You can decline most things."

She absorbed this.

"Why do people announce themselves before opening doors," she said.

"Courtesy. The person inside might want privacy."

"For what."

"Sleeping. Dressing. Thinking."

"Thinking requires privacy."

"Sometimes."

She looked at the window.

"I did not have a door," she said. "For two hundred years. I did not have a wall that opened and closed. Everything was just the cave and then not the cave and then the cave again."

I wrote it in the margin of the academy letter without thinking about it.

She saw me write it.

"What is that for," she said.

"I do not know yet."

She accepted this and looked back at the window.

Day Two

She was in the corridor outside my door when I stepped out for the morning session.

"Blood magic," she said. "Today."

"After the run," I said.

She waited through the run. When I finished she had me hold out my hand.

"Sanguine Pulse," she said. "Compression and release through the circulatory system. Offensive through direct contact. Your body already understands the principle."

She demonstrated it on a tree.

The tree lost several branches.

"Foundation," I said.

"The principle is simple. The application takes time."

Two hours later I had the first stable pulse. It existed, which was what mattered.

"Tomorrow," she said, "Crimson Veil."

I found her in the library after the session.