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It began with Sedena starting a cult.
Or at least, that’s what Ludger assumed. He’d been hoping she’d make friends eventually, so when she roped in other students insluding Erendir—the Third Princess with exactly 1 (one) friend— he almost felt relieved. Two socially inept kids bonding. That was good.
Still, he only expected chanting. Maybe some light brainwashing. The occasional blood ritual.
Normal teenager things.
So when faculty whispers drifted in about the Silent Forest being "suspiciously active" at night, Ludger ignored them. If the girls were summoning something, at least they were doing it together.
Besides, the faculty avoiding that area meant he could go there to smoke his cra—er, mana herbs—in peace.
Daytime. Lunch.
He was trudging through the undergrowth, boots hitting damp soil and moss like a man on a mission. A mission to reclaim his sanity from being overworked by that demon, Elisa.
Making sure he was mostly hidden, he took out his pipe. He was just about to light up when—
CRACK.
Not thunder. Not quite. More like the air being split open by something arcane and deeply, stupidly unwise.
Then, screaming.
Whose fucking idiot students are those?
"Erendir, we said lighting conditions, not lightning conditions!"
Ah.
His fucking idiot students, apparently.
"SENIOR YOU'RE SO COOL."
Aidan. The boy who spoke exclusively in capital letters.
He didn't want to go there. He ignored the part of his mind whispered, By all means, open it. See what fresh hell they’ve invented this time.
Erendir. Aidan. And Aidan meant his 3 other lackeys.
He then considered how this was all happening in an abandoned shed with Sedena. Which meant as long as they weren't summoning a high level demon, they should be fine.
"We need to hurry up, lunch break is almost over—"
Flora Lumos.
Not the high level demon he was expecting, to be honest.
Eh. Should be fine.
He was about to turn around, muttering something about not being paid enough for this shit, except, he remembered, he was.
"Why is this potion chunky?"
Potion. Chunky. Together in a single sentence without the word "not" in between.
No. Nope. Last time there was A Potion Incident he had to repair the west wing's roofs and mop the entire floor, and that he wasn't paid enough to do.
So he put up wards. Seals. A covert UN Owen distress signal he pretended was a pocket watch. Just in case he needed to fake his death and leave the country again.
Worse than that was the smell seeping through the doors.
I'm going in.
He slammed the door open with magic. No element, just pure pressure from raw mana that he blasted in a hurry.
Red.
Everywhere. Spattered across the walls. The floor. The students.
And the smell—
It wasn't metallic, so thank fuck it wasn't blood.
It was... spicy?
Sharp. Garlicky. Bright. Fermented.
Ludger blinked.
Last he checked, blood didn’t smell like chili paste.
He stared, horrified. Confused. A little hungry?
No. That was impossible. He hadn’t even lit the mana herb yet—and this kind shouldn't be giving him munchies. So why did he suddenly want rice?
He stepped forward, coat brushing against something sticky. A jar fizzed ominously in the corner.
He surveyed the scene with cold detachment.
“What,” he asked, voice low and edged, “are you all doing here?”
Sedena stood frozen, hands stained red and raised in defense. "Professor, it's not what it looks like!"
It was probably exactly what it looked like.
"WE WERE MAKING YOU AN ENERGY POTION!" Aidan blurted loudly.
Tacey smacked his arm. "Stop shouting!" she shouted.
Ludger blinked. Potion?
He paused. Then composed himself, trying not to show them how his hand went still and his breathing hitched just a tiny bit.
Did they know? About his mana circuits—
Flora sighed and stepped forward, the voice of reason in a room that had clearly given up on it."It's not like that," she said as she unsealed a box. It hissed ominously like a cornered cat.
The smell hit him harder now—a vivid, nostalgic sting. It couldn’t be. Could it?
He stepped closer.
Sedena bit her lip. “We messed up. This is our tenth attempt. It kept... exploding.”
The container opened.
The cabbage was hacked to shreds. Thick-cut carrots floated like apology letters. Some of the vegetables had been lovingly shaped into stars. Others looked like they’d been bludgeoned.
And yet—
The color.
The vegetables glistened. Verdant cabbage lacquered in deep red chili paste, speckled with garlic and green onion. It shimmered faintly from the recent addition of sesame oil, and you don't even put sesame oil this early, but it made it smell like something even more nostalgic.
It wasn't unwelcome.
“I-I grew the vegetables,” Sedena said, quickly explaining everyone's contributions.
Sedena used vegetables she’d grown herself in a greenhouse she technically wasn’t licensed for. Flora leveraged her noble connections to smuggle spices from five regions. Leo acquired fermented shrimp paste through a “family contact”—which Ludger noted was likely the black market acquired through the Liberation Army.
Tacey had been the only reason the cabbage wasn’t shredded into oblivion—she physically blocked Aidan from using a sword as a cleaver. Iona had apparently mixed the brine while meditating. And Erendir had—by accident or fate—infused the final batch with a bolt of divine punishment.
Ludger stared at them. They looked like a drug cartel and smelled like a war crime.
Erendir waved sheepishly. “She's not here but Lynne helped decipher the potion recipe! With Flora, even.”
Leo and Iona, who were calmly mixing another kimchi batch calmly, nodded in unison. Their batch looked… disturbingly competent. Flora cleared her throat and looked away, cheeks slightly pink. She muttered something about “temporary truces” and “it was a simple recipe."
“Recipe?” he asked, eyes flat on Sedena.
There was a pause.
Sedena winced. “I… may have found a note. In your desk. And then… transcribed it. And then… replicated it. Ten times.”
"And?" Ludger cocked a brow.
"And," she continued, "sometimes you muttered about it in your sleep. And we thought, for your birthday we would try it."
Birthday?
He stared at all of them.
A birthday gift.
He didn’t know what was worse: that they’d pulled off this much chaos in secret, or that he was genuinely moved by it.
No one had remembered his birthday in years. He wasn’t even sure he had one anymore.
Still. They tried. With lightning and star-shaped carrots and all.
He should report them, give them demerits, pretend like they were doing this to bribe him for grades.
But he couldn't. So instead, he cleared his throat loudly. Like that would push the feeling back down.
Ludger sighed. “It’s not a potion.”
Blank stares.
“It’s food,” he clarified. “From… somewhere else.”
More silence.
“You’re supposed to eat it.”
Aidan spoke. “Like, on purpose?”
Leo gently nudged him while Sedena and Flora's eyes narrowed for questioning Professor Ludger.
Ludger only nodded, taking a seat on one of the wrought iron chairs. The students all sat after him, gathering around the container.
In an instant, Ludger carved utensils from a nearby branch using his sword stick fortified with magic—chopsticks for him, spoons and forks for everyone else.
Ludger exhaled. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath.
He took a piece of kimchi, examined it, held his breath, and finally, he took a bite.
It was nothing like his mother’s. Hers had a careful touch—when she wasn’t deep in a trance channeling ancestral spirits or arguing with the kitchen walls.
This was too salty. Too sour. Not nearly enough sugar. No pears. Inconsistent texture. Way too much ambition.
It sucked.
And yet—
“It’s perfect,” he said.
Aidan erupted. "REALLY?! NO DEMERITS?"
"Minus five points for summoning panic across half the campus," Ludger replied flatly.
The group groaned.
“Plus five for teamwork. I’ll consider this a field research project. Somehow.”
They cheered.
Later, they shared his lunch—grilled meat, rice, slightly overcooked but still passable.
Tacey made fun of his chopsticks. Ludger taught her how to use one in her hair to fashion a bun. Aidan asked if it was really his birthday and if people died after turning 30, to which Ludger corrected that he just turned 27.
Ludger bit back the urge to throttle Aidan when the latter said 'Twenty-seven is basically thirty' and suggested home remedies his grandma taught him for aching joints and back pain.
Flora actually finished her portion despite the tears. Ludger said he was proud of her. She cried harder but blamed it on the spice.
Erendir ate with a straight face, surprisingly royal-like and called it diplomacy training for foreign cuisine. Ludger was strangely proud of her for that too, even though her mana control was still shit and she had a ways to go before matching up to her sister. Still, she wasn't doing bad. In fact she wasn't doing bad at all.
Ludger hummed in approval. Pretended it was the kimchi.
Leo was still the same. Short. But consistent—likely the silent backbone off the group and kept Tacey from exploding every time someone talked to Aidan.
Sedena was eating like kimchi like it was a UN Owen mission. He'd have to scold her for being nosy and looking through his files, but the fact that she pulled this off under his nose all while cooperating with others made him hold his tongue for now.
Iona pinched her nose because as a beastman her sense of smell was too strong. She tried it, but eventually just stuck to eating meat after an earnest, polite apology. Ludger didn't take offense or get mad at her.
He didn't even get mad at all.
He missed a faculty meeting. Didn’t get his smoke. Everything he ate after tasted wrong.
He wouldn’t have traded it for anything.
They’d graduate, eventually. They'd make their mark in this world. Leave him behind. Maybe forget this. Maybe forget him.
Maybe he would too.
But he'd remember how this moment felt. Warm and soft and uncomfortably real, like lightning crackling through his gut, seeping through his bones, his marrows, his very soul, threatening to tear down his carefully constructed walls one student-led disaster at a time.
It felt like a hug—one he'd never admit to needing, one he was still too afraid to want.
His father said he could be whatever he wanted when he grew up. His mother wanted a shaman. He told them both he’d be a doctor. Or a scientist. Or a developer.
Instead, he became a teacher.
By accident.
But today, surrounded his little headaches and with a growing to-do list he isn't working on, it still felt right.
It felt like home.