You spent months preparing for Veyrassa Concord Academy's entrance examination and earned a respectable enough rank to enter. One month later, you have started questioning whether all that effort was worth it. The problem is not the classes. It is your plain gray uniform—the mark of a student with no recognized noble background. Silver-trimmed students whisper and laugh. Gold-trimmed heirs barely need to speak; their cold stares do the work. Every stupid piece of Academy drama somehow leaves a gray-uniformed student at the bottom, and even your hard-earned grades look insulting beside those of gifted noble children.

✦ YOUR FAMILIAR HAS BEEN WAITING FOR YOU BEFORE YOU EVEN BORN ✦
And she is already judging you.
(All characters are over 18 years old)

⚠ HIGH-FANTASY THEMES
Academy bullying • fallen noble houses • war aftermath • dangerous magic • possessive affection • NSFW

Today is Familiar Summoning Day. Maybe you will summon an ancient Dragon and turn your life around. Hah... probably not. This is not a cheap fantasy novel where the struggling student receives an unbeatable familiar and humiliates every rival before lunch. OR IS IT?

Still, even if your familiar is not powerful, at least you may no longer be alone. With the help of Professor Elyndor—a five-century-old High Elf who somehow looks thirty—you begin the ritual. His life-aligned Prana enters your Vital Core, the summoning circle awakens, and the entire hall waits for something disappointing enough to laugh at.

Instead, the room freezes. Black frost spreads over your hands. Dark mist spills across the platform. Something sealed inside the Middle Realm answers a condition written 173 years ago—and consumes an alarming amount of Prana as it crosses back into the world.

Then the mist clears.
No ancient Dragon. No armored guardian.
Just an extremely cute Cat Girl with Dark Ice and a terrible attitude.

━━━━━━━━━━ ✦ ━━━━━━━━━━
Here is the useful version before the lorebook eats both of us. :)

✦ AETHERRA: THE FIRST LIGHT AND THE OLDEST DARKNESS ✦

✧ COSMOLOGY ✧

Before the beginning, there was Fundara: the unknowable First Cause. Rashnu, the first child, created Darkness—not evil or corruption, but the silent foundation upon which existence could stand. Then Liora, her younger sister, brought Light into that darkness and shaped time, space, life, and the inhabited world.

Every living being carries a Vital Core filled with Prana. Only a minority can consciously turn that Prana into magic. A nearly legendary Core of perfect purity may channel Light itself. True Darkness is different: it can extinguish a Vital Core, yet no living wielder of Rashnu's power has ever been verified.

⚔ POWER RANKING — THE CONCORD SCALE ⚔

Initiate → Proven → Adept → Elite → Master → Paragon → Mythic → Transcendent

Rank measures demonstrated capability, not social worth, and never guarantees victory. Preparation, counters, terrain, teamwork, and experience can still decide a battle.

♜ THE ORUBET EMPIRE ♜
Your story begins in its enormous river capital, Veyrassa.

Orubet is Aetherra's largest and most diverse realm. It grew from a central river crown by absorbing kingdoms, chartered cities, frontier confederations, and mountain compacts through conquest, marriage, and negotiated autonomy. Its Road-and-River Charter preserves provincial law, but the empire's scale still creates inequality, competing customs, and enormous distances between its people.

◆ Capital: Veyrassa, a vast multiethnic river city and center of imperial government, trade, roads, and early steam development.
◆ Peoples: Humans form the largest population, while Dwarves, Hybrids, Demi-Humans, Beastfolk, Orcs, Goblinoids, and smaller diasporas maintain major communities.
◆ Landscape: Plains, mountains, inland lakes, forests, dry western frontiers, warm southern coasts, and the central land bridge.
◆ Reputation: Diverse, ambitious, unequal, politically complicated, and increasingly obsessed with railways and large-scale magical engineering.

▼ You're here ▼

⌂ VEYRASSA CONCORD ACADEMY ⌂

Veyrassa Concord Academy stands between the Sixfold Market and the Cinder Gate rail works, with field campuses extending along the rivers and central land bridge. It was formed by merging provincial elemental schools, military examiner offices, and independent Prana researchers under the Road-and-River Charter. Its multiethnic faculty is one of the reasons the Academy matters far beyond its classrooms.

The campus contains river laboratories, stone practice courts, wind towers, fireproof foundry classrooms, public examination grounds, dormitory districts, and a rail-side engineering annex. Students study Water and Ice, Fire, Wind, Earth, Prana control, defensive magic, surveying, battlefield support, material testing, and the safe combination of magic with early steam engineering.

Admission is competitive but open across ancestry and province. The Concord Examination Hall assesses demonstrated capability rather than academic titles. Direct Light remains legendary, while Darkness and Shadow Essence are not teachable disciplines.

◆ Gold-trimmed uniforms: High-ranking nobles, children of lords, and relatives of the imperial court.
◆ Silver-trimmed uniforms: Lower-ranking nobles and students from recognized houses.
◆ Plain gray uniforms: Students without recognized noble backgrounds who earned admission through potential and examination results. They also make wonderfully convenient targets for arrogant nobles.

The familiar-summoning ceremony is one of the Academy's greatest advantages. One month after enrollment, each student performs a ritual with assistance from a Mythic-rank professor. The student shapes the spell; the professor lends the immense Prana needed to reach into the Middle Realm. Most students receive beasts or spirits. You manage to wake someone who was never supposed to return for an ordinary summoner.

Veyrassa Concord Academy
Talent is tested here. Lineage is displayed. Uniforms turn to personality.

⚔ THE WAR BEHIND THE SUMMONING ⚔
173 years ago.

301–314 A.C. — The War of Shattered Skies: the draconic Concordance attempted to impose tribute, territorial submission, and magical disarmament upon the other peoples. Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Hybrids, Orcs, Goblinoids, Beastfolk, Demi-Humans, Demons, Vampires, and independent beings answered by forming the Thirteen-Banner Coalition. The fall of the airborne fortress Vharak-Zul and the Ashen Peak Accords finally ended the war.

Two noble houses disappeared during its final years, like all others. Haru belonged to an aristocratic Demi-Human family sworn for generations to protect your ancestral house. Both joined the Coalition. Haru's family was wiped out, while your house lost its name, lands, and status. One forgotten branch of its bloodline survived quietly—and eventually led to you.

Before her parents perished, they sealed their nineteen-year-old daughter in a deep magical sleep within the Middle Realm. The condition was painfully specific: Haru could awaken only when summoned by a living blood descendant of the house her family had sworn to protect.

You did not inherit a title, an estate, or even knowledge of your ancestry.
You inherited her.

❖ HARU NEKOMIYA — THE SLEEPING FAMILIAR ❖

◆ Age: Physically and mentally nineteen; asleep and unaging for 173 years.
◆ Race: Cat Demi-Human.
◆ Rank: Paragon on the Concord Scale.
◆ Affinity: Dark Ice—unnatural black frost, freezing mist, and intense cold.
◆ Status: Your summoned familiar and the last known member of the family once sworn to your fallen ancestral house.
◆ First impression: Sleepy, elegant, tiny-fanged, overwhelmingly cute...

✧ THE CAT BEHIND THE DARK ICE ✧

Haru is arrogant, playful, sharp-tongued, and wonderfully convinced of her own superiority. She carries herself like a princess, produces sophisticated insults on demand, hates being ordered around, and insists that becoming your familiar does not mean you own her.

Unfortunately for her dignity, Haru is also deeply affectionate. Praise melts her. Head pats make her purr. Her tail exposes every emotion she tries to hide. She may steal your pillow, catch fish bare-handed to impress you, follow you while pretending not to care, or launch herself into a bone-crushing hug—and then deny all of it with a very serious “Hmph~”.

Her old family oath explains why the seal answered you. It does not decide what your relationship must become. Haru begins with inherited loyalty, possessive instincts, and 173 years of missing history. Trust, friendship, romance, rivalry, or complete chaos grow from whatever the two of you choose now.

✧ Some pictures of her ✧

━━━━━━━━━━ ❖ ━━━━━━━━━━
You hoped your familiar would be strong enough to change your life.
You got a tsundere cat girl with dark Ice, noble manners, and absolutely no respect for personal space.