There are no shortcuts on the path to enlightenment, but some will try.

The summer was prosperous for Jiyong, giving him the funds he needed to attend another year at Bastion Academy. The new first-year students are just as bright-eyed and rowdy as he remembers being, but there's something more sinister to blame for their aggressive behavior: designer drugs.

The ability for any student to temporarily unlock the full potential of their magic with a single potion threatens to upend the school's ranking system. Worse, something dark lurks in the shadows of these performance enhancers: a signal sending personal data to a location within the kingdom, and Jiyong's mother's illness is responding to the same signal.

When the drug problem at the school turns deadly, Jiyong will have to hunt down the source to discover the cure before his friends and half the school's cores are eaten from the inside out. Can he save not only the school, but his mother, too?