C2 (Mastery) is the sixth of the six CEFR levels. A reader at C2 can read virtually anything with ease, including nuanced, idiomatic and literary language. Every story below is written for C2 readers, so you understand most of what you read and pick up new words from context. Tap any word for its translation as you go.
When the Inquisition begins targeting women healers in 15th-century Castile, an herbalist devises a brilliant deception: a manuscript of impossible plants that conceals generations of forbidden gynecological wisdom—knowledge that will outlive her in ways she never imagined.
A black-market data thief who steals muscle memory from Olympic athletes accidentally downloads a sleeper agent's combat reflexes into his own body—and discovers that even scrambling eggs has become a potentially lethal activity.
A perfumer can identify three thousand aromatic compounds by name. The one her grandmother catalogued in Zanzibar isn't any of them.
A classical violinist busking in the Madrid metro notices something strange: his daily earnings follow patterns that seem to predict the city's economic mood weeks before anyone else catches on. When the numbers start dropping in a way he's never seen, he faces an unsettling question—what do you do when you can feel a crisis coming and no one will listen?
Humanity's first interstellar war is about to be declared over a head cold — on a planet where every scent is a binding oath and the words "I didn't mean it" simply do not exist.
A master forger in Florence receives an impossible commission from the Vatican: restore a fresco that was painted over centuries ago—not to conceal nudity, but to seal a portal whose bleeding pigments can rewrite whoever looks at them.
When Spain's foremost expert in books bound with human skin examines a supposedly 17th-century volume, a single anachronistic pigment unravels a horror far more recent than anyone imagined.
In a world where the ultra-rich move through time at blinding speed, workers are nothing but frozen statues to be arranged at will—until one laborer's hand begins to twitch, and he glimpses the blur of his masters for the first time.
OP, a struggling graduate student, sabotaged a classmate's access to library reference texts after the classmate's perfect scores kept destroying the grading curve—but now the collateral damage is spreading far beyond the intended target.
A king whose touch pours raw genius into any mind. His servants go mad, imprisoned by masterpieces they'll never have the skill to create. Below his tower, his stubbornly mediocre daughter picks up a brush.
One by one, the stars are going out. The thing devouring them isn't lost — it knows exactly where Noa's canoe is headed.
After a catastrophic voice crack at the Teatro Real ends his career, a once-celebrated tenor discovers he can communicate with Madrid's pigeons—and they have impeccable pitch but absolutely insufferable personalities.
A secret cabal learns to sever shadows from their owners and deploy them as perfect spies—until the shadows organize, elect a representative, and issue an ultimatum that could flatten reality itself.
When a routine neural update to the world's biggest social platform starts broadcasting every user's private thoughts to their followers in real time, a neuroscientist who helped design it discovers she might be the only person left who can still think in silence—and everyone wants to know why.
A cartographer stationed at the edge of the flat earth discovers that his ink spills reshape the landscape itself—and must confront the terrifying question of who is truly drawing whom.
When a violinist's fae contract comes due and a supernatural creditor arrives to claim his unborn child, his lawyer discovers that the loophole hiding in plain sight may cost her client something he never expected to lose.
When a diplomat is transmuted into a weeping willow in the middle of a sacred grove, forensic botanist Inés Covarrubias must plug into the forest's ancient root network to interrogate the only witness—a cantankerous oak with its own political agenda.
On the Infinite Autobahn, humanity has spent generations driving in an endless convoy where stopping means death. When a mechanic born at 140 km/h discovers the road is a loop, he faces the most terrifying act imaginable: pressing the brake.
Cristóbal Vega has built a career on dismantling illusions—until a street magician in Seville performs something his logic can't touch, and he finds himself returning night after night, unable to tell whether he's chasing the secret or the woman.
A young Spanish seamstress in 1920s Paris steals a bolt of fabric whispered to be cursed—and sews from it a gown so stunning it launches her career overnight. But when the women who wear her creation begin to wither, Luz must decide what her ambition is truly worth.
A celebrated Spanish chocolatier discovers that his trusted Venezuelan supplier has been using his shipments of rare criollo cacao to smuggle diamonds and a coded hit list—and now he's the one in handcuffs at the airport.
London, 1963: a stateless spy walks into Savile Row's most venerable tailoring house and orders a bespoke suit under one impossible condition — no one lays a finger on him. Maritza Quintero, the only woman ever trusted with cutter's shears, measures him by shadow, by string, and by the questions he refuses to answer.
A cynical stamp dealer who measures the world in market value is thrown off course when a woman walks into his Sunday stall—not for the rare stamp on an envelope, but for the love letter inside it, lost in the mail for sixty years.
A municipal city planner notices that the street layout of a new subdivision forms an occult summoning circle—and that the houses aren't designed for people to live in, but for something else to be kept inside.
