I apologize for the late update. Too much studies lately, so haven't had time to write as much... >.

And as always, enjoy the chapter.

~ Artemis University, Dormitory room 666

“Are you sure about this? Telling them such a thing… I fear that something bad would happen.”

“Given their personality, and that they were able to stalk me non-stop for 4 whole hours, I reckon that something worse would happen if I didn’t tell them instead. Get straight to the point and avoid unnecessary casualties, am I right?”

“Guh… I hope so.”

“Oh, don’t be so pessimistic. Didn’t you say that this campus had the most amount of these… rocks? If we can already clear this place in just a few hours, then a week for the entire city would not be a problem. And if I can just refine that awesome wide-area telekinesis move, it’ll be done in no time!”

“Fine, but what are you going to do with all these rocks?”

“Oh~ don’t worry about the small details, those two are here already!”

I opened the door using telekinesis, which was easy enough. The stalkers appeared before the door, floating in my magic. To be honest, I didn’t know that they were stalking me until I heard their movements and halfway along the little clean-up trip, and saw parts of Ed that protruded from their hiding spot. They don’t have a proper mana pool inside of them, so it was rather difficult to spot them since their mana just blended in with the settings. Well, of course, they couldn’t escape my wide-area telekinesis special move, where I could basically feel everything I’m covering, somehow. I would say they make for great spies and assassins, if not for their clumsy but kind personalities.

“Mhmm… mmm”

Ed looked flustered. “Pssst! Hylia wake up!”

“Mmm what… EEEK! Oops… umm… so you see we were umm following you for your safety, umm you know, you shouldn’t be skipping classes and… stuff.”

“You want to know about these rocks, don’t you?”

“Aaah no not really…“

“No point dragging this on, I’ll just tell ya’ll everything so don’t stalk me again,” I gave them a nice, big smile.

“Oh… alright.”

Ed and Hylia looked a little confused at first but caught on quickly. At least Ed looks a little calmer now.

Spilling the beans was rather quick, since I just poured all that information over their heads, leaving them in a daze.

“Wait wait wait… hold your horses, what did you say? The Zekiel Empire is going to launch a secret attack on this city? And you plan to save it by yourself? Ridiculous! What are you thinking?!” Hylia screamed at me.

“Yeah! You could have told us! If we do it together, the city could be cleaned up faster!” Ed replied with an honest but worried look.

“No… Ed, that’s not the problem here… and we can’t help much anyway. These bombs are too well camouflaged and we can’t tell them apart from normal rocks at all.”

“Thank you Ed, but I am fine alone; I have a secret plan. Don’t worry, Queen Salty is here to protect me isn’t she?” I gave them a wink.

“But… what can a ring do?” Ed questioned.

Once she heard that sentence loud and clear, Salty immediately materialized out of the ring, her hair fiery red with anger. The room turned dark as her smoky aura blocked out the windows. “A puny, worthless lowlife dare question the Queen?! I may be in the ring, but I am still the great dragon queen of the Marth Forests! My power simply cannot be understood by the likes of you puny lowlifes, and still you dare question my ability? Hmpf!”

… and she went back into the ring. She got real triggered there. Phew, dragons have hell lot of pride and salt.

“What did you just thought there?!” Salty telepathed her question to me.

“No, just thinking how cool and cute our Queen was back there.”

“C-c-c-cute?! Hmpf!”

As the aura dissipated on its own, I took a sip of tea that I prepared during the conversation. “Is there anything more you want to ask?”

“Well… I guess if you have a dragon queen then it’ll be fine. Or not. It’s the enemy empire forces you’ll be dealing with! How are you going to deal with them all?!”

“Ah- my plan is totally safe. If I could prevent a large-scale war between Marth and Zekiel from happening, that’ll be great.”

“Ugh, fine, do whatever you want. Just don’t go crying back to us halfway through. Sigh. I just when I thought we had a chance in the tournament this year.”

“I’m not saying this because I like you, but those companions of yours have amazing potentials. It’s a pity you puny humans are too afraid to bring out their true potential. Power and strength cannot be achieved by just lazing around all day. What a pity.” Salty suddenly gave out a piece of advice. Ah~ I knew Salty is a good girl.

Hylia and Ed’s faces looked a little guilty, so what Salty just said hit the bullseye. Well, I guess their powerlessness was just due to their own fault.

I looked at the clock. One o’clock. I check my timetable.

~~~~~

0800 - 0900 | Languages

0930 - 1030 | Calculations

1100 - 1200 | General Magics

1330 - 1430 | Magic Alchemy

1500 - 1600 | Art of Magic Enchantments

~~~~~

“Hmm. It’s almost time for my next lesson, so I’ll go now. Remember to lock the door when you leave.”

I decided to let them think about the whole conversation and absorb everything. It’s like putting a huge tank of water through a small funnel; it takes a little while for everything to go through. It’s not like anyone would want to steal a bunch of rocks anyway, so I just took a walk to the outside, and through the west gate to the popular restaurant streets and find snacks and drinks to fill my stomach.

After a filling meal of stuffed dumplings which contents tastes strange yet surprisingly good, and a weird concoction of fruit juices that looks like bitter medicine but tastes like honey, I went back into the school and headed to where the Magic Alchemy lesson is held at.

Once I reached the classroom, which is also used as a testing laboratory, it was smaller compared to the classrooms in the main building. It may be smaller, but the number of things that are cramped in each of the shelves that line the walls are extraordinary. Whether be it body parts suspended in a jar, or the wide variety of plants and materials that are well-labeled and stored in rows and rows of drawers. One glance and one can tell this is a the alchemy lab. Or now, the classroom.

I found quite a few fellow classmates that have already found their own table and chair to sit in, some chatting and others studiously reading their textbook. All of them stopped for a second to look at my apparently strange outfit of a lab coat on top of the school uniform, then returned back to what they were doing. Oh wait- the textbook! I can’t believe I forgot about that! Maybe the human side of my body is starting to act up on me. Well, I still have photographic memory and that doesn’t seem to change, so it’s just a minor side-effect of mind transfer into an actual body. At least I still have my notebook and pen, so everything will just be fine.

I just randomly found a seat near the front where there seems to be less people, and the lesson started promptly without as much as a hick.

I was relatively safe during the lesson. Sitting near the front meaning I’ll be able to see everything the teacher writes and hear everything he says, while staying out of the strike zone for the teacher to ask questions since I’m right at the front and side. Magic Alchemy is a new thing, unlike the calculations class. It’s fascinating how some plants and strange materials can create amazing effects just by combining them using several different techniques and methods, such as the basic stirring and heating, and imbuing of mana into the concoction. Then there are more advanced and cool tricks like instant freezing of a concoctions to produce pills. Looks like this lesson is all about brewing methods to create different types of results.

We had a go with brewing a low-level healing potion using water and a common herb called green fern. Heating and stirring it seemed simple enough, so I used water magic to lift it into a sphere and insta-cooled it by manipulating the energy levels using ice magic. Well, not really ice magic, since technically it is considered under fire magic. Grandma- no, Master taught me about this during one of the trainings, and it wasn’t as simple as just reversing the effects, but basically, it is a method of forcing heat out from a region to its surroundings to make it colder.

The result was a ball of dark-green stuff, probably very bitter and unappetizing. And also the unwanted attention of the entire class.

…

Luckily the lesson wasn’t much longer, and before I could be bombarded by any more questions and requests to teach them that trick, I quickly escaped the area and headed straight to the library for some peace and quiet. And reading.

I’ve been particularly interested about stories of legends and things like that when I first saw the horned rabbits and adventurer’s guild. I feel like a child all over again, to have an entire library of stories to read again!

Walking through the quiet aisle with only the solid wooden clacking of my boots, with the tasteful brick walls and sufficiently dim, warm lights, was already relaxing enough to relieve all kinds of stress and worries in my mind. Added in with a few fairy tale stories like the Eleven Knights of Moonlight and The Mourning Witch, my head felt clearer than before and I quickly finished these wonderful but short stories. The story about the witch was rather sad though, for her loved ones to be killed just because of her being accused of a witch, then came to murder the entire village, and in the end, became a real witch for all of eternity.

I soon became engrossed in all these fairy tales that I couldn’t stop reading them… oh there looks an interesting one called The Beast of the East, then there’s Legend of the Dungeons… just how many can I borrow at once?

…

At long last. The Art of Magic Enchantments. It sounded the most elegant and extravagant, yet so interesting at the same time that I had to select it. Here I stood, before the doors, with my bag filled with story books I borrowed from the library.

I had hoped that everything would be fine and smooth, but as I walked into the classroom, a familiar face greeted me.

“Nice to meet you again, Earth!”

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