~ 💎 WEEKLY POWER GOALS 💎🔥 60→1ch | 100→2ch | 200→5ch ⏰ Resets Monday! Thanks!
After class, Luo Wei tucked the Turtle Shell away and headed out of the classroom.
"Junior, wait a moment." Vilonka came quick-stepping out of the hall's side corridor, parchment ledger clutched to her chest.
Luo Wei's brain sounded the alarm. "Senior, is there more public service work for me?"
She'd developed a Pavlovian dread of student council members. Please not another feces-scooping assignment.
"Yes." Vilonka's smile was perfectly elegant. "The academy plans to put the North Church bell tower back in service, but the clockwork and ropes were gnawed through by rats. You and a few other students need to go up and clean and repair it."
"You can go after lunch. The clockwork will need a coat of pine oil, and the ropes will need replacing entirely. Collect the supplies from the Academy Supervisor."
"Understood." Luo Wei nodded. "Should I notify the other students?"
"No need — I've already reached them." Vilonka looked down, scratched a few marks in the ledger, then looked up. "Once the task is done, come downstairs and find the duty officer in the office for inspection. You can't leave until they've signed off."
"Got it. Thank you, senior."
"Good luck, then. I'll be off."
Vilonka had arrived in a rush and left in one, already marching the ledger toward her next stop.
Luo Wei watched her go and quietly exhaled. Good. Just fixing up a bell tower , much better than last night's nightmare of a job.
That relief lasted exactly until the second before she stepped into the North Bell Tower.
"This is the academy's bell tower?"
"This is a rat's nest!"
"SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK,—"
Theodore shoved the door open. Dust exploded outward in a wall, sending everyone behind him into a coughing fit. Rats flooded across the floor like a tide, pouring into corners and vanishing under the floorboards and into wall cracks in the span of a blink.
Nobody moved to go in. They all stood at the threshold, staring.
What met them was a dark den straight out of a nightmare. Cobwebs thick with dust and desiccated insect corpses had clumped into matted tangles that draped from the ceiling and clung to the bell ropes. The floor was buried under a solid layer of rat droppings and rotted wood, pill bugs and dung beetles threading through it all. Light crept in through the slit-narrow windows, and in those pale beams, shredded moth wings drifted and spun like flakes of enormous dandruff.
"How long has it been since anyone cleaned this place?" Even Hall was complaining. "Don't tell me no one's touched it since the academy was founded."
"With dust this thick? At least three to five years."
Theodore kicked a broken-legged stool out of the doorway. It collapsed on contact. The leg had long since rotted into soft pulp , and inside it, fat, milk-white woodworms squirmed.
Luo Wei looked once and broke out in goosebumps head to toe.
She really, truly hated hairless, fat worms.
Theodore and Hall crunched into the room. The plump white worms burst under their boots, oozing yellow like snot dripped into sawdust.
Luo Wei swallowed her gag reflex and stepped through the door. Gladys and Laura followed behind her.
"It reeks!"
The stench of dead rats punched everyone in the nose simultaneously. The smell had reached biochemical-weapon levels. Even Gladys looked like she was about to faint.
"I knew it," Theodore said, mouth curled. "Why would the academy hand us such an easy job as fixing the tower clock? Because the bell tower smells worse than a pigsty, that's why."
"Stop complaining." Laura pushed a broom into his hands. "Clean first, fix later."
Both the North and South Churches of Heria Magic Academy were Romanesque buildings, bell towers built into the structures themselves , each one sitting dead center on the top floor, pulling double duty as a watchtower. The chimes they usually heard all came from the South Bell Tower. The north one had been decommissioned for years, and nobody could figure out why the academy had suddenly decided it needed repairing.
Probably because free labor shouldn't go to waste, and idle students needed something to do.
As everyone knew, Romanesque architecture favored windows that were small, narrow, and set far too high. Practical lighting was essentially an afterthought, sacrificed entirely to atmosphere.
The North Bell Tower was a textbook example. Walls thick as a fortress, windows barely wider than arrow slits. Even at midday, you could hardly see your hand in front of your face in there.
They had to light oil lamps just to sweep the floor.
"We should clear the cobwebs first." Luo Wei didn't want to risk a fire later, so she started knocking down the overhead webs with her broom.
Admittedly, the floor was so damp it was practically seeping, so fire was probably unlikely.
Several recent rainstorms had done their work , the walls were dark with moisture, water bleeding through the stone in thin trickles.
Luo Wei swept a pile of webs together, then turned around and found inchworm larvae climbing a wooden pillar.
...The biodiversity in this bell tower was genuinely worth documenting.
Three-plus hours of hard sweeping later, the tower finally showed something resembling its original shape.
At its center sat a massive weight-driven mechanical clock. The wooden boards and splint pillars inside had rotted through, and the gears had rusted solid. Behind it hung a bronze bell for the bell-ringer to sound the hours , its surface blanketed in thick, spreading verdigris.
"Can we actually fix this?" Theodore stared at it with open skepticism. "I've forgotten basically everything from alchemy class."
"Same." Laura frowned. "I never really understood it in the first place."
"We've got it." Hall removed a loose gear and used a fire spell to forge the central bearing back into shape.
Gladys started from the other side, pulling off the rusted mainspring and fitting a fresh one in its place.
The junior division's alchemy course covered weight-driven mechanical clocks. They'd finished the unit not long ago, so the knowledge was still warm in Hall and Gladys's heads.
"Laura, pass me the rope," Luo Wei said, handing her a coil. "I need to go up and cut away the old hemp line."
The rope that had originally suspended the clock's counterweight had worn through. Someone had to climb up and reattach it.
"Got it." Laura took the coil. "Be careful."
"Mm."
Luo Wei bent down, gathered her skirt, and knotted it up at the knees. She tested the range of motion, then grabbed the wooden frame bracing the clock and started climbing.
"Laura, step back a bit. Don't stand under me — stuff's going to fall."
The frame was not reassuring. It shifted and swayed under her weight. Several of the crossbars had been hollowed out by woodworms and snapped the instant she touched them, raining wood pulp down in soft, rustling showers.
Luo Wei moved faster, pulling herself up onto the iron plate above the pendulum mount. She turned to call down to Laura to hand up the rope.
Then her eyes swept the wall.
There, on a stone ledge where the wall met the vaulted ceiling , a wooden box, palm-sized, half-buried under dust. The carved patterns on its surface were nearly obscured, filled in by years of grime.
But she recognized them immediately.
She'd taken one apart a few nights ago. She knew those patterns by heart.
The magic pattern that repelled dark elements. The same pattern she'd found in the academy's magic array.
What was inside it?
Luo Wei glanced down. Laura stood a couple of meters from the frame, head bowed to avoid the falling dust. Hall and Gladys were both bent over the mechanical clock. Theodore was shoveling rat droppings.
Everyone was busy. No one was looking at her.
Luo Wei rose onto her toes, gripped the wall's edge, and reached up. Her fingers found the box. She lifted it free, tucked it down into the hidden pocket sewn into the lining of her puffy skirt , the one she'd specifically designed for exactly this kind of situation.
Whatever was in there, getting it into her pocket first was the right call.
➤ Next: Swept Clean
───── ⊹ ⊹ ─────
📖 Read up to 300+ advanced chapters on Pat reon
🔍 Search: p a t r e o n(.)com/BZDXG
───── ⊹ ⊹ ─────