Li Fei hated housework. Cooking, now and then, was the lone exception.
She shed her robe, kicked off her heels, and even tied on an apron with a touch of ceremony. Then she took the full set of cookware her fiancée, Lady Zhihua, had so thoughtfully prepared out of her spatial ring and set about cooking, utterly focused, for other women.
She hadn't touched a kitchen knife in a while, but her skill hadn't slipped. If anything, her frightening dynamic vision and nerve reflexes had boosted her efficiency to absurd levels.
A peeled potato flew into the air, and in a flicker of blade light it came down as evenly cut shreds. Sword Mastery, now at Lv6, was doing the heavy lifting.
Peeling a potato in midair was still beyond her, of course. That had little to do with Agility. Li Fei's control over her strength simply wasn't fine enough yet, and even with the Vice Dean herself giving one-on-one instruction, she couldn't yet match a prodigy of a warrior who trained through the dead of winter and the height of summer.
The living room fell silent. Teacher and student propped their chins on their hands in perfect sync and gazed at the woman in the kitchen.
Purple twilight lit up the window, and her silhouette, bathed in the glow, was dazzling. Ripples of light drifted through her eyes.
The apron cinched her waist down to a handspan, yet her figure was all graceful curves. Beneath the ends of her short hair, her earlobes swayed gently, lending her the tender, virtuous charm of a young wife.
The blonde teacher's gaze grew hazy, and her thoughts drifted off into a wonderfully sweet dream. The innocent, dutiful girl bustling about the kitchen was her wife. In the dream, she tiptoed up behind her, wrapped her arms around her, and ignored the soft pounding of little fists and the murmured complaints, pushing dinner back until tomorrow morning.
Only when the smell of food reached her nose did the blonde teacher snap awake and straighten her back.
In half an hour, spicy-sour shredded potatoes, chili pork, minced-pork eggplant, and green pepper with eggs had all hit the table, along with a steaming pot of tomato egg-drop soup made with a few beaten eggs. Four dishes and a soup wasn't exactly a feast, but the red and green colors alone were enough to whet the appetite, and the aroma kept drilling into their noses.
"Quick, try some."
Li Fei brought over three bowls of rice and urged them warmly, like the lady of the house.
Melodia didn't stand on ceremony. She immediately grabbed a big helping of chili pork. Surprisingly, this seemingly fiery, passionate teacher wasn't used to spicy food, and her face flushed after a single bite. As Transcendents advanced along the evolutionary path, their vitality grew, their bodies hardened, and their adaptability climbed, but their sense of touch also sharpened, and their taste buds could clearly feel the stinging, burning sensation.
"Mmm… mmph…"
The blonde teacher let out a strained, suppressed sound, clenched her fist, and chewed and swallowed. Only then did she part her alluring lips, stick out her tongue a little, and suck in cool air. The thick saliva that had flooded her mouth strung faintly between her lips, and her tongue had turned noticeably red. There was something bewitching about it.
A trace of mana, or even a call on the power stored in her body's cells, would have set her right in an instant. But if she couldn't properly taste the sour, sweet, bitter, and spicy of a single dinner, life would be far too dull.
Melodia kept reaching for the dishes, one bite after another, until the back of her hand was patted by something soft and tender.
Li Fei pulled back her hand and pouted.
"Leave some for the guests, will you?"
The teacher's heart raced faster, pumping scalding blood to her head. Scenes from illustrated books tagged "cohabiting lesbian couple peeping room" surfaced in her memory, and the lead, of course, was…
Innocent Miss Annesia noticed her teacher's flushed face and assumed it was the spice. She hurriedly ladled her a bowl of soup, which, unsurprisingly, was downed in one go.
After the cozy dinner, the three of them cleared the table together. Considering the white-haired girl's feelings, the other two tacitly refrained from handing the chore to the elf servants.
Back at the table, Melodia sat up straight and got down to business.
"You've both gone through the files on Folded Space B-01, right?"
She paused, waited until the two students nodded obediently, and went on.
"I won't repeat the restrictions on mid-Sequence students interfering with ownership of the Tier-3 altars, or the rules on items. Let me cover the key points instead."
"Every opening of B-01 is a grand event. Nearly every branch academy sends one genius mage, some perhaps two or three, and a very few abstain. On the whole, though, the most dazzling crop of new-generation mages on the Enros Continent will gather together, fighting for the glory of their alma maters and even their home regions."
"According to the intelligence we're allowed to disclose, B-01 is an island. Tomorrow morning, 1,447 Silver-rank students and 26 Gold-rank students will all be dropped onto it. Out of that thousand-sail race, at most six students will break through."
"Gathering information on every rival isn't realistic, but focusing on the Gold-rank students is doable. I've already done that work, so take a look yourselves."
With that, Melodia handed over two file folders.
Li Fei blinked.
"The Gold-rank students will be targeted… which means other academies will dig into my information too? So wearing a Silver-rank brooch is totally covering my ears while stealing the bell?"
"Not entirely."
Melodia chuckled. "There are always some branches with poor intelligence networks, or some sky-high-minded young geniuses who can't be bothered to read up on their opponents, because they're confident they can crush every enemy with pure strength…"
"Got it."
Li Fei took the folder without another word. For genius mages, all of whom had Eidetic Memory, memorizing a mere stack of files didn't take long.
"A warning," Melodia said.
"Information has a shelf life, and geniuses can make huge breakthroughs overnight. This intelligence is for reference only. Trust it blindly and the consequences probably won't be pleasant."
"Take Li Fei, for example. At most, others have learned how you performed at the exchange tournament. How much you've improved in the two-plus months since, even I'm not sure, let alone outsiders."
Both students nodded in unison and moved to open their folders.
A crisp clap drew their attention. Melodia put more weight into her voice.
"There's one more key point."
"Your opponents are all one-in-a-million geniuses, but whatever you do, don't limit your attention to them."
"In past years, more than half of the eliminated students didn't lose to opponents. They lost to the environment itself!"
"B-01 is also called Black Magic Doom Island. It has an inner ring and an outer ring, and day and night alternate every six hours. When you first enter, the six altars are still in the final stage of gestation and can't be seized. Ownership can only be established once an altar has fully formed. The three Tier-3 altars are in the outer ring and will form in turn, roughly six day-and-night cycles apart. The three Tier-4 altars are in the inner ring and need at least twelve cycles."
"Remember, Black Magic Doom Island is relatively safe in the daytime, so you can spend most of your energy guarding against other students. In the dark, though, what wakes on that island is deadlier than a Sequence 6 mage. Be careful, and take every step with caution."
Li Fei asked, "The file says the outer ring is home to monsters with degraded vision but extremely keen hearing, and the inner ring has those same monsters plus creatures that drive you mad on the spot if you so much as see them?"
"Correct."
Melodia snapped her fingers. "The keen-eared monsters are Transcendent creatures unique to Black Magic Doom Island. They're swift as wind, explosive as thunder, highly resistant to magic, and there are huge numbers of them. If tens of thousands closed in, even a Sequence 4 mage would be in grave danger, and if you two get targeted, you'd be lucky to survive. As for the creatures of the inner ring, any Transcendent below a high Sequence who looks at one will lose their sanity."
"So remember: once darkness falls, the key to surviving in the outer ring is to make no sound. In the inner ring, it's 'make no sound' and 'don't look.'"
"Make no sound, don't look…"
Li Fei murmured it to herself, committing her teacher's warning to memory.
"All right, you can read the files now."
Melodia leaned back, her posture easing. "Besides Li Fei, there are twenty-five Gold-rank students, and here are twenty-eight files. Seven are marked in red. Those are the opponents with the most outstanding aptitude."
"Understood."
Li Fei flipped through the pages with a rustle. Dense text flowed through her mind like a river, leaving imprints that would never fade.
In truth, whoever claimed the six altars of B-01 mattered a great deal. It was billed as a stage where the continent's prodigy mages competed together, and it genuinely drew the eyes of quite a few high-ranking beings. But the claim had water in it. Leave aside rumors like "the Enros Continent has one ton of Aptitude in total, and the She-Devil hogs sixteen hundred jin of it," which the Magic Academy had denied more than once. Of Loxibrook's three Gold-rank students, only one had shown up.
Besides, the ceiling of this contest was capped at Sequence 6, so it couldn't stir up any great waves.
That meant the Dean could never approve much of a budget for gathering intelligence that would expire so quickly, just to make things easier for Li Fei and Annesia.
Luckily, a certain blonde teacher who claimed to "treat everyone fairly" had learned that the prettiest girl in her class would be there too. She'd quietly dipped into her own pocket to subsidize the purchase of a higher tier of intelligence service from the Thieves' Guild. That was how Li Fei and Annesia got files averaging three thousand characters per page. Otherwise, at best it would have been two thousand, with accuracy discounted on top.
Clearly, as a member of Miss Top Courtesan's backup pool, the blonde teacher was great, with the noble spirit of giving quietly and asking nothing in return. She was also a failure. Other simps at least got Miss Top Courtesan to remember their kindness and repay it as she saw fit, anywhere from a ceiling of "giving herself in return" to a floor of "sorry, Sister Zhihua~." Whatever Melodia did behind the scenes, Li Fei obviously couldn't feel it.
The rustle of pages slowed without her noticing. Faced with the last seven files stamped with conspicuous red marks, Li Fei read each line in silence, word by word.
Suddenly, her gaze froze on a familiar wolf's head.
It was the son of the Dean of the Magic Academy's Hedren Branch, the Little Wolf King, Xavier.
He was a target on the Dean's list. He was still breathing for now, but the look in Li Fei's eyes as she stared at the spell photo in the upper-left corner of the file was clearly the look one gives a funeral portrait.
A moment later, she turned to the next file with a blank face, until she'd taken in the full contents of every file.
There were twenty-eight files in all, covering the twenty-five Gold-rank students besides herself and three Silver-rank students. The latter three were "Gold-level in raw strength, but problem kids." They had dazzling aptitude but had lost the honor of being awarded a Gold Brooch for repeated violations of school rules.
Among them was a snake-haired gorgon wearing a Silver Brooch, marked in crimson.
Li Fei closed her eyes and ran the information through her head once more, then thanked her teacher sweetly.
"Thank you, Teacher."
"It's what I'm supposed to do."
Clearly, the blonde teacher had long since mastered A Simp's Self-Cultivation by heart. She didn't breathe a word about paying out of her own pocket. She calmly collected the two files they'd finished and added a reminder.
"No matter which rival you face, anyone with the ability to earn an entry ticket to Black Magic Doom Island, you can't let your guard down."
"But even Transcendents have limited energy, so raise your vigilance step by step: Silver-rank students first, then the twenty-eight students I gave you files on, then the Gold-rank students I marked."
"Mm-hm."
The two girls nodded again like chicks pecking at rice.
"Finally, some bad news."
The blonde teacher hesitated, and her expression turned a little odd. "If other academies also collect intelligence and sort it the way I do… I'm afraid both of your files will be marked."
"Huh?"
Li Fei frowned. "That doesn't make sense."
"Between the two of us, one's a low-Sequence and the other's a priest with a Silver Brooch. What did we do to deserve a mark? Don't tell me the fame of the Spell Encyclopedia has spread across the whole continent?"
"No, it's not that. It's mainly because of some leftover history."
Melodia gathered her words. "You know the Dean visited B-01 herself when she was a girl. And the last time it opened, the Twin Stars rose over Black Magic Doom Island… Besides lending a hand to some female classmates in that perilous environment and fighting side by side with them, which left certain misses and ladies unable to forget them, they also created some other grudges. Of course, I'm sure Miss Selene, the North Star, is innocent. She never did anything to wrong Lady Ye Shu."
Li Fei sharply caught the real point. The first thing she asked wasn't what they'd done. Instead she blinked and said with an innocent smile:
"When did the Dean come here, anyway?"
The age of the gray-haired beauty had always been forbidden territory, one that even her daughter Li Fei didn't dare touch. But now she seemed to have a chance to probe sideways and find out whether the Dean's girlhood was decades ago or centuries ago. Hehe.
The corners of the blonde teacher's mouth curled up, as if she'd remembered something amusing.
She tossed Li Fei a meaningful look, then declared righteously:
"Twelve years ago, of course! The Dean is forever twenty-eight!"
Li Fei chimed in.
"That's right. I really envy people whose twenty-eighth year has twelve thousand months in it."
"That spirit of refusing to admit one's age is worth learning from."
"Absolutely."
Playing off each other, the two tacitly took a jab at the Dean, and only then steered the conversation back.
"As for what exactly the grudges are, you'll find out tomorrow morning."
The blonde teacher kept them in suspense.
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