Chapter 753 – Three Thousand Mirror Ruins 20

Chapter 753 – Three Thousand Mirror Ruins 20

People with high psychic power never had poor memory or willpower, which meant that anyone who could make it into this class wouldn’t truly be a fool.

Once Instructor Yan Shuang explained, no one had any further doubts.

Even Lin Yue, Chen Xingye, Zhao Wuchen, and Wang Jingnan—who came from well-off families and could easily find someone to prepare body-tempering decoctions for them—earnestly followed their teacher’s instructions and began attempting to prepare the decoctions themselves.

Those with fewer cultivation resources needed no further prompting and obediently got to work.

Mo Lan didn’t hold back on this task.

Successfully preparing a body-tempering decoction wasn’t difficult. As long as you made good use of the measuring instruments, were careful, strictly followed the steps, and didn’t improvise, even clumsy handling of medicinal ingredients wouldn’t cause major problems. If you had any cooking experience at all, it was even easier.

The real difficulty lay in knowing how to adjust the dosages based on your own condition, modifying the original formula to achieve better body-tempering results.

But that required the skill of a very experienced apothecary. As beginners just starting out with medicine preparation, they only needed to follow the textbook steps faithfully.

Mo Lan was the first to finish preparing the Scarlet Refining Decoction. After submitting it to Instructor Yan Shuang for inspection and receiving confirmation that it was usable, she went to the adjacent body-tempering room, poured it into the medicinal pool, and dissolved it with hot water.

Without needing any reminder from the teacher, Mo Lan stepped into the medicinal pool.

This time she didn’t even go to the changing room. She simply removed her outer clothes and shoes by the poolside, storing them in her storage bracelet, revealing the gray body-tempering suit she wore underneath.

Now that she could sense psychic power and use the more secure, owner-bound storage mirrors, Mo Lan had put away the original owner’s unregistered storage mirror and didn’t plan to use it anymore. Instead, she switched to the storage mirrors left behind by the original owner’s parents—the ones fashioned as an archer’s ring and a bracelet.

Everything from the old storage mirror had been transferred into the archer’s ring and bracelet as well.

After taking a short swim around the medicinal pool, Mo Lan found a suitable spot and retrieved a reading stand from her storage archer’s ring.

This reading stand had been taken from the original owner’s desk. Not only could it prop up books for convenient reading, it also had two extendable arms that could automatically turn pages. You just had to insert a one-coin mirror coin, and it would work for a long time.

After adjusting the angle and page-turning speed, Mo Lan placed a book on it.

The other students hadn’t finished preparing their decoctions yet, so Yan Shuang remained in the adjacent preparation room to guide them, only popping over briefly to check on things.

What she saw was a certain student sitting steadily in the medicinal pool, reading a book.

Observing her expression—slightly tense, probably not feeling great—yet her gaze never left the turning pages of the book.

Yan Shuang ultimately chose not to comment on this.

After all, she was sitting properly in the medicinal pool. No one could say she wasn’t soaking in the decoction properly—it was just that her eyes happened to be fixed on a book.

Besides, the book was her own, bearing no school markings, so if it got splashed with medicinal liquid and ruined, there would be no need for compensation.

Perhaps she was trying to distract herself from the pain.

Though wasn’t the reading stand turning pages a bit too fast? Was she actually taking any of it in?

Oh well. As long as she stayed in the pool and tempered her body properly, that was enough.

Judging by her condition, she wouldn’t be passing out from pain early today. Yan Shuang returned to the preparation room with an unchanged expression to check on the other students.

Meanwhile, ever since Mo Lan had swiftly prepared a complete Scarlet Refining Decoction, the other students had felt a sense of urgency and silently began competing.

They were all the cream of the crop from this year’s aptitude tests in the Deer Cry Mirror—who among them was willing to fall behind?

Even people like Zhou Ming, who had accepted sponsorship for resources and had to defer to their sponsors’ children, didn’t necessarily enjoy being a perpetual follower. It was all temporary—just to obtain resources and not waste their own cultivation talent.

Preparing a body-tempering decoction had nothing to do with psychic power or Mirror Explorer aptitude. How could they fall too far behind Mo Lan?

Yet when they rushed to finish preparing their own Scarlet Refining Decoctions and left the preparation room for the adjacent medicinal pool to begin body tempering, the sight of a certain someone in the pool made them question reality.

“Mo Lan, what are you doing? Just flipping through a book for fun?” Wang Jingnan found it utterly inconceivable.

This person had refused sponsorship from his family and also turned down Deer Cry Real Estate’s sponsorship. His father said she had the heart of a strong cultivator—and this was the result? Continuing to be a bookworm?

If she could truly endure the pain of body tempering, and was so hardworking and diligent that she refused to waste time sitting idle in the tempering pool, why not hold a mind jade and cultivate her psychic power instead?

The pages were turning so fast—under normal circumstances, maybe you could follow along with full concentration, but while undergoing medicinal body tempering with unbearable pain wracking your body? There was no way she could actually comprehend any of it!

He even suspected she was putting on a performance of diligence and effort.

This kind of diligence and effort, aside from moving herself and surprising others for a moment, had absolutely no concrete benefit for improving one’s actual strength!

In reality, the reading stand’s page-turning speed was far slower than Mo Lan’s actual reading speed. She had left herself plenty of margin for distraction, so at the moment she had time to exchange a few words with Wang Jingnan. “Reading!”

Wang Jingnan’s face was full of disbelief. He stopped the reading stand from turning to the next page and lifted the entire thing up. “What did the first paragraph on this page say?”

Mo Lan pretended to recall for a moment, then said, “The beast core extracted from the one-star mirror beast Gleaming Firefly Worm yields the ‘Lesser Light Illumination’ skill, which can release a sustained light orb that provides adjustable brightness. It is one of the essential practical illumination skills for wilderness exploration…”

Wang Jingnan was stunned.

Lin Yue snatched the reading stand and book from his hands. “!!! Word for word! You really were taking it all in!”

Mo Lan nodded. What else would she be doing—flipping through a book for fun?

“Put the book back for me, please.”

“Oh!” Lin Yue carefully placed the reading stand and book back in their original position, even earnestly adjusting the angle for her.

“You’re this!” Lin Yue clenched her hand into a fist and gave a thumbs-up gesture.

In the Three Thousand Mirror Ruins World, the fist gesture meant “impressive.”

It was at this moment that she finally made peace with scoring seventeen points behind Mo Lan and not taking first place in the aptitude test.

Against someone this fierce, she had only fallen behind by seventeen points—that was pretty impressive in its own right!

She had always felt that Chen Xingye and Mo Lan shared the same love of reading, so she couldn’t help calling out to Chen Xingye, who had just gotten into the medicinal pool. “Do you want to read? I’ve got a reading stand in my storage space—I’ll give you one for free!”

“…” Chen Xingye bit down on his back molars. “Thanks, but… no need.”

After he finished speaking, cold sweat was already streaming down his face.

The pain made even speaking difficult—even if he loved reading, there was no way he could take in a single word!

Chen Xingye also quietly developed a measure of admiration for Mo Lan.

This classmate who had been so unassuming in the past had truly astonishing pain tolerance and willpower.

He couldn’t hold a candle to her.