Chapter 781 – Three Thousand Mirror Ruins 48

Bai Wei, who had been closely monitoring the entire battlefield, immediately jogged over to meet her. The glow of Glimmer Heal draped over Su Yu like a warm, gentle veil, slowly mending her wounds and easing her exhaustion.

A few more minutes passed before the two clashes of pure strength and will at the center of the battlefield also reached their conclusions, one after the other.

From Zhou Ming’s side came a tremendous, dull boom—like boulders splitting apart.

He had seized upon a weakness the stone-armored badger exposed after one of its attacks, driving his blade upward from below and plunging it viciously through the creature’s lower jaw.

Almost immediately after, Zhu Rao let out a victorious roar!

His grapple with the female earth-shaker bull had dragged on for a long time, and both sides had reached their limits.

Another ferocious charge from the cow was caught dead on his shield. The massive impact forced him to one knee, but he seized the opening to hack wildly at the bull’s front leg joints with the blade in his other hand. Finally, with a mournful bellow, the cow’s front legs buckled, and her massive body lost balance, crashing forward onto her knees.

Zhu Rao was not about to let this chance slip away. He surged to his feet, vaulted onto the bull’s back, raised his battle axe high, and with every last ounce of strength, drove it deep into the back of the beast’s neck!

“Mooooo—!” The female bull let out a long, despairing wail. She thrashed a few times, then finally went completely still.

Zhu Rao slid off the bull’s back and leaned on his battle axe, left with nothing but the strength to gasp for air—same as Zhou Ming.

Both had anticipated this fight wouldn’t be easy. Using the Wang Family’s resources, they had prepared highly effective “recovery potions” in advance.

Almost the instant the fighting ended, each of them produced a vial flickering with soft green light from their storage equipment, tilted their heads back, and downed it.

The effects kicked in remarkably fast. The wounds left from their battles with the mirror beasts visibly stopped bleeding and began closing before their eyes. Though the injuries hadn’t fully healed, they were no longer a concern.

Their nearly depleted stamina also recovered by more than half in short order, the weariness on their faces swept clean away.

The moment they recovered, Zhou Ming and Zhu Rao eagerly crouched down, carefully cutting through the mirror beasts’ tough hides and bones in search of beast cores.

Before long, Zhou Ming extracted an earthy-yellow beast core from inside the stone-armored badger. He wiped the bloodstains from it meticulously with his sleeve, then ran his fingers over its rough, solid surface with unmistakable fondness. Looking up, he caught sight of the beast core in Zhu Rao’s hand—one brimming with even greater explosive power—and couldn’t help but let envy show on his face:

“Once my psychic power improves a bit more and I can handle a second one-star beast core skill, I’m going to hunt an earth-shaker bull too and get myself a Brute Charge skill!”

“Hey! Brother, we think alike!” Zhu Rao slapped his thigh excitedly at this, waving the earth-shaker bull beast core in his hand. “I’ve been thinking the same thing! The earth-shaker bull core’s Brute Charge paired with the stone-armored badger core’s Stone Armor Shield—one for offense, one for defense. Who could stop you in a charge like that?”

“It’s getting dark soon. Hurry up and clean the battlefield so we can get back and extract the beast core skills!” Wang Jingnan reminded them. He was itching to finally obtain the beast core skill he’d been looking forward to—Wind-Chasing Blade.

Only then did Zhou Ming and Zhu Rao rein in their chatter. They quickly stowed the mirror beast carcasses, then poured a thick layer of deodorizing powder over the bloodstained ground.

Once back within the campsite perimeter, the three immediately settled in, took out their beast cores, and began extracting the skills.

“That fight took a lot out of me. I’m going to rest in my tent for a bit before extracting.” Mo Lan put on an exhausted act, then turned and retreated to her own tent.

The phantom leopard cat had been her target mirror beast, and today she had indeed hunted it down entirely on her own.

But she no longer wanted to do what her classmates did—crudely and directly extract the skill imprint from the beast core and stamp it into her mental sea.

In her view, that was tantamount to wasting both the essence of the knowledge and her psychic power.

What she needed was to analyze, then reconstruct.

The tent flap fell closed, shutting out the noise and prying eyes of the outside world. Mo Lan sat cross-legged, and the fatigue on her face vanished in an instant, replaced by focused, razor-sharp calm.

She took out the phantom leopard cat beast core. Her psychic power, precise as the finest probe, slowly penetrated into it.

Inside the beast core, a complex imprint composed of dark, shadowy lines and tiny wind spirals rotated slowly.

The sophistication of the structure, in her estimation, was roughly equivalent to a low-level magic spell model from the world of Valen.

For Mo Lan—someone who had already analyzed several one-star beast core skills and possessed the depth of knowledge of a Peak-level mage—understanding and reproducing it was not particularly difficult.

Her psychic power meticulously traced every trajectory, analyzing how energy coalesced within it, how it was imbued with brief stability and lifelike form, and how it formed a faint connection with the caster…

After just over an hour, Mo Lan’s tightly shut eyes slowly opened, a glint of understanding flashing through them.

The skill imprint within the phantom leopard cat beast core had been completely and thoroughly analyzed.

In the next moment, her formidable psychic power swiftly and precisely constructed an identical Lesser Mirror Image spell structure within her own mental sea—one that belonged entirely to her.

But that still wasn’t enough.

She also needed a method of casting that conformed to this world’s “common knowledge.”

Mo Lan retrieved a night-shriek bat beast core from her storage mirror accessory and extended a thread of psychic power to link the beast core with the spell structure in her mental sea.

Using her own psychic power as the fulcrum and the spell structure as the lever, she deftly “pried” and harnessed the dark elemental force stored within the beast core.

In an instant, another “Mo Lan” appeared silently beside her. At first glance, it was nearly indistinguishable from the real thing—Lesser Mirror Image had been successfully cast.

And the dark-attribute beast core in her hand visibly dimmed by a fraction, a portion of its energy consumed.

Anyone witnessing this would have assumed Mo Lan was doing exactly what every ordinary Mirror Explorer did—consuming energy from a beast core to trigger the skill imprint in her mental sea, thereby casting the skill.

No one would ever suspect that she had truly mastered the magical essence of Lesser Mirror Image, directly constructing the spell structure when casting.

This was the perfect disguise method she had painstakingly devised over the past few days.

She replaced the process of drawing upon free-floating elemental energy in the environment with drawing upon elemental energy stored in beast cores.

This way, her casting appeared outwardly identical to any Mirror Explorer in this world, and when she used mage-level magic, its effectiveness would no longer be constrained by the energy density of the surrounding environment.

She also took the opportunity to analyze the beast cores of the earth-shaker bull and the stone-armored badger.

These were all magical beasts she had openly helped kill, so in theory she was fully capable of extracting their beast core skills, and at a high degree of extraction at that.

Once mastered, the skills Brute Charge and Stone Armor Shield could be brought out and used whenever the need arose.