Chapter 189 – Broom Flight

Chapter 189 – Broom Flight

Entering the Second-Year Reading Room, the young witches took one look at the collection—several times larger than the first-year one—and nearly blacked out.

After seeing the reading list last night, their last shred of hope had been thoroughly extinguished. This year really was not going to be easy in the slightest.

At that moment, a purple-haired figure rushed eagerly into the reading room. “So many magic books!”

The joys and sorrows of one witch are not shared by another.

While the other young witches searched for and transcribed books according to the reading list, Mo Lan started copying from the very first bookshelf.

The other young witches finished their transcriptions and left. Mo Lan was still hard at work.

She didn’t stop until every single book in the entire Second-Year Reading Room had been transcribed into her Grimoire.

The transcription alone took most of the day.

Since a trip to the Castle wasn’t easy to come by, she also went to the library and spent some time reading Mo-Pic books before heading down the mountain in the evening.

A stop at the greenhouse to attune the Broomstick Grass, then to the Ingredient Collection Station to pick up some meat, a visit to the fields to check on the crops, and finally she cut through Breadfruit Grove to take the shortcut back to the Dormitory.

“Ahhh!”

From deep within the grove where one couldn’t see their hand in front of their face, a sudden scream rang out, startling Mo Lan so badly that the meat she was levitating nearly dropped to the ground.

Fortunately, the Vampire dark vision ability she had recently been integrating was beginning to show results, so she hadn’t been maintaining a Light spell at the time.

Otherwise, that hunk of meat would have definitely had an intimate encounter with the earth.

Coming back to her senses, she remembered that this was Valen—Magic could deal with ghosts here.

But the Academy didn’t have ghosts, so that sound…

Had some first-year witch really wandered into Breadfruit Grove this late at night to play?

From the sound of it, whoever it was had gone quite deep.

Mo Lan walked toward the source of the sound and spotted, from a distance, a young witch circling around a cluster of trees.

“What are you doing?” Mo Lan asked curiously.

“Ahhh!” Another scream.

Mo Lan nearly fell over backward. “???”

She sent out an illumination orb first. “It’s me!”

Bertha’s eyes were wide with terror. Once she could see who it was: “Upperclassman~ I came to pick breadfruit and I can’t find my way back.”

Her voice was on the verge of tears, looking quite pitiful.

Mo Lan had just assumed she was playing around!

Breadfruit consumption was quite high, and the ones on the outer edges of the grove had mostly been picked clean without having regrown yet, so one had to venture deeper to find any.

Bertha had arrived a bit late and wandered around until dark—it was perfectly normal to lose one’s way when you couldn’t see clearly.

Seeing her hands completely empty, Mo Lan said, “Come on, I’ll help you pick some. I need to stock up too.”

Once upon a time, an upperclassman had led the way for her and her classmates. Now it was her turn to guide a younger student.

The illumination orb lit up the surroundings as bright as day, and Bertha could see the path clearly now. She followed closely at Mo Lan’s side, matching her step for step.

Before long, they came upon a breadfruit tree whose fruit had ripened and hadn’t been picked yet.

“Go ahead and pick some. A single breadfruit provides a full day’s nutritional needs, and it keeps for seven days at room temperature without going bad. Just be careful—you can only eat it raw. You can’t heat it up, or it’ll explode…” Mo Lan explained the details about breadfruit before letting her go pick.

While her junior picked, Mo Lan also plucked a few clusters herself, levitating them alongside the meat with the Levitation Spell.

Bertha didn’t have Vasida’s enormous appetite from back then—she stopped after picking just two.

Having gone hungry all day, she took a huge bite of the breadfruit as soon as she plucked it, and then…

“Ahahaha!” Mo Lan doubled over clutching her stomach. “Sorry, I really couldn’t help it!”

The traumatic memories of gnawing raw breadfruit and having her teeth ache from the sourness were instantly healed!

“…” Bertha was already so overwhelmed by the sourness that she couldn’t speak.

Her upperclassman hadn’t mentioned it was this sour!

Oh wait, she had said that breadfruit didn’t taste good.

But this wasn’t just “not good”—it was horrifyingly awful.

She regretted it now. Why had she decided not to go with Anna and the others to the Ingredient Collection Station, just because she couldn’t cook?

Even randomly eating some fruit that could be eaten raw would have been better than this breadfruit!

But sour as it was, she had to eat it now, or she really would starve to death.

Once her ravenous belly was filled, Bertha felt like her very soul had shriveled up from the sourness.

“Upperclassman! You’ve all learned Culinary Magic already, right? Why are you still coming to pick breadfruit?”

If she knew how to cook, she wouldn’t touch breadfruit again even if her life depended on it.

“Breadfruit is very filling and it restores magical power. Sometimes eating this saves more time than cooking.”

Mo Lan didn’t want to say more—the matters of Breadfruit Cake and breadfruit juice had to be kept secret from the new students. The Headmistress had already given those instructions. “It’s getting late. Let’s head back.”

Along the way, Bertha seized every opportunity to ask more questions.

Things like why Mo Lan walked in the dark when she clearly knew the Light spell, when they could learn the Spring Water spell, when they’d be taught Culinary Magic, when they could buy Sorceress Magic, and so on.

Mo Lan answered everything she could.

Having gotten her answers, Bertha lamented, “This is awful, just awful! I promise I’ll study Magic properly—but can’t they provide food for just a little while longer?”

The mere thought of having to eat breadfruit for a while longer made her teeth ache.

Mo Lan felt deeply sympathetic, but… she had no intention of helping.

Every young witch had to go through this.

Mo Lan escorted Bertha all the way back to the main road of the dormitory area where the streetlights were, and only then did they part ways.

Bertha gazed enviously at her upperclassman floating meat back home, glancing back every few steps as she walked toward her own dormitory.

Back at her dormitory, Mo Lan set down her satchel and started cooking with Culinary Magic while flipping open the Grimoire to the page where she’d transcribed 《Broom Flight》.

“Let me see what this flying business is all about.”

Among the required reading, this book clearly corresponded to the flight course.

She had just visited the greenhouse today. The climate inside had dropped somewhat recently, and the Broomstick Grass she had planted had clearly entered its elderly stage—the leaves were beginning to yellow and fall off.

But last year’s textbook, 《A Guide to Cultivating Broomstick Grass》, only covered how to cultivate Broomstick Grass. It said nothing about how to make a broomstick.

This year didn’t have a broomstick crafting course either—only a flight course.

No matter how you looked at it, the missing piece should be explained in this year’s required reading—and likely flight course textbook—《Broom Flight》.

The first chapter of the book turned out to be a story!

After reading it, Mo Lan had an ominous premonition.

When Lady Amisha had mentioned before that the raw material for broomsticks was just common weeds found everywhere, Mo Lan hadn’t thought too deeply about it.

But now… so this was how the very first broomstick had come to be!

According to the story, after wands were discovered, a witch began exploring the applications of Magic Infusion in agriculture. She set up a field and infused all sorts of plants with magic, but every single one died—except for a single ordinary weed that survived.

So she kept infusing it every day. Eventually the weed grew to full size, but apart from being a bit larger than normal, it showed no remarkable properties.

Not wanting it to go to waste, the witch bound the grass into a broom and used it to sweep the floors at home. That was when she discovered that the broom could float in the air on its own—and could even carry her in flight.

And thus, flight magic was born.

So broomsticks really had originally been literal brooms for sweeping floors. Which meant it was now fairly easy to guess what kind of broom the flight course would teach them to make.