Chapter 266 – The Surveillance Light Screen

From the moment Mo Lan decided to cook all the snake meat, the utensils in her mobile kitchen sprang into action.

Mo Lan left the cooking to the enthusiastic utensils, only using cards to prepare sufficient seasonings and ingredients for them.

She could have found these things in her own farm garden, but she was too lazy to go back for them.

She was perfectly willing to train her magical abilities within the inconvenient living conditions the Academy had created, but she wasn’t willing to waste too much time on things that didn’t contribute much to her magical development.

That was why she was happy to grow the crops she needed in the dormitory courtyard and farmland, tending to them carefully to meet her daily needs while simultaneously practicing planting magic and Plant Magic.

But because she disliked wasting time on things unrelated to magical studies, sometimes she would use cards to prepare ingredients instead.

Especially now that her card sales continued to climb and she had no shortage of card-crafting energy.

Card Magic was her innate talent, and unlike other Card Magic contractors, she never had to worry about suddenly losing it one day. So she used it whenever she pleased.

Even Lady Amisha didn’t restrict her personal use of cards—she only prohibited her from selling certain cards too early that might dampen the young witches’ motivation to study magic.

Culinary Magic had become second nature to Mo Lan by now. She only needed to devote the tiniest sliver of attention to supervising the utensils, and they could produce exactly the dishes she wanted.

Identical to what she would have made herself.

While the utensils busied themselves, Mo Lan devoted more of her energy to processing the remaining spoils from her hunt.

The gold-striped leopard hide needed to be properly treated—it would make an excellent winter coat, and it would also work nicely as a warm blanket.

Not long ago, Mo Lan had learned from Lilith and the other senior students that the clothes, bedding, and even curtains made from fabric provided by the Castle Warehouse couldn’t be taken with them when they moved out of the dormitory at the end of third year.

These weren’t materials that fully belonged to them.

Without warm clothing, one would have to rely on constant-temperature magic circles for warmth.

But ordinary fabrics couldn’t withstand a constant-temperature magic circle—at minimum, it had to be magical beast hide.

The Inner Region had no magical beast hides.

The magical beast hides in the Alchemy Materials Warehouse could be used to practice Alchemy Magic, but finished products couldn’t be taken away for personal use.

So warm beast fur and pelts were among the important resources she needed to collect. At the very least, they would definitely come in handy during fourth year.

As for the black-haired wild boar hide, Mo Lan stripped it off along with the bristles still attached.

Using her well-practiced skinning technique, she split the large piece of pigskin into three layers.

Mo Lan had the Sewing Tool Card and didn’t need the boar’s bristles for sewing needles. The layer with the bristles still attached, she planned to keep for making herself a raincoat.

Black-haired boar bristles were impervious to water and fire—perfect for keeping out the rain.

As for the boar meat, Mo Lan processed it and placed it in a large crock to cure, planning to make smoked preserved meat later.

The last four three-tailed chickens, once processed, were frozen solid into blocks of ice.

She would store them in the dormitory’s icebox. If one day she failed to bag any good game, they would come in handy.

After Mo Lan had arranged every last spoil from her hunt with meticulous efficiency, she took out the Witch Crucible Set Card and removed all the magical plants from her satchel.

While they were still fresh, she hurried to use potion-brewing magic to extract the medicinal essences from each part, storing them in specialized crystal vials.

This way she could prevent the magical plants from withering and losing their potency. After all, fresh herbs always yielded more medicinal essence.

Once she had accumulated enough materials for a complete potion recipe, she could simply use the stored essences to brew it directly.

It wasn’t that she was being stingy, unwilling to waste even this tiny bit of lost potency. It was because ever since Greenhouse No. 1 was no longer open to them, she could no longer afford to use materials recklessly and brew potions at will.

If she couldn’t gather enough materials and couldn’t brew potions, how was she supposed to improve her potion-brewing magic?

So she had to stockpile ingredients, extracting and preserving them as medicinal essences to make perfect use of every magical plant. Saving even a little more potency, bit by bit, meant she could brew one more potion.

And the process of extracting medicinal essences was itself a form of training in potion-brewing magic.

Before long, an assortment of bottles and jars had accumulated around Mo Lan.

For the ones where she already had enough to complete a full potion recipe, she brewed them on the spot.

Only after she had finished processing every last magical plant did Mo Lan finally have the attention to spare for the surveillance light screen and check on how the young witches were doing.

By now, Vasida and the others had healed their injuries and returned to the Inner Region.

Mo Lan found them on the surveillance light screen.

Vasida’s entire body was coated in mud mixed with something black, crawling forward on her belly.

If not for the fact that she was the only one in the entire third year with those jet-black pupils, Mo Lan wouldn’t have been able to recognize her.

Occasionally, she could see a swarm of black giant ants the size of piglets marching past Vasida.

They were a species of enormous venomous ant—average in both defense and speed, with venom that wasn’t lethal. Getting bitten once or twice wasn’t a big deal, and an Apprentice-level witch could easily handle one or two of them.

But these giant ants rarely traveled alone. Encountering them meant encountering a massive swarm—sometimes an entire hillside would be riddled with their nests.

Still, Vasida seemed to have found something that could fool the giant ants’ senses.

Mixing soil with the blood and flesh of the giant ants and smearing it over her body would make the ants treat her as one of their own.

The only thing was—these giant ants didn’t like water. How had Vasida ended up in the middle of a giant ant colony in the first place? The water source shouldn’t be anywhere nearby.

Surely Amisha wouldn’t have been outrageous enough to teleport someone directly into a giant ant colony from the very start?

On another part of the screen, Sylph wasn’t in nearly as sorry a state. She appeared to be walking through the forest, making use of both Path Clearing and Wind Walk, moving far more easily than the other young witches.

She would pick magical plants from time to time, but when wild beasts appeared suddenly, her responses were somewhat clumsy.

She was particularly familiar with wood-element magic and used it exclusively, but her spell levels clearly weren’t high enough. Neither Thorn Spike nor Flying Leaf dealt sufficient damage to quickly inflict fatal wounds on wild beasts.

Her casting accuracy also seemed to have some issues—she couldn’t hit vital points and score instant kills while simultaneously dodging beast attacks.

However, her Mana reserves were abundant and her Super Speed was impressively fast. As long as the beast wasn’t exceptionally quick, Sylph could slowly wear it down.

And it was clearly evident that her combat skills were growing more refined with each fight.

If her spell levels were a bit higher, or if she learned some Apprentice-level spells with greater damage output, she should be able to handle most wild beasts before long.

After all, the majority of wild beasts were only equivalent to Apprentice and Beginner-level witches or transcendents.

After two years of accumulation, most of the young witches’ magical power had already reached the Beginner level, and those who hadn’t were not far off.

It was only their magical proficiency that hadn’t caught up yet.