Chapter 326 – Testing the Cards

Mo Lan spent three days attuning all nine hundred thousand sheets of paper, then placed them into the Grimoire.

The Grimoire, now holding a million pages, felt no different in weight or thickness when held in hand — it looked exactly the same as before.

But when flipping through it, every single one of the million pages was there, not one missing.

With the blank pages in the Grimoire prepared, Mo Lan got ready to head out to the castle library.

This time, Mo Lan didn’t take the hidden route through the underground river from the basement to Moon Lake. Instead, she rode her broomstick and took the old route through the Greengrass Plains.

Although this path was harder to travel and took longer, Mo Lan could test the new cards she’d crafted during this period along the way, and stock up on meat while she was at it.

During this time, she’d been holed up in the Waterfall Cottage, and whenever she reached a critical point in her research, she had absolutely no desire to go out hunting.

But since she could work on her own projects while simultaneously directing the kitchen utensils to cook with Culinary Magic, Mo Lan hadn’t lowered her living standards one bit.

Every day featured a well-balanced mix of meat and vegetables.

Under these circumstances, the meat stored in the basement had been steadily consumed without ever being replenished, and had long since run out.

These past few days, Mo Lan had even couldn’t help but craft some meat ingredient cards, breaking her previous resolution to avoid using the Book of Cards to obtain materials readily available in the mountains, which would have affected her Magic practice frequency.

As soon as she flew beyond the range of the defensive magic formation, Mo Lan encountered a pack of grey-backed wolves.

The tenderloin of these wolves made for excellent ingredients.

Mo Lan didn’t even take out her Wand. She directly summoned the Book of Cards, its pages flipping to the Super Magic Arrow Card page.

Considering that these grey-backed wolves were merely ordinary medium-sized beasts and weren’t known for their defensive capabilities, she selected an Intermediate Super Magic Arrow Card and set the arrow intensity to minimum while maximizing the number of arrows.

The card transformed into silent, invisible magic arrows that streaked toward the wolf pack.

One moment the wolves were growling and snarling at her in the sky; the next, their corpses littered the ground.

They hadn’t even had time to register surprise before the magic arrows pierced their skulls.

A few grey-backed wolves at the edges, slightly farther away, narrowly escaped the onslaught and still had no idea what had happened.

Upon seeing the gruesome fate of their companions, overwhelming terror engulfed them, and for a moment they completely forgot to move.

These two or three stray grey-backed wolves weren’t worth wasting another Super Magic Arrow Card on. Mo Lan drew her Wand and finished them off with Magic.

Only then did she land on the ground to inspect the damage the cards had caused.

Even though she had set the damage to minimum and focused more on area coverage, every wolf struck in the head by a magic arrow had two bloody holes in its skull.

Every single arrow had punched clean through a grey-backed wolf’s skull.

She couldn’t even find the arrows in the wolves’ heads anymore — the arrows had passed through and landed farther away.

Some were embedded in other wolves’ bodies; others were stuck in the ground.

This level of area damage was something she could currently only barely achieve with the Advanced Metal Arrow spell.

Moreover, the arrows were silenced and invisible — virtually impossible to defend against.

The speed was also astonishing. Almost the instant the card left her hand, the arrows were already among the wolf pack.

If she abandoned the area-of-effect spread and maximized the damage, concentrating it into a single arrow, even an Advanced magical beast would struggle to withstand it.

By comparison, this Intermediate-strength Super Magic Arrow Card was probably less effective in combat than even ordinary Advanced Magic.

Once all the Magic involved in this card reached the Advanced level and she could craft Advanced-strength Super Magic Arrow Cards, she could probably take on Peak level opponents.

At this rate, by the time she traveled the continent, even if her Magic levels hadn’t broadly reached Peak level, there would be very few existences capable of threatening her.

Even in a war of attrition, given her current stored card energy reserves, it would be hard to find anyone who could outlast her.

That sense of security hit her all at once.

Butchering magic swiftly carved out the tenderloins from the grey-backed wolves, which were then shrunk, frozen, and stored away before Mo Lan continued on her way.

This time she didn’t ride the broomstick. Instead, she activated an Intermediate-strength Multi-layered Magic Armor Card — 100 layers — wrapping herself in it, then sprinted through the forest using Super Speed, which had already reached the Advanced level.

When she encountered beasts, she’d fight the tasty ones and punch the unappetizing ones before running off.

She had been continuously using the Vampire blood fusion spell to enhance the Vampire abilities of rapid movement, rapid healing, and dark vision, but it had been a long time since she’d tested the results.

This time she discovered that in these mountain forests, even the gold-striped leopard — the fastest creature around — couldn’t outrun her.

Nothing could outrun her, and nothing could break through her Intermediate-strength multi-layered magic armor. When one layer shattered, another remained, and it continuously replenished layers, up to a maximum of one hundred.

Even though she never once actively defended herself and simply tanked every beast’s claws and charges head-on, from the place where she’d encountered the grey-backed wolf pack all the way to the edge of the Greengrass Plains, Mo Lan hadn’t sustained a single injury.

The hundred-layer magic armor still had fifty layers remaining.

This defensive capability far surpassed Stone Skin and similar spells.

Upon reaching the Greengrass Plains, Mo Lan switched back to the broomstick and flew at top speed until she reached the nearest underground shelter.

This shelter was one she’d dug during her earlier exploration of the Inner Region. Returning now, Mo Lan barely recognized it.

The shelter had originally been a simple dirt hole. Now, the interior space had expanded considerably, the earthen walls had been replaced with stone walls, the floor was paved with stone slabs, and there was even a stone bed against the wall.

On the stone bed lay several sheepskin blankets sewn together.

The Greengrass Plains had virtually no natural stone, so the stone walls and floor must have been renovated by a passing witch using the Petrification Spell.

The wool blankets had likely been left behind by other witches too.

In a corner sat several discarded stones carved with single-use constant-temperature magic circles.

Mo Lan even discovered a Magical lamp on the ceiling that no longer worked.

There was also a square-shaped recess carved into the stone wall, where a Lantern Tomato plant grew, casting a warm, cozy glow.

No need to guess — this was definitely left by Sylph.

It just seemed like no one had nourished it with mutant planting magic in quite a while, and the Lantern Tomato was looking a bit wilted.

Mo Lan nourished it with mutant planting magic, and it immediately perked right back up.

She casually plucked a small tomato and popped it into her mouth — sweet and tangy, with a delightful texture.

This little stone chamber was far more comfortable to stay in than the crude dirt hole from before.

Add a door and a window, and it could practically pass for a proper dwelling.

But Mo Lan hadn’t rushed here to stay.

She’d come as a precaution.

She wanted to test a card — a card that just might withstand the Thunder Night of the Greengrass Plains!