Chapter 56 – Crafting the Cover

“One portable miniature furnace, one crucible, ten jin of mold clay, three pieces of light-colored smooth beast hide, one barrel of deep purple dye, five jin of gold, ten jin of brass, seven purple magic gemstones…”

Mo Lan checked off the list as she gathered the materials.

It took several trips back and forth before she had all the materials and tools prepared and arranged on her workbench.

Then she buried herself in the work.

She shaped the molds, smelted the brass, and formed the inner frame of the cover.

The beast hide was boiled and bleached, then dyed deep purple after drying, stretched over the inner frame, and secured in place.

Then she smelted the gold, cast rough shapes using the molds, and began hammering, sculpting, engraving, and setting stones…

Thanks to her memories from Earth, the crafting process went relatively smoothly overall.

It was simply complex and required patience.

She worked in the Alchemy Classroom from morning until sunset before the blueprints finally became reality.

A quarto-sized (260mm × 375mm) gold-carved, purple gemstone-inlaid loose-leaf book was complete.

However, this could only be considered an ordinary book for now. To use it as a vessel for Grimoire magic, it still needed to be suffused with magic.

Such a large book was considerably more difficult to suffuse than the previous beast hide book.

Although the materials used to make this book were of higher quality and could withstand greater suffusion intensity, by the same token, the better the material, the harder the suffusion process.

It took Mo Lan a full three hours to complete the suffusion of this book.

It was already nine o’clock at night.

Mo Lan took out the scroll of parchment she had previously suffused and trimmed every sheet to fit the dimensions of this book, cutting over a hundred pages in total.

Since an Apprentice-level Grimoire could only hold one hundred pages, she punched holes in all of them and installed them into the loose-leaf book.

Finally, she placed the new vessel into the Grimoire, replacing the original beast hide book, and it was done.

When Mo Lan summoned the Grimoire again, what appeared was the beautiful large book.

Mo Lan was absolutely delighted.

The first page was the index page she had prepared, which could locate the page numbers of all collected books.

With the quarto-sized large book, although each page still held one book, the font could be much larger, each page could display more content, and the reading experience was vastly better than the palm-sized beast hide book from before.

The only drawback was that the book was rather heavy. It was fine reading it on a desk, but holding it up was a strain on the wrists.

But that was no problem at all. She could use Grimoire magic to hold the Grimoire — no matter how she held it, at whatever angle or position, it required no effort.

For instance, right now, the Grimoire was floating above Mo Lan’s left hand, naturally lying open.

With her other hand, she kept pulling books from the shelves of the First-Year Reading Room, pressing them against the Grimoire to copy them.

She quickly copied down the reading materials that interested her, leaving only ten blank pages in reserve.

After leaving the reading room, she didn’t forget to stop by the basement to grab two rolls of parchment.

By the time Mo Lan walked out of the Academy Castle, it was already past eleven.

On the road down the mountain, only the stars in the sky and the magic lamps along the path kept her company.

But after walking this route for a week, Mo Lan was already very familiar with it.

She could even read the Grimoire while walking.

The skill of walking while staring at a phone from her previous life still shone brightly here in Valen.

The magic lamps were so bright — perfect for her purposes.

At one-thirty in the morning, Mo Lan finally walked into the Dormitory district.

The young witches had all gone to bed. Not a single dormitory still had its lights on.

She walked up to her own yard and, looking at the fence gate nearly buried under slips of paper, glanced at the dormitory number in confusion.

That’s right — it was number 69!

What were all these?

Under the streetlamp, she could see there was writing on them.

She plucked them off one by one to read.

It turned out that second-year and fourth-year upperclassmen had come looking for her today to buy Status Cards. Since she wasn’t home, they had left messages saying they’d come back tomorrow.

Mo Lan slapped her forehead in realization. “I thought the upperclassmen weren’t interested! Turns out they were planning to come buy them on the weekend!”

But how come there wasn’t a single fifth-year upperclassman? Had they not seen the flyer, or did they simply not need one?

Mo Lan went to the backyard to collect her laundry, only to find the clothesline already empty.

When she came back, she saw that her clothes had been neatly folded and placed in the laundry basket by her dormitory door.

There was a note inside as well.

“It got dark and you still weren’t back, so we brought in your laundry for you! No need to thank us! — Vasida & Sylph.”

A warmth spread through Mo Lan’s heart.

It was really too late. Thinking that young witches would be coming to buy cards tomorrow, she did a quick wash-up and went straight to bed.

The next day, she didn’t even hear the six o’clock morning bell. She was woken up by a young witch who had come to buy cards.

She didn’t even have time to wash up before rushing downstairs to open the door. “I’m so sorry, Sophie! I went to bed a bit late last night.”

“Be careful staying up late, or you won’t grow tall!” Sophie warned her.

“Got it, I’ll be more careful.” Mo Lan obediently took the advice.

Not growing tall was a very real threat for a thirteen-year-old young witch who was only a meter fifty.

“Alright, I saw the poster outside the Castle Warehouse. That card that shows your magic power values — give me one! I can pay the full magic power cost in one go,” Sophie explained her purpose.

“Sure!”

Mo Lan quickly wrote up a contract using the Golden Pen Technique and handed it to Sophie.

Once the contract was signed and the magic power was received, Mo Lan handed over the card.

“I’ll be off then!”

After watching Sophie fly away on a broomstick, Mo Lan’s drowsiness had completely cleared. She hurried off to wash up — there would be more upperclassmen coming to buy cards soon.

Over the course of the morning, Mo Lan received twenty-nine second-year upperclassmen and thirty-one fourth-year upperclassmen.

All the magic power she earned was charged into the Book of Cards.

In the entire Witch Academy, apart from the fifth-year young witches and the Headmistress, every witch now had a Status Card.

After finishing card sales, Mo Lan sat in her dormitory previewing the textbooks for next week’s classes.

The textbooks for the theoretical courses were fine — densely packed with knowledge, full of substance.

But the book called 《 Starting from Zero: Learning to Cook 》 left Mo Lan at a loss for words.

The title was entirely accurate — it really did start from absolute zero.

The entire book taught only three dishes: baking bread, making vegetable stew, and pan-frying meat cutlets.

Everything started from preparing the raw ingredients.

The vast majority of the book consisted of recipes for these three dishes, leaving nothing out, with every single step meticulously documented.

Only the final tenth of the book actually discussed Culinary Magic.

Judging by the thickness of the book alone, you’d never guess it was merely a cookbook for three dishes.

Rather than calling it a Culinary Magic textbook, it would be more accurate to call it a cooking tutorial.

There was a reason such a book had been chosen as the Culinary Magic course material.

As the book put it: “Only when you know the cooking process inside and out can you command those pots, bowls, knives, and forks.”

After skimming through the book, Mo Lan even felt that with her own cooking skills and her memories of Earth’s cuisine, she would have a significant advantage in learning Culinary Magic.

It saved her the trouble of familiarizing herself with cooking procedures.

Wasn’t it simply going from cooking by hand to commanding the pots, pans, and utensils with her own Will?

This was something Mo Lan was familiar with. After all, wasn’t magic power driven by Will?