087 The college entrance exam and all that are utterly detestable.

Startled by Lance's threat, she scrambled into the carriage and at once forced herself into meditation.

But before she had even settled properly, her mind was suddenly flooded with all sorts of questions about her master, and she was compelled to break out of meditation early. When she opened her eyes, she saw a scene as though lifted from a comic illustration.

The silver-haired youth sat by the carriage window. Through the slightly open frame, warm sunlight poured in and fell evenly across his pale, clean features. He wore his usual gentle smile; in the sunlight, the red of his eyes shone all the more brilliantly. His soft hair stirred in the breeze, and he looked so unreal, as if he might melt entirely into the landscape.

She stared motionless at the beautiful boy before her, studying him as though meeting him for the first time, wishing desperately to hide this lovely moment away forever.

"Boom!"

A deafening crash and a dangerous smell of singed flesh and charred wood came from beside her face, jolting her out of her daze. She slowly turned her head to look at the scene of the crime.

The ironwood carriage, which had been perfectly intact a moment ago, now bore a new round blackened mark. Fortunately, the one who struck had controlled his force in time, so no extra little window had been blasted into the carriage. Even so, the place struck by lightning was still scorched black; the sturdy ironwood had split apart and curled upward in irregular fragments, fully revealing the brutality and power of the attacker.

"If you zone out again, I guarantee the next bolt will land on your head."

The handsome youth did not turn around, still gazing out at the scenery beyond the window, yet his voice echoed in her mind again and again like lingering music.

Shuddering from the fright of that bolt, she finally drove all the rosy fantasies out of her head and devoted herself to training.

When one was serious, time always passed swiftly. Unlike the forced cultivation she had once undergone under Lingyin's oppressive pressure, this time she had asked for it herself, and so she treated it with doubled earnestness.

Four hours of absorption, four hours of refinement. She felt as though she and a press for extracting oil worked on exactly the same principle: first find the seeds, then press out the oil.

Oddly enough, the refinement that would have been tedious, dull, and painfully slow progress for most people went remarkably smoothly for her. She had never imagined that the self-made method she had once devised for cultivating magical energy—namely, that mistaken technique of shuttling her magical power back and forth through her own body—had in fact been an unexpectedly effective way of purging impurities. And because she was already familiar with that entire sequence beyond any doubt, she very quickly finished purifying the freshly absorbed magical energy.

"Tell me," she asked curiously after eight more hours of training, holding a notebook in one hand and studying theory while she spoke to Lance, "why did that purification method actually make my magical energy increase back then?"

Lance was holding pen and paper, sketching out the entire route they had taken. Without looking up, he answered her question. "Probably because by then your magical energy had already been refined to some extreme. The new energy was born from the repeated friction between energy at its limit and energy at its limit, and then transcended out of that process."

As he spoke, Lance lifted his head to glance at her. "Didn't you notice back then that this method produced far too little new energy?"

"I did notice," she said innocently, spreading her hands. "I just thought I wasn't suited to cultivation!"

Lance struck her on the head with the pen in exasperation. "That is what happens when you don't study properly!"

She rubbed her head in grievance and shrank away to the side, continuing to practice drawing magical circles with a finger dipped in water.

After drawing for ages with no clear instruction on the next step, she poked Lance's arm again, still aggrieved. "Master, can we move on and learn something new after this defensive array I've spent so long on?"

Lance did not even lift his eyelids, merely continuing his grand endeavor of mapmaking. "Sure. When you can draw this formation quickly, within one minute, then we'll learn the next one."

She looked at the enormous array before her and silently teared up, then shrank back to the side once more.

And so, under Lance's high-pressure policy, she seemed in an instant to have returned to exam season. That thin little notebook was somehow expanded by her knowledge-starved efforts into a full two volumes of notes, and with all sorts of extra spells and formations, some important and some not, personally added by Lance, she had somehow compiled a travel diary of elopement along the way.

The carriage swayed onward, rocking and rocking. No one knew how long had passed. It was probably only on the day when she finally managed to draw that advanced defensive array within one minute that they reached the foot of the city gates of Aikaxia.

As they neared Aikaxia, the gate guards clearly recognized her and Lance. Before she even had a chance to state her identity, they opened the gates and let them in.

Yet once inside Aikaxia, the city was eerily silent, so quiet it was frightening. Puzzled, she looked around, only to find that the shop doors were all shut as well. The streets were clean, as though no one had ever walked them, and only the occasional faint sound of distant uproar and clamor proved that this was not an empty city.

"No way!" She turned back to Lance. "Does this mean they're fighting?!"

Without the slightest hesitation, Lance dragged her straight toward the direction of the noise. She, in turn, thoughtfully cast a small wind spell over both herself and Lance. With the air resistance reduced, running immediately became much easier.

At long last they reached near their destination, only to be stopped by the newly built city wall and its gate.

She looked at Lance. "What do we do? Just fly over?"

"Flying over is easy enough. Being shot down and mistaken for a target is something I won't help you collect a corpse for."

Lance also gazed at the wall with a troubled look. In the past, whenever there was a battle, they would inevitably stand at Ringfall's side; it was difficult not to be close to the battlefield. But now it had become difficult even to get near it.

She had no solution either, and could only stomp about on the spot in irritation. After looking around for a while, she finally spotted a familiar figure appearing far away atop the wall. Her heart leapt, and without a second thought she picked up a stone and hurled it toward the wall.

Although the natural laws of this world still obeyed Grandfather Newton's theorem, wind magic was precisely the sort of power that could make Grandfather Newton cry. With a mere thought, she wrapped the stone tightly in wind elements, and it instantly broke free of gravity, shooting straight toward that figure.

Crash!

The one struck clutched his head in pain, and the soldiers around him also noticed the little stone, all turning to look. She stood below the wall, waving cheerfully at him, her voice carrying clearly from far away.

"Sangqing, we're here to help you!"