Chapter 23: Who Doesn’t Explode a Furnace When Refining Pills?

On Sunday evening, students trickled back to their school dorms.

Yao Beibei dragged a suitcase full of clean clothes and carried a large bag of snacks on her back as she reached the girls’ dorm building. Huffing and puffing, she hauled her things up the stairs, only to find their door firmly shut.

With both hands full, she really did not want to put everything down only to pick it back up, so she shouted for her dear roommate: “Ding Ling-ling-ling, open up! It’s me!”

The door quickly cracked open. Ding Ling poked her head out, glanced around swiftly, and opened the door a bit wider. “Come in.”

Yao Beibei looked baffled. “What’s wrong? Why are you acting like…” She was practically dragged inside by Ding Ling. The moment she entered the dorm, she understood why Ding Ling was acting like a thief.

The wall outlet had already been replaced, but around it was a charred hole the size of a bowl.

With her suitcase in one hand and her snack bag in the other, Yao Beibei stared blankly at the scorched hole in the stark white wall. “What did you use? A hair dryer?”

Wait, that made no sense. Ding Ling had a buzz cut. Why would she need a hair dryer?

The automatic alchemy furnace Ding Ling had bought for the hefty sum of forty spirit coins had exploded.

The power had tripped across the entire third floor. A school maintenance worker came to fix the circuit, and the dorm matron made Ding Ling write a self-criticism letter^[1], though after looking at her arm, the matron added, “Make it three hundred words, and hand over the appliance.”

Ding Ling naturally could not hand over the alchemy furnace, so she had made Yao Beibei’s hair dryer take the blame.

“I’m sorry. I’ll buy you a brand-new one. Just tell me if there’s anything else you want.” Next weekend she would have more money and could buy Yao Beibei whatever she wanted.

Ding Ling had handed over the pink hair dryer covered in glittery rhinestones, claiming she used it herself.

The dorm matron took one look and knew it certainly was not hers. There were only two girls in Class F to begin with; what would happen if their relationship turned sour?

The dorm matron did not press further on who the hair dryer actually belonged to. “Be careful in the future. I’m confiscating the hair dryer.”

Yao Beibei was still dazed, but she instinctively waved off the compensation. “It was an old hair dryer anyway. You don’t need to replace it. Just tell me what you were actually doing.”

Ding Ling pulled out an upside-down plastic basin from under the bed. Lifting the basin, she revealed the alchemy furnace underneath.

“A rice cooker? You cooked rice?” Could it be that even Master Wang could not feed her enough?

“It’s an alchemy furnace.”

“Oh…” Ding Ling had refined pills in the dorm.

Beibei set down the snack bag and opened a bag of potato chips to steady her nerves. Only after munching through nearly half the bag could she speak calmly: “You know how to refine pills?”

Ding Ling opened the desk drawer and took out five or six small glass vials, each containing three or four pills. Most of them were red, with a scattering of orange ones among them.

Yao Beibei swallowed a mouthful of crushed chips. In the center glass vial was a purple pill.

Even someone like Yao Beibei, whose spiritual root had only awakened three months ago and who had never paid much attention to cultivation before, knew that purple pills were of the highest quality.

“S+ grade? You made this? You refined an S+ grade in a single batch?” Yao Beibei felt that even eight more bags of chips would not be enough to suppress her shock.

Just who was Ding Ling! Some kind of dazzling peerless genius?

She had never even attended a cultivation academy in Nanzhou, yet using a secondhand alchemy furnace that looked like a rice cooker, she had produced a top-grade S+ grade pill in a single batch!

“It was the second batch. I was still feeling things out during the first.”

For instance, how to adjust the spirit-gathering talisman when refining in this furnace. Although it was marketed as a plug-in automatic model, anything mass-produced never yielded particularly high quality.

Sure enough, it had only produced some B+ grade orange pills.

By the second batch, Ding Ling had first stuck a spirit-gathering talisman inside the lid, then drew an array beneath the furnace with spirit stone powder. Yet out of more than a dozen pills, there was still only one top-grade purple pill.

The rest were crimson, which still counted as high quality, stabilizing at A grade.

Although the secondhand furnace had exploded, the manual said it could be repaired. She planned to visit a repair shop on Xuanyuan Street next time to get it fixed.

From the sound of it, Ding Ling actually seemed embarrassed, as if taking until the second batch to refine a top-grade purple pill was humiliating.

“The gap between people really is bigger than the gap between species.”

Beibei finished the rest of the chips, refused Ding Ling’s offer of a new hair dryer once more, and gossiped enthusiastically, “Did you know they added a security scanner at the school gate?”

“I know.” Ding Ling nodded, her expression somewhat subtle. She had not expected a mere curse slip to cause such a massive stir.

Zhou Ziyue had been the main writer of the curse slip, and she had merely added two strokes, yet Chen Li still showed no remorse even now.

Vice Principal Gao refused to let the matter drop. Principal Li had only just taken medical leave when such a malicious incident occurred in the school. It was an outright challenge to his authority as vice principal.

Vice Principal Gao felt this was aimed directly at him, perhaps secretly orchestrated by the teachers who supported Principal Li.

Principal Li was indeed on medical leave, but the board of directors had long been dissatisfied with his lenient policies. Several members wanted Vice Principal Gao to take over and had granted him broad authority to reform the campus.

For something like this to happen on the very first day of implementing the new system, there had to be a faction dissatisfied with him.

Vice Principal Gao ordered Director Chen to get to the bottom of the matter. He wanted to see just who was causing trouble in the school.

The curse dispeller hired by the Ye family was also racking his brain: “Just what is the condition to break it?” Unless the other party was some mighty expert who could draw ancient guarding arrays like the ones found in secret realms.

But if the person were a mighty expert, why would they trouble a student?

Surely Chen Li would not be so blind as to run straight into the line of fire himself.

Beibei continued, “Everyone entering the school has to go through the security scanner and get checked with a mirror.”

Even parents were not allowed in. Otherwise, why would Yao Beibei have carried so much stuff by herself, tiring her out so much she had wanted to sit by the school flowerbed and open two bags of snacks to recharge?

Yao Beibei tore open a chocolate nut bar. As she chewed on the nuts, she noticed the new clothes Ding Ling had washed and hung out on the balcony. Did she buy clothes? And from a famous sportswear brand… a knockoff?

Beibei glanced hesitantly at Ding Ling. Should she tell her that the letters on her sportswear were printed upside down?

Ding Ling put away the pills and stepped out onto the balcony under the moonlight to “plant herself.” Seeing Yao Beibei looking as if she wanted to say something, Ding Ling asked, “What is it?”

“Nothing, nothing. Go ahead.” Yao Beibei continued to speculate aloud, “With how thoroughly they’re investigating, what on earth are they looking for? Chen Li isn’t dead, is he?”

Chen Li was not dead, of course. He returned to class first thing Monday morning.

After not seeing him for just a few days, Chen Li had grown so thin he was practically a skeleton. His build had originally been similar to Zhang Tianyu’s, with robust muscles filling out his short sleeves, but now, whether biceps or triceps, all that muscle had melted away.

Yao Beibei glanced at him from a distance and remarked, “Look how skinny he is. He’s barely heavier than you now.”

That “you” referred to Ding Ling, who was even thinner.

Aside from the bare minimum nutrients needed to sustain bodily functions, Ding Ling prioritized channeling spiritual energy and nourishment into her spiritual manor to nourish her spiritual root.

If her spiritual root did not recover, everything else was pointless.

Ding Ling lifted her eyelids to glance at Chen Li. His face had a sickly greenish cast, and a sharp, hostile air lingered between his brows.

The wound on his hand had originally swollen all the way up his arm, but his arm was now fully healed. Only his palm remained wrapped in bandages, with a yellow talisman pasted over them.

“There’s a talisman stuck to it,” Yao Beibei said, bursting with curiosity. “What kind of talisman is that?”

“A guardian talisman.” Ding Ling could tell at a single glance, and her interest was slightly piqued.

Someone of considerable ability had given Chen Li that talisman to temporarily suppress the curse. However, eradicating it completely still required meeting the conditions to break it.

Word was that Chen Li’s father had gone to plead with the Ye family again, and the Ye family called upon a renowned medical cultivator from the capital to treat him. His arm had healed in an instant, yet the wound on his hand still showed no improvement.

With that guardian talisman in place, the wound would at least not deteriorate any further.

Chen Li’s gaze was dark and sullen as he glared at everyone coming and going. Soon, no one dared to walk anywhere near him, leaving a wide, empty circle around him.

While Yao Beibei was gossiping, Zhang Tianyu walked over and cast a glance at Ding Ling.

Well then. He had worried for nothing.

He had spent the entire previous day tearing through Xuanyuan Street without catching so much as a glimpse of Ding Ling’s shadow. The moment he got home, he had called his Uncle Gao and described what she had been wearing.

“She’s a classmate of mine who went to Xuanyuan Street for fun. I was following her, but I accidentally lost her.”

Uncle Gao was a subordinate of Zhang Tianyu’s father and had watched Zhang Tianyu grow up since childhood. Hearing that the boy had followed a female classmate on the very first weekend of the semester and then managed to lose her, he frowned and scolded him.

“Xiao Yu, we might work in unorthodox business, but we can’t do things like that. If you like this classmate of yours, buy her some candy, chocolates, pretty clothes…” He paused when he got to the part about pretty clothes.

That little girl from Nanzhou dressed so refreshingly unconventional. How should one put it? Xiao Yu was truly his father’s son; their taste was practically identical.

Zhang Tianyu had spent ages trying to explain himself: “I wasn’t stalking her! I was just worried she’d get scammed… I…” He could not wash himself clean even if he jumped into the Four Extremes Sea^[2].

That evening, his father had actually come home for dinner, a rare occurrence. He should have known Uncle Gao and his dad wore the same pair of pants! Not a single thing could be kept from him!

Zhang Tianyu’s father asked his son, “You like that girl? Your Uncle Gao told me your taste is just like mine. What does she look like? She must be pretty, right?”

Only then did Zhang Tianyu finally find a chance to tell his father, “Dad, I got placed into Class F.”

His father did not care in the slightest. All his father wanted to know was what Ding Ling looked like.

Zhang Tianyu glanced over at Ding Ling’s buzz cut and cardboard-flat frame. Right at that moment, Ding Ling turned around and handed him a small bag. “Here. This is your commission.”

Zhang Tianyu took it and looked inside. Five spirit coins? What on earth had she sold? He desperately wanted to know!

After finishing lunch at noon, Ding Ling got ready to head to the library. She could not quite fathom why, wherever she went, she seemed to drag the entirety of Class F along with her.

Yao Beibei ate and roomed with her every day, becoming her follower before Ding Ling even realized it. That, she could understand.

Zhou Ziyue was trailing sneakily far behind, probably wanting to continue investigating the curse.

Then why were Zhang Tianyu and Yi Ang tagging along?

All five members of Class F arrived at the library in a grand procession.

Ding Ling said, “I want to check out every book about Taiyi Zhenren and Nezha.”

The librarian glanced at the badge on Ding Ling’s collar. “Class F may only borrow the most basic books from the first row on the left.”