A brave man may not live, but he cannot die

Chapter 277 Girls Dormitory
Night fell like a mysterious veil over Grindelwald's moonless, starry sky, the occasional hooting of an owl echoing across Mirror Lake and the empty plains. In the painting, a giant sits on the city wall, watching a freckled girl carrying a nightlight carefully slip past the corner of the wall.

Megan pushed open the slightly ajar wooden door, and warm candlelight spilled out from the crack. She quickly slipped inside and closed the door behind her.

She breathed a long sigh of relief; she hadn't been discovered along the way.

The clock points to four o'clock.

The student dormitories are much smaller than the faculty dormitories, with no living room, only a large activity room shared by each grade. The atmosphere of the dormitory is reminiscent of a tree hollow, with two oak high-legged four-poster beds with thick curtains on either side, and desks and bookshelves underneath. Megan's desk is piled with various open books and notes, while Celia's desk is much neater, reminiscent of a top student.

The berries and leaves hanging from the ceiling weren't decorations, but rather vegetation growing on the branches. These berries glowed at night, providing illumination, and dimmed at lights-out time, reminding the students it was time to sleep. The candlelight in the room was left for Megan by Celia; when Megan sometimes worked the night shift, Celia would cleverly help her deal with room checks.

Her head was still spinning; she knew it was a symptom of mental exhaustion. She rubbed her stinging eyes and looked at the full-length mirror leaning against the wall. Beneath the frame was a comical mouth, and as Megan's tired face appeared in the mirror, the mouth seemed to speak at just the right moment:

“Ms. Megan, look at your eyes. Your arcane circuits are like smoking wood. Should I contact the school doctor?”

"Shh!!" Megan quickly put her index finger to her lips to make the mirror shush.

The mirror pouted, as if in protest, in a rather human-like manner.

The mirror rippled, magnifying Megan's face and allowing her to see clearly how many blood vessels were in her eyes.

Megan remembered what her boyfriend had told her.

For the sake of their shared home
A happy smile involuntarily crept onto her lips, as if her fatigue had lessened somewhat.

She spread her hands, and the clothes rack behind her stretched out "arms" like tree branches, taking off her coat and hanging it up automatically. Then she took out a shoe rack to take off her shoes. After doing all this, she even bent down as if bowing, just as elegant and considerate as a hotel concierge.

Megan entered the bathroom. Unlike the dormitory surrounded by oak trees, the bathroom had hard stone walls, with messages from the previous thousand years of upperclassmen engraved on the bricks. Half of the wall was covered with strange and bizarre writings. There were enigmatic arcane formulas, "The starry sky is sealed beneath Mirror Lake!", and a treasure map that looked like it belonged to some dungeon. Someone had actually gone to explore it, leaving a message: "Don't worry, everyone, I rescued her cat."
She took off her clothes, intending to throw them into the laundry basket beside her, only to find that Celia's clothes were already in the basket.

Regular use?

Megan found it odd. Everyone at the academy wore school uniforms daily, and that Hero's Choice white JK stockings never got dirty, never wrinkled even after graduation, and never needed washing. Did Celia wear her regular clothes at the academy?

That's true. I don't have class today, so I might as well change my clothes and change my mood. She thought to herself as she looked at the underwear hanging next to her.

The cotton-white vest and cotton-white panties were still slowly dripping water, as if they had just been hung out to dry. They were hand-washed by a clean-loving girl.

"Thank you for leaving the door open for me," she whispered to the laundry basket.

Megan tossed the clothes into the laundry basket, then sat wearily on a small wooden stool, her lips twitching as she muttered a spell.

Runes lit up one after another on the stone wall, and the earth's gravity was pulled away by the arcane magic. Megan's body slowly floated up, hovering in mid-air to receive the pure water dripping from the cracks in the ceiling.
The rain pattered down gently, like a soft drizzle, and a pleasant warmth rose from it.

When I came out of the restroom, it was already four in the morning.

Wrapped in a bath towel, she tiptoed to the desk, and the clothesline outside the dormitory stretched out its "arms," ​​drying her hair with a dry towel.

Using this little bit of time, Megan picked up her quill, dipped it in ink, and began to catch up on her unfinished homework.

Actually, I wore light makeup today. Xiaoxi taught me how. Did Berlin notice?
My mind was elsewhere from the assignment, yet I didn't hesitate to put pen to paper.

She marked the blockages one by one on this rubbing of the human body's arcane circuits, occasionally making changes to the drawing to find more efficient paths.

Arcane circuits are a gift from heaven to mankind, a key that can unlock the door to the arcane world.

The number of circuits directly determines whether a person can sense mana, and whether they have the ability to manipulate, store, and construct arcane magic.

Some arcane circuits are available from birth, while others are closed and require training or other means to open.

Similarly, arcane circuits, like muscles, can develop various problems when used beyond their limits, such as fatigue, blockage, and misalignment. This can reduce the efficiency of an arcane mage in using arcane magic, and in severe cases, may even lead to circuit depletion and death, or even endanger their life.

The circuit can also be widened to accommodate more and higher quality mana, or certain circuits can be blocked to allow other circuits to operate more efficiently.
A circuit repair doctor who can do this is called a "circuit tuner".

Becoming a tuner requires many qualifications, including a pair of magical eyes filled with "circuits," hands as steady as an internist's, and a much higher requirement for mental stability than other arcanists.
Even with these conditions met, learning to be a Arcane Transformer is difficult and lengthy. The arcane community still lacks a universally accepted conclusion on how arcane circuits are generated and how they operate. It is only known that they are heritable, mutable, modifiable, and possess rejection properties. Modifying such complex circuits, which are even finer than nerve fibers, requires a Transformer to have comprehensive arcane knowledge and extensive experience.

The Clock Tower is one of the few institutions in Temuran capable of training tuners. Its tuning curriculum has been running for nearly a century, with an extremely high dropout rate. Even the tuners trained there cannot guarantee a success rate when faced with complex circuit tuning projects. It's like fluid dynamicists: they know why the ocean has waves, but when facing unfamiliar waters, no one can guarantee that they can calculate the force and direction of every wave.

However, there is a type of person who doesn't need to learn; they can see through a tangled web of circuits simply by looking at them, and find the most correct solution and the blockage point by intuition.

These people are children of the sea, capable of sailing across the ocean. They see splashes of water as if they see waves; they are natural tuners.

Such people are extremely rare among humans, and even fewer have the opportunity to learn arcane arts and become proficient. Even Grindelwald, who possessed the Book of Merlin, might not be able to recruit a potential master tuner even after decades.

Megan is exactly that kind of talent.

She slowly put down her pen, then picked up a sewing needle from the side, heated the extremely fine and long silver needle tip over the candle flame for a while, and then dipped it into the medicine in the drawer, giving it an ethereal glow.

She stared at her bloodshot eyes in the mirror and "inserted" the tailor's needle into her pupils.

His hands didn't shake at all.

There was no bleeding in the eyes, and the needle became ethereal under the influence of the medicine, beginning to be guided by mental energy to wander through the exhausted eye circuits.

She stared at herself in the mirror, expressionless, like a craftsman looking at a machine, correcting it.

However, the consequences of a craftsman's failure are merely to repair it again, while the consequences of her failure are blindness, a broken circuit, and the loss of her ability to become a tuner.

About three minutes later, Megan pulled the needle out and then inserted it into her right eye without hesitation.

Tuning is a specialized course that can only be started in the third year, and practice can only be done on simple experimental subjects such as magical creatures, like the Tun Tun rat. Only after practicing until the sixth year, and achieving a success rate of over 70%, are students allowed to perform clinical procedures on humans.

Megan pulled out the sewing needle. The medicine was just finished. She threw the needle and quill into the pen holder. The bloodshot in her eyes had faded considerably, leaving only deep weariness.

This is why the only tuning professor in the academy likes her. What takes other students half an hour or even an hour to decipher, she finishes in less than three minutes. Even when she is extremely mentally exhausted, she even performs a circuit tuning for herself. But as impressive as she is, it is unknown how the professor would react if he knew she did this.

Next to the pen holder were two photo frames. One photo showed a street in a small British town, with two children being held by their respective adults. It was a picture of her and Buren when they were children, and it was the only photo of the two of them together.

In the other frame is a stunningly beautiful woman dressed in a feathered robe. The Elf Queen, Tiresia.

Tiresia is the progenitor of all modern tuning techniques; she once tuned Merlin's instruments.

Legend has it that Merlin, as the only arcanist to have connected to the 'Root', possessed circuits within his body as vast as rivers and seas, or even the orbits of stars. The flow of mana within them could even produce a audible, resounding roar. These circuits transcended the realm of "arcane," and the mere flow of mana within them was enough to achieve "magic."

Tiresia is Megan's idol.

Megan's adoration for Tiresia had nothing to do with tuning; rather, it was because Tiresia, as an elf, could talk to insects and make flowers, plants, and trees worship her—Meghan thought this was incredibly cool.

She extinguished the candle, reached out her hand to the ladder, and vines sprouted from her feet, lifting her onto the bed.

Get some rest. While two hours of meditation won't provide any real exercise, it's enough to refresh yourself. It shouldn't affect your class tomorrow.
Megan works night shifts three or four days a week. Because she knows some arcane magic, she can work in Broom Alley. The pay is decent, but it's far from meeting the "performance" her boyfriend wants.

Megan didn't understand why it cost so much to get her hair washed and a face mask done at that beauty salon. But she was happy to chat with Buren.

The shop was full of wealthy women. She felt like the ugly duckling in the swan story, her hair dry and yellow like wilted winter grass, and even makeup couldn't cover her freckles; her features were also sunken.
Perhaps it was a lack of self-confidence that led to her and Celia being assigned to the same dorm room by the Sorting Hat. Megan always wished she had half, no, even a quarter, of her roommate's beauty. Just thinking about it filled her with a sense of happiness.

Fortunately, even with me like this, Beren still likes me.

Just then, the curtains on the opposite bed suddenly parted, and Celia peeked out cutely. The dim light illuminated the delicate outline of her oval face, and she smiled at Megan, saying, "You're back?"

"Oh, why isn't Xiaoxi asleep yet?" Megan lowered her head guiltily. "Did I wake you up? I'm so sorry."

"No, no~ I was reading a book."

Celia took a thick, open book from the bed and showed it to Megan to prove she wasn't lying.

"Reading a book?"

Megan looked at the book in the girl's hands, "The Tragedy of Sumulangma: Thirty Bloody Years Before the Emperor's Accession," and asked hesitantly, "Why are you looking at this?"

Celia chuckled awkwardly and quickly put the political book back on the bed. "Just browsing, nothing special. Oh, never mind that, how were you today?"

“I…” Megan didn’t know how to say it.

But at this moment.

The full-length mirror in front of the dormitory suddenly screamed, "Graduation is coming when it gets dark! Close your eyes when it gets dark!!"

The two girls hurriedly scrambled back into bed, pulled the curtains over, and plunged the room into darkness.

A moment later, the reflection of an elderly woman carrying a nightlight appeared in the mirror. She was dressed in old-fashioned men's clothing, and her silver hair was tied in an elegant knot at the back of her head. She looked around the dormitory from the mirror, and when she noticed that Megan's previously open notebook on her desk was now closed, she shook her head slightly in displeasure, but did not disturb their sleep, and turned to check on the next dormitory.

At Grindelwald, it's common for arcane fanatics to sneak out in the middle of the night to practice arcane magic. However, the school believes that meditation training during adolescence is equally important and shouldn't be neglected, so there's a mandatory six hours of sleep each day.

"Xiao Mei. Xiao Mei?" Celia called softly.

Seeing that the other person was ignoring her, the girl in her pajamas jumped off the bed, was caught by vines growing from the ground, and then sneaked up the ladder into her roommate's bed.

She slipped under the curtains, and soon a sound that would make one's nose bleed could be heard.

"You dare pretend to be asleep to fool me? Take this!"

"Xiaoqian, I was wrong. No, no."

"Let me be healthy!"

After a brief tug-of-war and rustling sounds, the conversation quickly turned into: "Xiaomei, I was wrong. Stop scratching me—haha, hahahahaha!"

Panting heavily, the classic ending concludes with Celia begging for mercy.

Celia was too thin and no match for Megan. But judging from Megan's counterattack, this shy and withdrawn girl also has a lively side that was previously unknown to others.

The voice gradually turned into a conversation.

"That...Xiaoqian"

"Ok?"

"Can I tell you something?"

"Of course!"

"That's right, today..."

Megan slowly revealed the details of the casino incident.

Celia was terrified. "You...you used arcane magic to peek at the casino's cards?"

Her voice immediately dropped to a lower level, "If the academy finds out, I'll get a major demerit!"

After a long silence, Meghan stammered and said in a low voice, filled with extreme guilt:

"Now... Mr. Quinn knows... Xiaoxi, this is my first time here, could you help me ask him about that..."

"what?!"

Celia's voice suddenly rose again, and she said angrily, "How can this be?!"

"I'm sorry," Megan said, almost in tears. "Never mind, I'll apologize to him myself. Don't be angry."

"I mean, how could he gamble?! It's infuriating!"

Megan stared blankly at Celia, who was inexplicably sulking, feeling like she was seeing a mother who had suddenly discovered her son had gone astray. It was rather cute.
(End of this chapter)