Millennium Witch

Okay, it decided to retract its momentary disrespectful thought.

—The witch teacher is still very gentle, and in terms of professional ethics, she is far superior to her father.

……

When the night rain stops and the dark clouds disperse, the bright moonlight and the stars appear together in the sky, creating a vast and breathtaking scene that stirs the soul.

Standing on the back of the black dragon, with the evening breeze blowing on her face, Yvette quickly reviewed the entire day's events in her mind, checking if any details had been overlooked.

Although it was sudden, she had actually been planning this research trip for a year.

For example, they investigated which locations were near the mountain whale's movement path and which areas were high-probability zones for attacks by the mountain whale. They also deployed some hidden cameras—all parts salvaged from the heads of discarded golems, combined with energy storage panels, elemental chips, and some recycled functional modules—to function as a simple surveillance probe.

When the mountain whale appeared and approached the abandoned military base where Dugrabi and the others were located, she rushed over immediately. However, she deliberately did not show herself and instead hid in the shadows. Using wind magic, earth magic, and lightning magic in combination, she silently completed a series of micro-operations, including "removing Little Jasmine's wreath", "creating a pit to trip her up", "stunning her with a weak electric current", "covering and decorating with cement slabs", and "dropping the remains of the magic puppet".

Finally, they successfully created the misunderstanding that Little Jasmine was dead, which gave Dugrabi a huge psychological shock—anyway, given its puppet face blindness, it shouldn't be able to distinguish the details on the remains without being reminded.

However, in her original plan, she intended to wait a little while before making her hero appearance. After all, the four mountain whales were quite strong, and she needed to take the initiative to step forward, complete the final step of the education, and then reveal the fact that Little Jasmine was not dead.

Unexpectedly, as the Dragon Prince, Dugrabi had considerable potential. In his rage, he single-handedly drove away the four mountain whales. After driving them away, he didn't return, leaving the three unconscious little golems behind. He then ran to a lakeside and went into the night.

Yvette waited for a long time, but seeing that it didn't move, she returned directly to the Puppet Kingdom and then went out with the others to search and rescue, completing the final step of the investigation plan.

All I can say is that she meticulously planned and waited a whole year for this assessment; it would be hard to find another teacher in the world as dedicated as her.

……

Soon, the Black Dragon and the Children's Expedition were brought back safely, and the puppet life of the Cooks family quickly returned to peace.

Because this story contains so many interesting aspects to explore—such as the fact that the seemingly vicious Mr. Dragon is actually kind at heart, that Mr. Dragon can actually speak but always pretends not to understand, and that Mr. Dragon is actually so powerful—in short, for a long time afterward, Dugrabi's various contrasting behaviors became a topic of conversation among the residents of the Puppet Kingdom.

Dugrabi, however, was not so happy. After all, the dragon's image had collapsed, which was no different from social death.

Fortunately, it has become more obedient now, studying those obscure and difficult basic rune knowledge with its teacher every day. This has given it a good excuse to stay in the large warehouse where the RV is parked and not go out.

The progress is still a bit slow. I often feel dizzy from studying, and when I open my eyes again, I can still see those terrifying and complicated runes flying around in front of me. It's almost become a nightmare.

Chapter 77 Refusing to Learn This or That

Giving Dugrabi a basic rune lesson didn't actually have a significant impact on Yvette's daily life.

Firstly, the knowledge imparted needs time to be digested, and Dugrabi's ability to memorize is extremely poor. Just memorizing commonly used runes would take it several months, or even several years.

Secondly, in her daily life, there wasn't anything particularly stressful or urgent that she had to do. She spent her days meditating and practicing at a fixed time, occasionally studying "Detailed Explanation of the Spell Architecture Engine" and "Analysis of Spatial Rune Technology," and the rest of the time, besides reading miscellaneous books, she actually slept.

But she didn't think that sleeping was a lazy act; on the contrary, she saw it as a form of spiritual practice.

This is not sophistry, but rather a result of her long-term observation that the brain produces soul runes at a faster rate during sleep.

If this were considered within the context of early civilizations, it would be an epic discovery.

—It may have already been discovered, but human lifespan is too short and there are few nature mages, so even if the soul runes that increase total sleep time were discovered, no one would care.

But it was different for Yvette.

Soul runes are spiritual power; they are the same thing. They relate to a nature mage's ability to manipulate spells, the efficiency of a rune hacker in cracking a spell, and even an ordinary person's energy and spirit, and even the quality of their sleep.

There are only two known methods to increase soul runes.

One is meditation.

One is a natural product of the biological brain.

In the past, Yvette mainly relied on meditation. The principle is very simple: meditation is like tensing all the muscles in your body, making the soul runes tighter and denser, triggering the "rune siphon effect." In the process, there is a chance to get some soul runes from the outside world and gain an improvement. Nature mages can also improve their magic power through this method.

Well, it's a very simple operating mechanism, and there are no alternatives or improvements. The downside is that over time, it leads to spiritual depletion; although it will recover, it's very uncomfortable.

But sleeping is different.

During sleep, the biological brain produces more soul runes, resulting in strong mental power and a comfortable and energetic spirit. Upon waking, one can comfortably engage in various learning and exercise activities, making it seem like a natural fit for a long-lived species like Yvette.

She can sleep forever if she wants.

Sleep your way to become the world's number one top-tier spiritual body, and sleep your way to become an unparalleled king of spiritual power.

Although it would require her to sleep for a very long time, she had already secretly made up her mind to make this her lifelong career and spiritual practice.

Therefore, in conclusion, this cannot be simply dismissed as laziness.

……

Time flies, and another year has passed. It's the second month of spring, when the grass grows and the orioles sing.

This is the sixth year that Yvette and the others have been in Cooks. The spring is still chilly. In order to imitate the wintering behavior of humans, the village chief Copperskin led everyone to build a fireplace, so that they could warm themselves by the fire during the freezing cold.

This even led to the development of the training activity of "chopping wood." Due to its novelty, it became very popular, resulting in a constant abundance of firewood in the kingdom's halls. Sometimes there was so much that Dugrabi had to burn some of it with his dragon breath.

Dugrabi thought this was absurd. What would a group of alchemical creations need for warmth? Apart from it and its teacher, the others here probably would never know what cold felt like in their entire lives.

However, when it thought about the even more outrageous human cultivation practices of this group, it felt relieved, with a feeling of "What can I say when you're all like this?"

Sometimes it would also advise acquaintances, such as Jasmine or Ice Rain, that instead of cultivating with the goal of becoming human, they should set their goals higher and directly aim to become "dragons." In that case, as a living true dragon, it could give them some guidance.

Unfortunately, the machine race didn't appreciate it. Dugrabi, having been rebuffed, gave up and continued his daily routine of diligently studying the basics of runic literature, only to start dozing off as he studied.

On Yvette's side, there is one area where she has made significant progress: combat skills.

Since meeting the Spider Woman in Cooks about two years ago, she has been launching a sneak attack on Cooks about once every two or three months, mainly to spar with the Spider Woman.

During the process, she devised a rather vague plan for improvement, which was to see how many minutes the battle would last before she could gain the upper hand and achieve stable suppression of the Spider Woman.

Initially, it took about 10 minutes to do this, and overall it was a draw—at least she thought so. At that time, she and the Spider Woman were very similar in combat skills and were very suitable practice partners.

Two years later, that number has been increased to 5 minutes, which is a huge leap. She is very proud of this and feels like she has gradually transformed from a player who was obsessed with numbers into a player who is skilled in technique.

The Spider Woman, however, was having a bit of a hard time. She reported the information about this mysterious intruder to the commander, but she still couldn't figure out which monarch's faction the intruder belonged to, or why he kept coming to the King of the Sea's territory to cause trouble every few days.

Even because the other side never really hurt the Spider Woman, usually just leaving her exhausted and on the verge of collapse, the two lords, the Mountain Whale and the Fish Man, didn't want to come to her aid anymore. They were always slow to arrive, like police officers who always arrived late in tokusatsu shows.

This led the Spider Woman to a terrifying suspicion: that the other side was intentionally using this protracted war to wear down the patience of the Kux defenses, and that the mysterious silver-haired girl would strike her deadly when everyone relaxed their guard.

With these thoughts in mind, the Spider Woman finally couldn't take it anymore. She decided that once that important event was over, she would resign and leave immediately to avoid living in constant fear.

……

In June of the same year, the plum rain season began.

However, this isn't the case in Cuxhaven. June temperatures there are low, often below 10 degrees Celsius, and the climate is cold and dry. Although lush green grass covers the mountains, the distant snow-capped peaks still stand firmly, perpetually frozen.

On this slightly chilly morning, after completing a short quiz on Dugrabi's runic knowledge, Yvette finally decided to let it experience more advanced knowledge ahead of time, in order to make some plans for its future learning direction.

Inside the warehouse, Yvette tapped on the board beside her and said, "I have a few different professions I can teach you. See which one you want to learn. Your senior sister, Rosalyn Theon, dabbled in all of them, but I suggest you don't follow her example. Firstly, you're not as passionate about runic literature as she is, and secondly, her knowledge was quite superficial. Much of the knowledge she spread across the Radiant Continent was probably deduced by her later."

"Great!" Dugrabi was very excited and immediately put on a look of listening attentively.

“Well, first of all… I can teach you the techniques of rune hacking. Once you master this skill, as long as you're fast enough, you can hijack someone's magic before their spells hit you, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” Yvette explained. “However, the downside is that rune hacking requires many prerequisites. You need to be proficient in rune fundamentals and corresponding compilation techniques, proficient in rune security techniques, and have a grasp of architecture, encryption techniques, database knowledge, and vulnerability practice…”

As the teacher rambled on about a whole bunch of knowledge he'd never even heard of, the wildfire that had just ignited in Dugrabi's eyes was instantly extinguished.

No, spell hijacking sounds even more powerful than the legendary forbidden spells, but there must be so much to learn about it, right?

Isn't this deliberately making things difficult for it?

The more it listened, the more dizzy it became, and it quickly interrupted the teacher, saying, "Why don't you just tell me roughly how long it will take to learn?"

Yvette hesitated, "Given your current learning efficiency and our rudimentary learning conditions... it might take at least two hundred years..."

Dugrabi was dumbfounded. He had cultivated for two hundred years for a single skill? He wasn't even in the Land of the End by then, was he?

It quickly said, "Next one, next one?"

"I can teach you magical engineering. With this skill, you can create some basic magical equipment. While you won't be able to create cutting-edge artifacts like elemental chips, given the level of magical equipment development on the Radiant Continent, becoming a top alchemist shouldn't be a problem..." Yvette said. "Of course, this also requires mastering many other things, such as the fundamentals of magical engineering, magic circuit etching, mathematics, physics, and basic mechanics..."

Good heavens, math! Dugrabi felt a chill run down his spine and quickly shook his head again: "No, no, no, teacher, please stop reading! Next! Next!"

Yvette continued, "I can teach you rune compilation, which is part of the prerequisites for rune hacking. It allows you to design personalized spells according to your own needs. Although in the human world, spells with too large a scale are unusable, usually limited to 200 runes, understanding runes is understanding our world. I think you've studied the basics of runeology for so long, you understand this very well..."

“No, no, no, I think I’ve mastered enough of the commonly used runes. There’s no need to learn all the less common runes…” When it came to the field of runic studies, Dugrabi was terrified, all sorts of nightmares flooding his mind. He shook his head repeatedly, saying, “Next! Next!”

"Then I'll teach you agricultural and natural science techniques. While they won't directly boost your combat power, using magic to influence plant growth should be extremely important for the overall development of the Dragon Kingdom, enough to make you go down in history. This only requires understanding natural magic, crop science, soil science, agricultural meteorology, and..."

"Uh, teacher, I don't want to farm, nor do I want to get involved in the management of the Dragon Kingdom... Next! And the next one!"

"Then I'll teach you runic medicine. While potions can heal and save lives, runic elixirs can produce special effects, providing various enhancements. However, due to the different materials, once you return to the Radiant Continent, you'll likely need to begin by researching and classifying the properties of medicinal herbs. Therefore, the first thing I'll teach you is..."

"Teacher, I... I don't want to be a doctor either. Please, please, let's choose another one..."

"..."

Thus, it changed its major several times, but due to various prerequisites, Dugrabi was unable to make a decision, as it seemed to be uninterested in any field.

Now, Yvette was genuinely angry. She reached out and smacked the black dragon on the head three times.

You little rascal, you don't want to learn this or that, what do you actually want to learn?

Chapter 78 Magic Magic Book

After being hit three times by Yvette, Dugrabi became a little nervous and quickly said, "Teacher, don't rush! I'll make a decision right away... I want to learn... I want to learn... I want to learn ready-made spells! The kind that can be used directly in battle! I don't need rune literature or anything like that, that's too old-fashioned and not suitable for me..."

You don't want a fishing rod, you just want fish... Yvette thought, but recalling Dugrabi's performance over the past year, she felt it was very much in line with its style.

However, without magical equipment, the spellcasting environment of the Radiant Continent dictates that spells must be made very small. Even if she were to give Dugrabi a ready-made spell, she would still have to spend some time redesigning it.

After thinking about it, she suddenly realized that this matter seemed quite interesting.

To draw an analogy, it's like an author who has written a million-word novel deciding to write a ten-thousand-word short story.

……

That evening, she turned on the lights in the RV, spread the papers out on the table, picked up a quill pen, dipped it in ink, and began to work out simple design ideas on the draft.

Because she hadn't experienced something like this in so long, she couldn't help but think of things that happened five hundred years ago.

Back when she was researching rune compilation at the bottom of the Abyss Base, she often felt smug about her clever little designs, thinking she was incredibly smart and a genius compiler. But when she entered the dream for the third time and went to Agasher University to audit classes, she realized that those little designs she thought were genius were just basic knowledge points that all college students had to master in class.

There's a sense of shame about someone who's illiterate and discovers universal gravitation in a small mountain village, only to find out later in a big city that this knowledge is already commonplace.

Now, her attitude towards ultra-small-scale spells with less than 500 runes is completely different from before.

On the one hand, her accumulated experience has given her more ideas and approaches to this ultra-small-scale design, which are yet to be tested. On the other hand, this experience is very simple and authentic, bringing a sense of novelty that she hadn't experienced before.

However, she does not believe that the design of these small-scale procedures is simply for the purpose of teaching students.

She was certain that she would use these techniques in the future.

After all, she is a long-lived species, and the magic terminal is a high-tech precision device. No matter how good the quality is, it will always malfunction over a period of hundreds or even thousands of years.

For example, her old terminal, the Black Tower S3, had accumulated a large number of bad sectors over 200 years, and the symbol point cache also had some problems. Last time when she entered the dream in Agash, she specially replaced it with a new one, but she stopped using it after acquiring a new ring.

In a few decades or even a hundred years, when the ring on her hand also has problems and there is no stable channel for entering dreams, where will she go for after-sales service?

That means we can only use these small-scale spells, just like the mages on the Radiant Continent.

……

For the sake of future security, over the next month, a grand plan gradually took shape in Yvette's mind.

Unlike ordinary, junior rune compilers, she, standing at the high end, always looks very far ahead. If you ask her to design a small-scale spell, she will not only consider that small-scale spell.

Instead, she has to consider a bunch of smaller procedures.

In gaming terms, she hopes that these techniques can work together and interact with each other, which can be called "combos," and will eventually become a "system" or "style."

If her idea succeeds, by utilizing the synergistic effects between smaller techniques, the entire system, once completed, will present a jigsaw puzzle-like effect.

The power unleashed by the final, crucial step will surely exceed your imagination.

Thinking of this, she wrote a few words on the paper—

Water, fire, wind, earth, thunder.

This is her forte: elemental magic. It is also one of the five easiest development paths to learn in the university courses of the Origin Civilization. The runes corresponding to each system and the effects between the runes are already relatively clear and reliable.

If you were to create a magic manual, you would definitely start with these five.

Then, she thought for a moment and wrote five more words below—

life.

soul.

natural.

Force field.