[Soul Gathering] can convert dead Transcendent beings into undead creatures and guarantee their loyalty.
Clearly, this special knowledge looked very similar in function to [Summoning Magic], the nature-school Transcendent knowledge. It could help a caster assemble a reliable fighting force, even a full legion.
But a glance through the war history of the Enros Continent makes it plain that the strategic significance of [Soul Gathering] is far beyond anything [Summoning Magic] can reach.
After all, the number of creatures [Summoning Magic] can call is fixed and has to be built up slowly over time. For Transcendents who are short on time and fond of quick returns, that value isn't exactly spectacular. The former, on the other hand, can raise a cold, merciless army of calamity in a short span, devouring enemy lives without pause. The corpses, and even the souls, of the dead stand back up and turn on the comrades, friends, and kin they once fought beside, so that those too may sleep forever in cold darkness.
Under this model of feeding war with war, the tide of countless undead keeps spreading until it drowns the ends of the world.
Plenty of necromancers who couldn't make it in Enlos just ducked into some folded plane and spent a decade or a few decades unifying the entire thing… As long as you have [Soul Gathering], the snowball will start rolling sooner or later, and clearing the "conquer the world" quest solo is no dream.
Of course, some of these "Lords of the World" got swelled heads and tried to copy the approach in Enlos… The result was usually that before the snowball even got rolling, they faced a "righteous mob beating" from high-Sequence Transcendents. They didn't exactly go peacefully, and they even got cursed out by fellow Death school mages.
It's precisely because there are so many of these fools that casters who specialize in death magic suffer discrimination. In fact, according to survey data from the Magic Academy, most Death school mages are rather kind. Of 914 interviewees, a full 31.47% killed no more than three digits' worth of sapient beings per year, and many of those were living materials bought through legal channels. They're nowhere near as deranged as the public imagines.
That's obviously thanks to the efforts of the great factions to keep the peace. Never mind that war is breaking out somewhere on the Enros Continent at every moment, or that outside Loxibrook there's news every few days of a high-Sequence being accidentally razing a village, a mage botching a spell revision and vaporizing a town, or Branch XX of the Potioneers Guild dumping waste potions into a river. Overall, things stay within controllable limits. As for the necromancers with no sense of fair play who deliberately spread plague to raise undead armies and turn multiple cities into dead land, the vast majority get sanctioned. These clueless necromancers are also known as "Enros Continent Peace Prize generators."
Massacring a city? Just a quest for a Continental Peace Prize laureate.
Li Fei didn't have the nerve to play such a grand game yet. She mainly wanted [Soul Gathering] to get her a batch of loyal wraith sisters, so she could prepare more parts for Ghost Gundam…
"From Novice to Master, the combat units Soul Gathering can convert are skeleton warriors, zombies, wraiths, shadows, banshees, and vampires."
Li Fei tapped her knee with her forefinger, recalling what the textbook said. "But you can choose which units to convert into through secret arts, ritual gear, and so on. For example, corpse scarabs can replace skeleton warriors, and abominations can replace banshees. In short, the higher the Soul Gathering realm, the higher the conversion efficiency."
After a long stretch of thought, Li Fei still couldn't bring herself to decide.
After all, if she pushed [Soul Gathering] straight to Advanced to get the best conversion efficiency available at her stage, it would cost 5 potential points, even though this special knowledge's level wasn't affected by the other three Death school knowledges!
That was too big an investment. Li Fei didn't want to decide rashly.
She stood up, told the maids to repair the hole in the floor, then carried a stack of textbooks into another room for some quiet self-study.
…
Night fell, and Loxibrook was livelier than usual. Every household had its warm, peaceful lights on, waiting for the moment to ring out the old and ring in the new.
Yet the Young Madam was deaf to everything beyond her window, her heart set on nothing but textbooks.
This left the ladies baffled.
On this special day, most of the maids had taken leave to be with their families. Besides Sofia, Eva, and their daughter, and the sprites, Lady Zhihua and Su Ling'er had naturally clocked out early, and even Qiao'er, who'd been busy with her internship these past few days, had made it back before dinner.
And of course Grace was there too.
As for Lilith, she was at home keeping Lady Annie company.
"What's wrong with her?" Su Ling'er asked, puzzled.
"Something must have set her off," Eva guessed.
Qin Zhihua walked straight over to Li Fei, stroked her shoulder, and said softly, "Take a break. Tomorrow's soon enough."
"An inch of time is worth an inch of gold," Li Fei said with a perfectly straight face.
Qin Zhihua just watched the Young Madam quietly.
A few seconds later, Li Fei meekly put down her book and joined the pajama party.
Counting Ram, Honey, and Li Yue, there were eleven girls present, and apart from Sofia, Yawen, and Qiao'er, every one of them had been entangled with the Young Madam.
If Lady Zhihua were left to manage the scene alone, something bad would probably happen, and it would eat up even more study time.
Women really do drag down my cultivation speed.
And eleven hours ago I was actually planning to welcome the new year in such an absurd way. How hilarious.
Every one of the ladies was a beauty, and their nightgowns were a feast for the eyes, but Li Fei's heart was still as water as she talked with them calmly.
Suddenly, a melodious zither song drifted in from outside, and golden-red glow lit up the ladies' eyes.
Dragon and phoenix bringing good fortune, a spectacle Loxibrook staged every New Year's Eve. The fairy dragon and the phoenix soared across the sky, playing a song of peace and offering the city the finest Blessing.
One difference from the time they celebrated Li Fei's birthday was that after a single dazzling glimpse, the phoenix's divine flame drew all its radiance back in. It didn't dye the night sky in gaudy colors, and so kept the elegance and depth the night deserved.
Children cheered, old folks beamed, and lovers embraced.
Li Fei's expression didn't change in the slightest.
Meh.
The Young Madam thought it, then glanced at the wall clock.
Miss Second Hand chased Minute Hand tirelessly, brushing past her again and again, until at last she watched, helpless, as Minute Hand straddled Lady Hour Hand.
Fortunately, Miss Second Hand came to her senses.
Why couldn't the three of them be together?
Even if it was only for one second of Bliss.
So Miss Second Hand slipped into their embrace too, leaving no gap between them.
The new year had arrived.
Up in the sky the stars trembled and swayed, and the moonlight dimmed.
Another stunt?
Li Fei glanced toward Bai Manor and guessed without a ripple of emotion.
But she was wrong.
Gray mist came from the west, ten thousand ten-thousand miles of it, shrouding the heavens and drowning the earth.
The vast continent and boundless seas were all veiled in thin fog. Even the Eastern Continent could not stand apart, as endless gray mist flowed across it.
In the deep, beautiful night sky, something blood-red seemed to simmer, though looking closely, one couldn't make it out.
Across the mist-filled land, mighty auras surged skyward, piercing the heavens like beacon fires scattered across the board like stars, their overwhelming might making mountains and rivers tremble.
"Will some great existence awaken this time…?"
"Another feast has arrived."
"Kill!"
"I wonder how many grandmasters will fall this time…"
Amid the murmuring, some auras sank back into silence while others burned fiercer still, their fighting spirit flaring.
Either way, the joyful, peaceful mood of the new year had been shattered. Even Loxibrook fell silent. Soon came the cries of babies and uneasy, anxious murmurs, and some old folks sighed, as though remembering years gone by.
After more than half a century, the Year of Mist had come again.
"So what happened?"
Having taken in the strange sight outside the window, the Young Madam asked without a ripple of surprise.
"The Year of Mist," Qin Zhihua answered.
By the calendar of the Enros Continent, a year has four seasons of three months each, exactly three hundred and sixty days.
The "Year of Mist" alone is the exception, with three hundred and sixty-one days. It follows no fixed pattern. In the past four thousand years there had been times when two Years of Mist came in a row, and a stretch of a full century when none appeared.
The textbooks recorded the omens that heralded a Year of Mist, but said little about what it actually meant.
Li Fei had asked Tingbao and Nicole about it, and both had been tight-lipped.
She hadn't been in any rush to dig into it. The Enros Continent hadn't faced a Year of Mist in decades, and as a low-Sequence Transcendent she saw no need to waste energy on such arcane secrets. But now that she'd lived through one, it was hard to keep treating it as someone else's problem.
"Will it affect us in any way?" Li Fei asked again.
Lady Zhihua, with her family's deep scholarly tradition, clearly knew more. After a moment's thought, she shared the clues she had.
"According to ancient records, the death years of many renowned powerhouses coincide with Years of Mist."
"What a Year of Mist affects may be more than one plane."
"The powerhouses caught up in it are all high-Sequence, and all of the Knowledge Sequence."
"Beyond that, I've never heard of any rumor of mass slaughter caused by a Year of Mist."
So lots of high-Sequence powerhouses die, but weak Transcendents and ordinary people aren't threatened?
I'll go ask again tomorrow.
Li Fei nodded and didn't worry too much.
When the sky falls, the tall ones hold it up. If a real problem came along, it wouldn't fall to a lowly low-Sequence Miss Witch to fret over.
As it turned out, plenty of people felt the same way.
For ordinary folk, firewood, rice, oil, and salt came first. Even if some great upheaval came, they couldn't change it, only drift with the current. Rather than fret over nothing, they might as well enjoy New Year's Eve with their families.
On top of that, Loxibrook's outstanding public order really did give its citizens great confidence. When they saw constables on every street corner, the mood of fear was snuffed out quickly and the ancient city grew calm again.
Of course, at that same moment, some cities had already fallen into chaos. Brawls, looting, and bloodshed erupted one after another, and women's wails rose and fell through the New Year's night.
But the citizens of Loxibrook couldn't hear any of it. Their ears were already filled with the sound of fireworks blooming.
Bang!
The fairy dragon stopped plucking the strings. Burning arrows shot into the night sky and burst into hundreds upon hundreds of dazzling streaks of light, trailing long tails of flame, painting a gorgeous, eye-catching picture beneath the starry sky veiled in thin gray mist.
Clearly, ritual still mattered. As the fireworks rose, laughter and cheering returned to the city.
"So beautiful…" Su Ling'er sighed in admiration, but what danced in her pupils wasn't the scattered sparks. It was Li Fei's cold, drowsy face, flickering through the light and shadow.
"Mm," Grace, Qiao'er, and Sofia said in unison.
The moment she finished speaking, Sofia lowered her eyes and hugged her wife and daughter tight. Whether she was using a mother's love to wipe out thoughts she shouldn't have, or apologizing, nobody could tell.
"Meh." Li Fei yawned.
Isn't it just gunpowder that explodes in a different way…?
She thought lazily, then suddenly her brow arched.
Gunpowder…
In a flash of inspiration, Li Fei felt she finally understood what she could put in that storage space of over ten thousand cubic meters…
What? This young lady is a mere "spell girl"?
Spells are hardly such an inconvenient thing!
…
Dawn broke.
The house was eerily quiet.
After Sofia's family of three, Qiao'er, and Honey had all returned to their rooms in turn, Qin Zhihua tacitly allowed Grace and Su Ling'er to stay the night. So were Ram, the head maid who looked after the Young Madam and every resident with such care, and Li Yue, who had once sacrificed herself for Li Fei.
Since it was New Year's Eve, she could indulge the Young Madam just this once. It was also a chance for herself, in the new year, to speed up getting used to the life she would have to face sooner or later.
Grace had approved of these two sprites as well.
The Young Madam's behavior, however, was completely unexpected.
She read textbooks for half the night.
She didn't go to bed until three in the morning, and then…
She topped up on an hour of sleep with the Moon Pillow, climbed out, and went back to reading.
She ignored the New Year's six-layer Royal Burger completely.
Perhaps in a few days the Young Madam would be wracked with regret, beating her chest and stamping her feet, but at least for now, she was fulfilled and focused.
Her lower belly no longer hurt, but gazing at a Li Fei who seemed like a different person, Qin Zhihua felt a little lost, unsure whether to be glad or worried.
In the end, faced with the Young Madam insisting she "wasn't sick, didn't need a priest, and didn't need medicine," Lady Zhihua poured her another cup of coffee and set off toward the War Academy under the first sunrise of the new year.
Li Fei looked up and, through the thin haze, watched her fiancée's figure vanish beyond the window. Then she took another sip of the coffee Zhihua had brewed herself.
A little sour, a little bitter, a little sweet. The tangled flavors blended together like a thousand threads of thought rolled into a knot, impossible to make sense of.
"Meh," she judged, and buried her head in her book again.
…
Though today was a day off, Sofia, as a dutiful daughter-in-law, good wife, and good mother, rose as quietly as ever and took her medicine to clear the raindrop-like mechanical purple bruises from her body, without disturbing her still-sleeping wife and daughter.
She opened the wardrobe and reached her long, cold-pale fingertips toward a loose home nightdress. After a moment's hesitation, though, her hand slid to another set of clothes.
Biting her lip, she glanced back at her wife and daughter like someone hiding from her own guilt, her cold heart trembling.
But she put on the highly elastic black bodysuit anyway, thin and snug, like yoga wear.
Sofia smoothed her slightly tousled blonde hair in front of the mirror, and could barely recognize herself.
It was still that cool, elegant face, but there was an added softness of motherhood between her brows, and her tightly pressed lips looked a touch shy, almost girlish.
The outfit wrapped everything from the neck down snugly, except her hands and feet. Half her palms curled inside slightly long sleeves, looking delicate and endearing. But the stretchy, clinging fabric outlined her tall, slender figure to perfection, and her legs looked especially long and straight. Her lovely feet were so pale they were nearly transparent, with a cool, icy texture, only the tips of her toes glowing with a soft luster.
Against the pure black, her skin looked even whiter, which made the line of her lips an even more striking crimson. Every frown and smile gave off the charm of a young wife, the sort that stirs pity.
Modesty and allure coexisted in Sofia, just like her conflicted thoughts.
In the end, she walked out in that outfit, each step careful and soundless. Whether she was afraid of waking her wife and daughter or of waking the self that was pretending to sleep, she couldn't say.
Miss Qin has already left. It's time for me to help Miss Mother-in-law dress and wash. That's what a dutiful daughter-in-law should do.
But only that far. I mustn't cross the line.
Hazy thoughts churned in her heart. Sofia lowered her gaze and walked up behind Li Fei, intending to savor these few minutes of throbbing, tormented thrill.
"I can do it myself."
Miss Mother-in-law changed into her dress briskly.
"Eh?"
Sofia was a little stunned.
"I keep troubling you. It'd be bad if Eva got jealous."
Li Fei said it like a joke, but there was nothing playful in her flat tone.
Of course she knew Eva wouldn't misunderstand. Eva only wanted to cuddle together.
But Li Fei was done playing around. It was time to rein in her heart, focus on cultivation from now on, and stop dallying with flowers.
Sofia's silently retreating figure was tall and graceful, and it gave off a dejected, losing-dog aura.
"Meh."
So spoke Li "Repeater Princess" Fei.
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