Chapter 322: Chapter 288: Red Gold and Graduation

In the office, Jeming was quietly shaking his head over his student, Anita, when a playful voice quietly appeared at the doorway.

“Yo~ my dear junior, I can smell the fresh scent of ’pain’ radiating from you from miles away! So, how does it feel to be beaten by reality during your first time as a mentor?”

Senior Sister Viola strolled in uninvited, much like a shark smelling blood in the water, with a smile plastered on her face that could only be described as schadenfreude.

Jeming rolled his eyes at her and grumbled, “Senior sister, is your happiness always built upon my ’pain’?”

“Of course not entirely, my happiness is built upon everyone’s pain!” Viola exaggeratedly waved her hand, then shared eagerly.

“Speaking of which, I remember my two favorite students! When they realized that Magic Potion was far from the romantic notion they imagined and was instead endless material processing, tedious ratio calculations, and the ever-present risk of explosions, their faces—despairing yet having to brace themselves…tsk tsk, that was a source of joy for me for a long time!”

She shifted gears, looking at Jeming with anticipation: “So, junior brother, next time you give that little one named Anita a lesson, you must! You must notify me! I want to find a good spot to savor the pain and confusion emanating from her as she struggles in the ocean of tedious knowledge! Just thinking about it makes me happy!”

After saying this, she didn’t wait for Jeming’s agreement or disagreement, and let out a string of “hehehe” laughs, turning around to leave the office, seemingly just coming over to harvest a wave of happiness.

Jeming watched Viola’s retreating figure, the trace of helplessness on his face gradually melting away, replaced by a gentle smile.

“This pervert…” he muttered quietly, yet his heart felt warm.

He understood that Viola was expressing her concern in her own slightly twisted way, enlivening the atmosphere by the way.

With her interruption, the bit of depression in Jeming’s heart dissipated quite a bit.

He sat back down in his chair, his mind becoming clear.

“Well, everyone has their own choices and paths.” His thinking became clearer, “What I can do is fulfill the duties of a mentor, clearly laying out the knowledge in front. How much she can absorb, which path she takes, in the end, is her own destiny.”

With his current knowledge reserve and realm, guiding an apprentice who isn’t even an official wizard is really easy.

As for how the other party performs, that can only depend on her own abilities.

Once he figured this out, Jeming’s mindset calmed down completely.

In the years that followed, his life didn’t change much by having another student.

Apart from needing to make a regular weekly trip to the academy to teach Anita a foundational course in Alchemy, he still invested the vast majority of his energy into his own research.

And Anita’s performance, indeed, did not exceed Jeming’s initial expectations.

The initial stages of Alchemy, with large amounts of foundational theory to memorize, tedious material property identifications, and the extremely patient-demanding precise operations, soon made her feel bored and fatigued.

Her enthusiasm for learning visibly declined, and she began to divert more of her attention and hard-earned points to learning those immediately effective and seemingly cool offensive or functional witchcrafts.

Jeming saw her several times at the academy practicing newly learned witchcraft with her companions happily, or using points to exchange for a ready-made witchcraft model and then burying herself in practicing casting techniques.

In class, he had more than once directly reminded her: “Relying on ready-made witchcraft models without understanding the root optimizations is like walking with a crutch built by others. It may be easy at first, but you can never truly understand the essence of power or advance to further realms.”

Unfortunately, his admonitions were like stones sinking into the sea.

Anita might have listened, but clearly hadn’t taken it to heart.

Or rather, with her current “wisdom” level and interest orientation, independently researching, understanding, and constructing a witchcraft model suitable for herself was indeed too difficult and uninteresting.

“After all, not everyone is a genius like Amy and Victor…” Jeming, while observing in the dark, couldn’t help but shake his head again, a wisp of nostalgia for his old friends brushing through his heart.

Even with the talent of Amy and Victor, they were the pride of everyone’s eyes back in the academy.

In comparison, Jeming’s various research projects were progressing unusually smoothly.

After completing the third stage of energy transformation in the Purgatory Sulfur Plane, the abundant energy finally allowed him to let loose.

The hatching speed of Black Giants greatly increased, and the population began to grow steadily.

He estimated that the next time the need to participate in a plane war arose, the number of Black Giants under his command was likely to break through the thousand-mark!

This meant he would possess a sizable, powerful heavy-armored ground cannon fodder army.

Simultaneously, research on the various peculiar biological samples brought back from the Aerial Plane was progressing as planned.

Through profound analysis of their flight structures, energy utilization methods, and space adaptability, Jeming had already a clear draft in his mind for the design blueprint of a new generation of cannon fodder units.

However, at present, he had a more urgent improvement plan: to perform a second re-refinement on his lifebound magical treasure, the “Five Elements Rainbow Transformation Mirror”!

After years of accumulation, most of the rare materials needed for the re-refinement were prepared, with just one last—and most crucial—ingredient remaining: Red Gold.

“Red Gold… the refinement of this thing is really an artistic endeavor.” Jeming’s consciousness sat cross-legged before the door of the Great Dao Book Pavilion in the depths of his mind, holding a book exuding ancient Daoist charm, carefully reading the records on red gold refinement.

According to the records, Red Gold, similar to Refined Gold, is a conceptual material refined with Gold as the base raw material.

But the core “concept” of refining the two is completely different.

Refined Gold distills the concept of “eternity” inherent in gold, emphasizing “unchanging” and “everlasting,” thereby bestowing objects with indestructibility.

However, overemphasizing “eternal invariability” may sometimes limit the future growth and potential for change of a magical treasure.

Red Gold, on the other hand, distills the concept of “immortality” inherent in gold.

Immortality is not merely simple, eternal unchanging; it emphasizes “essential indestructibility,” “true nature long-lasting.”

Even if changes occur in form and nature, its core “existence” and “essence” can still be maintained and even gain new life amidst these changes.

For materials like the “Five Elements Rainbow Transformation Mirror,” which is a magical treasure for refining the illusionary substance of various “lights,” the concept of “immortality” is far more fitting than “eternity,” leaving vast space for its future evolution and advancement.

The difficulty lies in the “purity” of extraction.

The preliminary extraction method of Red Gold is, surprisingly, as simple as that of Refined Gold, and can even be mastered by a Qi Cultivation Stage Cultivator.

With Jeming at the Golden Core Realm coupled with Wizard Alchemy’s precise control of energy and matter, completing the initial refining poses no difficulty.

The real trouble lies in the subsequent purification.

Since only the pure concept of “immortality” is needed, the other mixed concepts and even most material properties of the gold itself extracted during the initial refining of Red Gold must be eliminated bit by bit through repeated high-intensity tempering.

This is a process requiring immense patience and energy input.

According to records in the classics, at least ten repeated refinements are needed to obtain barely nearly purely conceptualized Red Gold material.

“The technical difficulty is not high; it’s purely time-consuming and labor-intensive,” Jeming withdrew from introspection and returned to the core laboratory of the Purgatory Sulfur Plane.

Looking at the pile of standard Gold Ingots shining brightly in front of him, he made a judgment: “Luckily, I’m not lacking time right now.”

According to the records, the quality of Red Gold decreases during refinement. To ensure enough raw materials for the second re-refining of the magical treasure, Jeming prepared a thousand cubic meters of gold directly!

He initiated the large composite Alchemy Array that had long been set up, starting the first step of coarse refining.

The vast Pill Fire intertwined with the energy of the Alchemy Array, melting the massive amount of gold at the array’s center, boiling.

The “immortality” concept within is forcibly extracted, condensing into dark red, oddly textured initial Red Gold.

Then, he merged all the initial Red Gold into another more complex array focused on “purification” within the Cultivation Immortality System, initiating the second refinement.

The array operated, lights flowed, and under the energy wash, the initial Red Gold began to slowly “evaporate,” with unwanted other concepts and residual substances, the “impurities,” being separated and discharged.

The remaining portion’s color became deeper, and its texture seemed more pure.

He knew this process needed to be repeated at least ten times.

The later stages become more challenging in purification, with the consumed Spiritual Power and time increasing exponentially.

“Fortunately, this thing can mostly run automatically; it just requires periodic Spiritual Power supplement and array parameter adjustments… so it won’t waste too much of my time.”

Jeming set up monitoring and alarms, redirecting his main focus to other research.

…

…

Time quietly slipped away like sand through fingers.

In the blink of an eye, it was graduation season for the batch of apprentices at Nolun No.147 Academy.

On the plaza, the atmosphere was solemn with a hint of tension.

Jeming, hovering above the platform for mentors in the observation area, swept his gaze over the crowd below, easily finding that familiar yet unfamiliar figure—Anita Chuck.

Ten years of academy life hadn’t left many signs of transformation on her.

Instead, because she dispersed too much energy on seemingly flashy but fundamentally unstable witchcraft, her progress in the Alchemy field that required solid foundation and rigorous thinking was slow, even regressing in some aspects.

The outcome was as expected.

When Dean Avery Knight, in a calm yet authoritative tone, recited the list of those who earned the qualification to participate in the elite selection by passing the graduation trial, Anita’s name did not appear.

She stood among those who didn’t pass, head lowered, hands tightly clutching the hem of her clothes, shoulders trembling slightly, seemingly unable to accept this reality.

The wizards standing together with her had similar reactions, with the air around them seemingly solidifying with disappointment and reluctance.

According to Nolun Workshop’s regulations, apprentices who fail the graduation trial do not thus sever their wizard path.

They still have a chance—to head to the frontlines of the plane wars, where in the life-and-death tests of blood and fire, they might find a slim opportunity for breakthrough, or perhaps… succumb, and fall.

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