"By the way — is there any method to improve one's Aptitude?"
Li Fei stood behind Ms. Nicole, idly running a comb back and forth through her silver-grey hair, her tone perfectly casual.
Performing filial devotion while fishing for cultivation knowledge was perfectly routine for the scholarship student. The learned Principal showed no sign of suspicion, and answered as readily as ever:
"Improving one's Aptitude is no simple matter, I'm afraid."
Nicole leaned back in her chair, enjoying her daughter's attentions. She picked up her red tea, organized her thoughts for a moment, then began to unravel Li Fei's question in her characteristic unhurried cadence:
"There are four main approaches."
"The first involves costly means — rituals and potions. Such resources can only be described as 'precious' and 'prohibitively expensive.' The ritual arrangement methods and formulae alone are worth a king's ransom, and gathering the requisite materials is next to impossible."
"The second involves exceedingly rare encounters — special environments, certain Transcendent structures, Transcendent items — all of which carry the effect of improving Aptitude, yet can never be sought, only stumbled upon. In popular serialized fiction, you often see protagonists eating some miraculous fruit, or blundering into an unheard-of location, and coming out with Aptitude that's shot through the roof… but obviously, that's protagonist privilege."
"Beyond those, a very small fraction of lineages, class paths, and Innate Talents can also drive Aptitude growth."
Nicole paused, her voice taking on a distant, musing quality. "It is said that a witch once awakened an Innate Talent of a most curious sort — the higher her Charisma Attribute, the higher her Aptitude…"
!!!
Li Fei's heart lurched into a sudden sprint.
The one who knows a person best is often her enemy.
Kenneth, for instance — his "honeypot spy-insertion scheme" back then had been genuinely creative. With only limited contact, he'd used sheer intuition to divine something of the courtesan queen's nature, and his plan had succeeded, smoothly planting Grace at Li Fei's side — even if events had spiraled in ways he'd never anticipated.
By the same token, the Principal — who had sworn undying enmity with witches and led the charge against them at every purge — anything that passed through her lips carried a very high degree of reliability.
— I need to go pump Lady Gneia for information… If I got my hands on an Innate Talent that links Aptitude to Charisma, the sky would be the limit.
Li Fei wrestled her emotions under iron control. Her hands never stopped moving — gentle, patient strokes through the silver hair, fingers dipping every so often into the strands to lightly scratch the scalp. She'd picked up that trick from Lady Annie; it had a remarkable way of coaxing more detailed and patient instruction out of a teacher.
Nicole closed her eyes in contentment and continued at a leisurely pace:
"Finally, the reliable methods for steady Aptitude improvement. There are three.
"One: advance your Sequence level. You've no doubt already felt it — each Sequence breakthrough brings a transformation from the inside out, and even Aptitude rises a little along with it.
"Two: study spells. You must understand — spells, in all their boundless variety, are themselves derived from the Laws… which means that continuously researching spells is, in essence, the process of comprehending Transcendent knowledge and peeling back the source of the Laws layer by layer. As you master more, stronger, and higher-tier spell models, you not only expand your Sea of Consciousness and break through the walls between realms — your Aptitude improves as well.
"Three: combat. Savage, desperate combat. In the space between life and death there is great terror — and great enlightenment. It can awaken potential and birth wisdom. Some have even, after completing a 'legendary' battle, won the favour of the Law of Combat itself, causing their Law Affinity to surge and their Aptitude to leap an entire tier."
— Margaretkins, why is there no Law of Tea? If there were, I'd practically be the Law's own daughter.
Li Fei sank into profound internal anguish.
The methods seemed numerous enough on the surface — but whether hunting down rare resources or grinding up the Sequence ladder, every single option was easier said than done. Even the "relatively accessible" path of constructing spell models came with a non-trivial drain on her Wealth…
Which brought her to the fundamental contradiction:
She'd gone looking for ways to improve her Aptitude precisely to reduce how much Wealth she spent buying Knowledge Tomes. Yet to improve her Aptitude, she'd need to spend enormous amounts of Wealth buying Knowledge Tomes.
Headache.
She set the finished braid down on Nicole's shoulder, exhaled a silent sigh, kept her smile perfectly intact, and said brightly: "Oh, right — where is Yusura staying these days? I'd love to catch up with him."
...
Li Fei could plainly feel that the atmosphere around the Magic Academy had grown considerably more lively than usual — evidently the exchange event was producing exactly the effect it was designed to. The moment classes let out, students were already slipping out of their classrooms in droves, eager to spar with their new teammates.
"I'm so jealous. You got matched with such powerful partners."
Li Fei sighed. "Looks like all our class's glory rests on your shoulders."
Klein's teammates were formidable: one was Kova, one of the War Academy's two representatives at the exhibition match; the other was a second-year senior from the War Academy's Scouting department.
As everyone knew, the Scouting department went by another name — the "Assassination department." The combination of Agility as primary attribute, Transcendent knowledge in Tool Mastery, and the special Transcendent skill Stealth made that department a prolific breeding ground for rogues, assassins, and marksmen. Extremely dangerous.
"The competition hasn't started yet — anything could happen."
Klein smiled and shook his head, his composure utterly unruffled. Li Fei's little attempt to make her opponent swell with overconfidence had failed to land.
"I'm off — I need to spend time coordinating with my teammates, or I'll be eliminated embarrassingly early."
Li Fei waved a farewell and strolled with practised ease to the entrance of Class Three, crossed her arms, and waited for the bell.
Ms. Ye Shu ran over by nearly ten minutes, but the moment Grace stepped out of the classroom she spotted Li Fei. Despite her ever-present poker face, those slate-green eyes lit up unmistakably.
"Good afternoon, Grace-woof."
Li Fei dropped her voice to a conspiratorial murmur and attached a harmlessly teasing little suffix to the poker-faced young lady's name.
Only once she saw those cheeks go red did she toss over the flying broomstick.
"My place."
"Mm."
Sensing Li Fei's Transcendent aura — now broken through to Sequence 8 — Grace blinked once before hugging the Nimbus 6S and heading toward the school gate.
Before long, the broom was carrying them both out beyond the city walls. Li Fei looped her arms around Grace's waist, her voice languid:
"Let's go into business together."
"…What?"
Grace glanced sideways, just slightly.
Evidently, after the Folded Space incident, she'd become extremely cautious about flying — so cautious that even talking with Li Fei couldn't be allowed to distract her too much, and she kept the lion's share of her attention fixed firmly on "safe operation of the vehicle."
"Transfer your timber yard and mining operation into my name."
Li Fei announced her scheme to absorb Grace's assets with complete moral conviction.
Of course, even when eating out her own people, Li Fei maintained impeccable table manners — she put forward a genuinely win-win proposal: "I'm not taking it for nothing. Once the properties are under my name, I can get you exempt from all tax costs. I may also be able to pull in some quality contracts and trim the labour costs… We split the income — I'll look at the ledgers and we'll work out the exact ratio."
"Mm."
Grace trusted Li Fei without reservation.
A short while later, Li Fei was slamming her palm on the table.
"What?! The mining operation has to hand eighty percent of its income to the Mettis family?!"
At that moment she was seething with righteous fury. She hurled the ledger onto the table and laughed contemptuously: "We put up the capital to build it, we run ourselves ragged managing it, and we only pocket twenty percent… Are we begging on our knees or running a business?!"
"We require the Mettis family's patronage," the rotund steward said with an ingratiating smile.
"Ha. My operations need the patronage of those jumped-up relics?"
Li Fei's smile was ice. "That tribute stops today."
This threw the steward entirely off balance. Since when did these properties become yours, exactly?
He looked to Grace for rescue — only to find her perfectly indifferent, tacitly endorsing Li Fei's claim.
— Master and Mistress of the house, you died wronged.
— You'd only been gone a few days and already the properties are gone… What's that? I was bought off by the Mettis family before your deaths? Then never mind.
The steward dabbed at his sweat and ventured a cautious argument:
"But… without the Mettis family's backing, certain business partners may well cut ties with us…"
"That's fine."
Li Fei waved a breezy hand. "Isn't the Magic Academy running an exchange event? Construction venues would need timber and ore, wouldn't they. And I heard from a friend that the Golden Kumquat Tavern's windows are broken — you know what that tells me? It tells me the build quality is substandard — one good gust and the whole place sways. The whole thing needs a renovation. A thorough, comprehensive, expensive renovation. And then there's the City Hall…"
"The point is — so what if we stop paying the Mettis tribute? Are we really going to run short of customers?"
By the time she'd finished talking, the steward was trembling from head to foot, not daring to say another word.
Before, who had the timber yard been doing business with? Furniture workshops, small guilds building houses… A client of the Magic Academy's calibre had been beyond imagining.
From the courtesan queen's utterly self-assured tone, he had grasped, fully and clearly, just how much her network was worth. The only thing left for him to do now was send word to Young Master Kenneth.
Li Fei paid him no further attention and returned to scrutinising the ledger.
As time had passed, Li Fei had come to understand the System with ever-greater nuance — including one particular rule: items given to her by others, or directly solicited, could not increase her Wealth. But things seized, things found, and income earned through work or business operations all counted toward Wealth.
If her guess was right, the moment the timber yard and mining operation transferred to her name, the additional fixed assets alone wouldn't cause her Wealth to tick upward at all. But as operations got underway, the revenue these two properties generated should eventually feed into her Wealth — enough to patch at least a small part of the gap.
"A mess."
After poring over it for a good while, Li Fei set the ledger down and shook her head.
Even without any formal accounting education, she could tell this "family business" financial management was an absolute shambles:
A huge backlog of unsold inventory meant at least thirty percent of the timber output was being written off as "spoilage" — but Li Fei could tell just by thinking about it that a significant chunk of that wasn't natural waste, but someone lining their own pockets. Plenty of the lumber sold to noble clients was priced so cheaply that Li Fei suspected they might actually be selling at a loss. Equipment expenditure was laughably low — which did cut costs, but also meant the workers were toiling away with worn-out, antiquated tools, with predictably dismal efficiency. R&D expenditure: zero. More precisely, Li Fei found not a single line item for "process improvement" anywhere in the books.
The fact that they hadn't gone under yet probably said something depressing about the competition.
The most egregious point of all: the timber yard and mine were located outside the city, which gave them some latitude on enforcement, and so the operation made heavy use of enslaved labour. But why on earth had the Belikeli family's blockheads ever concluded that paying top coin to hire armed overseers in rotating shifts — browbeating a gang of half-starved slaves into grudging, sullen labour — was more profitable than using incentive schemes and performance metrics to motivate the slaves' own initiative and let them compete against each other for productivity?
A brief note, while we're here: Loxibrook, law-abiding as it was, did in fact have an institution of slavery. Enslaving local residents was obviously off the table — that would bring the enforcement squads down on you in an instant. But indigenous peoples from Viranean and similar places could absolutely be put to work as slaves. The city's legal consultants had long since worked out a perfectly tidy, perfectly lawful framework for the whole business — the procedure being: first, saddle them with some trumped-up charge; then compel them to undergo "rehabilitative labour"; and finally, the slaveholders would actually pay to take on the contract for "supervising and reforming" these offenders.
City Hall's attitude was one of tacit approval — so long as all the requisite processing fees and taxes were duly paid.
What's that? The prisoners felt they were being used as slaves and had suffered an injustice? If they could make it to City Hall alive, the staff would receive them warmly and helpfully assist them in filing a formal complaint — and then promptly notify the "buyer," politely requesting that all parties return home first, close the door, and have a nice private discussion about it. If the slave happened to "commit suicide" or "succumb to a sudden illness" during said discussion, the enforcement squad would not be coming to ask questions.
Slaves, however, were evidently inefficient — and Li Fei, who was rather fond of holiday side-jobs, had done more than distribute flyers in her time. She'd done actual skilled work, including a stint "manually reducing dissertation similarity rates," which had equipped her with a certain base of knowledge. She'd never pass as a proper accountant, but she could absolutely hold forth on strategy — and she had some constructive, even pioneering ideas to offer.
"Stand guard at the door. If any half-orcs come asking for me later, bring them straight in."
Seeing her property being run into the ground was giving Li Fei a headache. She waved the steward toward the exit.
"Yes, ma'am."
The steward received this as a pardon, scurried out with great relief, and went off to send word to the Mettis family.
Once the room was empty, Grace padded silently to Li Fei's side and, at Li Fei's gesture, settled herself directly onto the desk. Li Fei, deep in thought, wrapped both arms around a pair of very firm and springy legs and buried her face against grey stockinged thighs, using them as a bolster.
Shortly, footsteps approached. Grace slipped quietly off the desk.
"Sit down."
Li Fei poured a cup of tea for each of Kenan and Yusura with a welcoming warmth, the corner of her mouth curved up. "Didn't expect us to be working together again so soon."
These two — who had clambered to the light of a new world over the bodies of their entire tribe — had both crossed into the Knowledge Sequence.
Yusura had shed years off his appearance. He'd gone from a guttering-candle elder on the threshold of death to a hale and sharp-eyed middle-aged half-orc in one go, though his warm, amiable manner was unchanged.
Kenan, on the other hand, wore the face of a man who had eaten nothing but grievances for years — bitter, haggard, entirely unlike the spirited newlywed he had once been. Evidently the time since their return had seen Yusura talk his own son thoroughly in circles; at the very least, Kenan had neither gone for his throat nor refused to do business with him.
Li Fei caught the complicated look in Grace's eyes and reached over to take her hand, soothing her, while she spoke aloud:
"Just as we discussed this morning — the timber yard and mining operation here are yours to manage, and you'll receive the corresponding share of the profits."
There was no reason whatsoever for them to refuse this arrangement. Old Yusura had probably squirrelled away a modest private fund somewhere, but the sum couldn't be all that large — and these two half-orcs, strangers in a strange city, needed to find their footing in Loxibrook and fund their path as Transcendents. The best option open to them was to attach themselves to a patron.
Principal Nicole would obviously have no use for them and would never give them a meaningful position. The prestige of a tribal chieftain meant nothing in Loxibrook — no one here had any idea just how exceptional Yusura's capabilities really were. Clearly, Yusura would far rather come work as a senior manager under Li Fei and draw a share of the profits than scramble around on his aging bones as a part-time sparring partner.
And Li Fei trusted in Yusura's abilities readily enough — after all, anyone who had unified an entire pocket-world was no soft touch, and managing a modest commercial operation should be no problem. Of course, given that neither party would truly trust the other's character, a spell contract was a certainty — and Li Fei also planned to hire a third-party accountant to cross-check the ledger every single day.
"I will do everything in my power."
Yusura said, smiling cheerfully.
"..."
Kenan stared at the table and said nothing, but made no objection to the arrangement either.
"Excellent."
Li Fei clapped her hands with satisfaction, stood, and tossed the ledger across to them — every bit the lady of the house: "Let's take a walk and see your new workplace. We can talk as we go."
____
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