Holy crap!
Hua, my Hua… just how much secret savings have you been hiding from me?
Li Fei stared at the sachet in the gift box, lost in thought.
The sachet was embroidered with a pair of mandarin ducks, the same style as Lady Zhihua's. Its spherical storage space held a full twelve hundred cubic meters…
In that moment, the size of Lady Zhihua's secret stash became, in Li Fei's mind, a rival to the three great hidden ultimate mysteries: "Has Lady Nicole ever had any snuggling experience?", "Has Tingbao ever 'generated power' over me?", and "Have Consort Xiang and Consort Hui gotten pregnant with my babies?"
After carefully putting the sachet away, Li Fei suddenly realized that, counting the rings from the two high-Sequence witches, she could already carry more than three thousand cubic meters of stuff on her person…
Her heart gave a shudder, and an ominous premonition surfaced.
Miss Top Courtesan unwrapped the gift box from Lady Chloe with trembling hands.
Inside lay a flawless, pure white ring engraved with two angel wings, radiating a noble and sacred aura.
[Angel's Perch]
Type: Storage Equipment
Capacity: 1,000 cubic meters
"…"
Li Fei covered her face in anguish.
Storage equipment was rare and indispensable, but it was also a luxury good, loaded with far too much value beyond its function.
A cheap watch worth a few bucks tells time just fine, yet successful people never hesitate to splurge on a famous brand to show off their status. Lab-grown diamonds look just as beautiful, yet when it comes to proposing, people line up to play the sucker and empty their wallets for natural ones.
Spatial rings were the same. For a lone wanderer, a few cubic meters was enough for essential supplies and a full set of gear. Even counting backup gear, the backup's backup, food, water, Spell Scrolls and potions… a few dozen or a hundred cubic meters was more than plenty.
Now Li Fei could carry more than four thousand cubic meters of cargo on her person. Unless she planned to turn into a transport girl and take on escort jobs, a huge amount of that space was bound to go to waste.
Waste wasn't the scary part. The scary part was that after accepting these "overly expensive but not very useful gifts," she'd have to give something back when everyone else's birthdays came around…
And besides, was it really only four thousand-odd cubic meters?
Uneasily, Li Fei unwrapped the next box.
What came into view was a black ring set with an amber gem, mysterious and deep. Just looking at it called to mind a woman more bewitching than the night itself, one who walked as silently as a cat.
Clearly, this was from Lady Hathaway, the catgirl big sister who served as vice-president of the Thieves' Guild.
[Cat's Eye]
Type: Storage Equipment
Capacity: 1,234 cubic meters
"Ugh…"
Li Fei clutched her chest and choked, tilting her head back.
A moment later, she kept unwrapping with a blank face.
This time, the corpse of the gift box revealed a rose-pink ring, dazzling and so lovely one hardly dared touch it, like a thorned rose, elegant and commanding.
Needless to say, this was a gift from Lady Gwona, the daughter of the Mercenary Guild's guildmaster. The lady had always been generous: Li Fei's Secret Garden had been her thank-you gift, and when Li Fei's attempt to run up the bid failed at the very first auction of her life, it was Gwona who bailed her out.
Although Li Fei and Lady Gwona couldn't exactly be called close, she was on very good terms with Lady Zhihua. So in a sense, this gift wasn't for Li Fei alone. It also carried a note of "happy engagement."
[Sleeping Rose]
Type: Storage Equipment
Capacity: 1,088 cubic meters
Li Fei was sunk. She toppled backward onto the bed, her silky hair fanning out.
After a long while, she spoke in a feeble voice:
"This Palace is tired. You open them for me."
Miss Tail, just as listless, wriggled out and took over the unboxing for Miss Top Courtesan, unwillingly.
[Mobile Fox Den]: a gift from the lifetime honorary chairman of the Pharmacists' Guild. One spatial ring, golden like the Lewd Fox's fur.
[Safe Harbor]: a gift from Miss Stepdaughter. Also a spatial ring, moon-white.
[Fingertip Church]: a spatial ring, a present from Lady Maria, whose power could raise the dead. Elegantly shaped, in a soft white.
[Embers]: Miss Grace had come up in the world and could now afford a spatial ring with a capacity of over a thousand. She must have skimmed plenty of loot in the Land of Inheritance. Worth noting: although the deadpan girl's cyan eyes and black-and-red longbow were both strikingly alluring, this ring was in her favorite color, gray.
[Warm Heart]: a spatial ring. As a thoughtful daughter-in-law, Sofia naturally remembered that her mother-in-law favored pink, so her coming-of-age present was pink girl-pink all over.
Li Fei, however, turned a blind eye to these precious sentiments. Her eyes were hollow and dull, fixed on the ceiling like a girl locked in a basement.
Two boxes remained. Miss Tail turned her head and asked silently:
Open them?
Silence was tonight's Cambridge.
"Damn it all!"
At long last, Li Fei slammed a fist into the mattress and wailed with regret, like an adventurer whose arrogance had gotten his fiancée captured alive by a succubus.
She finally understood what it meant to lift a rock only to drop it on her own foot.
After all, in the past Miss Top Courtesan had muttered plenty of lines like "When I have money, I'm definitely buying a huge spatial ring" and "It's so inconvenient carrying makeup around…" She'd been counting on some understanding, beautiful, wealthy big sister to solve her troubles.
That was one of the big reasons she'd never bought a spatial ring herself. Miss Top Courtesan believed that persistent wishes always got an answer. She'd dropped so much green-tea talk, and she refused to believe it wouldn't pay off.
And the facts proved that a pie falling from the sky makes a starving person delirious with joy, but if pies keep falling one after another, they'll stuff the poor soul to death.
So here was the question:
Miss Top Courtesan has a birthday, and everyone gives her spatial rings.
So when it's someone else's birthday, would it look cheap if Miss Top Courtesan wrapped herself up as the present?
Or if she sold off some of these rings, would they hack her to pieces for it?
Li Fei searched her conscience and arrived at a desperate answer.
"Whatever. Let it be."
Li Fei turned her face aside and waved a hand weakly, signaling Miss Tail to finish this torture of the soul as quickly as possible.
A few seconds later, Miss Tail suddenly twitched.
"What is it?"
Li Fei lowered her eyes in suspicion and found Miss Tail holding up a booklet.
She took it. It was rather thin, with the four characters on the cover reading Spell Jottings. The handwriting was clearly Mama Nicole's, graceful and upright, with a classical beauty.
She flipped it open and skimmed. Written in the first person, it recorded Nicole's thought process and insights from when she was at Sequence 7, studying and even trying to improve spells, along with her reflections on gains and losses.
Clearly, this was a priceless treasure that would drive countless mages mad.
Li Fei thought it over for a moment, then tossed the book aside, buried her face in the sheets again, and urged in a muffled voice:
"Hurry up and open the rest."
The Archmage's own handwritten spell insights and her understanding of spell models were certainly precious, and she had thoughtfully prepared content for the low-Sequence stages rather than anything too profound or obscure. But with Li Fei's current aptitude, expecting her to understand it was asking a bit much.
As Li Fei kept drawing her knees up and dropping them again, her pale, gleaming calves and the tops of her feet slapping against the sheets, Miss Tail slowly reached for the final, headlining gift.
Bai Mengtian's.
Miss Tail deftly tugged the bow loose and opened the box, revealing a radiant headpiece.
Its openwork outline was a lotus flower, set on a base of rose gold and studded with crystal-clear, colorless crystals. The scattered crystals, cut in different sizes, were arranged into delicate and beautiful patterns, with a refined, unworldly quality.
Sunlight fell on the cut facets and split into sharply distinct black and white, making the crown look even more dreamlike and dazzling, with a captivating charm.
Without a doubt, the girl who wore this crown would become the most noble princess in the world.
Li Fei was still trying to smother herself in the sheets and hadn't taken in the crown's beauty at first glance. But the moment the tip of Miss Tail touched it, a column of information still popped up in her System Panel.
"I'd like to see just how big a spatial ring Tingbao got me…"
With that thought, Li Fei glanced at her System Panel.
"Hiss… Ting! My Ting!"
The next second, Li Fei shot upright like a dying invalid roused by shock, staring at the crown in disbelief.
[Bai Mengtian's Handcrafted Crown]
Equipment Rating: Radiant
Attributes: Aptitude +1
Enchantment: Descent: Bai Mengtian
Descent: Bai Mengtian: Aptitude +1000 for 1800s. Recharge time: 30 natural days.
Note: can be recharged with a Sacrificial Gem.
"Ah-ba, ah-ba…"
Li Fei's mouth fell open. She couldn't tear her eyes off this crown that looked like it had come straight from a fairy tale.
Tingbao's gift for her eighteenth birthday, her coming of age, was Radiant-grade equipment! And the first Radiant-grade item of her life!
Even more outrageous, this thing could actually add Aptitude…
Li Fei studied the equipment's attributes and fell into deep contemplation about society and life.
Strength, Constitution, Aptitude, and Agility: these four base attributes were the foundation of a Transcendent and the source of overwhelming power. Morality, Charm, Command, Luck and the like were special attributes.
Comparatively speaking, Morality and Charm fluctuated the most. Even for an ordinary person, the Morality Value could easily flip-flop between positive and negative. Charm needed no explanation: an excellent makeup artist and wardrobe could work wonders, turning a plain-looking girl into a stunner and raising her Charm by a dozen or even dozens of points at once. Of course, the higher the Charm, the less makeup helped. When Li Fei's Charm broke a hundred, makeup could only change her aura and style, and could barely raise the number at all.
Luck and Command were harder to change. Otherwise, items that boosted Luck wouldn't all cost an arm and a leg, like Lady Zhihua's Potent Luck Potion…
But Aptitude was, without dispute, the attribute hardest to improve.
Apart from raising one's Sequence and breaking through along the Transcendent path, the only way to improve Aptitude was through fortuitous encounters. And what were those? Rare, precious opportunities that couldn't be mass-produced and could be met but never sought.
Things like powerful Innate Talent specialties, class ranks, and Legacies.
Things like Transcendent wonders that could only be described as grand.
Things like extremely precious rituals and potions. The formulas and ritual knowledge alone were worth a fortune, and gathering the materials, then successfully setting up the ritual or brewing the potion, was harder still.
Of course, it had to be stressed that vast wealth also had the great power to work miracles. Take the direct descendants of Enlos's ten richest tycoons. They could buy the knowledge of the [Soul-Burial Spirit-Nourishing Grand Array] from Li Fei, then buy a few densely populated planes, set up the array inside them, and use countless lives as nourishment to push their Aptitude higher… It was said that Martin Jack's son had undergone five rituals and taken six potions right after birth, and visited at least three Transcendent wonders, giving a child already born at the finish line another pair of wings.
But the difficulty of amassing vast wealth was no less than that of chasing miracles, wasn't it?
Besides, nearly all the resources that permanently raised attributes, rituals and potions alike, shared one flaw: no second benefit.
And now what was Li Fei looking at?
A piece of equipment that raised Aptitude!
It was unscientific, un-Transcendent, and unreasonable.
Even if it only raised it by one point, it would be epoch-making.
But the most outrageous part of all was the enchantment…
Miss Top Courtesan held the crown, and only one thought circled her mind:
What does it feel like to have Aptitude higher than your Charm value?!
"Oh my mama…"
Li Fei spaced out for a long while before shuddering as if waking from a dream, letting out a long sigh.
But her gaze remained on the crown, burning hot and filled with greed and longing, like Gollum catching sight of the One Ring.
At last, her snow-soft fingertips picked up the crown with a tremble, and the Radiant crown came to rest on hair like ink, held up by an even lovelier head.
Just try it.
But the cooldown is a whole month…
What good is any amount of Aptitude for half an hour? It's just a birthday gift for fun anyway. Give it a go.
And I can't waste that half hour either. Maybe I could comprehend a low-tier spell?
Li Fei's eyes flickered, and the scales in her mind swung wildly, until her peripheral vision happened to catch the Spell Jottings she'd flung far away a moment ago.
"Rua!"
At last Li Fei let out a howl, snatched up the Spell Jottings, sat cross-legged, and poured mana into the crown to activate its enchantment:
[Descent: Bai Mengtian]
In her sharply black-and-white eyes, hazy blue flames ignited, cold and rational, like a deity looking down on all living things from on high, feeling neither joy nor sorrow.
From all directions, above and below, and even from the different dimensions connected through the same spacetime node, strange, awkward, obscure notes rang out. The sounds were fragmented yet overlapping, drowning her thoughts like a tide.
Everything within her sight turned into bizarre colors and broken lines, with masses of characters flickering in and out like a rising tide. But the waves turned without order: one moment a black torrent roared eastward, the next a riot of color swirled down into the depths of the earth.
As a flood of chaotic information poured into her mind, blood began to seep from the corners of her eyes and from her nose. Her body temperature kept climbing, as if her soul were boiling.
Even the hair on her head twisted and danced as though alive. Her blood turned into worms writhing languidly beneath her skin, dull cracks sounded from her bones, and lumps kept bulging up under her flesh, as if Tentacles were about to burst out of their shell.
I can't… get lost…
Her Transcendent premonition rang long and loud in her heart, jolting Li Fei awake.
Fortunately, snuggling day and night with sensitivity super-doubled didn't just "wear in" a relationship. It also "honed" willpower.
She shut out the redundant, maddening, chaotic information, forcibly gathered her focus, and lowered her head to flip through the Spell Jottings.
Dense diagrams, formulas, numbers and symbols entered her eyes, which burned with blue flames. They flowed through her mind like water, endlessly rearranging and recombining, expounding the essence of Transcendent knowledge.
"So that's how it is…"
In a low sigh, time trickled by second by second. Li Fei devoured the notes as if intoxicated. For the first time, without relying on the System, she drew Transcendent nourishment, climbing the steps from the barren foot of the mountain toward a summit whose end she couldn't see.
In the field that had been blank, a tender sprout finally pushed up.
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