Chapter 29 Part 2

The boy jumped as if his tail had been stepped on. “I have no complaints about the principal or the school leadership! Don’t you dare slander me, you filthy commoner!”

Meng Yiran furrowed her brow, looking genuinely troubled. “But this classmate right here was admitted by the school leadership. It was the principal’s decision that let someone completely unqualified to learn alongside you into this classroom.”

The room fell deathly silent. The boy’s face cycled through shades of green, black, red, and white. In the end, he gritted his teeth, roughly shoved the two bottles in his hands back onto Tong Yuwu’s desk, and slunk away into the crowd.

Meng Yiran watched his retreating back and sighed. “And that’s the kind of student who makes it into Lishen—someone who does a good deed and doesn’t even leave a name.”

She deliberately raised her voice. “Thank you for your valuable feedback on the school.”

In an instant, the classroom erupted in muffled, suppressed laughter.

The boy’s face burned red as he craned his neck and barked, “What’s so funny!”

Seeing that he still dared to act arrogant, Meng Yiran had no intention of indulging him.

“Besides the new classmate, do you have opinions about the others too?

“Want to air them all out? I can submit them all at once for you.”

The boy glared at her venomously for a long moment before falling silent and slinking back to his seat, pretending to fiddle with the materials on his desk.

Meng Yiran rolled her eyes at him inwardly. She had already completely forgotten Ling Ge’s earlier warning not to provoke the noble students.

The female teacher looked a bit awkward as she glanced at Meng Yiran. “Is that enough now?”

She tried to usher her out politely. “I need to continue with the lesson.”

Meng Yiran shook her head. “Teacher, I haven’t asked my most important question yet.”

If entering the classroom had been eighty percent propped up by sheer fury at first, forcing her to stay calm, then by now she had bizarrely adapted to this fabricated identity. She could hold her head high and speak without batting an eye, even while clutching a notebook filled with nothing but doodled circles.

She turned to the female teacher. “I overheard what you said earlier outside.”

She picked up her feather quill and pretended to take notes again. “Has your teaching philosophy always been like this? Making the relatively weaker students in the class hand over all the school-allocated resources to those with better grades?”

The female teacher’s face went pale.

Seeing that she had truly struck a nerve, Meng Yiran pressed on. “This approach is quite unique, isn’t it? How long have you been implementing it? Has it had a significant positive effect on the class’s overall performance?” She paused, then curved her lips into a smile. “Oh, and by the way—are you willing to share this practice selflessly with the other teachers at the semester evaluation meeting?”

“No, that’s not it.” The female teacher’s words began to stutter. “I’ve never thought that way. Ahem, no—no, what I mean is, I’ve never taken resources from struggling students to give to the top performers.”

She glanced at the items on Tong Yuwu’s desk. “For the ones she can’t refine herself, I figured they were just sitting there anyway…”

Meng Yiran nodded in understanding. “I see.”

She drew another row of circles on her paper. “When it comes to students who can’t keep up with the pace, you tend to…”

“No!” The female teacher cut in hurriedly.

She coughed twice to cover her embarrassment. “Actually, I didn’t explain myself clearly earlier. She missed the last class and didn’t hear the instructions, so I was planning to demonstrate it for her one-on-one.

“See? I’ve already come all this way over here.”

Meng Yiran let out a sigh of admiration. “You truly are a dedicated teacher who takes her students’ progress to heart.”

The female teacher stiffly tugged at the corners of her mouth.

She stepped past Meng Yiran without another word, sidling up to Tong Yuwu’s side. She nudged Tong Yuwu aside to claim the center spot at the table, then casually straightened the two bottles the boy had tossed back onto it.

“I’ll walk you through it once. Watch closely.”

As she spoke, she glanced up at the rest of the class. “Don’t just stand there gawking. Get back to your own work.”

The students bowed their heads and resumed their tasks, but Meng Yiran noticed nearly everyone stealing glances at the scene.

The room fell quiet, save for the female teacher’s soft explanations and the faint clinks of glassware from the class’s experiments.

No longer needing to keep up appearances, Meng Yiran felt her nerves ease just a fraction.

But to her surprise, the terror she’d suppressed under all that tension now came rushing back in waves, each one stronger than the last. It was so intense she nearly retched right there. Her entire body trembled, her legs worst of all—if not for the wide hem of her robe hiding them, she might have broken into full-body shivers in front of everyone.

In her unsteady state, she swayed on her feet, on the verge of toppling over.

Tong Yuwu, displaced from her spot, stood right beside her. She picked up on Meng Yiran’s distress and shot her a quick glance amid the lesson.

Meng Yiran had been watching her too. Their eyes met, and she managed a feeble smile.

That smile sapped the last of her strength. Her body tilted, slumping against Tong Yuwu’s shoulder.

Tong Yuwu’s brows furrowed in an instant. Her toes shifted instinctively, as if ready to put some distance between them.

Meng Yiran understood completely.

Tong Yuwu was just wired that way—anything alive that got too close was met with instant disdain, her cat excepted.

She wasn’t sure whether to be glad for Little White Cat or pity the human Meng Yiran she’d become. In the end, she settled for bitter amusement, letting out a pitiful sniffle.

Tong Yuwu’s body went rigid.

Her brows stayed knitted, refusing to fully smooth out, but she straightened up all the same, making no move to shift away.

Meng Yiran had been steeling herself to suck in a breath and stand on her own, but sensing the shift in Tong Yuwu’s demeanor, she looked up in astonishment.

The Noble Miss’s expression was far from pleased.

Those eternally serene purple eyes hung low, locked on the female teacher’s hands as she worked the materials. But beneath that mask of focus, her lips were pressed into a thin, unyielding line. A faint flush of color bled through, lending her an air of fragile defiance—the very picture of suppressed irritation.

Meng Yiran’s own features softened with genuine warmth as she beamed a radiant smile at her.

Tong Yuwu appeared not to notice, her head never turning, her gaze fixed unblinkingly on the female teacher as she reached the critical phase.

“Once all the materials are prepped, mix them into the vessel and apply heat to melt them down. At that point…” The female teacher glanced at Tong Yuwu. “We’ll use spiritual power to compress them, speeding up the fusion.

“Uh, you do know what spiritual power is, right? Put simply, it’s the force we draw on to manipulate the magic elements around us. If your spiritual power runs low and you can’t fuse them in time, the batch is ruined. Release too much… well, that’s not an issue for you. Overdo it, though, and you’ll crush the materials too hard—worst case, boom.”

The disdain in her voice thickened by the moment, until she said outright: “At your level, when it’s your turn to refine, just pour in whatever spiritual power you’ve got for as long as it lasts. Then sit back and see if it works.”

Tong Yuwu listened with rapt attention, her purple eyes riveted to the materials now liquefied in the vessel.

Unseen by anyone, a dark gleam flickered deep within those violet depths.

The female teacher continued stirring the mixture with care.

All at once, an inexplicable sense of peril crashed over her. She couldn’t process it in time—her body reacted first, hand flying up to shield her face.

“Bang—”

The pot of materials, which had been harmoniously blending just moments before, suddenly exploded. The vessel flew from the Female Teacher’s hands, hurtling toward the ceiling like a moth to a flame. After deforming completely, it fell back down under the pull of gravity and smashed heavily onto the floor.

Meng Yiran had been leaning on Tong Yuwu’s shoulder. Sensing something amiss, she flipped over in an instant, pulling Tong Yuwu into her embrace to shield her. Once the dust settled, Tong Yuwu gently pushed her away. Meng Yiran lifted her gaze. “Are you okay?”

Tong Yuwu’s expression was inscrutable. She stared quietly at Meng Yiran for two seconds before shaking her head.

The entire class turned to look their way. The Female Teacher, closest to the explosion, was covered in black soot on her face and clothes, looking utterly disheveled.

Out of basic human decency—and a touch of embarrassment—Meng Yiran offered a awkward consolation. “Are… you alright?”

The Female Teacher hung her head in shame, fumbling awkwardly for words. “Sorry, there was a little issue with the experiment. I, uh… I must not have controlled it properly just now.”

Meng Yiran didn’t have the heart to tease her further. “Why don’t you go take care of that first?”

Some of the partially melted materials had splattered onto the Female Teacher during the blast, leaving her in poor shape.

She nodded at the suggestion, issued a few reminders about classroom discipline, and temporarily left the room.

Meng Yiran had no desire to stick around any longer.

The night was long and full of dreams—better to wrap things up quickly. For the short term, at least, no one else would dare bother Tong Yuwu. Her goal achieved, it was time for her to go.

As she prepared to leave, Tong Yuwu stared at the notebook in her hands, as if seeing right through her. Meng Yiran felt a pang of guilt.

She couldn’t write the script of this world at all. Earlier, when she’d been pretending, she’d just been scribbling nonsense with the quill pen. The Boy and the Female Teacher had been across from her and couldn’t see, but Tong Yuwu, standing right behind her, had likely spotted the ruse.

Yet instead of bolting, Meng Yiran calmly asked, “Do you have any feedback or suggestions?”

Tong Yuwu looked up at her.

Meng Yiran forced a smile. “Uh… aside from that guy earlier, has anyone else in the class been bullying you?”

She struck a protective pose. “If you have any troubles or anything that’s bothering you, you can tell me.”

Tong Yuwu shook her head.

Meng Yiran pressed on. “Really, nothing at all?”

Her mind flashed to that ink-stained Magic Book. “This isn’t just about stealing your materials. Damaging your books, throwing away your tools—any behavior that interferes with your studies counts as bullying.”

Tong Yuwu finally reacted.

She gazed at Meng Yiran and spoke softly. “Does interrupting the class count?”

Meng Yiran froze, then gritted her teeth in frustration. “Of course not!”

She leaned in close, her voice low enough for only the two of them. “Don’t you have a conscience? You think I’m bullying you? When have I ever…”

Halfway through, her face flushed red, and her words trailed off.

Memories of a certain absurd night flooded her mind. Meng Yiran glanced down at Tong Yuwu’s rose-pink lips and recalled the Doll Lady’s words about their rich fragrance and warmth. Unlike now, those lips had been slightly swollen that night from her repeated attentions, every breath laced with ambiguous moans that burned like fire.

And here she was, stepping up to defend her, only for Tong Yuwu to pin the “bullying” label on her.

Meng Yiran shook her head to clear the indecent thoughts, then said stiffly, “I mean—cough—in Clarity Magic Academy, when have I ever bullied you?”

Before Tong Yuwu could respond, her eyes widened. “The miasma doesn’t count. I wasn’t in my right mind in the miasma.”

Even as the words left her mouth, a wave of guilt washed over her.

Why did it suddenly feel like she hadn’t exactly been gentle with the Doll Lady all that often…

Tong Yuwu, oblivious to her inner turmoil, simply let out a naive “Oh.”

Meng Yiran couldn’t stay a moment longer. She waved hastily and fled without looking back.

Once she was gone, the Female Teacher returned to the classroom after tidying up.

Perhaps chastened by the incident, her demeanor was much kinder now. She decisively discarded the severely deformed lump of scrap metal that barely resembled its original shape. Glancing at Tong Yuwu’s mostly empty desk, she hesitated for a moment before lending her own set of tools.