A sky full of stars (thanks to Mu Zicheng for the Super Fan certification)

With everything at hand settled and nothing urgent to do for the next few days, Lu Yuan simply needed to prepare his belongings and wait to depart. Enjoying this rare moment of leisure, Lu Yuan walked slowly on the thin snow on the stone path, his pace a bit slower than usual.

He exhaled a puff of white breath and inadvertently looked up at the night sky above.

The North Campus of the Knight Academy is located at a very high altitude. Lu Yuan, who had been busy running around the Hanging Tower and the Pharmacy Group recently, hadn't paid much attention to it. But now, on a night when the wind and snow weren't too heavy, he looked up and the twinkling stars in the sky seemed exceptionally clear and bright.

Looking at the vast, clear, and dazzling starry sky, Lu Yuan couldn't help but blink. His mind wandered aimlessly, wondering how far apart the universe he was in was from the Earth of his previous life, or even whether they were the same universe. He wished he knew a little about astrology.

In his mind, Oden followed Lu Yuan's gaze to the stars in the night sky. After a moment of silence, he suddenly spoke with some emotion:

"Speaking of which, your era is truly wonderful. Light has spread far and wide, you have your own Academy, and organizations like the Night Watcher. There aren't so many Taboo Entity running rampant on the earth, and even Heretic and cultists seem to be far fewer than before."

Lu Yuan listened to Oden's rare emotion, looked away from the starry sky, and asked in his heart with some curiosity:

Was your time dangerous?

Oden was silent for a moment after hearing this. The cloud of Gray Mist swayed slightly and then slowly spoke:

"Actually, it wasn't that dangerous, it was just very... well, I'll tell you about it another time."

He stopped mid-sentence, seemingly unable to find the right words to describe the situation back then, and finally simply waved his hand and didn't continue.

Seeing this, Lu Yuan did not ask any further questions. He followed the stone path back to his two-story house, closed the door, sat cross-legged on the bed, and completed his daily guard training for the night in an orderly manner.

As the last wisp of thought returned to its place, a familiar line of Gray-White Text appeared in my field of vision:

[Guard II:+0.3...45.6/50]

Looking at the Guard II entry, which had unknowingly reached 45.6 over time, Lu Yuan couldn't help but sigh inwardly.

If I think about it carefully, I've only been here for almost a month since I entered the North Campus of the Knight Academy. I originally thought that coming to this secluded Knight Academy would give me a good rest for a while, but it turns out that I'll have to start running around outside again so soon.

"Why is the Auris Empire so dilapidated everywhere?"

Lu Yuan couldn't help but complain in his heart. This time, he didn't deliberately shut down the telepathic connection with Oden.

Hearing this complaint, Oden, nestled in his left leg, chuckled and sighed in agreement:

"You bet it is, it really is quite dilapidated, but thankfully there are you guys out there fixing it up, aren't you?"

Lu Yuan smiled upon hearing this, and upon reflection, he realized it made perfect sense.

In the following days, life in the North Campus slowed down. Lu Yuan continued his usual routine: he would go to the Rock Grand Knight Commander Hanging Tower's Inscription Room in the morning to check in, and then spend the afternoons loafing around in the Lantern Knight's Pharmacy Group.

Frey, who works in the Pharmacy Group, has benefited a lot from working with Lu Yuan on the plague testing program recently. These past few days, whenever she sees Lu Yuan in the Potion Room, she is noticeably more talkative than before.

As they chatted more, Lu Yuan realized that this seemingly petite and pouty senior was actually a genuine genius. He hadn't noticed it before because they hadn't interacted much.

According to Frey herself, she came from a small family and, by a twist of fate, obtained the recommendation qualification for the Knight Academy a year earlier than Lu Yuan. She also by a twist of fate passed the entrance test and stayed in the North Campus.

During her first year at the university, Frey went on field missions with the team and passed many academic assessments. After going through a lot of trouble, she realized that she was still best suited to stay in the Potion Room and do Potion Studies. Later, she was discovered by the Lantern Knight and has been staying in the Pharmacy Group to participate in various research missions ever since.

As Frey sat beside the lab bench, resting her chin on her hand, and sighed somewhat dejectedly:

"To be honest, compared to those real monster geniuses in our Knight Academy, I feel like an ordinary person without any clear goals."

"Although many people outside praise me for being knowledgeable and having a wide range of interests, in my own opinion, being a jack-of-all-trades is actually the same as being a master of none. I was originally glad that I had some talent in Potion Studies, but compared to you, I've been left far behind."

Hearing these words, Lu Yuan turned to look at Frey's serious yet slightly sulky little face, and for a moment he really didn't know how to respond or comfort her.

Because only he himself knows best that if he hadn't steadily accumulated experience points step by step through the experience bar in his vision, based solely on his own talent, he would at most be a Second Order Transcendence being by now.

Perhaps he's holed up in some remote branch as an ordinary Night Watcher squad leader, or more likely he's already dead at the hands of some unknown monster.

Ultimately, after living in this world for so long, Lu Yuan felt that he had never truly faced the deepest darkness and despair of this land.

To be fair, the Auris Empire has been quite considerate to ordinary people at the bottom of society. Although it certainly can't compare to his hometown in his previous life, what more can one ask for in a world where Transcendence power belongs to the individual?

At least in terms of daily taxation and legal systems, the empire's exploitation of ordinary civilians was not too excessive. Lu Yuan guessed that this was mostly a result of the need for a stable lower-class population and Sanity Ring for Transcendence Path.

According to the experience in the history books of the previous life, the upper class usually allocates a little, the middle class takes a little, and the lower class skims off a little, so that when it falls to the bottom, a lot of people die. However, such tragic and corrupt signs have not yet appeared on a large scale in the current Auris Empire.

This peaceful routine of checking in continued day by day until the afternoon before departure. The Deacon of the courtyard came to inform Lu Yuan to get ready and to set off early the next morning. Only then did Lu Yuan put aside his idle thoughts of the past few days.

That same evening, the String Knight came to the outer room of the Pharmacy Group specifically to find Lu Yuan, carrying a thick stack of hardcover booklets.

In order to hand over the items before Lu Yuan set off, the old knight with white hair and beard had clearly been working very hard these past few days. His eyes were still bloodshot. He had personally written down all the alchemy techniques he had summarized throughout his life, the precautions for various heat control, and his experience in refining rare medicinal materials from the Northern Territory, compiling them into this heavy notebook.