August 20th, 6:15 a.m.
Yawning, Jiang Han lazily washed up and tidied herself in the bathroom.
When the warm water cascaded over her body, she shuddered. The witch's sleepy early-morning genes were driven away, and her thoughts returned to her brain.
—In other words, she went from being an idiot back to a normal person.
Beneath the warm water, her mind became active again. From last night until she forced herself to go to bed early at two in the morning, Jiang Han had read the obscure and profound Practical Runology: Roloria Columbus at least five times.
What annoyed her was that whenever she was about to fall asleep, that photo of Roloria staring at a trophy—a scene with an oddly similar charm to Xuelun Curie looking at a trophy—would always make her laugh herself awake.
As a publicly recognized master of practical runology, Roloria had been nominated for the field's highest honor, the Words of Runes Award, seventy-nine times in her life, yet had never won it.
Even more tragically, during those seventy-nine times she watched the trophy from below the stage, she had never cried. Completely unlike Xuelun Curie, she was hailed as a true "Iron Lady."
Until two years after she had aged out of eligibility at ninety-eight, she was invited to present the Words of Runes Award.
When she awarded the trophy she had pursued all her life but never obtained to her fourteen-year-old apprentice, Gwendolyn Newton—the finest practical rune maker in the world today—Miss Roloria's tear-filled gaze fixed upon the trophy as she held it in her hands, unwilling to let go for a long, long time. The photograph became an enduring classic.
It was a little immoral to say so, but she and Xuelun Curie truly were like two brilliant jades of their age.