Over the next few days, Zhou Lu spent almost all his time in his room, guiding Huohuo to ram the wall as she practiced her headbutts. Only once did Wu Xiaoqing call him out for a day.
Although the last experiment had failed and nearly cost her life, Wu Xiaoqing still had not given up on her mushroom project.
After several days of painstaking research, she finally found another evolution route that she considered harmless and invited Zhou Lu over to stir-fry some mushrooms for testing.
As for whether the new mushrooms were edible, Zhou Lu had no idea.
Because he had never beaten one.
Whenever he recalled that day, Zhou Lu felt utterly humiliated. He vowed to train his martial skills—at the very least, he could not let a mushroom humiliate him like that again.
If he had not known a little martial arts and had Huohuo's help, he would have been pinned to the ground and beaten by a mushroom.
"Are you really researching food?" The bedraggled Zhou Lu looked helplessly at Sister Xiaoqing. "I feel like that mushroom could take on three of me."
The key was that once this thing entered its explosive growth phase, a single culture medium could grow dozens of identical mushrooms in one day.
However, the mushroom seemed to activate combat mode only when its life was threatened. Normally, it just lazed about hugging a piece of wood and sleeping.
The mushroom that had fought him had suddenly erupted only when he took out a knife and planned to slice it up.
Despite failing again and again, Wu Xiaoqing clearly had not abandoned the project. After all, it was the graduation project she had chosen herself.
Over these past few days, Zhou Lu had not rushed to train Body Feed, nor had he hurried into the secret realm to explore. Instead, he had Huohuo consolidate her previous skills while practicing headbutts.
Just as Xiao Xi had said, Body Feed was indeed extremely difficult to train. The Beast Tamer and their spirit pet needed to reach a certain level of emotional bond. Only when both sides could sacrifice themselves for the other would they have a chance of obtaining it through training under specific conditions.
And without guidance from someone experienced, even if one trained according to the instructions, one might not necessarily comprehend the flow between the two sides' attributes.
Fortunately, while Zhou Lu did not know who possessed Body Feed, he could let himself use Body Feed a few times.
There was no way he could complete the task of disrupting the exam, but he could use it to farm a few one-time Body Feed Skill Cards.
Zhou Lu could only hope this task would not be like the last one, where the reward for failure turned into some other skill.
Otherwise, he could only keep recalling that previous feeling to practice Body Feed.
Thud!
Thud!
As Zhou Lu considered his next training plan, Huohuo was happily ramming the wall over and over.
This time, Zhou Lu had learned his lesson and specifically bought a metal cultivation pot for plant-type spirit pets. Its hardness and appearance could not compare to the White Jade Snail's shell, but it was more than sufficient for training.
"Say, are you really not going back to your own room?" Zhou Lu asked Xiao Xi, who was lying on the rim of a cup and drinking tea nearby.
Xiao Xi glanced at Huohuo, who was continuously crashing into the wall, then shot Zhou Lu an irritated glare. "Are those human words? Is my room even fit for anyone to stay in now?"
Knowing he was in the wrong, Zhou Lu coughed twice, not knowing how to respond.
Xiao Xi yawned and continued, "I don't know why, but watching her smash the wall doesn't feel like noise anymore. If I were on the other side of that wall, though, it would be pure torture."
Following Xiao Xi's gaze, Zhou Lu saw that the once-smooth wall had been smashed into a crater by Huohuo, exposing the stones at its deepest layer.
The teachers' dormitory had been built to the highest defensive standards. Its outermost layer was cement capable of absorbing energy, giving it a certain degree of resistance against attacks of all attributes.
The innermost layer was made of stacked stones: Blackwater Stone, one of the hardest materials in the world.
Though the outer cement was also sturdy, Huohuo's relentless impacts had still created a crater. But Blackwater Stone was, at least for the current Huohuo, a wall of sighs that could not be crossed.
How wonderful!
A weak spirit pet trained tirelessly so she would not become a burden to her master, making herself stronger and stronger.
And this spirit pet was even the same kind of Plant-type Spirit Beast as herself.
This was simply the most textbook-perfect plot imaginable!
Sitting atop the cup and watching Huohuo train so earnestly, Xiao Xi sighed emotionally to herself.
But just as Xiao Xi was feeling sentimental, Huohuo stopped.
Her metal flowerpot had become somewhat misshapen after the continuous impacts, making her look adorably silly as she moved around with it on her back.
Huohuo arched her body and made her way to the crater she had smashed into the wall.
Staring at the seam where the Blackwater Stones joined together, she fell into thought.
Huohuo extended her Vine Step and attached it to the seam.
The sudden silence surprised both Zhou Lu and Xiao Xi. Yet the faint sounds coming from the wall next made both of them panic.
"Fuck! Huohuo! What are you doing?!" Zhou Lu shouted, trying to stop her.
But by the time he spoke up, it was already too late.
With a thunderous crash as the wall collapsed, rising dust engulfed the entire room.
Huohuo, the culprit behind the disaster, was so frightened by the sight that all her leaves stood on end. Her Entangling Vines wrapped around themselves and contracted.
Huohuo swiftly burrowed into Zhou Lu's arms, then poked out a little leaf to secretly peek toward the collapsed wall.
Xiao Xi held her face in both hands. "No! My room!"
The wall had collapsed toward Xiao Xi's room.
As the Blackwater Stones fell, the roots Huohuo had inserted into the seam suddenly lost their anchoring point and probed about in all directions with nowhere to settle.
Just as Zhou Lu was about to ask what Huohuo had been doing, he saw her vines retract from the pile of fallen rubble.
Several tiny pieces of clothing were wrapped in her vines and offered before Xiao Xi.
Your clothes are dirty...
Huohuo shook her vines, signaling for Xiao Xi to change clothes.
Xiao Xi looked at the hem of her skirt stained by tea and did not know whether to laugh or cry.
This silly little weed actually tore down the wall just to fetch me clean clothes.
As Xiao Xi sank into a brief moment of emotion, Huohuo, whose scheme had succeeded, stuffed several tiny pieces of underwear into her flowerpot with lightning speed.
"..." Xiao Xi stared speechlessly at the scene.
Huohuo patted Zhou Lu's arm with a leaf, pretending she wanted to chat with him.
"Hey, don't pretend. I saw everything," Xiao Xi said coldly.
Huohuo pretended not to hear.
"Give my underwear back! You perverted wild weed!" Xiao Xi stood with her hands on her hips, furious.
Huohuo immediately became unhappy. She stretched out her vines and argued with Xiao Xi: I'm not a wild weed! I'm domestically grown!
Zhou Lu helplessly tried to mediate. "All right, the most important thing now is to get someone here to deal with this. A collapsed dormitory is no small matter."
He had never imagined that Huohuo would teach herself how to use her roots to drill through cracks and topple a wall built from Blackwater Stone.
"Come to think of it... why is Huohuo so interested in your clothes?"
Still somewhat angry, Xiao Xi answered Zhou Lu's question irritably. "My intimate clothing is actually leaves mimicked by Seeking Dao Wood. To Plant-type Spirit Beasts, they're excellent growth nutrients, and they even give them a tiny attribute boost. Spirit Beasts are very sensitive to things that benefit them."
"So that's how it is..." Zhou Lu nodded thoughtfully.
"Then do you have any more clothes like that?" He looked at Xiao Xi and blinked.
"..." Xiao Xi looked at Zhou Lu as though he were a pervert.
"Look... they're dirty anyway, right?" Zhou Lu also realized the question sounded strange and hurriedly explained.
"Say no more. You master and servant are both perverts!" Xiao Xi stood with her hands on her hips, fuming as she pronounced her verdict.
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