"Low-grade active... buffering..."
The words that followed had been eaten away by worms.
Su Li opened the notebook. The first three pages contained hand-drawn circuit sketches, their lines bold and rough, utterly unlike the Merchant Guild's neat technical documents.
The main text began on the fourth page, but large sections in the middle had been smeared over and covered up, making the original writing impossible to discern.
On the seventh page, he found a readable passage.
"...using biological aether as a catalyst, establish an elastic buffering layer within the metal lattice... the core lies in the resonance ratio between the catalyst frequency and the metal substrate..."
His finger stopped on that line.
Active buffering.
A technology he had spent half a year cracking in his previous life, relying on Elonore as a living catalyst. What this notebook recorded was precisely the earliest theoretical prototype of that technology.
He turned to the eighth page.
Blank.
The ninth page was blank as well. Everything after that was blank.
Access locked. The remaining content required a higher access level to unlock.
"Put that notebook down."
Talia's voice came from behind him.
Su Li closed the notebook and returned it to the shelf.
"That's a research manuscript left behind by a senior three hundred years ago." Talia walked to his side, staring at the notebook. "It involves the Elves' core inherited technologies. Your current access level can't touch it. Don't get any ideas in the future, either."
Su Li turned around, his expression utterly sincere.
"Understood."
Yet inwardly, he was already calculating how to derive it himself with the complete Sword Spirit Root. In his previous life, with Elonore as the catalyst, it had taken him half a year to reverse-engineer the entire process.
This life, the Sword Spirit Root had been completed. In