"But there's no hurry yet. I need to make some ink for writing first."
Wu Chu washed the brush and stone inkstone, then hung the brush on the rack. "Making ink is rather troublesome. I'll need to gather some materials first, and I don't even know if I'll be able to find some of them. For example, I need oil to burn for the soot. I'll have to test which kind of oil works best."
At the mention of Wu Chu making something new, Little Moon Spirit's eyes lit up. "What materials do you need, A Chu? Tell me, and I'll go gather them."
Yibao wasn't in a hurry now. She knew Wu Chu would need her to make the ink, since he surely couldn't remember the materials and steps required.
"Yibao, time to get to work."
Yibao replied from his Consciousness Sea, "You should first picture in your mind how ink is made. That'll make it easier for me to extract those memories..."
"..."
In the days that followed, apart from cultivating, Wu Chu and the others tried all sorts of methods, lighting lamps with various animal and plant oils and collecting the soot.
And so, time gradually passed into autumn.
Wu Chu discovered that although the magic power in his body had been steadily increasing from eating a little Dragon Meat each day, it still seemed far from reaching the point of qualitative change.
As Little Moon Spirit put it, why was his "Ordinary Illness" taking so long to recover from? She could hardly see any progress at all!
So, being straightforward and candid wasn't always a good thing.
More than a hundred days had passed—which would have been over a hundred years by Earth's reckoning—but Wu Chu didn't feel that his cultivation was slow. Every day, he