Nanahoshi Shizuka could no longer keep still.
She was like a wild beast that had spent ages trapped in a cramped cage, unleashing boundless energy the instant it broke free.
She paced anxiously back and forth through the Laboratory, her leather boots tapping out a rapid rhythm on the wooden floor. Every step seemed to fall on the drumbeat of truth.
She seemed to be using this "vigorous physical exercise" to barely keep pace with the flood of inspiration about to burst from her mind.
After three or four laps, she abruptly stopped, spun around, and rushed to the enormous wooden table, snatching up a stack of fresh blank paper and a quill.
She did not even take the time to pull out a chair. Instead, she bent straight over the table and began frantically scrawling new designs in a posture that was utterly inelegant but highly efficient.
Her hand moved astonishingly fast. The fragile-looking quill became a precision carving tool in her grip, its tip making an endless scratching sound against the rough parchment.
Exquisite ancient runes and magic power circuits of dizzying complexity poured from her pen, as though she had rehearsed them thousands of times in her mind.
As she drew, she rapidly filled the blank spaces with writing resembling advanced mathematical expressions-formulas for calculating energy ratios and spatial parameters.
Then, as though she had spotted an error, she roughly and impatiently wiped away the still-wet formulas with the back of her hand, without the slightest regret. Blurry smears remained, and she wrote new formulas over them.
The only sounds left in the room were her breathing, quickened by intense concentration, and the ceaseless scratching of pen against paper.
Cui Ciyou, Roxy, and Sylphy were like spectators who had stumbled into a great artist's studio in the