Hazy moonlight filtered through the layers of leaves outside the window into the tree house, scattering patches of soft light across the spacious bed.
Xu Yi held an irregular hexagonal crystal prism up to the moonlight, turning it this way and that with a puzzled expression.
"Hey, Xu Yi, what is that?" Stille asked curiously from beside him.
"Elder Windini said this is a very special Magic Crystal. It contains far more mana than an ordinary Magic Crystal. I tested it while holding it just now, and it really does have an enormous amount of mana-even more than the high-concentration magic crystals our merchant guild produces," Xu Yi replied.
Stille reached out a finger to touch the Magic Crystal, sending a trace of mana from her fingertip to examine it. She discovered that the mana it contained was indeed unusually abundant, on an entirely different level from an ordinary Magic Crystal.
"It is strange, but surely it isn't worth a full thirty thousand gold coins?" Stille still looked baffled. "It's only one Magic Crystal. No matter how much mana it contains, what great use could it have? It probably couldn't even support you casting a ninth-level spell."
"If all I wanted was to cast a ninth-level spell, I wouldn't have spent thirty thousand gold coins buying it from Elder Windini." Xu Yi shook his head. "I'm just curious why the mana concentration in this Magic Crystal is so absurdly high. If I take it back and hand it over to Avita and the others to study, they might manage to reproduce it. That would be another major step forward in our merchant guild's Magic Crystal refining technology."
"I knew you were far greedier than I'd imagined..." Stille rolled her eyes at Xu Yi, then looked down at the jumble of