Learned Quite a Lot!

Lu Chi lowered his head and looked at the jumbled mess he was carrying. The backpack straps had been tied into several knots; undo one and two more appeared. After working at them for ages and still failing to untie them, he finally bit them open with his teeth.

He sighed.

The summary had taken almost two days to write. Lu Chi wrote much more slowly than before, not because he wanted to slack off, but because he realized that clearly writing about the things in Cangwu Valley was far harder than writing "how breathing exercises felt today" back at the Academy. Those things could not be summed up with "the east wind was warm and the west wind was cool." The speed of that Grey Zhe, the silence in the pine forest, the force in the crack that bounced his perception back—he tried several ways to describe them, but none of them felt right once written down. In the end, he simply stopped writing what they were "like" and only wrote "what happened" and "what I did." When he finished and looked it over, it was dry as dust, like an account book.

But he did not want to revise it again, so he handed it in as it was.

Ning Xiaohe's summary was twice as thick as his. She wrote down every unfamiliar smell she had scented in the valley and drew several diagrams. Some were plants, some were terrain, and some were things even she could not explain clearly, with a pile of question marks noted beside the drawings. She broke down the Grey Zhe's smell into four dimensions: temperature (scorching), texture (dry), motion (intermittent release), and base layer (inorganic, unlike a living creature). After breaking it down, she added a small line beside it: "But whether