The Magic Ban Festival was a traditional wizarding holiday, generally held one hundred days after the winter solstice and one week before Qingming. By that standard, this year's Magic Ban Festival fell on March 28, still three weeks—nearly a month—away.
In other words, there was plenty of time. Zheng Qing had enough time to mentally prepare for this spring outing.
Compared to that, his increasingly regular daily studies put him under even greater pressure.
Perhaps the school believed the students had already passed the adjustment period of their first semester. Perhaps it was because the Promotion Exam was less than half a year away. Or perhaps the conflicts between student societies had made the professors feel that everyone had too much free time.
In any case, only two weeks into the second semester, Zheng Qing already felt immense academic pressure.
For one thing, the coursework had become more difficult. Subjects such as Spell Studies and Magic Script Studies had begun moving away from practical spells and similar material, instead teaching highly theoretical concepts. For most people, Zheng Qing included, such classes were more terrifying than a hypnosis spell. Worse still, if they lost focus even slightly during class, they would be completely unable to understand what the professor said afterward.
On the other hand, extracurricular assignments had also become much heavier. Less than a month after school began, the students had already received three essays, four lab reports, nine test papers, and countless after-class exercises. What Zheng Qing regretted most was choosing Merfolk Common Tongue as an elective. In the second week of school, they had been assigned a Merfolk Language text to memorize in full. As a result, whenever he studied from recordings while growing Trumpet Flowers in the dormitory, the irritable Tuantuan scratched him so many times.
It