A Love Story (Four Thousand Words, Two-in-One, Bonus Chapter for Alliance Leader Lingyan Zhi Rui)

Generally speaking, love was a luxury.

Unlike luxuries such as private jets, personal bodyguards, or grand balls, it did not require you to spend tangible assets. It consumed your energy, your wisdom, even your life; what it cost was your intangible wealth.

Moreover, like those luxuries that consumed your tangible wealth, it continuously depleted your resources. If you reduced your investment in it for a period of time, this luxury called love would quickly fade. It might even decay faster than your leather coat.

Of course, this luxury could also be like a fine aged wine: the longer it settled, the richer and more delicious its flavor became.

Most people spent their entire lives consuming their intangible wealth in exchange for pitiful tangible wealth, merely to maintain their existence in this world. Only those who did not need to expend too much intangible wealth could use romance and time to build up this expensive consumable.

But wizards were different. They were not ordinary people. They knew magic.

In the preface to his nineteenth-century book Timeline—The Baseline of Magic, Archwizard Lev Tomas wrote: "...Other than time, there is no other true magic in this world. And love is the existence among all other things that comes closest to the true essence of magic..."

Perhaps because his student life before high school had been overly monotonous and pure, Zheng Qing was full of confusion at this restless age. Ilena was like a lighthouse in the darkness, allowing his lost self to glimpse certain directions.

Short skirts, high heels, long wavy hair, different outfits every day—every part of her brimmed with the mysterious allure of the opposite sex. Sometimes, Zheng Qing felt like a sailor bewitched by a siren. Though he knew the waters before him were deep and dark, he still jumped