Dormitory 403.
In the dark.
Zheng Qing opened his eyes and stared blankly at the folds of the bed curtains above him. His eyes were unfocused, as though his gaze had fallen somewhere impossibly far away. Only after a long while did they slowly regain their focus.
This time, when he woke from his dream, there was an extra chest in his mind.
It resembled the chests in the Gray Cloth Bag, except it was bluish-gray in color and looked ancient and solid.
Inside the chest were two talisman guns.
Zheng Qing knew that these two talisman guns might not allow him to cast a true Forbidden Curse, but they could let him use a tiny fraction of the "power of a Forbidden Curse"—provided he could manifest those two guns from his mind.
In the teacher's words, that meant having an imagination powerful enough to sketch out every tiniest detail of the two talisman guns from nothingness.
Zheng Qing reckoned that fully manifesting a talisman gun was probably no easier than passing the Registered Wizard examination.
Perhaps this was another kind of balance and order.
With a self-mocking thought, he raised his hand before his eyes.
The bluish-gray chest in his mind silently opened a crack. Magic surged in his palm, and silver threads darted through the darkness, sketching the phantom of a Colt Python out of thin air.
But the phantom looked rather fragile. It trembled unsteadily in Zheng Qing's hand, as though it would shatter with a single squeeze. And this talisman gun had no trigger.
The teacher had said that he already possessed a trigger.
After only a moment's thought, Zheng Qing remembered the spellbook stuffed into the deepest part of the Gray Cloth Bag—the teacher had once said that the incantations copied in that book were