Zheng Qing had originally thought wizards did not celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival.
He had flipped through the hefty Ancient Wizard Almanac long ago and had not found any Archwizard named Qu Yuan in it. Perhaps there was one, but surely not one important enough for wizards to commemorate with a festival.
That had given him an inexplicable sense of relief—at last, he would not have to eat zongzi this year.
As a food with multiple identities—commemorative, festive, traditional, and more—zongzi and mooncakes had never been Zheng Qing's favorites. Every time he ate them, it felt like taking medicine; he had to drink a great deal of soup to swallow them down. Yet custom dictated that he eat them anyway.
Especially since modern mooncakes and zongzi were stuffed with all sorts of bizarre fillings, like hawthorn, durian, and egg yolk—Zheng Qing had grown up in the north, eating sweet zongzi with red dates since childhood, so the first time he tried a savory one, he had been utterly shocked by such heresy.
But that relief lasted only until the final week of May.
On Thursday morning, as Zheng Qing was returning to the dormitory after finishing his usual morning lessons, he noticed that the campus had gained many dragon-related symbols. School workers in gray robes bustled about nervously, fastening dried coiling dragons to many tree trunks. Those dragons seemed to have been refined from the corpses of real flood dragons; they looked lifelike, as though they might come alive at any moment.
When curious students approached to touch them, the withered dragons would even glare and spew frightening smoke.
"Is there some event today?" After returning to the dormitory, the young publicly funded student casually mentioned the commotion outside. Then, seeing Fatty Xin and Dylan hard at work, he could