With Jiang Yu acting as a mediator to keep things under control, Li Meng finally stopped bristling.
The four of them made it safely to the teaching building.
Today was Friday, and the morning's class was Alchemy. Although only a month remained before final exams, Professor Tesla, who taught the course, had been absent for a long time and merely assigned his graduate students to lecture in his place. As a result, most students lacked sufficient reverence for the subject.
Of course, another reason for that lack of reverence was that they revered it too much.
That might have sounded contradictory, but it was true. Because it involved the process of "qualitative transformation between matter and spirit," Alchemy had remained an independent and advanced discipline from the era of Classical Magic to the modern age dominated by the Dimension School, tormenting every wizard determined to explore the Path of Magic.
In class, this manifested as the course material being far too obscure and difficult. Aside from the first semester of freshman year, when they only covered the development and theories of modern Alchemy, the later material immediately felt like an entirely different subject. To use an inappropriate analogy, many students had only just learned that one plus one equaled two before entering school; during their first freshman semester, the professor used several of Peano's axioms to explain why that was so; then by sophomore year, the course became about how to prove "one plus one."
It looked rather similar to what they had studied before, but the gap between them was immeasurable. Students without enough talent had only one option if they wanted high marks on the exam: memorize the professor's entire set of lecture notes. The notes were another widely criticized aspect of the course. Since Professor Tesla had