Whether bickering or teasing, it was all just a small diversion amid the tense atmosphere of final exams.
Wednesday afternoon was the written Potions Studies exam.
Zheng Qing had worked through the first half of the paper very smoothly, but when he reached a question involving dew, he suddenly could not distinguish the relationship between "White Dew," "Autumn Dew," and "Cold Dew."
As he recalled, during the Cold Dew season, Xiao Xiao had once taken everyone to the Hundred Herbs Garden to collect Cold Dew leaf by leaf. At the time, he had mentioned that Cold Dew was cold in nature and unsuitable for collecting in a copper plate of the metal element; it should be collected with a stone, jade, or wooden plate instead.
White Dew, meanwhile, had been collected by Professor Li personally with the students during class. Zheng Qing remembered it clearly. That was the first time he had encountered a Dew Collection Plate—a brass vessel, golden all over, engraved with dense Runes.
As for Autumn Dew, Zheng Qing's mind was muddled. For the moment, he could not remember what was special about it, but it felt strangely familiar, as though he had definitely seen it somewhere before.
His ink-soaked Quill Pen hovered in midair for a long while. Just as its tip was about to buckle beneath the weight of the ink drop and the ink was about to fall, Zheng Qing finally began writing:
"Autumn belongs to metal, metal's color is white. At the White Dew solar term, grass and trees condense mist; moisture transforms without flowing. As Yin energy grows heavier, dew congeals and turns white. This is White Dew."
This was the official definition of White Dew in the textbooks. Zheng Qing was thinking clearly: no matter what relationship the three had, writing