Good News and Bad News

The rats of the Wizarding World were not essentially different from the rodents Zheng Qing had seen growing up—gray fur, long tails, able to burrow, climb trees, and swim; vigorous, prolific, and fond of living in sewers, gutters, graveyards, and similar places. At most, rats in the Wizarding World were a little bigger, a little smarter, and a little more capable of survival.

That was only to be expected of rats surviving in the Wizarding World. After all, this was a world inhabited by wizards. Other creatures lurking along its edges naturally needed stronger adaptability than their distant relatives, or they would have long since been hunted to extinction by other predators.

After hearing the task Old Yao had assigned, the classroom erupted in wails of misery.

The delicate young witches in particular made no effort to hide the disgust on their faces. Zheng Qing had every reason to believe that the task the school had assigned them would certainly spark a boom in the underground student black market for rats and other creatures.

Young wizards with money had never been stingy about spending silver horns and gold beans to buy precious time for things they considered more important: a magical experiment, a hunting match, pursuing a witch, and so on.

As for wizards without money, they could only trade their time for limited funds to support their simple, dreary academic lives.

For some reason, the moment he thought of such transactions, the image of a burly Fat Wizard immediately surfaced in the young scholarship student's mind. Zheng Qing remembered that Sephrano and his Xiangqi Society seemed to have been running similar "gray magic" schemes at school all along. Even so, that did not mean Zheng Qing would go to Sephrano to buy rats to turn in.

Perhaps because he