The Beauty Potion

The midterm exams were held at the end of November, and the results of these school exams came out quickly.

Lin Er ranked eighty-eighth in the whole school. Their homeroom teacher had even prepared a batch of certificates, and she received one for improvement.

Honestly, she didn't really want to go up and collect it. There were only a little over 180 students in their entire first-year class.

An even worse blow was that she had been studying English for two or three months, while her young pen pal had been learning Chinese for just over a month, and now they could already mix Chinese and English and guess their way through conversations.

Being reborn didn't make a person smarter or suddenly give them more time. She liked to space out in class, had to set aside time after class to talk with her pen pal, had all sorts of personal matters and errands at night, and devoted all her time on Saturdays and Sundays to martial arts classes.

Her grades had improved entirely because she had studied it all once before. Although she had forgotten most of it, she still had moments of sudden understanding when the teacher explained things.

She couldn't quite remember whether this ranking was higher than in her previous life, but any improvement was good.

Her young pen pal was a little bold. He now dared to borrow her wand and take the Knight Bus to Diagon Alley all by himself.

It was also then that Lin Er discovered there was nothing ordinary in the wizard set. The wizard robe she had thought was perfectly ordinary could grow or shrink to fit the wearer.

It could also serve as a disguise, making it hard to see what the person inside looked like.

The broom was more magical than Lin Er had realized, too. It was as if it had some kind of safety protection: even if she lost control and ended up upside down, with the broom above her and her body below, she wouldn't fall off.

Perhaps those things had given her young pen pal courage, because he even dared to go into Knockturn Alley.

In the end, a furious Lin Er took back all three pieces of the set she had lent him.

How old was he? He was only the age of a first grader, yet he dared to run around everywhere. That also made her particularly sure that the person on the other end was most likely a Gryffindor.

She didn't voice that guess, though, because she could tell her young pen pal liked Slytherin. It seemed to be because his mother had been in that house.

Along with the certificate, she received the first birthday present from a friend in her life—a beauty potion.

Apparently, he had helped his mother make it.

Lin Er had originally planned to put it away as a keepsake, but the moment she heard it could whiten her skin, she drank it down.

She really had been very dark-skinned when she was young, because she had run around fields and farmland since childhood and had never thought to stay out of the sun.

Because of that, she had never shown her young pen pal a photo of herself, even though she now had a phone.

At first, she worried that she had been too impulsive and would turn so pale overnight that people would find it strange. But the result was a little like how she looked after a bath, except that her skin wouldn't darken again.

That immediately fired up Lin Er's enthusiasm for making money.

She had now fallen in love with fishing—the kind where she rode her broom in the middle of the night, wearing a wizard robe and using spells, and flew for two or three hours to reach a river.

As the saying went, anglers could catch anything except fish, so it wasn't strange for her to catch some odd things, was it?

Prince's mother clearly understood a girl's desire to be beautiful. After accepting her fishing haul, she began gradually sending Potions over.

Her young pen pal was beside himself with excitement, because he was now his mother's assistant, and the cellar, like the attic, had become his private domain.

When a person was in a good mood, even the world seemed more beautiful.

Yan Jingting poked her deskmate and looked thoughtfully at her face.

"Have you gotten fairer lately?"

Lin Er raised an eyebrow, put away the math worksheet she had taken out and finished to fight off sleep, then pulled out her politics textbook and began memorizing it.

"Maybe? I haven't spent much time in the sun lately."

They still had no concept of using skincare products, and Yan Jingting hadn't noticed any fragrance on Lin Er. Sitting so close, she could also see that Lin Er really wasn't wearing makeup.

There was hardly any other explanation besides her skin gradually getting fairer because she hadn't been out in the sun.

She couldn't help touching her own hand enviously.

"Then your natural complexion must be really good. And you don't get pimples, either, plus you have so much hair."

Not getting pimples and having lots of hair really did make the girls in their class envious.

Middle school students were prone to acne these days. Most had it fairly lightly, with perhaps just a few pimples, but the student in front of them really did have an entire forehead covered in them.

To make matters worse, her skin was fair, so even a single pimple stood out. With no other choice, she had cut herself straight bangs to cover them all.

But that seemed to make it even worse, and she worried about it every day.

Not getting pimples and having lots of hair were traits Lin Er had been born with. Everyone in her family had thick eyebrows and big eyes, but they were all very dark-skinned.

Back then, Lin Er's father had fallen for her mother at first sight because of her snow-white skin. Unfortunately, none of their children seemed to have inherited it.

The beauty potion worked very well, but it couldn't overcome the limits of her genes. Even after drinking quite a bit, she was only a little fairer than the average classmate, nowhere near as fair as her mother.

"It runs in the family. Everyone in my family has this much hair. And you haven't seen my mom—she's the one who's really fair."

But her father was also genuinely dark-skinned, so her previous complexion might not necessarily have been caused by sun damage.

"All right," Yan Jingting sighed, slumping over her politics textbook on the desk.

Their politics teacher had taken leave at short notice, so evening study had become actual self-study. It was mainly because it had been so sudden; otherwise, another teacher would have taken over the period long ago.

Even with such short notice, their English teacher had claimed the next period. They had heard the teacher had already gone home to change clothes and eat, only to rush straight back to the office upon hearing there was a class available.

Who had they heard it from? The English teacher's own living "surveillance camera," of course.

This habit of competing to take over classes often baffled Lin Er. Weren't the teachers paid a fixed salary?

Later, some of her classmates became teachers, and all they complained about in the group chat was how the school had assigned them too many classes.

Why did the teachers now seem so happy to take on an extra period?

"Oh, right, we have music again tomorrow. What do you think the teacher will play for us this time?"

That got her interested. Their music and art teacher was also their math teacher.

They had only one music class and one art class a week. In art, they learned to draw, but if music wasn't taken over by another teacher, the teacher would play a movie for them.

So far, they had finished watching Hayao Miyazaki's animated films. Because of Kiki's Delivery Service, she no longer dared casually show people her wizard robe or broom.

At the time, someone had even remembered that she had brought a broom to school at the start of the term and said it looked a lot like the one in the movie. She had laughed it off.

The same went for her wand. Most of these classmates had seen it when she had first been unable to bear parting with it, but she had mentioned liking Harry Potter back then, so it wasn't strange for her to have merchandise.

After watching the movie, they all started asking Lin Er where she had bought her wand.

How would she know? Even with an extra ten or twenty years of memories, she was still a country bumpkin.

Her standard answer was that a relative working away from home had given it to her.

Ying Yuecheng had also been curious about which relative it was. Lin Er said it was a relative from her grandmother's side of the family, which finally put him off the idea of asking someone to bring him one too.