Conjuring Something Out of Nothing

Exchanging gifts really was the fastest way to bring people closer, even if it was only a little hot water.

Once she was in bed, Lin Er pulled the thin blanket over her stomach and listened to the quiet question from beside her.

"Lin Er, can you go to your relative's place to shower every day from now on?"

The dorm room, with more than twenty people in it, was far from quiet. Their voices could only be heard nearby.

Lin Er blinked in the dark. There was no reason she couldn't, though she had only made the decision on the spur of the moment today. The trouble was that the broom was too conspicuous. When she had taken it out today, some people in the dorm had thought she had brought her own cleaning tool to school.

That was common in primary school. After a summer vacation, the schoolyard would be overrun with weeds.

It was less common in middle school. Even when the schoolyard grass needed tending, the school supplied the tools, and the students gave up their PE time. After all, middle school students had far more to do than primary school students.

"Sure. I'll bring you all some hot water when I come back."

Shi Meng's breathing paused for a moment. She clearly hadn't expected Lin Er to agree so readily, though she had had something like that in mind when she asked.

"Thank you. Should we come meet you when you get back?"

Carrying a bucket of water up to the sixth floor really wasn't easy.

"No need." Lin Er lowered her voice. "It wouldn't be good if people saw, and I'm not sure I'll be back at the same time every day."

After all, she was climbing over the wall, and using a method that she couldn't let people see.

The school had actually installed quite a few cameras, but most were concentrated around the teaching buildings and intersections.

The rest were in corners where fights were likely to break out, and along sections of the perimeter wall with other structures or objects beneath them.

For example, the trash incineration pit and the section of wall with a flower bed.

Those two spots provided footholds, making them key places for climbing out of school. Teachers even patrolled them every night.

The spot Lin Er used was the one the school worried about least. For one thing, the wall was two or three meters high on the school side and hard to climb.

Even if a student got over it, there was a cliff above the river on the other side. Including the wall, the drop was at least three or four stories, and anyone who jumped would land among the rocks below. Students only wanted to skip class and go online, not kill themselves.

So there were no streetlights or surveillance cameras there. No one could see what anybody was doing there, whether from the buildings above or from either side.

Lin Er knew about the place because of Ying Yuecheng. She didn't know how he and the others had found it, but in their second year of middle school, they had gotten into a group fight there and left no evidence afterward. The school had issued public reprimands for three days.

In a student's body, her biological clock was a powerful thing. She had thought she might be unable to sleep without a phone to play with, but she ended up dozing off without knowing when.

She didn't even know when the dorm supervisor shouted from the hallway that their room would lose points for talking after lights-out.

A new day meant new uses of magic. This time, she cast Transfiguration on one of her red, cutout performance outfits, turning it into a very ordinary white short-sleeved shirt.

She didn't wear it, though, because she didn't know how long it would last. If it changed back after three to five hours, she would be embarrassed, and it would frighten her classmates too.

At the same time, after getting up, she traded an apple to the person on the other side and received one use of magic, proving that trading worked.

With four uses of magic available, Lin Er looked at the Memory Charm, itching to try it.

Really, it wasn't as though she couldn't commute to school, right?

Look, if she went fast on the broom, she could be home in three minutes. She could take her bedding back and make up the bed in the upstairs storage room. She would have so much room to sleep at home.

Most importantly, her evenings would be entirely her own. All she had to do was cast a Memory Charm on her homeroom teacher and make him forget that she was a boarding student.

The term had just started, and the commuting students' passes hadn't been issued yet.

There was already one extra person in their dorm, and none of them knew one another well yet, so it wouldn't be strange if she moved out. No one would go ask the teacher why she had suddenly started commuting after living there for three days.

Should I try it?

Lin Er hesitated all morning and finally gave up at noon.

The magic book contained detailed descriptions of spells. The Unforgivable Curses she had entered earlier had all been banned, and the Memory Charm carried risks too. Casting it improperly could cause permanent brain damage.

She had no grudge against her homeroom teacher. There was no need to do that for a little convenience. At worst, she could trade something for a bottle of Polyjuice Potion next term, act as her own parent, and arrange to commute herself.

Her homeroom teacher, having narrowly escaped disaster, touched his head. Good, his hair was still as thick as ever. The chill he had just felt on the back of his head must have been his imagination.

Since their most basic needs had been met through trading, the two of them weren't in contact as much as before. At most, Lin Er guessed that the person on the other side was probably short of food, so she would get an extra serving at the cafeteria at noon and give it to her for free.

Everyone at their school used tickets to get meals. The regular meals really tasted so bad that none of the cafeteria servers suspected anyone would use a fake ticket.

Lin Er used the expired lunch ticket from the meal she hadn't eaten yesterday. Even the bowl she used had been transformed from a southern magnolia leaf.

That cost her another use of magic.

But as she flipped through the magic book, it seemed she had enough for her current life. After all, the other spells didn't seem particularly useful either.

For once, she couldn't sleep during the afternoon nap. The excitement of being reborn gradually faded, and disbelief and uncertainty began to well up.

Real life wasn't a fantasy. Every day she lived was real. English class was followed by math, and the geography teacher would casually draw maps.

She still had to sit through forty-five minutes of every class.

It wasn't like a fantasy where she would first get good grades, then go to a good school, find a good job, and finally reach the pinnacle of life.

She had to take it all one step at a time.

Even reborn, she was still herself. Her IQ hadn't changed at all, and the little extra life experience she had over her peers was only enough to make up for the gap between them before.

She still remembered Shi Meng saying that her dream was to become a doctor, though her parents thought dentistry had better prospects, so she figured she would study dentistry.

Lin Er, on the other hand, had only learned about professions from books. The goals she had for her future were all taken from other people's model essays.

She hadn't opened her eyes until she started working. While she was in school, she had felt inferior, and if she didn't understand, she wouldn't have to be upset. So she didn't think about it. She drifted through each day, doing nothing but being a student, pushed along all the way.

Only after she started working did she discover that, outside her family's "protective umbrella," it didn't seem to be raining after all.

But it was too late. Everything was already in the past.

Some people said it wasn't too late, that it was never too late to change, especially when it came to improving oneself.

But if she had that kind of perseverance, would she have hypnotized herself because of her inferiority complex, letting herself gradually fall out of step with the world?

Now time had turned back, and she had the mindset to understand the need to work hard, but her abilities were what they were.

She still took longer than her classmates to memorize the texts required in Chinese class. At most, she could now look at the teachers she had once feared without being so frightened that her mind went blank.

English class still sounded like an incomprehensible book. She would memorize words one day, only to find them vaguely familiar the next, and couldn't even tell an "a" from an "e" when writing them from memory.

Only math was easy for her. They hadn't started functions yet, and she could do her homework without "referring to" Shi Meng's.

As the history teacher talked at the front of the class about Yuanmou Man and Peking Man, her mind wandered.

She thought about housing prices in Beijing, her parents' wages, how to make money, the Beijing Olympics having just ended, what to eat that evening, and whether the pickled vegetables in her suitcase would go bad.

During a class, they spent less than half the time following the teacher's train of thought. No wonder she couldn't keep up. Only by catching up on materials and homework and drilling practice questions after class could she keep pace with the classmates who listened attentively.