Chapter 63: The Iceberg Beauty’s Unconventional Magic

Su Liyue, wielding wind magic, sliced with precision into the crevices of the dragon turtle’s carapace.

As she extracted the magic core, still pulsing with a golden glow, viscous brain matter oozed between her fingers, dripping onto the scorched earth where it hissed and corroded, emitting plumes of white smoke.

Meanwhile, Ye Xingchen, armed with a dagger etched with decomposition runes, produced a crisp ‘crack’ as he carved a desktop-sized bone plate from a fissure in the carapace. The cross-section revealed a delicate, honeycomb-like structure—the very secret to its shock absorption.

A pale blue fascia clinging to the inner surface of the bone plate abruptly drew his gaze.

“Could this be… a natural anti-magic coating?”

With a delicate flick of his dagger, the translucent tissue shimmered and flowed like quicksilver.

He swiftly produced a crystal vial, collecting the substance as it automatically congealed into pearl-like granules within the glass.

The sheer scale of the explosion was bound to alert other teams. Indeed, Ye Xingchen’s enhanced senses already detected several groups, drawn by the blast, rapidly closing in with the aid of wind magic.

“Qingqing, we need to go, now!” Su Liyue urged with a sudden urgency. “We must relocate immediately, or the other teams will be upon us in moments.”

Only then did Mu Wanqing snap back to reality.

The battle’s ferocity had left her utterly stunned. A formidable Golden-tier Armored Dragon Turtle beast, a creature of immense power, had been effortlessly dispatched by her best friend with a mere handful of spells, all in under ten minutes.

This outcome vastly exceeded her wildest expectations. Their instructors had explicitly stated that a beast of this caliber necessitated the combined efforts of four full teams, yet they were only three!

As for herself, she had contributed nothing more than a single freezing spell, and even then, she wasn’t certain it had made any difference.

The entire confrontation had felt less like a battle and more like a dazzling display of teamwork by the perfectly synchronized duo, Su Liyue and Ye Xingchen.

What shocked her even more profoundly was the sheer destructive force of the recent explosion. Could an apprentice mage truly unleash such devastation?

It was a universally accepted truth that a spell’s potency amplified with the caster’s growing strength.

Even the most rudimentary Fireball spell exhibited a colossal difference in effect when cast by an apprentice versus a fully fledged mage.

Yet, Su Liyue’s recent attack appeared to shatter this fundamental rule entirely.

Even more baffling was the question of how she had managed to fuse water and fire, two inherently conflicting elements, to unleash such terrifying destructive power.

Without hesitation, the trio mounted their magic brooms and swiftly made their escape.

Su Liyue, with a practiced ease, cast wind magic to accelerate their flight, while Ye Xingchen subtly shifted his Qimen Pan’s Nine Heavens God to Taiyin God, diminishing their presence as he simultaneously calculated the optimal Dumen (TL Note: “Dumen” or “Gate of Restriction” in Qimen Dunjia, an advantageous direction for concealment) direction.

“To the southeast, within the Xun Palace, lies a dense forest,” Ye Xingchen declared with decisive clarity.

“The Dumen Fuyin (TL Note: A specific astrological configuration in Qimen Dunjia, indicating a favorable condition for concealment) there makes it ideal for multiple people to hide. Let’s move!”

Mu Wanqing found herself utterly bewildered, but before she could voice a single question, Su Liyue had already grabbed her broom handle. “Stay close, Qingqing!” she instructed.

“Huh? Alright!” Mu Wanqing stammered, hastily channeling her magic to accelerate and keep pace with the other two.

As they flew, she was astonished to realize that despite several close encounters with wandering magical beasts, the creatures seemed utterly oblivious to their presence, allowing them to pass unhindered.

“Yueyue,” Mu Wanqing finally couldn’t hold back her curiosity. “What was that fire magic earlier? The sheer power was absolutely unbelievable!”

“Consider it a modified version,” Su Liyue replied with a casual shrug. “I used water magic and alchemy to produce hydrogen, then detonated it with an open flame. Hydrogen combusts explosively when it meets oxygen; I simply harnessed that principle.”

“Hydrogen? Oxygen? Alchemy can combine with magic?” Mu Wanqing’s eyes widened in disbelief.

“Well…” Su Liyue carefully considered her words, knowing that the inhabitants of this world were unfamiliar with the periodic table of elements.

“You could understand it as a kind of invisible natural force. Some powers, though unseen by the naked eye, undeniably exist.”

“Borrowing natural force?!” Mu Wanqing’s voice shot up, laced with astonishment. “Isn’t that an inherent talent of the Elven race?”

Observing Mu Wanqing’s utterly perplexed expression, Su Liyue simply waved a dismissive hand.

“Do you remember how I taught you to truly master water magic? Magic, much like cooking, hinges entirely on how you combine your ingredients.”

Gazelle at the sparkling ice rose, shimmering under the sunlight, Mu Wanqing found her thoughts drifting back to their early days at the academy.

She recalled how, during lessons on water magic, their academy instructors had repeatedly underscored its “gentle” nature, its “impact force,” and its “restraint over fire,” yet always concluded that water magic was inherently weaker in damage compared to the other three elements.

Unless an abundance of water elements saturated the environment, a practitioner would invariably find themselves at a severe disadvantage in actual combat.

After all, one couldn’t reasonably expect to seek out a river for every skirmish, or to lug buckets of water onto the battlefield, could they?

Yet, Su Liyue had defiantly shattered this ingrained common sense.

By ingeniously combining wind and water magic, she pioneered ice magic: first, using water magic to draw moisture from the air, then employing wind magic to rapidly cool and condense it into solid ice.

Even more astonishing, she discovered that ice blades, once accelerated by wind magic, could unleash penetrating power far surpassing that of ordinary water projectiles.

This technique, she realized, not only consumed less magical energy than clumsily manipulating large volumes of water, but also magnified her offensive efficiency severalfold.

From that moment on, the academy began to vigorously champion the practice of ice magic, and the moniker “Twin Stars of Genius” gradually became synonymous with their names.

Sometime thereafter, Su Liyue acquired a new, elegant epithet: “The Iceberg Beauty.”

***

Even as the trio sped away, the vivid scenes of their recent battle were being clearly projected onto the grand crystal orb situated in the heart of the academy.

Dean Yu Qinglan observed the footage with a placid expression, yet the surrounding instructors, tasked with monitoring Golden-tier magical beasts, remained utterly dumbfounded, unable to fully process what they had witnessed.

“This… can this truly be the work of an apprentice mage?” a fire-element instructor murmured to himself, so engrossed that he didn’t even notice his recording quill clattering to the floor.

On the screen, the Golden-tier Armored Dragon Turtle, a beast famed for its impenetrable defenses and rumored to require the combined might of four teams to subdue, had been almost single-handedly vanquished by Su Liyue, the top student of the third year, in a mere ten minutes.

While the instructors had long held high estimations of this prodigious young woman’s capabilities, witnessing the battle firsthand still left them profoundly shaken.

“Her command over the elements… it transcends the very scope of our textbooks,” another elderly instructor remarked, pushing up his spectacles, his voice betraying a slight tremor.

The crystal orb replayed the earth-shattering explosion, its raw power reverberating even in the silent hall.

The fire-element instructors exchanged bewildered glances. Never had they conceived that the element of fire could suddenly erupt with such terrifying, unbridled power.

This revelation completely upended the traditional magical theory that “fire magic primarily excels in sustained scorching.”

“We must re-evaluate the entire trajectory of fire magic’s development,” one asserted. “That explosion… it seems to have incorporated principles we have yet to comprehend.”

Dean Yu Qinglan remained seated in the principal chair, silently observing the fervent discussions among the assembled instructors, offering no words of his own.

Yet, inwardly, his thoughts raced uncontrollably. Who exactly was the master behind Su Liyue?

Her profound command and understanding of elemental magic far surpassed that of any ordinary mage, making it impossible not to connect her abilities with her mysterious spatial-element master.