Millennium Witch.

Chapter 77 - 77 - Refusing to learn this or that
Giving Dugrabi a basic rune lesson didn't actually have a significant impact on Yvette's daily life.

Firstly, the knowledge imparted needs time to be digested, and Dugrabi's ability to memorize is extremely poor. Just memorizing commonly used runes would take it several months, or even several years.

Secondly, in her daily life, there wasn't anything particularly stressful or urgent that she had to do. She spent her days meditating and practicing at a fixed time, occasionally studying "Detailed Explanation of the Spell Architecture Engine" and "Analysis of Spatial Rune Technology," and the rest of the time, besides reading miscellaneous books, she actually slept.

But she didn't think that sleeping was a lazy act; on the contrary, she saw it as a form of spiritual practice.

This is not sophistry, but rather a result of her long-term observation that the brain produces soul runes at a faster rate during sleep.

If this were considered within the context of early civilizations, it would be an epic discovery.

—It may have already been discovered, but human lifespan is too short and there are few nature mages, so even if the soul runes that increase total sleep time were discovered, no one would care.

But it was different for Yvette.

Soul runes are spiritual power; they are the same thing. They relate to a nature mage's ability to manipulate spells, the efficiency of a rune hacker in cracking a spell, and even an ordinary person's energy and spirit, and even the quality of their sleep.

There are only two known methods to increase soul runes.

One is meditation.

One is a natural product of the biological brain.

In the past, Yvette mainly relied on meditation. The principle is very simple: meditation is like tensing all the muscles in your body, making the soul runes tighter and denser, triggering the "rune siphon effect." In the process, there is a chance to get some soul runes from the outside world and gain an improvement. Nature mages can also improve their magic power through this method.

Well, it's a very simple operating mechanism, and there are no alternatives or improvements. The downside is that over time, it leads to spiritual depletion; although it will recover, it's very uncomfortable.

But sleeping is different.

During sleep, the biological brain produces more soul runes, resulting in strong mental power and a comfortable and energetic spirit. Upon waking, one can comfortably engage in various learning and exercise activities, making it seem like a natural fit for a long-lived species like Yvette.

She can sleep forever if she wants.

Sleep your way to become the world's number one top-tier spiritual body, and sleep your way to become an unparalleled king of spiritual power.

Although it would require her to sleep for a very long time, she had already secretly made up her mind to make this her lifelong career and spiritual practice.

Therefore, in conclusion, this cannot be simply dismissed as laziness.

……

Time flies, and another year has passed. It's the second month of spring, when the grass grows and the orioles sing.

This is the sixth year that Yvette and the others have been in Cooks. The spring is still chilly. In order to imitate the wintering behavior of humans, the village chief Copperskin led everyone to build a fireplace, so that they could warm themselves by the fire during the freezing cold.

This even led to the development of the training activity of "chopping wood." Due to its novelty, it became very popular, resulting in a constant abundance of firewood in the kingdom's halls. Sometimes there was so much that Dugrabi had to burn some of it with his dragon breath.

Dugrabi thought this was absurd. What would a group of alchemical creations need for warmth? Apart from it and its teacher, the others here probably would never know what cold felt like in their entire lives.

However, when it thought about the even more outrageous human cultivation practices of this group, it felt relieved, with a feeling of "What can I say when you're all like this?"

Sometimes it would also advise acquaintances, such as Jasmine or Ice Rain, that instead of cultivating with the goal of becoming human, they should set their goals higher and directly aim to become "dragons." In that case, as a living true dragon, it could give them some guidance.

Unfortunately, the machine race didn't appreciate it. Dugrabi, having been rebuffed, gave up and continued his daily routine of diligently studying the basics of runic literature, only to start dozing off as he studied.

On Yvette's side, there is one area where she has made significant progress: combat skills.

Since meeting the Spider Woman in Cooks about two years ago, she has been launching a sneak attack on Cooks about once every two or three months, mainly to spar with the Spider Woman.

During the process, she devised a rather vague plan for improvement, which was to see how many minutes the battle would last before she could gain the upper hand and achieve stable suppression of the Spider Woman.

Initially, it took about 10 minutes to do this, and overall it was a draw—at least she thought so. At that time, she and the Spider Woman were very similar in combat skills and were very suitable practice partners.

Two years later, that number has increased to 5 minutes, a truly enormous leap. She is very proud of this, feeling like she has gradually transformed from a player obsessed with numbers into a skilled one. However, things are a bit more complicated for the Spider Woman. She reported the information about this mysterious intruder to the commander, but still doesn't know which monarch's faction the intruder belongs to, or why they keep causing trouble in the King of the Sea's territory every few days.

Even because the other side never really hurt the Spider Woman, usually just leaving her exhausted and on the verge of collapse, the two lords, the Mountain Whale and the Fish Man, didn't want to come to her aid anymore. They were always slow to arrive, like police officers who always arrived late in tokusatsu shows.

This led the Spider Woman to a terrifying suspicion: that the other side was intentionally using this protracted war to wear down the patience of the Kux defenses, and that the mysterious silver-haired girl would strike her deadly when everyone relaxed their guard.

With these thoughts in mind, the Spider Woman finally couldn't take it anymore. She decided that once that important event was over, she would resign and leave immediately to avoid living in constant fear.

……

In June of the same year, the plum rain season began.

However, this isn't the case in Cuxhaven. June temperatures there are low, often below 10 degrees Celsius, and the climate is cold and dry. Although lush green grass covers the mountains, the distant snow-capped peaks still stand firmly, perpetually frozen.

On this slightly chilly morning, after completing a short quiz on Dugrabi's runic knowledge, Yvette finally decided to let it experience more advanced knowledge ahead of time, in order to make some plans for its future learning direction.

Inside the warehouse, Yvette tapped on the board beside her and said, "I have a few different professions I can teach you. See which one you want to learn. Your senior sister, Rosalyn Theon, dabbled in all of them, but I suggest you don't follow her example. Firstly, you're not as passionate about runic literature as she is, and secondly, her knowledge was quite superficial. Much of the knowledge she spread across the Radiant Continent was probably deduced by her later."

"Great!" Dugrabi was very excited and immediately put on a look of listening attentively.

“Well, first of all… I can teach you the techniques of rune hacking. Once you master this skill, as long as you're fast enough, you can hijack someone's magic before their spells hit you, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” Yvette explained. “However, the downside is that rune hacking requires many prerequisites. You need to be proficient in rune fundamentals and corresponding compilation techniques, proficient in rune security techniques, and have a grasp of architecture, encryption techniques, database knowledge, and vulnerability practice…”

As the teacher rambled on about a whole bunch of knowledge he'd never even heard of, the wildfire that had just ignited in Dugrabi's eyes was instantly extinguished.

No, spell hijacking sounds even more powerful than the legendary forbidden spells, but there must be so much to learn about it, right?

Isn't this deliberately making things difficult for it?

The more it listened, the more dizzy it became, and it quickly interrupted the teacher, saying, "Why don't you just tell me roughly how long it will take to learn?"

Yvette hesitated, "Given your current learning efficiency and our rudimentary learning conditions... it might take at least two hundred years..."

Dugrabi was dumbfounded. He had cultivated for two hundred years for a single skill? He wasn't even in the Land of the End by then, was he?

It quickly said, "Next one, next one?"

"I can teach you magical engineering. With this skill, you can create some basic magical equipment. While you won't be able to create cutting-edge artifacts like elemental chips, given the level of magical equipment development on the Radiant Continent, becoming a top alchemist shouldn't be a problem..." Yvette said. "Of course, this also requires mastering many other things, such as the fundamentals of magical engineering, magic circuit etching, mathematics, physics, and basic mechanics..."

Good heavens, math! Dugrabi felt a chill run down his spine and quickly shook his head again: "No, no, no, teacher, please stop reading! Next! Next!"

Yvette continued, "I can teach you rune compilation, which is part of the prerequisites for rune hacking. It allows you to design personalized spells according to your own needs. Although in the human world, spells with too large a scale are unusable, usually limited to 200 runes, understanding runes is understanding our world. I think you've studied the basics of runeology for so long, you understand this very well..."

“No, no, no, I think I’ve mastered enough of the commonly used runes. There’s no need to learn all the less common runes…” When it came to the field of runic studies, Dugrabi was terrified, all sorts of nightmares flooding his mind. He shook his head repeatedly, saying, “Next! Next!”

"Then I'll teach you agricultural and natural science techniques. While they won't directly boost your combat power, using magic to influence plant growth should be extremely important for the overall development of the Dragon Kingdom, enough to make you go down in history. This only requires understanding natural magic, crop science, soil science, agricultural meteorology, and..."

"Uh, teacher, I don't want to farm, nor do I want to get involved in the management of the Dragon Kingdom... Next! And the next one!"

"Then I'll teach you runic medicine. While potions can heal and save lives, runic elixirs can produce special effects, providing various enhancements. However, due to the different materials, once you return to the Radiant Continent, you'll likely need to begin by researching and classifying the properties of medicinal herbs. Therefore, the first thing I'll teach you is..."

"Teacher, I... I don't want to be a doctor either. Please, please, let's choose another one..."

"..."

Thus, it changed its major several times, but due to various prerequisites, Dugrabi was unable to make a decision, as it seemed to be uninterested in any field.

Now, Yvette was genuinely angry. She reached out and smacked the black dragon on the head three times.

You little rascal, you don't want to learn this or that, what do you actually want to learn?
(End of this chapter)