Chapter 118 - 115: Secret Realm Ring
"Doudou, Doudou! I Tongnong Gang! Kemando, so scary!"
In Doudou’s forge, a Thorns vine was clinging to the window, emitting a strange utterance that mixed Mandarin, Shen City dialect, and the Magic Language.
Doudou was energetically swinging his little hammer. He planned to forge the 5th Gold Coin today, and then he could take a vacation.
He was quite annoyed with the chattering Mumu at the window.
He just kept swinging his hammer as if he hadn’t heard a thing. The Shadow of the Red Demoness stood guard nearby as always, just in case one of Doudou’s Gold Coins exploded and injured him.
Seeing that Doudou was ignoring it, Mumu’s thorn branches suddenly grew faster, stretching into the room from outside like octopus tentacles, then circled around to Doudou’s other side.
"Doudou Doudou, fasaluluman, wo want, Kemando, give me!"
Suddenly, with a BOOM~, the Gold Coin on the anvil exploded again.
A graceful red silhouette instantly appeared in front of Doudou, shielding him, while the thorn branches instantly turned from emerald green to jet black, a layer of Magic Power coating them.
"TING TING TING TING..."
Countless golden fragments scattered, striking the interior of the room.
Doudou glanced over at his snack storage shelf. ’Hmm, it’s fine. Specially finding a stone slab to place there was a good idea after all.’
Then, he raised his little hammer, scurried forward on his short little legs, and charged at the thorn branches.
"If I, Doudou, don’t hammer you to death today, then my name isn’t Dou!"
"Yaaaahhh~~~!"
What followed was a flurry of chaotic CLANGS and CRASHES.
The result was completely unsurprising: Doudou was exhausted, while the certain thorn branch was completely unscathed.
"Have you memorized the idiom dictionary? Do you recognize all the characters in the Xinhua dictionary? Have you done your language arts worksheets? Scram, scram, scram, stop bothering me! Go finish your homework!"
Unable to achieve a spiritual link for inspiration and finding the world too vibrant and colorful, Mumu had no choice but to start studying to save itself.
But this path was not easy. So, whenever it was free, it would come and pester Doudou. When it was feeling bold, it would go and bother Qin Xiaoxia. In short, it just wanted to be able to use the language of this world as fluently as Doudou.
As an Elf with Magic Power, understanding was not difficult. But for Mumu, which had no oral organs and relied on resonance to produce sound, speaking was much harder.
Moreover, spoken language was easy to understand, but watching videos and reading text was not. Typing and trying to go online was even more difficult.
Mumu really wanted to get on Doudou’s good side, but even though it felt it was being very attentive, it just couldn’t figure out the temper of this irritable Mischievous Elf.
The Shadow of the Red Demoness was like a silent, unblinking, dazed spectator, watching the farce between the two Elves with one hand on its torso and the other behind its back.
On the other hand, Su Su, who had only recently obtained Magic Power, was far more diligent than the half-hearted Mumu.
She was in her attic, studying from a thick book written by Qin Xiaoxia.
The book was written with Magic Patterns and bound in the parchment traditionally used by the association, containing a little over twenty pages.
Although it didn’t seem like much, it contained a volume of knowledge about Magic Power far beyond imagination.
It wasn’t that Qin Xiaoxia really wanted to save a Gold Coin, but that the exchange involved in a spiritual link was too broad and convenient. Knowledge itself was an important resource, and it couldn’t be allowed to lose its sense of mystique.
At this moment, Qin Xiaoxia was sitting in the empty hall, looking thoughtfully at the Statue of Comir.
The statue was truly too lifelike. Sometimes, in a daze, he would almost think the statue’s long red hair was swaying in the breeze.
Although the Red Demoness’s demonic and glamorous beauty was of a kind that was clearly inhuman at a glance, and the statue’s beauty was entirely that of a human form, the essence of the Red Demoness was still revealed in every part of the sculpture.
If it weren’t for the fact that the Shadow of the Red Demoness at the core of the Secret Realm was the same as ever, Qin Xiaoxia would have suspected that the Shadow of the Secret Realm had become the statue.
However, he wasn’t looking at the statue today to investigate the untold secrets between the Shadow of the Secret Realm and the Statue of Comir, but because he wanted to visit the Side of Truth again.
In truth, he had many questions. The Magic Power of a Wishing Gold Coin and Doudou was not only insufficient to obtain profound answers, but sometimes it wouldn’t yield any answer at all.
For example, questions about the reasons for the world’s changes and its ultimate direction were obviously not things a Wish could solve.
Two Wishes about similar questions had basically ended with him gaining nothing.
Even if a being like a world consciousness really did exist and could answer some things, like how it had foreseen the Nightmare Swamp, it was possible that the being itself was clueless about the world’s changes.
But then again, the last time he had merely sought a method to accelerate the growth of a Magic Energy Crystal Vein, it had nearly blown his head off.
This time, he would be jumping from elementary school one-plus-one to advanced mathematics. That would be tantamount to suicide.
"Sigh~"
Qin Xiaoxia let out a sigh. He could only think about it for now.
’I wonder if Mumu, a Tree Shepherd that’s several hundred years old, can withstand it after it recovers. Or maybe I should just pull it over and try now?’
At that very moment, the main body of a certain Thorns plant felt a sudden chill, as if it had been plunged into a freezer.
A suddenly ringing phone saved Mumu.
Qin Xiaoxia stood up from a chair by the round table in the corner of the empty hall, took out his phone, and answered the call.
"Mentor, everything is proceeding according to plan."
Sun Tian briefly described the arrangements for the investment plan and the fund over the phone.
"Mm, I don’t understand business and finance, but will there be any problems with things like financial subsidies?"
"There won’t be, Mentor. We will screen a large number of valuable candidates for funding, and slip in one or two of the association’s own teams. This kind of investment is inherently a form of venture capital. Even if those teams don’t get the expected returns, as long as the proportion isn’t too exaggerated, there won’t be a problem. Besides, the assessors and fund managers are all my people."
"Alright, you handle it with discretion. By the way, I’ll go see your mother when I have time."
Sun Tian grew excited when he heard this.
"Yes, of course! I’ll notify you when they return to the country!"
"Mm, that’s all then. Pay close attention to the reactions of the big players in the international market."
After hanging up, Qin Xiaoxia also temporarily shelved the unrealistic idea of using the Statue of Comir anytime soon.
He turned to consider something truly practical.
Linked Secret Realms!
This term, or rather, this theory, originated from the Fairies of Magson.
Just as he had learned during his discussions with Doudou back then.
The most famous and successful example was the "Fairy Ring" of the Magson Tree Sea Forest.
One after another, the Fairies wove Secret Realms over long ages and linked them together using a wondrous Secret Realm Technique. This formed the "spectacle" of the Fairy Forest—a spectacle, of course, only for the Fairies who could see the Secret Realms and other beings permitted to see them.
It wasn’t hard to guess what the Fairy Ring was from its name.
It basically formed a planar and three-dimensional encirclement of the Tree Sea Forest, expanding the space of the Fairy Secret Realms to tens or even hundreds of times the size of the Tree Sea.
With Qin Xiaoxia’s current resources, Magic Power, and technology, completing such an astronomical project was naturally a fool’s dream, but he could borrow and learn from some of its techniques.
For example, a simple linkage wasn’t impossible.
In the future, he could establish and weave Secret Realms at the association’s Secret Places around the world and link them together. This would not only increase the coherence of the Secret Realms but also make his own travel more convenient.
After all, whether the future civil aviation system could even be effectively maintained was still an unknown.
With financial backing secured, the association branch in Los Angeles could probably be established. Jenny and the others were recent graduates with limited funds. Baru didn’t have enough money, and it wasn’t convenient for him to provide it either. This had delayed them from settling on a suitable location to use as a cover for their work, to the point that they’d even considered just using Su Su’s grandmother’s old house.
But it wasn’t appropriate for a few young people to be running over to a place like that at all hours, not engaged in proper business. And what would they do when more people joined in the future? Say they were having a party every time?
PS: Chapter 2/3.