Holding the book, which smelled of aged ink and dust, Pandora walked to a small reading nook tucked between the towering shelves. Her mind instantly plunged into the dense sea of text.

  A special talent, born from her Wizard’s nature, quietly unfolded. A faint glimmer flashed in her weary eyes. Under her intangible mental field, vast chunks of information were rapidly comprehended, sorted, and filtered, leaving only the core, structured essence behind.

  It happened naturally. Fluidly. Almost on instinct. She didn’t even realize how fast she was reading. Her eyes lingered on a page for only a breath or two before she subconsciously turned to the next.

  Of course, this wasn’t just her second-rank Wizard mental abilities at work. That power was just the scalpel. What let her dissect the text with such efficiency was the theoretical framework of Alchemy she’d built over two months of her elective course and self-study. It let her extract the true core principles and grasp the internal logic of the hefty tome.

  But even reading this fast, it would take at least three full days of intense focus to finish and preliminarily understand this brick on “Transmutation Potions.” Finishing it thoroughly before the “three-month” deadline, with her free time shrinking, was still a tall order.

  She couldn’t waste a second.

  Soon, Pandora was completely absorbed in the vast world of words and symbols. Normally, nothing external could disturb her at this point. Even someone chattering right beside her wouldn’t pull a wisp of her attention from that deep focus.

  But…

  A faint rustle… rustle… reached her ears.

  It sounded like slender fingers turning pages. Unhurried.

  Pandora’s head snapped up. She looked at the female apprentice who had, at some point, silently seated herself beside her. Her appearance was plain. Unremarkable. Except for her skin—it had a sickly, almost translucent paleness.

  That wasn’t the point. The point was… she was flipping Pandora’s book!

  Smack!

  Pandora slammed her palm down on the page about to be turned, freezing the girl’s hand mid-air.

  “Why are you touching my book?” Her voice was low, the displeasure in it thick enough for even the most emotionally dense person to understand they were seriously bothering her. “There are other books. Can’t you borrow one yourself?”

  This clear, sudden accusation made two apprentices browsing nearby stop and glance over, their expressions curious.

  Pandora’s words seemed to stun the girl. Her eyes held pure astonishment, as if she’d never imagined being questioned in the library… never thought she could be… seen.

  What’s… with this person?

  Pandora’s brows knit tight. She lowered her voice again, enunciating each word. “I. Am. Talking. To. You.”

  The girl before her slowly ‘woke up’ from her shock. But the expression surfacing in her eyes wasn’t apology.

  It was… delight?

  Pandora was more confused.

  The girl spoke, her voice trembling with disbelief. “You… can see me?!”

  What did that mean?

  Pandora instinctively scrutinized the girl more carefully. Something was off. Her form seemed… faint. At first, she’d blamed the other’s overly pale skin. But now she saw it—the girl’s entire outline had a nearly translucent quality. The dim library light had hidden it at first.

  And… she cast no shadow.

  So… she was a ghost?

  Pandora stayed outwardly calm. She just glanced at the two apprentices nearby, who were now whispering with peculiar looks. Their reaction confirmed it. To them, she was probably just a crazy person talking to herself.

  Taking a slow breath, Pandora wasn’t sure how to handle a… ghost. Especially one that didn’t seem immediately hostile.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  So… she decided to ignore her. She turned her head back and focused intently on her book, acting as if the other wasn’t there.

  But it seemed… she’d misjudged her. She was actually an evil spirit. Diabolically so…

  Rustle…

  Pandora watched as the page right under her eyes lifted slightly from an invisible force.

  She finally, slowly, raised her head again.

  “You can see me.” This time, the other’s statement wasn’t a question, but a declaration of absolute certainty. “But why? No one else can… Never mind. The important thing is, I finally… have someone to talk to…”

  “No. No one will chat with you. At least I won’t,” Pandora coldly cut her off.

  “Huh?” The girl tilted her head, looking almost… innocently cute.

  Yeah, right, Pandora screamed internally. Go away! Stop bothering me!

  She didn’t say another word. She just went back to her book. No matter how the girl chattered incessantly in her ear. No matter how the girl, with her semi-transparent hand, drew bored circle after circle on the table…

  Pandora’s mind remained still as water. No reaction. She just focused on her book. Within the book was beauty and treasure. Reading reveals its meaning…

  …But her heart wasn’t quite that “still.”

  Because…

  “What did you just… say?” Pandora finally couldn’t take it anymore. She looked at this chattering girl, scrutinizing her once more. Plain features. Simple attire. She looked like an ordinary academy apprentice.

  But an ordinary apprentice absolutely could not know this much about Potioncraft.

  Seeing Pandora finally acknowledge her, the girl’s face lit up with a triumphant smile. She cleared her throat and, with keen interest, adopted a teacherly tone.

  “I said, if you want to learn how to truly brew a ‘Transmutation Potion,’ this book can’t teach you. I don’t know which clueless person put this error-filled junk on the shelf. But any somewhat advanced Potioneer knows—the theory about ’Form Anchoring’ in here has a fatal flaw!”

  She pointed to a passage on the page, her tone absolute. “You should check Charles’s Potioncraft Corrections, Chapter Three, Section Seven, around… page three-twenty-one? It explicitly mentions and corrects this mistake.”

  Without waiting for a response, the girl’s translucent form lazily reclined on Pandora’s desk. She propped her head up with her hand, watching with amusement as Pandora stood, found the thicker, plainer-covered Corrections from a nearby shelf, and frantically flipped to the cited section, comparing the texts.

  When Pandora finally looked up, her eyes a mix of shock and confusion, the girl clicked her tongue smugly. “See? I wasn’t wrong, was I?”

  Her semi-transparent form sat up straight. “Your Potioncraft is decent for a freshman, but compared to me, it’s still miles off!” Her voice brimmed with pride, like a child showing off a secret stash.

  “And the problem isn’t just this one…” She blinked. “The biggest issue is that you simply can’s brew a ’Transmutation Potion’ right now.”

  “What do you mean?” Pandora’s face showed little, but her inner calm had shattered. She pressed, her voice dropping even lower.

  This reaction only stoked the girl’s enthusiasm. She sat up straighter, adopting a serious, instructive tone:

  “‘Transmutation Potion’ is a ’Formal Rank’ potion. That means its grade is at least fourth-rank! Below fourth rank, everything you can make falls under ’Apprentice Rank.’ Their underlying principles are fundamentally different! So give up. You can’t brew it.”

  Her words fell like hammer blows. “If you truly want to brew it, you need to at least become a ‘Formal Demon Hunter’ first. Otherwise, no matter how good your theory is, you won’t produce a single genuine drop! You can test everything I’ve said. You’ll see I’m right. Of course, you’ll be responsible for the wasted time and resources.”

  Pandora refused to accept it. Adopting the posture of a devout seeker of knowledge, she fired off several more profound, technical questions. She even used what she’d just read, tearing apart the most advanced theories to try and find flaws in the girl’s logic.

  But the girl’s knowledge was on another level altogether, its breadth and depth far beyond Pandora’s current reach. She answered with utter ease, as if the abstruse theories were basic common sense. Some of the concepts in her explanations, Pandora… couldn’t even grasp. The other’s knowledge had reached a domain Pandora hadn’t yet touched.

  Pandora finally gave up the futile interrogation. After a reluctant internal struggle, she accepted the harsh reality: at her current stage, she simply could not brew a “Transmutation Potion.” It meant her original three-month plan might be derailed…

  But in that moment, curiosity overcame her goal. Her attention shifted completely from the book to the mysterious ghostly girl.

  She slowly closed the heavy Corrections. “You… who are you? Why are you here?”

  The girl’s smug expression faded. Her semi-transparent form seemed to dim. “I… I don’t really know who I am either,” her voice turned ethereal. “It seems… I just opened my eyes and found myself here. And I seem to be trapped on the library’s second floor. I’ve tried. I can’t go up, and I can’t go down.”

  She looked up at the sloping ceiling and the crimson sky beyond. For the first time, a flicker of genuine, living fear appeared in her eyes. “I can vaguely sense that if I leave this place… I might truly ‘die.’ For good. It’s a kind of death that terrifies me utterly.”

  “So…” Pandora connected the dots. “You’re a ghost trapped in the library?”

  “……” The girl was silent for a moment. “You could… understand it that way.”

  Pandora had an epiphany. The sense of familiarity finally clicked. This entity seemed to be one of the campus’s legendary oddities—the “Library Alchemy Ghost.”

  Legend said if an apprentice spent too long reading “Alchemy” books on the second floor, they might suffer a nightmare of being unable to leave, even becoming trapped as a new ghost. Potioncraft was a branch of Alchemy. The detail about being unable to leave matched perfectly.

  Perhaps the origin of the legend was some unfortunate apprentice who’d been forced to experience everything this girl had…

  Pandora looked at the illusory girl, now gazing at her with expectant eyes. She suddenly felt she was experiencing something extraordinary—something an ordinary apprentice might never encounter.

  Once she regained her composure, however, those scattered rumors were once again pushed to the back of her mind.