169: Chapter 169 Don't flaunt your wealth in public.

It had to be said that Lord Cthulhu was still reliable, even helping him tell a lie at a time like this.

After cursing his ancestors together with the witch, the two began to discuss the Spells they would exchange.

Xie Feng first went over the Spells he knew in his mind: Contact Formless Spawn, Summon Byakhee, Spacetime Gate, Bind Dark Young, and those obscure Spells he had painstakingly learned from the book of eibon and the revelations of glaaki.

After picking and choosing, he finally selected one that was neither too shocking nor lacking in weight.

The Vrees Sign.

It could brand a mark onto the target, greatly increasing their resistance to Cthulhu-esque pollution for a short time. This Spell was likely unrecorded in the Hyperborean Continent.

"I'll trade this for your Contact Nophke."

The witch stared at Xie Feng.

The Lie-detector Spell had just verified that this man from the Nine Provinces had no direct connection to Liu Yanqing, but the aura of the Old Gods on him still made her instinctively maintain a trace of vigilance.

However, she had indeed never seen the name of the Vrees Sign Spell in any of the ancient texts of the Hyperborean Continent. If this man from the Nine Provinces was telling the truth, it was indeed a valuable bargaining chip.

"Write down the incantation's structure and the method of mana guiding for me. If your Spell is indeed effective, you can take the original scroll of Contact Nophke."

The witch pulled out a blank piece of parchment from under the stone platform and slid it over.

Xie Feng took the parchment. Spreading the five fingers of his right hand slightly, silvery-white threads of mana welled from his fingertips, precisely branding the Vrees Sign onto the paper.

After finishing, Xie Feng slid the parchment back to the witch.

The witch lowered her head to carefully examine the magic circuits on the paper, then raised her finger to draw a sensory line.

When her fingertip touched the edge of the rune, she nodded and retrieved a scroll bound from parchment from deep within her stone platform, handing it to Xie Feng.

Xie Feng took the scroll and flipped open the first page, and then his entire body froze.

The entire page was densely packed with writing, its structure somewhat similar to the cultes des goules he had painstakingly studied before, but the vocabulary system was completely different.

Xie Feng could barely recognize a few recurring word roots, but his current level was far from enough to read the entire Spell scroll from beginning to end.

Oh no, I can't read the words!

I can speak but can't write; I'm practically illiterate!

Xie Feng stood for a moment, silently closed the scroll, and stuffed it into his robe. Maintaining a calm and composed expression on his face, he said to the witch, "Thank you, a pleasure doing business with you."

He needed to get out quickly and find a bookstore.

Xie Feng asked around as he walked along the cobblestone street, eventually finding a cramped bookstore in an alley on the west side of the Old Capital.

The shopkeeper was a hunchbacked wizard wearing thick crystal glasses, dozing off on the counter.

Xie Feng said "buying books" in the common tongue. The old man raised his eyes to glance at him and asked lazily what he wanted.

"An introductory literacy book or a dictionary. The larger and thicker, the better."

"?"

The old man pulled out an extremely thick, parchment-bound volume from under the counter and slapped it down.

Written on the cover was An Introduction to Common Script.

It had to be said that gold and silver were indeed hard currencies.

The saying that money is naturally gold and silver was indeed true; otherwise, Xie Feng wouldn't even have a way to pay.

Xie Feng paid, tucked the book under his arm, and left the bookstore.

Finding a square, Xie Feng used some silver to buy some sweets, coaxing a few half-grown boys to start teaching him.

"I absolutely cannot let Tu Ziguan and the others know about this, otherwise it'll spread through the entire Sect within a day of getting back."

Sitting cross-legged on the stone steps, he opened the book, pressed the fingertips of his right hand against his temple, and slowly activated the mark of Yog-Sothoth.

As the children taught Xie Feng, Tawil's silvery-white Void Realm silently unfolded deep within his right eye socket. His perception of time and space was stretched, and every single character was decomposed, reorganized, and filed away deep in his consciousness.

"Unbelievable. I actually have to do preschool education first. Who on earth learns magic while looking up words in a dictionary?"

Xie Feng grumbled to himself. He had to learn quickly; otherwise, if the demigod resurrected before he finished, they wouldn't be able to leave.

The grammatical structure was sixty percent similar to the original text of the cultes des goules he had repeatedly studied, while the vocabulary system borrowed heavily from the word roots of the Hyperborean Continent.

Relying on the thinking speed stretched by Yog-Sothoth's mark, Xie Feng plowed through page after page.

Xie Feng had an excellent memory—having a photographic memory was just the baseline. With his thinking speed boosted by the mark, the time it took him to turn each page was countless times faster than a normal person.

The sun slowly sank past the edge of the city walls, and the gray-blue light of the sky was gradually replaced by a deep, dark ink blue.

He turned page after page, devouring the entire An Introduction to Common Script from beginning to end.

"Hurry up and run!"

Xie Feng rushed back to the group's stronghold.

Once Xie Feng had gone far, a young mage with spirited eyes emerged from the bookstore.

"Who was here just now?"

"A customer. Very strange. He had a wizard's emblem on him, along with some odd-looking plaque, and bought a children's literacy book before leaving."

The young mage's gaze fell upon the cover of the display book. His brow furrowed slightly, then smoothed out.

"Was he also carrying a staff with a powerful aura?"

The old man stopped what he was doing.

"Do you know him, kid?"

"No. He stopped me on the road earlier to ask for directions, and all the places he asked about were ones he shouldn't have. Truly a strange person."

The young mage withdrew his gaze from the display book's cover, casually thanked the old man, and pushed open the door to leave the bookstore.

Almost no pedestrians could be seen on the cobblestone streets of the Old Capital anymore. In the distant central square, the young mage looked up at the severed head, then hitched the old leather backpack higher on his shoulder before turning to step into the shadow of a stone pillar across the street.

His figure quietly disappeared into the depths of the Old Capital's crisscrossing alleys, with only the old bronze buckle on the side of his backpack occasionally glinting in the darkness.

After Xie Feng left the Magic Association, the witch sat alone in the stone room, her pale fingers resting on the parchment scroll of the Vrees Sign.

Just now, when exchanging Spells, she had used the residual effects of the Lie-detector Spell to sense across the stone table, touching several distinct yet equally ancient and deep remnants of magical energy beneath Xie Feng's cloak.

They were grimoires... at least two, perhaps more.

She stood up, walked to the door, and whispered something to the two mages waiting outside, who were also wearing magic robes and had skin so pale it was almost bloodless.

"How is it? How did the investigation go?"

The two of them walked in one after the other and closed the door.

"A group of people seems to be with him; they are people from the Nine Provinces. How about him?"

The witch went back and sat down.

"He has more than one book on him. The remnants of magic I sensed indicate at least two, possibly more. I couldn't probe the contents, but the aura of the pages is no weaker than the ancient texts from Mu-Thuran's peak period.

In the entire Hyperborean Continent, existing grimoires of this level can be counted on one hand."