Chapter 191: New Potion
Even though the responses had greatly decreased because he revealed that he was a new student, Xiao Lin had still used most of the night replying messages. Most of the ones who contacted him were troubled by the fact that he had so much money, but they did not disbelieve him. All the transactions on the forum were protected by the academy, and any acts of fraud would be punished. However, every time Xiao Lin revealed he was a new student, the responses would be full of doubt.
It was not that there were no lower-year students that used New Dollars, but transactions like Xiao Lin’s that were over three digits were extremely rare, and the jealousy it invoked caused certain thoughts to float around, such as questioning the legality of his money.
Since deals on the forums did not hide your ident.i.ty, which was one of the ways the academy ensured reliability, Xiao Lin’s name was spread around by the fourth-year students.
Xiao Lin had actually underestimated the value of New Dollars. Even though upper-year students had chances to earn New Dollars in the New World, the amount was miniscule. Graduates of the academy were usually no different from fresh graduates on Earth; they were fairly impoverished.
Coincidentally, the very same night, Xiao Lin’s name appeared on the second-year forums as well. The thread by Wu Qin a while ago about him reaching the threshold to meditation had been regarded as a joke, but a teacher had witnessed the thread. The two incidences had caused a lot of people to believe the earlier incident, and no one was treating it as a joke anymore.
Who was Xiao Lin?
That night, a lot of people had that question in their heads.
He did not know that he was being investigated and asked about by countless students, but Xiao Lin managed to get a deal done before he went to bed. In the end he had picked a female research student to deal with, even though her price of one to two was not the highest among the offers he received. In fact, the highest offer he got was around one to two and a half.
However, the conditions she offered were very attractive to Xiao Lin. Other than that price, she would provide him with various new potions. The potions were all newly developed and had not even entered ma.s.s production, but she was able to provide them to Xiao Lin.
Her name was Fei Yawen. She said she was a research student from a certain potions lab. In truth, there were a lot of labs like that; they usually focused on a certain kind of research, such as new spells, swordsmanship or medicines.
In the early days, the colonists had learned from the established systems within Planet Norma. However, even if those systems had been pa.s.sed down for thousands of years, they were not completely flawless. After they had completely familiarized themselves with the systems, they started to look at it with a modern lens. They often located problems or room for improvement. That was why almost every academy had a lot of laboratories, with which graduates could choose to stay within as research students instead of heading to the New World.
However, that was not the key reason Xiao Lin had agreed to deal with Fei Yawen. After all, even if the potions she offered were good, he would need to actually be able to use them.
The potions that Fei Yawen researched were related to experience and training. She claimed that her supervisor had always been researching methods that could boost and speed up learning. It would dramatically increase the overall skill of the colonists once it received widespread use.
That was what interested Xiao Lin. His Academic Genius’s pa.s.sive ability was to increase his learning efficiency by 100%, and he was beginning to feel the benefits that it brought him. When he entered the academy, his attributes were the lowest in the academy, yet now he was quite a bit better than a regular student, and only lost out to those with talents.
Fei Yawen needed to buy 3,000 New Dollars, based on the one to two exchange rate, it would end up being 6,000 redemption points. Neither of them wanted any delay and quickly agreed to complete the deal the next day.
The next day, Xiao Lin deliberately woke up very early. He walked around with the address given to him in hand, and he reached a five-storey building in the south-western corner of the academy. That was the specialized research building in school. The sky had just begun to brighten, so there were not a lot of people around, giving the research area a serene feeling.
Since he was early, Xiao Lin did not hurry, and chose to walk around idly. However, he began to get impatient when he did not see Fei Yawen, even after waiting a long while, so he gave her a call, which was picked up very quickly.
Xiao Lin was just about to open his mouth when he saw Fei Yawen furrow her eyebrows in frustration in the magical display. “I’ve been waiting for you for half an hour. Where are you?” she said
“What?” Xiao Lin was confused, he exclaimed, “I have been here for a long while, but haven’t seen you at all. Why didn’t you call me?”
Fei Yawen paused before saying with a weird expression, “You’re at the research area?”
“Of course. Didn’t you say we were going to deal here? Are you backing out?” Xiao Lin said. He had borrowed a black bag to carry his New Dollars there just for the deal. There was no choice; since there were not any banks around, they could only deal in cash.
Fei Yawen’s face was full of disbelief as she murmured, “No, it’s not that. How did you get inside in the first place? Only research students that have pa.s.sed certain tests can enter this area... Whatever, just head to the lounge at the entrance. I’ll wait for you here.”
Xiao Lin hurried back to the entrance and finally saw the research student. Fei Yawen was quite a pretty woman. She did not look that old and had a very pretty face with a pair of thick spectacles. She was waiting outside, but when she saw Xiao Lin come over from the inside, her small mouth gaped.
Even as Xiao Lin walked over and greeted her, she was still murmuring in disbelief, “Could the security systems be broken? That’s not possible, how could anything in the academy have quality problems?”
Xiao Lin could more or less guess what troubled the woman, and was pleasantly surprised himself that the access the dean had granted him even encompa.s.sed the research area. He was amused, but did not show it as he tried to get the deal done. He still needed to head back and train.
Fei Yawen set aside her suspicions for a moment as she took out a box from the bag she had with her. After opening it, Xiao Lin saw a row of test tubes; they were probably the efficiency-enhancing potions that she mentioned.
“I need to tell you beforehand: even though the potion has pa.s.sed the research phase, according to the current data we have, the effects of the potion are still not too stable. Do you understand me?”