After thanking Emily Smith, Ethan Brooks returned to the school once again. Other than the school, he had nowhere else to go, as he was unfamiliar with this place. Besides, he could always learn something at school, and although the spiritual energy here was thin, it seemed to be a little better inside the school.

After the last class, he didn’t go to the English teacher. For him, whether he had full credits or zero made no difference; there was no need to listen to a woman nag. Besides, although he hadn’t started cultivating yet, his memory was incredibly strong. If he wanted to learn something, he could just go to the library.

In the days that followed, Ethan Brooks spent his time either cultivating or going to the library, occasionally attending a few classes he liked. As for the issue of skipping too many classes and not being able to get a diploma, he completely ignored it.

The dormitory was originally for four people, but one guy was always in the game room, another was living with a girl off-campus like a married couple, and the last one’s home was in the city. Ethan Brooks himself often spent the whole night cultivating in the small woods on campus, so the dorm was often empty. In fact, Ethan Brooks was the one who stayed in the dorm the most; he would come back every three days for a good sleep, and the rest of his time was devoted to cultivation.

Although he knew perfectly well that cultivating in this place would yield little result—he might never reach the Foundation Establishment stage even if he cultivated to death—his long-standing habits left him with nothing else to do but cultivate. With his powerful memory, he could remember anything he liked after reading it once, which saved him a lot of time.

Ethan Brooks, who had always kept a low profile in his previous life, became even more low-key in this unfamiliar environment. However, because of the previous love letter incident, he had earned a nickname: “the lover under the bed.” But Ethan Brooks didn’t care at all and just went about his business as usual.

At first, many people thought he was thick-skinned for still coming and going from the cafeteria and library as if nothing had happened, but as time passed, no one paid attention to him anymore. It was as if he was just a drop of water in the vast ocean, utterly unremarkable.

Two months passed, and Ethan Brooks barely managed to reach the first level of Qi Refining. This was not only because he had used up all the twenty thousand yuan Emily Smith had given him to buy herbs and brew them into medicinal soup, but also because he cultivated day and night without rest.

However, he also knew that without external aids, the first level of Qi Refining might be the highest he could ever reach in his life.

Although his cultivation progress was slow, he gained a lot from the library. Not only did he use two months to study all the textbooks from elementary to high school, but he also skimmed through books on medicine and various esoteric subjects.

Although he felt that the knowledge here was rather shallow, it wasn’t completely useless—after all, he was only at the first level of Qi Refining now.

When summer vacation started, the school library was to be renovated, so Ethan Brooks lost his place to go. Now, he found himself in another financial crisis, with only a little over two thousand yuan left. If he didn’t go out to work during the summer, he wouldn’t even have enough money for food, let alone for buying herbs for cultivation.

If it were just about finding an ordinary job, that might work for others, but not for Ethan Brooks. He needed to cultivate—it had become a habit, and only cultivation gave him a sense of direction. Without money, it was all just empty talk. Besides, the money from a regular job was far from enough for his cultivation needs.

He knew how to refine pills, but not only was he only at the first level of Qi Refining and unable to refine pills, even if he could, so what? Were there any spiritual herbs here? Was there a pill furnace here?

Giving up on the idea of pill refining, he was glad that he could still make talismans. At his current level, he couldn’t make advanced talismans, but he could still make some basic ones like “Spirit-Clearing Talisman,” “Evil-Repelling Talisman,” “Protective Talisman,” and even simple “Fireball Talismans.”

He bought some talisman paper, wolf-hair brushes, cinnabar, and other materials. Although the best talismans were made from demon beast hides and blood, there were no demon beasts here, so he could only use cinnabar and rooster blood, mixing them himself. While he couldn’t make high-level talismans, he could at least make some simple ones that didn’t even count as first-level talismans.

Fortunately, high-quality yellow paper here, combined with a few medicinal herbs, could serve as talisman paper. After all this, Ethan Brooks’s last few thousand yuan were gone.

The cinnabar, rooster blood, and a few cheap herbs were brewed by Ethan Brooks into talisman-making materials with a faint fragrance. A few thousand yuan really wasn’t much; all these materials together were only enough to make a little over thirty talismans. And that’s not counting the materials wasted on failed attempts.

Luckily, although Ethan Brooks was only at the first level of Qi Refining, he had once been a master capable of making fifth-level talismans, and the talismans he was making now didn’t even count as graded.

Out of more than thirty sets of materials, he managed to make eight talismans: two each of the “Spirit-Clearing Talisman,” “Evil-Repelling Talisman,” “Protective Talisman,” and “Fireball Talisman.”

Although he only made eight talismans, one of the “Spirit-Clearing Talismans” was, by a stroke of luck, almost as good as a first-level talisman—a pleasant surprise.

It took him half a month to make these eight talismans, averaging less than one per day. The next step was to go sell them.