Chapter 190: Smoking Makes You Smarter

His ability to detect the tracker’s position wasn’t as accurate as he wished it could be. It was more like a broad compass than an exact location. He could sense the little blimp of mana but couldn’t calculate the distance from the target.

However, as far as he could tell, Grace hadn’t moved yet, which made sense since she usually stayed at the library until class started anyway.

He felt a little bit like a detective as he did this, which made it twice as exciting after that realization. In the spirit of things, he created a smoking pipe out of mana. It even had a little bit of smoke coming out of it.

Weirdly the smoke was the hardest part of the whole thing. Magical fire unlike real fire didn’t use wood as a fuel, it used pure fire mana. Therefore, that meant that normal magic fire didn’t release smoke unless it was used to burn something else.

In Julius’s case, he tried many things to achieve a nice puff of smoke. What was the point of creating a pipe if nothing was smoking out of it? That was just an unlit pipe, something much less cool than what he had envisioned.

He even tried to use the moisture within the air to create steam, but that didn’t exactly work out very well. He just ended up making the air hot.

Eventually he had to admit defeat and used a couple of pieces of old paper. He just stuffed them inside the pipe and lit them on fire. He could figure out how to make smoke another day.

Just you wait Mr. Smoke, I’m coming for you, he swore to himself.

“What are you doing?” He heard a confused voice call out.

“Sorry?” He asked.

Aubrey sat down next to him, placing her tray on the table. “Why are you pretending to smoke a pipe? Don’t you know those things are bad for your health?”

“I got healing magic,” Julius said as if that made the problem moot.

Aubrey gave him a silent stare and then she turned to the person who had just arrived after her. “Lily, Julius is smoking.”

“What?!” The blonde-haired girl who still had one eye closed from sleep, jolted awake. “What’s doing who?” She asked mixing up the words to her question.

Aubrey just pointed at him.

“Tattletale,” he muttered to Aubrey. Who just gave him a smug smile in return.

Oh, just you wait, he promised Aubrey.

Lily examined what Julius was doing with a critical glare. “You are way too young to be smoking. Don’t you know what that can do to your lungs?”

“Like I told Aubrey, I have a healing skill,” he pointed out.

“That doesn’t work like that. You could also say that you cut your arm off and it doesn’t matter because you have a healing skill,” Lily argued.

Eh, that’s a little close to the mark there, Lily, Julius thought to himself as he remembered himself doing exactly that. However, since he was very intelligent he didn’t choose to mention this to Lily or Aubrey. He didn’t have a skill with the word sage in it for no reason.

“Point taken. But I am not even smoking the thing,” he told them. He turned the pipe around to show that it was just filled with paper. “Look, I can’t even pull any smoke from it,” he said bringing to his lips and demonstrating for them. There was a hole at the end of it that he could suck on, but it wasn’t attached to the bowl.

Lily sighed in relief when she saw him as if he had just avoided a catastrophe. With that being said, she still had a question for him. “Why would you want to do that?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. It seemed fun,” he said.

“Let me try,” Aubrey said and before asking for permission reached out and plucked it from his hands. She brought it to her own lips, doing what he had been doing, not at all caring that the pipe had been in his mouth.

“Oh, you might be on to something, Julius. I feel so much smarter all of a sudden,” Aubrey said in awe, continuing to suck on the fake pipe with enthusiasm.

“Really? Did he manage to put some type of enchantment on it?” Lily asked excitedly.

“Nope! It’s completely normal, but for some reason, I feel wise when I have it in my mouth,” Aubrey told her.

“Wait, so it’s just a fake pipe? Why does it do that then?” Lily asked curiously.

“I don’t know, but here. Try it,” Aubrey told her and passed it over for Lily to try.

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Julius watched as his stolen construct was passed around without his say-so. Lily took it between her lips and gave an experimental puff.

Her face went from distrusting skepticism to wide-eyed with astonishment. “You’re right. I totally feel smarter. Almost like some enlightened sage,” Lily said with an expression like that of an old hermit pondering on the mysteries of the universe.

“That’s great and all. But can I have it back?” Julius asked impatiently.

“Don’t be like that,” Aubrey slapped him on the back. “You can always make another one right?”

She had a point. It wasn’t like he couldn’t just create a second one. Which was exactly what he ended up doing. However, when Aubrey saw him making another one, she reached out her hand expectantly.

“What is that for?” He asked purposefully naive.

“Well, you might as well make one for me too, right?” Aubrey asked him blandly.

“I could. But you guys can also share with each other,” he said while sucking on his new pipe.