High School of Demon Hunting

Chapter 1044: Chapter 106 Trend Divination Method

The Ban Magic Festival is a traditional festival for wizards, generally held one hundred days after the winter solstice and a week before Qingming. According to this standard, this year’s Ban Magic Festival falls on March 28, which is still three weeks away, nearly a month from now.

That is to say, there is still ample time, and Zheng Qing has enough time to mentally prepare for this spring outing.

By contrast, the daily study routine that was gradually getting back on track was giving him greater pressure.

Perhaps the school felt the students had gotten through the first term of their freshman year and adjusted, perhaps it was because of the advancement exams that would take place in less than half a year, or maybe the conflicts between student societies made the professors feel that everyone had too much time on their hands.

In any case, having just started the second term for two weeks, Zheng Qing already felt enormous academic pressure.

On one hand, the study content became more profound; for instance, subjects like Curse Studies and Magic Script were moving away from practical spells and onto very theoretical matters. For most people, including Zheng Qing, these kinds of courses were more terrifying than a sleep-inducing spell. What’s more frightening, if you were slightly distracted during the lecture, you’d completely miss what the professor was teaching afterwards.

On the other hand, the tasks outside of class also became much heavier. Less than a month into the semester, students had already been assigned three papers, four lab reports, nine tests, and a number of homework exercises—the most regrettable for Zheng Qing was choosing Fishman Common Language, which in the second week of the semester had a Fishman Language text that needed to be memorized in full, resulting in him being scratched many times by the irritable Tuan Tuan while studying the recordings and planting Speaker Flowers in the dorm.

It was simply devilish.

Of course, compared to other students, Zheng Qing was still considered fortunate, because his profound knowledge in Talisman Studies meant that Lecturer Zhang had nothing more to teach him, allowing Zheng Qing to shift much of his focus from this course to other areas.

Such as Divination.

As Professor Yao elaborated earlier when sorting out the essence of magic, broadly defined, Divination Study is the linear resolution of dimensions; narrowly defined, it is the analysis of the specific dimension ’timeline’.

In their freshman year, Zheng Qing and his peers could only access the narrowly defined Divination and its associated practical methods. Such as smoke divination skill, Tarot Card Analysis, star sign divination, and the ’Trend Divination Method’ they would officially start learning next term, and so on.

”I understand the principle... but why do we need to bring a weekly journal?” Zheng Qing sat at his seat, shaking the notebook in his hand in perplexity about Professor Yi’s requirement: ”Logically speaking, we are attending a Divination Class, not a class meeting, right?”

”This is something that Professor Yi required,” Tang Dun said, standing next to the scholarship student while holding a notepad, peeking at Zheng Qing’s notebook: ”So you brought your weekly journal, right?”

It was already March 3, a Tuesday on the third week of the second semester.

Like last semester, Tuesday mornings were reserved for a Divination Class, which were still held in Classroom 1001 in the east wing of the teaching building.

It was a quarter past eight in the morning, less than fifteen minutes before the start of class, and the classroom was already filled with students. However, instead of buzzing around and chatting with each other, they were all silently focused, either doing homework or catching up on sleep. This greatly disappointed the Simple Sketch stick figure by the door.

It always expected these students to provide some entertainment during class.

As the monitor of Astronomy Class 08-1, Tang Dun had always been the link between the professors and the students. Any commands from the professors that needed to be conveyed to the students, or any feedback from the students to the professors, were mostly facilitated through Headmaster Tang.

Just like today’s Divination Class, Professor Yi required all students to bring their ’weekly journals’ to class before it began; therefore, before class, Tang Dun confirmed with everyone individually to ensure they had brought their notebooks.

The so-called ’weekly journal’ was the diary that Professor Yao had required everyone to write every week since the first day of school, covering daily life, moods, reflections, and so on. Initially, Old Yao even asked some students to read their weekly journals aloud in front of the class.

This requirement persisted until now, with each meeting including a check—just last weekend, because he’d forgotten to write it, Zheng Qing had frantically written one before the meeting.

Seeing Tang Dun extend his head over, Zheng Qing raised his notebook and muttered, ”I brought it... but you haven’t told me what this thing is for.”

”It’s said to be related to the new divination technique we’re going to learn today,” Tang Dun grasped his feather pen, marked a check on the notepad, then turned and walked towards the next student. Before leaving, he reminded, ”You could ask the doctor, huh? He should know.”

Upon hearing this, Zheng Qing tilted his head and glanced at Xiao Xiao.

Xiao Xiao rolled her eyes and huffed, ”Not clear, don’t want to say, don’t ask me... Can’t you do a little pre-class preparation?”

Zheng Qing flipped through his ”Basic Yi Studies·College Freshman (Second Volume)” haphazardly, saw those complex and convoluted terms, huge blocks of text explanations, and the dizzying charts, and immediately closed the textbook again.

”Hmm, no hurry, no hurry... Anyhow, the professor will tell us soon,” he said in a serious tone, justifying his actions.

Xiao Xiao made a tremendous effort to restrain from slapping her notebook onto Zheng Qing’s face.

Zheng Qing’s prediction this time was very accurate—perhaps one of the few things he could predict precisely—after class started, Professor Yi easily brought up the purpose of the weekly records:

”As I mentioned in the first divination class I taught you, every type of divination needs to consume a vast amount of informational resources as fuel. And the ’Trend Divination Study’ you are about to learn today draws its resources from these weekly records.”

The professor stepped down from the podium, stood beside Li Meng’s desk, and casually picked up the little witch’s pink weekly record, completely ignoring Li Meng’s pale face, and continued teaching at his own pace:

”What is a trend?”

”A trend is the direction in which affairs develop. Only this direction is not clear enough and very vague, with variability and uncertainty... Does it sound familiar?”

”Very true! In a sense, divination actually belongs to the discipline that studies ’precise trends’!”

”In the past, the divination skills we learned tended towards precise divination, and we generally did divination for others or for specific events. But the Trend Divination Method is different.”

”The Trend Divination Method is mainly suitable for wizards to divine their own future, and this type of divination is vague, allowing the wizard to only obtain a general sense of their fate and rarely precise information about a particular event or person.”

”Open your textbook to Chapter 2, Section 1.”

”To learn the Trend Divination Method, we’ll first learn the chart-making method based on this divination. Although it appears very complicated in the books, I can responsibly tell you this is the simplest divination method that everyone can learn and master during the four years of college.”

”It demands the least from your talents.”

”All that’s needed is a bit of patience and your intuition as a wizard.”