Chapter 379

“Okay.” Harold hung up the phone and turned back to Juniper. “Right, you were saying you were looking for me?”
“I was,” Juniper said, her gaze sweeping over the lab. It landed on a beaker filled with a multi-colored liquid.
“Tsk.” She shot him a look, a lazy smile playing on her lips. “And here I thought you were the future president of the association Baldy Fox recommended. Can’t even get a simple reagent ratio right?”
Baldy Fox? The name made Harold pause. That was the exclusive nickname the Grandmaster used for his teacher. How did she know it?
“Don’t touch that!” he cried out in alarm as Juniper expertly slipped on a pair of gloves and picked up a dropper filled with a red liquid. It was a highly corrosive chemical agent. For an uninformed girl to touch it so casually, was she trying to get herself killed?
Juniper ignored him, calmly adding two drops to the beaker before placing it in the data analyzer. “You—!” Harold’s face paled as he rushed forward. That was the culmination of days of careful preparation for the Grandmaster’s arrival. Adding another liquid would throw off the entire ratio. Given the Grandmaster’s infamous temper…
But as he fumed, the control panel lit up with the test results. The data was accurate to six decimal places—a level of precision he had failed to achieve after countless attempts.
Harold stood frozen, staring at Juniper in utter disbelief. If he remembered correctly, she hadn’t even measured the drops. She had achieved perfect accuracy just by feel.
“Also,” Juniper continued, her eyes now on the air conditioner, “the temperature in here is too high. It can affect your judgment of the ratios.”
“How Harold stared at her, struggling to find his voice. “How do you know so much?”
him directly, her voice clear and
“Because. Juniper turned to t
deliberat
“I am the four tempered
“I am the
impossible to please master you were just talking about.”
“What?” Harold was sure he had misheard. His eyes widened in shock, his voice
dry. “You’re saying you’re my teacher’s master?”
“That’s right,” Juniper replied, casually sitting down and crossing her legs as she took a sip of lemonade.
went into a complete
Harold’s mind we
tailspin. He had always imagined his
teacher’s mentor to be a
cantankerous old man in his
seventies, not a young woman who couldn’t be more than twenty Three years ago… she would have been even younger. A fifteen op sixteen-year-old girl was guiding his teacher? And now, at eighteen, she was his Grandmaster?
His mind reeling, Harold quickly sent a message to his teacher for confirmation. The
reply came almost instantly.
Baldy Fox: [That’s right. My mentor was only 15.]
[Wait, it’s been three years. She’s 18 now.]
[Don’t worry. At 18, she can be held legally responsible. She’s probably not as brutal as she was three
years ago l He He
could still feel the
phantom ache on his bald head
from all the times she had whacked
it. swhovels
[Harold, don’t let her age fool you. She’s a damn genius. I had to beg, borrow, and
steal to get you this opportunity. You have to cherish it.]
Harold lowered his phone, his expression dazed as he looked back at Juniper. Their eyes met in a silent standoff.