Did the convenience store have fish bones? And colorful sugar? And rosemary? Or does she need a full on grocery/potion supply store for this one?

The convenience store had rosemary and the kind of colorful sugar you sprinkle on cakes but not fish bones. 

Hmm.

She flies back to the cafeteria, looks for anyone eating fish that looks like it may not have been thoroughly deboned.

There is a nervous-looking wulong girl with part of a fish skeleton on her plate, eating something with a lot of rice. 

May floats up to her. "Hello, quick question?"

She startles slightly, then forcibly relaxes. "Yes?"

"Sorry to bother you! I just want to make a potion that calls for fish bones and you have the most conspicuous fish bones in the cafeteria. Do you need them?"

"Oh--no, help yourself." 

"Thanks!" Yoink. "I'm May, will I see you at the art appreciation thing?"

"Mo Xuanyu. Yes, I like mana." 

She flushes and ducks her head, realizing that that sounded stupid as soon as she'd said it. 

"I like mana too!" giggles May. "See you there!" She drops the fish skeleton in her pocket artwork and zooms off to the store for her sugar and rosemary.

The store has fresh rosemary in little packets and decorative sugar in brightly-colored plastic bottles. 

Yoink. She will be rolling in Kisses soon enough for tiara reasons and does not feel the need to be very conservative about this.

Potion! She will make a small test batch and then a bigger batch if it's awesome.

The uptick in working memory and attentional capacity is fairly small, but noticeable, and it doesn't have any annoying side effects. 

Cool. Great big hydrondful of it so she can take it for reading complicated books and exams and stuff.

While that's cooking, what's the next book in her stack?

The next book in her stack is the lifeweaving book. 

Lifeweaving isn't something just anyone can learn; in order to learn it, you have to consume the petals of a Flower of Life, which is a very magical lotus. They grow Somewhere, but the location is a secret to anyone who knows it; the author is not one of these people. 

The author does not, herself, practice lifeweaving, but has studied it from a third-person perspective in cooperation with a number of people who do practice lifeweaving, of whom a few very old members are regular lifeweavers who acquired and consumed a Flower, and the rest had magic talismans for it. (There is a minor note that a plurality of those were warlocks of Lucasta, and it seems like Lucasta has a source on Lifeweaving Magic Talismans specifically, but investigating that is not within the purview of this book). 

Huh, Flowers of Life. May wonders if those are necessary to create a talisman too. Any cool non-obvious applications of her tiara?

Distilled light is a really really good potion ingredient. Using lifeweaving light offensively is extra-effective against demons and the undead, so she should be careful practicing that around her roommates. Rank 5 lifeweaving can reverse mind control. 

Oh dang, kickass mind-control reversal. What potions call for distilled light?

There aren't a whole lot of potion recipes in general circulation that require distilled light, because it is very, very rare and expensive, but if you put a tiny sliver of it in a big batch of just about any healing potion it will grossly improve its quality, and developing recipes that rely on it as an ingredient isn't very hard once you've got a basic grounding in alchemy. 

Cool. She will ask her teacher about it when she takes her alchemy class.

When she is through with that book she will pick up the next one!

The next book is on Wulong clan history in China. 

There are lots of different clans of varying levels of power; most of them claim territory of some kind, but they also, especially the big ones, have little pocket dimensions they live in for reasons of defensibility. Wulong clans vary in how much they bother dealing with non-wulong witches in their territory; some of them don't care, and some of them don't dare; they tend to puff themselves up as being the most important, so if you can't smack down your neighbors if they annoy you, pretending they're beneath your notice saves face. 

To what extent wulong hybrids count as wulongs for clan purposes also varies by a number of factors including what saves face; if a hybrid gets strong enough that claiming them will be impressive, one generally does that, and if one gets strong enough to get away with snubbing you and does so, pretending you never wanted them is a safe fallback. 

Wulong clan members tend to marry other wulongs, generally either members of their own clan far enough removed, members of other clans they want to make an alliance with, or non-clan-affiliated individuals. The wulong clans tend to have high enough levels of prestige and luxury that most such marriages are actively sought out by those who marry in, but there have been historical cases of coercion. Marrying non-wulongs is unusual, but not frowned upon as such, so long as all one's children choose to be wulongs on Awakening. Marrying another wulong and having dalliances with non-wulongs is not unusual; sometimes the non-wulongs are brought in as concubines and their children expected to assume wulong status; sometimes they are simply abandoned on the outside. Rates of the former as opposed to the latter have gone up temporarily on at least three different historical occasions when wulong hybrids left outside have achieved remarkable things after being abandoned by their wulong parents and subsequently snubbed them. The three definitely confirmed examples in question are Li Suona, daughter of a Wen clan member and an orc, who married into the Jiang clan and publicly refused to acknowledge any connection between her children and the Wen clan, Mo Ran, daughter of a Nangong clan member and a daeva, who turned out way more powerful than her Nangong parent or her not-even-a-witch daeva mother, winning acclaim under the monicker Dàzǐlóng (大紫龙) and marrying someone just as powerful and disinterested in all the dragon clans as she was, resulting in one possibly apocryphal anecdote where her wife chased off a messenger from the Nangong clan with a whip, and Zhao Mingguang, daughter of a Jin clan member and an elf, who ran off to Alfheimr, became a winter court duchess, and has publicly expressed the opinion on multiple occasions that the wulong clans are horribly backwards and not worth bothering to send ambassadors to. 

A handful of small wulong clans ran off to Taiwan when the Communist Revolution happened; there's a lot more tension between them and the native witches than there tends to be on the mainland between wulongs and non-wulongs and they don't have anywhere near the ability to pretend to be special that the mainland ones have retained. 

Gosh, how interesting. She's glad she doesn't live in China. Are there are lot of non-witch wulongs? Which powers do such folks have?

The book does not comment on this specifically. 

Maybe the next will!