uniforms in Dragon Kingdom high school that is blue and black poured out of every classroom door boy's and girl's walking is same steps, merging into a single slow river headed toward whatever came next.
The usual noise of the school — the shouting, the laughter, the complaints — had gone silent, replaced by something closer to reverence, or fear.
Under Lin Wang's stare, everyone crossed as one body into the open expanse of North High School's playground.
What waited there stole the breath from my chest.
The field — usually lined for sports, for the ordinary business of being seventeen — had been consumed by something ancient and enormous, carved directly into the earth.
A dais of polished, milk-white stone stretched fifty meters across, its surface threaded with veins of silver that pulsed like something breathing.
At its center, a magic circle glowed with soft, restless light, its geometric patterns shifting and coiling like they were alive.
The air above it shimmered, thick enough to taste — ozone, and something older than ozone — and the fine hairs on my arms rose without my permission.
This wasn't a diagram drawn in chalk. It was a machine built to decide who got to keep living.
The playground was a sea of anxious faces, all stitched together under the same blood-red Dragon Kingdom insignia, and beneath the silence I could feel it — a low current of hope and terror running through every single one of us.
Then a figure climbed the steps of the dais.
Principal Lin. White hair burning against the light of the circle behind him, his frame bent with age but his presence unbent by it — the kind of strength that didn't need volume to be felt.
When he spoke, his voice was a slow, grinding rumble that reached every last row without him raising it at all.
"Children of the Dragon Kingdom." His arms spread, as if to gather the entire field into an embrace. "Today you step onto the banks of the River of Time. You will feel its current for the first time. Danger and opportunity flow together in those waters — and your future, the future of this kingdom, rests on what you do with them."
"Fight, in the trials to come. Never surrender. The chance to claim a World Seed is in your hands now, and only now."
"Take it. Take all of it."
Long su listened the way a drowning man listens for shore — every word a clue to a world I'd been dropped into without warning.
I was so lost in it that I flinched when something brushed my back.
Chen Shuirong who had pushed through the crowd to stand beside me again. She nudged me a second time, voice pitched low enough to be just for me. "You've been staring off into space all morning. Die in there and I'm taking your lunchbox."
Somewhere behind my ribs, that same traitorous heat threatened to climb back up my neck, and I had to physically resist the urge to rub it again.
It was such an ordinary thing to say, in a moment built entirely out of the impossible, that it cracked something loose in my chest anyway.
I managed something like a grin — the shape of it unfamiliar on this face. "Well. At least someone would miss me."
The sun pressed down heavy and gold across the stadium stones, throwing long shadows over rows of nervous shoulders.
The whole world felt charged, like the air before lightning.
Principal Lin's voice rolled out over us again, each word deliberate. "The gate will scatter each of you to a random point within the River of Time. What you take from that current becomes the foundation of your Seed World — remember that."
"A trivial gain breeds a weak seed. A worthy treasure gives it strength from the moment it wakes." His tone hardened, sharpened into something closer to a blade.
"But above every other rule: do not die. Return. A future built for humanity is worth nothing from a corpse."
"Are you ready?"
His gaze swept the field once — slow, final, weighing every face it passed over.
"READY!"
The roar that answered him shook the air itself.
Then the world dissolved into a silent, consuming wave of blue — not light so much as the absence left behind when light is torn away, a pressure that flattened every thought before it could finish forming.
A larg circle gate made from Blue light shin through the air
The students who where standing start moving in the same time
One after another went through it
Very quickly it became long su and his classroom turns
With ligh steps he stood before the gate and hesitate for less couple seconds before walking through the gate
Then: everything felt different
The body wight just disappeared and can see nothing but a full of darkness , even time seemed to be stooped around him
Just a small point of light in the horizon that was running to his direction