The first bus had been definitively pegged as the "elite transport," segregating the top two hundred scorers. It was a blunt hierarchy, a public sorting of the strong from the… less strong. This immediately set the other nineteen busloads of candidates to a frenzied, silent calculus. Were they also ranked?A new, anxious vanity took root. The lower the bus number, the closer to the top, the more… legitimate one felt. A pathetic, desperate kind of prestige.
As it happened, Bald Lu and his team from Gao Yang were on Bus Nine, as were Pang Ci and the Lin siblings from Jingyang. This reinforced the ranking theory in their minds. Old enemies, now lumped together and branded as trash from the three weakest cities, they found themselves in a silent, deeply reluctant alliance. It was an alliance of shared shame, forged in the disdainful glances from other candidates.
Wu Xiaomei from Gao Yang muttered around a mouthful of chips, "Just my rotten luck. Stuck with you people."
Pang Ci, ever ready with a retort, shot back, "Yeah, well, it's not ourfault you couldn't climb over ourbig brother's benchmark, is it?"
Benchmark?Wu Xiaomei thought, rolling her eyes. That 'Duck King' isn't a benchmark; he's a bottomless, treacherous ditch.
A cheerful, chatty boy from another city, also munching on snacks, leaned over. "You guys are new, huh? Don't get your hopes up. I checked. Bus Twenty? Packed with monsters from Luque City. One of the Big Five. If this was a straight ranking, we'd be nowhere near the middle."
The candidates from the three cities, perhaps burned one too many times by Yao's schemes, had adopted a policy of extreme circumspection. They spoke little, observed much. This very restraint, however, seemed to irritate others.
A group of boys from Rainfall City, a mid-tier metropolis, sneered openly. "A bunch of idiots. You really think it's by score? If it was, we wouldn't be on the same bus as you lot."
"Most of us broke a hundred and fifty thousand points. What did you get? Scraps?"
The insult was direct, humiliating. The three-city candidates had the self-awareness to know they were at the bottom. They didn't need it rubbed in. But the Rainfall City boys seemed strong, confident. Picking a fight seemed unwise.
"They're from Rainfall City," someone whispered. "Sent forty candidates. Their top three all cleared two hundred and fifty thousand. Way out of our league."
All eyes from Jingyang drifted to a particular seat near the front. The Gao Yang candidates looked to Bald Lu. Bald Lu shifted uncomfortably. Damn it, didn't I say to keep our heads down outside our own cities? Don't look at me! I'm not in charge!His own gaze slid to the seat in front of him…
No reaction.
A Gao Yang candidate in the seat next to Yao's quietly typed in their group chat: He's asleep.
The three-city crews collectively sighed. Fine. Play dead. Let it go. Swallow the insult. For now.
But complete silence felt like abject surrender. Pang Ci, after a moment's thought, piped up, "Hey now, that's a bit harsh. Our fifty or sixty thousand is only one digit off from your hundred and fifty, right?"
The Rainfall City boys were momentarily speechless at the sheer audacity of the comparison. Three of them exchanged glances and laughed, a cold, derisive sound. "Sure. So we're only one ranking digit apart, then."
The implication was clear: on this bus of two hundred, if they were in the top fifty, the three-city rejects were clinging to the bottom rungs, numbers 190-ish.
The words stung. Pang Ci's eyes glinted, but he said nothing more.
The Rainfall City quartet, emboldened by their perceived superiority and the others' silence, grew bolder, their taunts more pointed.
To someone like Liu Yun, a master of reading situations, this felt off. Rainfall City was solidly mid-tier—not weak, but not a powerhouse. They were all on the same bus, presumably by some design that placed them in a similar bracket. And with someone as notoriously troublesome as Oxus present, why poke the hornet's nest so blatantly? It felt staged. Calculated. Best to stay out of it,he decided, shooting a warning look at his own people. Absolutely do not engage.
Yao was, in fact, asleep. The previous night had been long. She'd declined Fu Qiang's dinner invitation, opting instead to cultivate, research Qin Mianfeng, and make preparations. The most draining part had been recalling her little locust through the pet space over a vast distance, a process that devoured psychic energy. She'd also spent hours in the "explosion" of crafting her meditation puppet. By morning, she was running on fumes, her mental reserves scraping the bottom.
She was jolted awake by the bus's intercom.
They had reached a transfer station.
The shock wasn't from the announcement, but from the sound itself—a jarring, digitized fanfare that was a dead ringer for a certain fruit-brand phone's default alarm tone. Anxiety incarnate.
She blinked, groggy, her eyelids feeling like sandpaper. Rubbing them, she looked out the window. The city was long gone. They were in a remote, wilderness-flanked area. Ahead lay a sprawling, utilitarian complex that looked like a cross between a highway service plaza and a military outpost.
A proctor from the Union, playing the part of a weary tour guide, lifted a crackly megaphone. "Wake up, wake up! Transfer station! Thirty minutes to destination. This is a rest stop. You may disembark to use facilities or visit the provision center. Fifteen minutes. Those remaining on board will have a ten-minute muster period before departure. Be prompt."
The beast-bus slowed and rumbled into the station.
The candidates, all clever and wary, immediately pulled out devices to triangulate their location. The screens returned blank static, though personal communicators still worked. The area was deliberately obscured.
Soon, all two thousand candidates from the twenty buses were spilling out onto the paved concourse.
Yao shuffled out with the crowd, checking her communicator. A long, detailed message from Pangci awaited, complete with an audio file attachment, meticulously documenting the "Rainfall City hicks" and their insults. Big brother, I even recorded it. They're totally dissing you, I can feel it.
She played a few seconds, winced at the nasal sneers, and closed it. She headed for the provision center.
The moment she stepped through the automated doors, a soft chimesounded in her ears, and a translucent system prompt appeared before her eyes:
Backpack Locker Engaged. Per Examination Protocol, candidates may retain only three (3) personal items on their person. Total carried weight must not exceed 50kg. Explosive, mechanized, and area-denial weaponry is prohibited. Accepting these restrictions grants 100 Selection Points usable within this provision center. All items acquired with points become permanent personal property.
Already?Yao's brow furrowed. The exam was starting here, with resource management. It made sense—they wanted to limit the advantage of prepacked wealth, but not eliminate it entirely. A candidate's background wasa form of long-term strength. This was a controlled dampener, not an equalizer.
But the choice was strategic. Refuse, and you kept whatever you had in your spatial storage, but forfeited the 100 free points and the chance to buy from this specific, likely tailored inventory. Accept, and you traded your prepared arsenal for a shot at something possibly better, or at least different.
For the truly poor, it was a no-brainer—take the free points. For the scions of great houses… it was a complex calculation. They had to weigh the value of their pre-selected, possibly rare family resources against the unknown offerings here.
Yao, despite her tenuous connections to Blue and Orange-blooded families, was functionally penniless. Her money was gone. She had no powerful artifacts on her. And they were allowing her to keep threeitems.
This kind of setup…She moved to the side, out of the stream of candidates who were now sprinting for the various entry gates, each leading to a private procurement booth. The clock was ticking—fifteen minutes, now down to fourteen and a half.
She didn't rush. She needed to think. The rules themselves were a test. There were no hints here. Success depended on intuiting the exam's focus.
Talent. Combat Power. Strategy.
Zhou Linlang's briefing came back to her. The four great academies had preferences: Northern Frontier prized innate talent. Southern Aurora valued raw combat strength. Western Forge favored background and resources. And Eastern Watch… preferred strategic cunning.
She'd quipped about the name then, but the intel was solid. Recent rankings placed Western Forge overall strongest (resources talk), Northern Frontier with the most individual monsters (talent unleashed), and Eastern Watch with the highest student survival rates in deadly instances (strategy saves lives).
If she had to guess, this provincial selection, designed by a committee surely influenced by all four, would lean towards testing Resources, Talent, and Combat in a brutal, large-scale free-for-all. Strategy would be a personal tool, not the core metric. The scenario would be simple: throw four thousand teenagers into an arena and let them fight. Complex puzzles were unlikely.
If that was true, then consumables for temporary boosts, healing, and combat would be king.
This blatantly favors the wealthy,Yao realized with a chill. The exam itself is biased.The Union, staffed by established Arcanists—many of whom were nobles—had shaped the rules. It was an open secret. The "fair" option of taking the 100 points was, in fact, a trap for the poor, locking them out of using any family-given advantages. The rich could choose to keep their potent, rare items.
But seeing the trap, should she spring it? Should she keep her meager resources?
No.
"The fact that Northern Frontier and Eastern Watch allowed this format means there's a counterbalance baked in," she murmured to herself, her mind racing. "A rule or a mechanic within the exam itself that can offset this inherent inequality. The key is to find that leverage and use it better than the rich kids who are also doubtless analyzing the rules."
"The truly top-tier Orange-Blood kids… if they're as smart as they are privileged, they'll see it too. They might try to have it both ways—keep their best gear andgame the equalizing mechanic."
The Union wouldn't leak, the Ministry wouldn't allow it. But you didn't need a leak when you were raised in that world. Some of them would be thinking the same thoughts she was.
Thirty seconds of analysis. Ten seconds of action.
Yao selected "Accept." A standard, non-magical backpack appeared strapped to her. From her now-locked spatial storage, she swiftly retrieved three items: a high-grade healing potion, a psychic restorative, and her crude, self-made meditation puppet. She left the third "item" slot conceptually empty, minimizing weight.
She was among the first to step into a procurement booth, not because she rushed, but because she hadn't wasted time dithering.
Inside, it was a vast, warehouse-like space, eerily silent despite the presence of other candidates who flickered in and out of visibility at the edges of her perception. Privacy fields. Everyone was a ghost to everyone else. She didn't hesitate. Activating a skill, her features blurred and shifted—not a full transformation, but a subtle "Phasing" effect layered over a basic "Glamour" from her new Light-based arsenal, muddling her appearance. She became a nondescript young man with forgettable features.
The store was a treasure trove. Aisles stretched into the distance, shelves groaning under glowing crystals, intricate devices, and vials of shimmering liquids. Everything was tagged with a point cost.
1-point items: stacks of potent, lightweight healing salves and energy tablets. 5-point, 10-point, 20-point sections with progressively rarer goods.
They're giving this away,she thought, a thrill running through her. The explicit note that items were permanent was a giant flashing sign: TAKE THE EXPENSIVE STUFF.
Which meant the truly sharp candidates would beeline for the 100-point section.
In her blurred form, she moved. Not with her full, blinding speed, but with a quick, athletic grace that ate up the distance. She zeroed in on the 100-point aisle. It was sparse. Only ten unique items, with just ten copies of each.
Her eyes scanned. A Gene-Essence Lure, superior to the one she'd used. A core of condensed spatial energy. A vial of what looked like liquid starlight. And there, a small, intricate puzzle cube made of interlocking crystal facets—a "Soul Forge Fragment," used in high-end meditation tool crafting. Perfect.
She reached for the puzzle cube. As her fingers closed around it, she saw the digital counter below the shelf display plummet: 6…5…4…3…2…
Another hand, materializing from thin air as its owner dropped their invisibility, grabbed for the spot where the "1" had just flashed to "0."
They grasped empty air.
The cube was in Yao's hand.
"Give it to me. I'll trade you a 100-point item of your choice." The voice was cold, imperious. Its owner was a boy perhaps a year older than her, with sharp features and an air of lethal grace. On the breast of his combat suit was a sigil: a stylized, roaring crocodile outlined in deep, fiery orange.
Crocodile Cloud Que Clan.One of the four Orange-Blood families of Boluke. Fantastic luck,Yao thought, her heart sinking. Her plan was to deal with Qin Mianfeng and the Donglong crew, maybe score a decent ranking. She had no desire to tango with the apex predators this early.
But she hadn't gone through all that trouble to back down now. If she had the potential to eventually clash with this tier, a little early hostility was a calculated risk.
Thank the stars for the double-blind disguise,she thought. If he sees through both layers instantly, the gap is insurmountable and I'm dead anyway. If he doesn't… I'm just a random face.
She met his eyes for a split second through her glamour, then turned and ran, not at her top speed, but fast enough to be taken seriously.
The Orange-Blood youth, "Que" something, didn't immediately give chase. A cold smirk touched his lips. His eyes glazed over for a second, the irises shifting to a reptilian, slit-pupiled yellow. He cast his gaze over Yao's retreating form.
His vision pierced the first layer, the generic glamour. It fell away like tissue paper. But beneath it… the image was fuzzy, distorted, as if seen through warped glass. He caught a glimpse of a different bone structure, a different set of features, but couldn't lock it down before the figure darted around a distant shelf.
Interesting. A double-blind. And he kept his speed in check. Not panicking.The boy's interest was piqued. He swiftly turned and snatched one of the remaining 100-point items—a vial of Blue-tier peak paralytic venom. As he did, he replayed the blurred facial impression in his mind, cross-referencing it against the dossier of notable candidates he'd memorized.
"Oxus?" he mused silently. "The surface was a generic disguise. The under-layer was meant to be Oxus? Or is someone impersonatingOxus? A grudge, then." That narrowed the field considerably.
Pocketing the venom, he strolled casually through the other aisles, seemingly browsing, but his senses were expanded, a predator passively mapping the movements and choices of every other ghost in the warehouse.
Yao, now back in her own form, browsed the lower-point aisles with an air of boredom, picking up a few common healing patches and energy bars. Her mind was whirring. He didn't chase. He's confident. He's shopping, but he's also observing. He's gathering intel on what people are buying. He's planning to loot us all during the exam.It was the obvious, brutal play. She couldn't even blame him.
With twelve minutes left on the clock, she was one of the first to exit the provision center. Only a handful of others were outside, most looking dazed or excited. The ones who left early were the anomalies.
Yao fished out a cigarette from a pocket—a cheap, calming habit from her old life—and lit it. As she took a drag, she noticed a pair a little way off.
A lanky, black-haired boy with a faint dusting of freckles was squatting on his heels in a perfect "Asian squat," noisily devouring a slice of bright red watermelon. Juice dripped down his chin. Next to him, the girl with the twin pigtails and the twin Blue-tier pets—"Yun Baobao" from the Cloud Beast Yun clan—was berating him, her hands on her hips.
"...eat eat eat, you'll turn into a melon! I had to drag you out because you were trying to argue that a crate of peaches counted as 'survival gear'! You weren't going to use the 50kg for anything else, were you?!"
"No way! Yun Baobao, you underestimate me!"
"Shut up! When we get back, I'm telling your sister… you moron! If you don't break into the top ten this time, she's going to skin you!"
"Wah, I'm eating, don't distract me…" He took another huge, messy bite, red juice spurting. His eyes, momentarily lifting, met Yao's across the distance. He saw her watching, cigarette in hand, an unreadable expression on her face. A flicker of adolescent shame crossed his features, making the messy eating seem even more grotesque.
Yao stared for a second longer, then slowly turned away, taking a long pull on her cigarette. Nope. Not getting involved.
She could hear the girl hissing "So embarrassing!" behind her.
Finishing her smoke, Yao glanced at the buses. Still ten minutes before muster. She headed for the restrooms.
The facilities were, oddly, quite beautiful—built like a scholar's garden retreat, with flowing water, rock arrangements, and fragrant plants. It was serene, and currently populated by a steady stream of anxious young Arcanists.
The four boys from Rainfall City were there, chatting in low voices by the sinks.
"…what did you get?"
"Damn it, I went for the 100-point shelf but it was cleaned out. By the time I turned around, the 50-point stuff was going too. Had to just grab whatever."
"No chance. The 100-point stuff is for the nobles and the top seeds. We never stood a chance."
"Hey, you see anyone come out super early? Or not go in at all?"
"Not sure… Hey, you think that Oxus guy got something good? I wonder what the big shots—urk!"
They didn't finish. From the shadowed lattice work of a nearby decorative rock garden, several slender threads—a mix of solidified light and sticky, reinforced spider-silk—lashed out, wrapping around ankles and wrists, yanking them off their feet and into the dense foliage behind the rocks.
They reacted fast. One boy exhaled a cloud of disorienting smoke. Another summoned a flickering, defensive halo. A third had a dagger in hand. But the four Rainfall City boys were a team. As they fell, a synchronized pulse of energy flared from their bodies. Four identical, glowing cards materialized in the air above them and shattered.
Team Chain: Shared Bastion. Effect: Link defenses, shared cleansing of negative status effects. Duration: 30 seconds.
The smoke dispersed harmlessly. The binding threads lost their purchase. The attackers—a hastily assembled crew from the three cities, plus a wild-card or two—found their initial ambush completely neutralized. The defenders' collective magical shield glowed, 40% stronger.
Shit!The ambushers, realizing their advantage was gone, scrambled to retreat.
"You think you can jump us and just run?!" the Rainfall City leader snarled. "Get them!"
The four moved in practiced unison, hands rising. The air grew heavy, humid. The beginnings of a combined-area spell—Cloudburst: Rain of Shocks—crackled to life, tendrils of electricity snapping between their forming water orbs.
Then—
Interruption!
A lance of precise, hostile energy, honed to Level 20 perfection, shot not at any of the four, but at the precise, invisible confluence of energies betweenthe caster on the far left and his teammate. It was like severing a specific circuit in a complex machine.
SZZZT—POP!
One of the arcing lightning tendrils snapped, fizzling wildly. The forming spell stuttered, the synchronized rhythm broken.
In that heartbeat of disruption, a brilliance erupted from the deeper shadows of the garden.
Not an attack aimed at them. A Luminous Burst, maximized to Level 20, detonated not as an explosion, but as a silent, overwhelming pulse of pure, blinding whiteness. It filled the secluded garden nook, washing over the four Rainfall City boys and their shimmering shared barrier.
The light was absolute, consuming. It wasn't meant to damage, but to obliterate senses, to drown out the world. In that terrifying, silent white void, the Light Ray Fluid that had delivered the Interruption snaked back, now joined by dozens of other hair-thin filaments. They didn't pierce the 40%-boosted barrier. Instead, they coatedit, weaving a net of solid light over the four stunned boys.
Then, a second Luminous Burst, this one tuned to a concussive frequency, detonated insidethe light-net.
WHUMP.
The sound was a muffled, deep thud. The shared barrier, hammered from within its own blinded, sensor-deprived confines, flashed violently and shattered like glass. The four boys were thrown backwards, not by raw force, but by the violent backlash of their own broken spell and shield. They hit the damp grass, dazed, temporarily deaf and blind, their coordinated defense in ruins.
By the time the blinding whiteness faded from their vision, the garden was empty save for the scent of ozone and crushed grass. Their ambushers, and their mysterious, light-wielding benefactor, were gone.