The transition from the wild, unrefined chaos of the Jade Forest to the sterile, high-society atmosphere of the Hall of Merit was like being slapped in the face with a silk glove that had been dipped in ice water.
The Hall was a staggering masterpiece of floating jade platforms and white marble so polished that Kai could see his own soot-streaked reflection staring back at him from the floor. Thousands of students stood in rigid, disciplined ranks. Most of the noble scions had managed to use "Cleaning Charms" or high-grade spirit-soaps to look presentable, smelling of jasmine and expensive oils.
Kai and Robert, however, stood at the back of the commoner section looking like they had been through a industrial laundry cycle with a bag of wet charcoal and a very angry badger.
Kai was vibrating. It wasn't a metaphor; he was physically humming from the "Perfected" energy packed into his cells. The Tier 8 Direwolf core was sitting in his chest like a swallowed sun, and every time he shifted his weight, the marble floor beneath his boots emitted a stressed creak, as if it were reconsidering its structural integrity.
"Robert," Kai whispered out of the corner of his mouth, trying to keep his hands from glowing an accidental orange. "I think I'm melting the floor. If I stand here any longer, I'm going to sink into the basement."
Robert looked over, his face as pale and flat as a sheet of parchment. He was the opposite of Kai—while Kai was a heater, Robert was a cooling unit. The torches on the nearby pillars were visibly leaning away from him, their flames flickering as if Robert were accidentally drinking their light. "At least you aren't a gravitational hazard. Every time I blink, the Proctor's hair starts drifting toward me. He's looked at me four times like I'm a broken vacuum cleaner."
"Silence!" the Head Proctor barked. He was a man who clearly took great pride in his starch-stiffened robes, and he looked at the gathered students with the weary eyes of a man who had seen too many teenagers try to play god.
His gaze lingered with a mix of disgust and profound confusion on the two smoke-stained commoners in the back.
In the center of the hall stood the Monolith of Merit, a towering slab of black obsidian that looked like it had been carved from the night sky itself. This was the moment of truth. In the Academy, your worth wasn't decided by your dreams; it was decided by a number.
The points were calculated with a brutal, mathematical simplicity:
Tier 9 Beast: 100 Points
Tier 8 Beast: 1,000 Points
The Monolith flared to life, sending ripples of golden light across the white marble. Names began to scroll upward in glowing script. The mid-tier nobles preened as their scores appeared—200, 300, 400. They discussed their "valiant struggles" against Stone-Hide Boars as if they had conquered entire nations. Then, the scrolling slowed, and the top four names solidified at the top of the stone in a font that was twice as large as the others.
#1. Zhao Yan (Princess): 1,400 Points (1 Tier 8, 4 Tier 9s)
#2. Kai (Candidate 409): 1,000 Points (1 Tier 8)
#3. Li Mu (Northern Duchy): 800 Points (8 Tier 9s)
#4. Robert (Candidate 410): 600 Points (6 Tier 9s)
The hall went so quiet that the sound of a single jade hairpin falling could have been heard in the next district. Thousands of heads turned simultaneously, a sea of silk and jewels swiveling toward the back of the room.
Princess Zhao Yan turned around, her violet eyes—bright with the chaotic light of her Royal Bloodline—scanning the crowd until they landed on Kai. She looked at his singed hair, his dirt-streaked face, and the fact that his boots were literally smoking.
"One kill?" she muttered, her voice carrying across the silent hall with the weight of a royal decree. "You spent three days in the most dangerous forest in the Empire, survived a Tier 8 eruption, and you killed one thing?"
Kai shifted uncomfortably, a small puff of steam rising from his shoulder. "It was a very large thing, your Highness. And it was quite attached to its own life. We spent most of the time... negotiating. Or rather, I was the one being negotiated with."
A noble heir from a Zhao branch family, smelling strongly of sandalwood and arrogance, snorted loudly. "He probably found a carcass and poked it with a stick until the sensor registered it. There is no way a farmhand took down a Crimson-Mane Direwolf without even a Liquid Core. It's a glitch! The Monolith is clearly malfunctioning under the stress of the 'common' elements!"
"If it's a glitch," Robert added helpfully, his voice echoing from the shadows of his hood like a bored ghost, "then I suppose the Monolith also decided to be 'charitable' by giving me 600 points? Or perhaps the machine just prefers people who don't spend their entire budget on hair-oil."
The Proctor looked ready to have a stroke. "Silence! The Monolith does not lie! It is a Tier 5 artifact of absolute truth! Though..." he paused, squinting at Kai. "I may have the janitors scrub it with spirit-bleach after you two are finished."
As the ranking ceremony concluded and the students were being led to their new dormitories, the Head Proctor detached himself from the podium. He intercepted Kai and Robert near a statue of the First Emperor, looking like he had just been forced to swallow a lemon-flavored rock.
"The Dean wants you. Both of you. Immediately," he hissed, glancing around to make sure no noble families were watching. "And for the love of the Emperor, try not to lean against the walls on the way there. The paint in the inner sanctum is older than your family tree and ten times more expensive."
He led them through a series of hidden corridors where the Qi was so thick it felt like walking through warm honey. They passed through a portal that shimmered like a soap bubble and stepped into the Celestial Study. It was a circular room that seemed to exist in the eye of a permanent, silent storm. The walls were made of starlight, and the floor was a window into the nebula below.
Dean Azure sat behind a desk made of solid, translucent starlight. He didn't look like a Half-Step Martial Emperor; he looked like a tired scholar who had spent the last decade trying to solve a particularly annoying crossword puzzle.
As Kai and Robert entered, the Dean winced, waving a hand in a dismissive arc.
"By the Heavens," the Dean sighed, and a sudden, pleasant breeze filled the room, whisking away the scent of 'burnt wolf' and 'commoner sweat.' "I am a Half-Step Emperor, not a veterinarian. You two smell like a stable that caught fire during a sulfur storm. It's offensive to the very concept of aesthetics."
Kai bowed, a bead of sweat turning into a tiny hiss of steam the moment it touched his bronze-colored skin. "Apologies, Dean. I'm a bit... pressurized. The Tier 8 core isn't sitting very still."
"A bit?" The Dean stood up and walked around his desk, his movements so smooth they didn't even stir the air. He poked Kai in the shoulder with a single finger. A tiny blue spark jumped out, stinging the Dean's hand.
"You're a walking tea kettle, boy. One more hour of standing in that Hall and you'd have turned into a very impressive, very loud, and very dead firework. You've packed so much energy into your cells that you're practically a human battery."
He turned his gaze toward Robert, who was standing perfectly still. "And you. Stop eating my room's ambient Qi. I pay a lot of money to keep these candles flickering at this specific frequency. It's rude to treat a Dean's study like a buffet."
Robert bowed his head, his face a mask of hollow innocence. "My apologies, Dean. I'm... perpetually hungry."
The Dean sighed, reaching into his wide, white sleeves. He pulled out two jade slips—one the color of a weathered river stone, the other a deep, obsidian black that seemed to suck the light out of the room.
"The noble houses are already sharpening their knives," the Dean said, his tone shifting from dry humor to a cold, razor-sharp seriousness. "They are currently filing paperwork to have you both audited for 'unauthorized high-grade artifacts.' They can't fathom that a commoner could achieve a 'Perfected' state without cheating. They think you have a Duke's treasure hidden in your boots. I told them you're just too stubborn to die, but nobles have a very poor imagination."
He tossed the grey slip to Kai.
"The Sovereign's Breath. It is the only cultivation manual in the Imperial Vault that won't cause your Five-Element foundation to explode the moment you try to liquefy your Qi. A word of warning: the first time you perform a rotation, you will feel like you are being folded like a piece of laundry by a giant. Don't scream; it's bad for the dorm's morale."
Then, he handed the black slip to Robert.
"The Void-Consuming Scripture. It will allow you to anchor that 'Nothingness' of yours to the physical world so you don't accidentally evaporate into a ghost. Try not to use it to steal my lunch from across the room. I'm a Martial Emperor; I'll know if my dumplings go missing."
"Go," the Dean commanded, waving them toward a hidden exit. "The official Blood Test and Foundation Audit is at dawn. If you aren't Tier 1 by the time the sun hits the spire, the Zhao family will have you 'reassigned' to a border outpost where the average life expectancy is measured in minutes. I've put a 'Do Not Disturb' ward on your dormitory room. If anyone knocks, ignore them. If the building starts shaking, that's just the manuals doing their work. Try not to bring the roof down."
Back in their small, stone-walled dormitory room in the Commoner Wing, the contrast was hilarious. The room contained two hard wooden cots, a single washbasin, and a window that looked out onto a very beautiful, very expensive wall.
Kai sat on his bed, which immediately began to creak and groan under his "Perfected" density. "He's a strange man, Robert. I can't tell if he wants to help us or if he's just bored and wants to see what happens when we blow up."
"He gave us the good stuff," Robert replied, already sitting cross-legged in the corner, a small shadow-vortex forming around his feet as the black slip began to glow. "I think he just wants to see the look on the Princess's face tomorrow morning when a 'Farmhand' is standing on the same Tier as her."
Kai grinned, the orange embers in his eyes glowing bright in the dim room. He pressed the grey river-stone slip to his forehead. He felt the weight of the Tier 8 core in his chest, the "Glass Ceiling" of his mortal limits pressing down on him.
"Me too," Kai whispered. "Let's see if this 'Sovereign' can actually breathe."
As the two of them closed their eyes, the dormitory began to hum. The "Farmhands" were gone; the first true cultivators of a new era were about to wake up.