[CHARACTER PANEL]
Name: Li Fei
Level: 1
Sequence Level: None
EXP: 9/300
Class: None
Legacy: None
Mana: 0
Strength: 4 → 5
Agility: 6 → 7
Constitution: 4 → 5
Intelligence: 7 → 8
Charisma: 139 → 141
Morality: -4
Luck: 1
Command: 0
Aptitude: 0
Achievements: None
Innate Talents:
1. Depravity
— When Morality decreases, Charisma increases. (Irreversible)
2. ???
Knowledge Tree: Inactive
Potential Points: 1
Spells: None
Combat Skills: None
Evaluation: The makings of a true star courtesan.
[MESSAGE PANEL]
[You have killed a Moonlight Wolf. +11 EXP]
...
[SHOP PANEL]
Wealth: 257
[GACHA PANEL]
Remaining Draws: 1
"Hmm… So every time I level up, Strength, Agility, Intelligence, and Constitution each go up by one point, and I get one gacha draw plus one Potential Point? It gives me immediate, tangible gains — but I have a feeling the system has a lot more to offer than that… After all, this thing looks a lot more like a Qidian-style system than some half-baked light novel knockoff. I'll have to keep experimenting."
Li Fei bounced on her heels a couple of times. Her body felt noticeably lighter. She swung her sword through the air a few times — the blade shrieked through the space before her with a sharp, intimidating whistle.
"The improvement is obvious… but it's nowhere near enough!"
She muttered to herself, her gaze lingering on the Charisma and Aptitude entries for a moment before she clicked her tongue with regret. "Leveling up doesn't increase Charisma or Aptitude. What a headache."
Exercise could raise Strength, Agility, and Constitution. Immoral conduct caused Morality to dip. Li Fei had figured out the pattern early on — there was a two-way feedback loop between herself and the system. The system's stat boosts benefited her directly, but changes she made to herself were also reflected back in the panel.
And yet, in the two-plus months she'd spent in Loxibrook, the stat that had fluctuated most dramatically wasn't Strength or Constitution. It was Charisma — which shifted several times just from changing her outfit in the morning.
Stripping off her sleeping gown: up a little. Pulling on silk stockings: up a little more. Fully dressed and put together: down a little.
She'd run the experiments with the door closed. Unless she was actively trying to look terrible — smearing mud on her face, that sort of thing — the swing in either direction stayed within ±3 points.
Under most circumstances, Li Fei's Charisma held steady somewhere between 137 and 143. The main drag was combat gear — all that tightly strapped armor did her no favors — while showing up to work in a nice dress reliably put her at a solid 141 right from the start.
So the 141 currently displayed on her panel wasn't actually a product of leveling up. It was simply because she'd taken off the mage's robe. She remembered perfectly well: stripped down to a plain underlayer, her Charisma sat at 141 regardless.
She jotted down the stat changes in her notebook. Then, on a whim, she opened the "Knowledge Tree" in her System Panel.
In an instant, nine towering, majestic gateways materialized before her eyes, radiating an aura that was ancient and immense.
Each gateway was carved with different inscriptions and imagery — a colossal tree with roots plunging into the earth and branches piercing the clouds; a pair of pure white angelic wings; a frenzied, crimson storm of fiery rain…
"These are… the nine affinities of Transcendent Knowledge!"
Li Fei murmured to herself, and her thoughts drifted back to an evening a few days ago, warm with a pleasant buzz —
Nicole, the grey-haired Grand Magister with her effortlessly elegant bearing, had wrapped an arm around Li Fei's waist and whispered softly into her ear: "Fei, there are many paths to mastering Transcendent power. But whether it's the Bloodline Sequence — where your standing is decided from birth — or the Ritual Sequence, which offers a single great leap beyond the mortal threshold, both come with far too many constraints, and breaking through their upper limits is all but impossible. Only by walking the Knowledge Sequence — by mastering one of the nine affinities of Transcendent Knowledge — will you find truly limitless possibility."
Li Fei had been taking small, careful sips from her glass of "Witch's Blood," her flushed little face tilted upward. "Lady Gneia told me the Knowledge Sequence is also called the Hero Sequence. That's such a cool name… Nicole, are you a Knowledge Sequence practitioner too?"
"The Magic Academy and the War Academy have been dedicated to cultivating Knowledge Sequence Transcendents since the day they were founded."
Nicole gave her a quiet confirmation, and — basking in Li Fei's wide-eyed admiration — continued to explain the meaning behind Transcendent Knowledge: "For those who walk the Knowledge Sequence, 'Sequence Level' is merely the key that unlocks a 'Class.' What truly determines a practitioner's strength are the nine affinities of Transcendent Knowledge — recognized by the laws of the world itself, and rumored to lead, at their furthest reaches, all the way to divinity."
"These nine affinities are: the five great schools of magic — 'Order, Chaos, Life, Death, and Nature' — and the four martial disciplines — 'Combat, Tactics, Nobility, and Scouting.'"
"What a shame, though — there are always dull students who get it completely backwards. They throw themselves into Bloodline advances, Ritual shortcuts, and elixir aids, acquiring or developing new Classes, pushing their Sequence Level higher and higher — and only then circle back to actually study and comprehend the Knowledge they should have been building all along. It really is tiresome."
...
"So that means…"
Li Fei had already decided long ago which school of magic she would pursue at the Magic Academy. Her gaze swept over the single Potential Point she'd earned from leveling up, then settled on the gateway patterned with a great tree, lush and green and vibrantly alive. Her voice trembled with barely contained excitement.
"System — spend it! Nature magic!"
The green gateway exploded open with a thunderous boom — like a sacred, sublime Goddess of Nature lifting the hem of her skirts, granting Li Fei a fleeting glimpse of the most fundamental, most breathtaking corner of natural law.
In that moment, her consciousness seemed to scatter to the very ends of the world. She witnessed a tender, jade-green seedling thrust itself up from the soil and grow, grow, grow — until it became a towering ancient tree connecting earth to sky. She watched an ugly, fragile larva break free from its egg, grow slowly larger, spin itself into a cocoon, and at last burst free as a butterfly… Vast oceans of knowledge surged through Li Fei's mind, illuminating the radiance of nature, the splendor of life.
She couldn't understand a single bit of it. But she was utterly, completely overwhelmed.
She glanced at her System Panel. Now she understood.
Mana: 0 → 40/40
Knowledge Tree:
1. Nature Affinity:
Introductory Natural Magic (Unlocks "Basic Natural Magic" upon advancing to Sequence 9):
You may learn and use Tier-1 Natural Spells.
Potential Points: 0.
"Oh… I… um…"
Li Fei was momentarily at a loss for words.
The rest of that evening's conversation with Nicole was still vivid in her memory:
"Of course, you can't blame those students entirely."
Nicole drained the last of the wine from her glass, her tone hovering somewhere between sympathy and gentle mockery:
"After all, you need sufficient Aptitude just to set foot on the Knowledge Sequence. The students who pass the entrance assessment at least have the bare minimum of natural talent — roughly one in ten thousand — but even then, the gap between high Aptitude and low Aptitude is like the distance between heaven and earth."
"Those with insufficient Aptitude have no choice but to keep climbing to higher Sequence Levels, drawing their body and soul ever closer to the laws of the world, just to have any hope of peeling back the veil that shrouds Transcendent Knowledge…"
The star courtesan, cool and unruffled on the outside, had quietly slid her gaze over to the Character Panel — specifically to that glaring "0" in the Aptitude column. The pleasant haze of wine vanished on the spot.
She set her glass down without a word. She wrapped both arms around Nicole's, pressed close with a sway of her willowy figure, dropped her chin onto Nicole's shoulder — pinning down that smooth, silky grey braid in the process — and fixed Nicole with wide, luminous eyes that brimmed with both anxiety and barely concealed hope.
"So, um… how exactly does the entrance assessment work? Is attendance mandatory?"
Nicole smiled and idly combed her fingers through Li Fei's hair. "The entrance assessment is a serious matter — it concerns the future of the Magic Academy and of this entire continent… Even I, as principal, cannot simply compromise the integrity of that process."
"'Cannot simply compromise'… which means you could, theoretically?"
Li Fei's eyes brightened immediately — the light of someone burning with genuine yearning for Transcendent Knowledge.
She was the type who never stopped thinking about studying even in the middle of a crush, the type who had always aimed for the top tier. She understood, better than anyone, just how much structured, systematic learning could matter.
That evening, on a warm and wonderfully winding road of intellectual pursuit, the star courtesan had walked the razor's edge of a Morality point collapse — pushing, probing, testing limits — and finally, to her immense satisfaction, extracted a promise from Nicole to personally "arrange her enrollment." Along with it came a mage's robe as an enrollment gift, and a full two pages of notes in her journal covering everything she needed to know about the path of the Transcendent.
As for the Morality point that ultimately failed to drop — that was less a testament to the star courtesan's ironclad principles and more a credit to Nicole's extraordinary gentleness.
Setting aside the minor detail of Li Fei's plan to sneak in through the back door while somehow walking away with gifts, the intelligence she had coaxed and wheedled out of Nicole over the course of that night was genuinely invaluable:
According to Nicole, the "slow" students at the Magic Academy were flatly incapable of grasping the deep, abstruse mysteries of Transcendent Knowledge before they had advanced to Sequence 9. They had no choice but to leverage every resource and technique available to advance to Sequence 9 first, deepening their attunement to Transcendent Knowledge, before they could even manage to barely grasp "Introductory Knowledge." After that came unceasing cultivation, study, and battle — gathering materials for Rituals and Elixirs — progressing all the way to Sequence 8 before they could begin comprehending "Basic Knowledge," and so on, rung by rung, pushing ever upward toward higher Sequence Levels.
Only those with peak Aptitude — the paragons favored by the laws of the world itself — could harness magical power and wield spells before ever setting foot on the Transcendent path. Like Irena, Nicole's own adopted daughter.
If Sequence 9, 8, and 7 were equivalent to middle school, high school, and university, then Introductory Magic, Basic Magic, and Intermediate Magic were the corresponding textbooks for each stage.
Some people don't crack open a middle school textbook until they've actually started middle school, and even then the material leaves them baffled. Others have already fully internalized middle school curricula while still in elementary school — and are barely two exams away from stepping into their first year of high school.
For those extraordinarily rare individuals — those who shook heaven and earth, who stood apart from all ten thousand races — there was only one term the world used to describe them:
Grandmaster-tier Aptitude.
On the Continent of Enlos, the word "Grandmaster" carried a weight like a divine mountain — heavy enough to collapse endless city-states and kingdoms beneath it, a title that only those blessed with supreme fortune and supreme talent could bear.
After all, by any reckoning of the world, the Grandmasters at Sequence 2 were no different from gods walking among mortals — gazing down upon all living things from a height beyond the clouds.
Epic-tier existences were all but invisible to history, leaving behind only scattered traces and fragments, venerated as totems by certain nations and peoples, worshipped with incense and prayer day and night.
As for those of Legendary standing — they had long since been swallowed by the river of time, leaving nothing but fragments of stories so incomprehensible they read like mythology, sung by wandering bards across the ages.
And Li Fei — who had just moments ago been agonizing over her Aptitude — had, without the slightest effort, stumbled into a natural talent capable of shaking all of Loxibrook to its foundations.
"As expected of me."
The moment it sank in, Li Fei flung herself onto the bed with glee, buried her face in the pillow, and laughed until her whole body shook. Finally, she rolled over, planted her fists on her hips, and declared:
"It seems this Li, right here, possesses Grandmaster-tier Aptitude!"
It was a good while before she sat up. Her face was still flushed, and she gave herself a firm, quiet talking-to:
"All right, that's enough swelling up. Potential is worthless until it becomes actual strength… Tall trees catch the wind. Prodigies die young. This lady had better stay small and careful."
"So, next up…"
She rubbed her palms together, eyes fixed on the Gacha Panel. "Time for the most thrilling moment of all — the draw!"
At the center of the Gacha Panel was a massive circular wheel, divided into sections by color.
Just over half the wheel was white. Close to a quarter was green. Roughly five percent was silver. And barely visible, almost imperceptible, was a sliver of gold.
At the very top of the wheel, a pointer. At the bottom, two lines of text:
Remaining Draws: 1
Draw History: None
System — draw!
Li Fei willed it, and the draw count cleared to zero. The great wheel lurched into motion, spinning faster and faster.
"One shot, one soul! Land on gold, land on gold, land on GOLD…!"
Li Fei stared the wheel down with unblinking intensity, hands pressed together in fervent prayer, lips moving soundlessly.
After a few breathless seconds, the wheel gradually slowed — and the red pointer came to a stop on…
The white sector.
____
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