The convoy of buses snaked like a great, segmented serpent along a winding road canopied by the vibrant, sun-dappled green of ancient trees. On either side, verdant mountains rolled into the distance, soft and hazy, lending the journey the serene, picturesque quality of a tour through a vast, protected national reserve. Inside the vehicles, four thousand junior high graduates with their packs and provisions might have looked like tourists on a field trip, were it not for the crackling undercurrent of tension that filled the air—a silent, collective hum of focused mana and fraying nerves.
Their destination announced itself long before they arrived. The lush valley gave way to open plains, and there, rising from the earth like the fanged jaw of some primordial beast, stood the wall.
It was monstrously high, a sheer cliff-face of dark, seamless stone that stretched into the distance until its ends blurred with the horizon. It was not a mere barrier; it was a declaration. Its surface was a tapestry of forbidding complexity—etched deep with glowing, interlocking runes that pulsed with a slow, rhythmic light, and crawling with intricate arrays of arcane script that seemed to shift and writhe if stared at for too long. The script whispered of bindings, of law given physical form, of curses woven from legal precedent.
Yao observed it from her window and felt a familiar, quiet frustration settle in her gut. She was adept at strategies, at exploiting systems, but this… this was the deep language of this world's native power structures. This high-level "foreign tongue" of advanced occlumancy and jurisprudential thaumaturgy was a subject gap in her education she couldn't yet bridge.
Beside her, Yu Qin was murmuring to others, her voice low. "Some of those are Oath-Curses, formed from legal verdicts. For felons with particularly dangerous abilities… This place… it might be a prison."
A prison. The site for their advancement exam.
Murmurs rippled through Bus Nine, a wave of uneasy speculation. A prison? Yao studied the wall's impossible scale. This was no folded-space pocket dimension; this was a genuine, territorial colossus. The entire plain had been claimed, encircled. What lay within?
The entrance was not a gate manned by guards, but a seamless part of the wall itself. As the lead bus approached, the stone… shifted. It bulged, contorted, and resolved into a gigantic, rough-hewn face—a relief of astounding scale, with deep-set eyes, a broad nose, and a mouth that yawned open as it spoke, its voice a low, grinding rumble that vibrated through the very frames of the buses.
"Baphis Plains Penitentiary welcomes all examinees of the Secondary Advancement Examination. We hope you find your upcoming… assessments… stimulating." The words were genial, but the tone, emanating from that stony visage, carried a chilling, deeply unnatural quality.
"Prepare for entry scan and verification."
The face smoothed away, and the wall parted silently along a central seam, stone sliding against stone with a sound like a continent groaning. The opening was precise, granting each bus just enough clearance to pass. Bus One glided through first, followed in solemn order.
Inside Bus Nine, the proctor paused his drama-crystal with a sigh and stood. "Listen up. Once inside, the first structure is the Triumphal Gate Hunting Grounds. New inmates are traditionally processed there. They undergo an… internal sorting. A fight for better quarters. It's a system designed to breed instant animosity, to break potential alliances before they form." He delivered the explanation with the bland tone of a tour guide.
Wu Xiaomei, ever the pragmatist, frowned. "But Teacher, wouldn't that kind of brutal elimination just let the strongest establish dominance faster? Create a natural leader?"
The proctor offered a thin, knowing smile. "It would. If there were any 'soldiers' left to lead afterwards. Most of the 'troops' die in that first culling."
The implication sank in, leaving a cold silence in its wake.
Yao kept her eyes on the passing interior of the wall tunnel. It was a stark, claustrophobic passage, the walls closing in, still etched with those ominous runes. Higher up, anachronistic and menacing, hung rows of ancient, rust-pitted iron spikes—anti-siege pendants from a bygone era. They looked mundane, just cold iron.
Impossible, Yao thought. In a world of magic, nothing so prominently placed was merely decorative. The sense of being watched, by countless unseen, impersonal eyes, prickled at the edges of her heightened perception. It was the gaze of the prison itself.
Ahead, an opaque wall of soft orange light blocked the tunnel.
"The verification hub. Nothing to worry about if you're… clean," the proctor said, resuming his seat.
"Define 'clean,' Teacher?" Pang Ci's voice piped up, laced with theatrical worry. "Is, uh… hemorrhoids a disqualifying condition?"
A collective, silent groan passed through the coach. The oddball from Jingyang strikes again.
The proctor didn't even look up. "Body odor, hemorrhoids, infertility—none of it matters. The 'ailments' it scans for are of a different nature. Use your imagination."
The bus passed into the orange glow. Yao felt it wash over her—a tingling, invasive cascade that sought patterns, anomalies, hidden layers. Her fingers curled slightly, nails digging into the fabric of the seat. Her dual-core existence, her very origin… would it register as an 'ailment'?
The light passed. Nothing happened. She released a breath she hadn't realized she was holding, her mind already analyzing the scan's parameters. Non-invasive. Seeks active magical maladies, parasitic bonds, or unauthorized dimensional anchors. My condition is structural, foundational… not a disease.
Then they were through, and the vista that opened before them drew a soft, collective gasp.
The Triumphal Gate Hunting Grounds was a vast, circular colosseum sunk into the earth, its design a brutal echo of ancient amphitheaters. The arena floor, where they now were, was a complex maze of pillars and low walls. But the true focus was the towering, concentric rings of seating that rose all around them, stretching up towards the distant open sky. And those seats were packed.
A sea of faces looked down—thousands of spectators. Families who had traveled far, school principals and teachers with vested interests, representatives from guilds and corporations scouting future talent, and, most prominently, segregated in their own elevated sections, the nobility. The air buzzed with a low roar of conversation, the rustle of fine cloth, the clink of ceremonial cups.
Yao's gaze swept the stands, then instantly jerked away from the most opulent section. The Four Orange-Blood Houses. She had no desire to draw the attention of that world, especially not from her. Zhou Miao. A primal, strategic aversion took hold. If I don't look, she isn't there. She isn't. She can't be here today.
She focused forward, on the seven dark, yawning tunnel mouths that led from the arena floor into the bowels of the prison. Her analysis of the exam's likely structure was interrupted by a booming, familiar voice.
"Brother-in-law! Hey! Over here!"
Fu Qiang was hanging over a railing in the Blue-Blood section, waving energetically. The call, loud and clear, cut through the ambient noise. 'Brother-in-law.'In a crowd of four thousand teenagers, the title was absurdly conspicuous.
A flash of intense social annoyance was quickly submerged by cold analysis. The Fu family's previous attitude had been calculatedly ambiguous. They needed a plausible, controllable groom, not a beloved son-in-law. Their choice of the Jingyang Xie branch was a move against Xie the Phantom Orchid. So why this public fanfare now?
Two possibilities. Either the pressure on the Fu had escalated to a point where they needed to flaunt their "solution," or Fu Qiang was deliberately stirring the pot, trying to use the specter of the Xie family to counterbalance the other Orange-Blood house threatening them. A classic case of fighting magic with magic. Devious.
It was a transparent ploy, and Yao was its designated pawn. But to publicly snub the Fu here would unravel her carefully maintained position in Jingyang. Gritting her mental teeth, she turned and made her way to the railing, keeping her gaze strictly within the Fu family bloc.
The Fu contingent was… numerous. A sprawling, vibrant clan. Where the Jingyang Xie exuded a severe, masculine intensity, the Fu were a kaleidoscope, with a striking abundance of young women. They were like a garden in full, competitive bloom—vivid, beautiful, and watching her with a mix of open curiosity and more complex, knowing glances. The air around them smelled of expensive perfume and subtle intrigue.
"Fu Qiang. Taking in the sights?" she said, her tone flat, already calculating her exit.
Before she could extract herself, a new presence intruded. A young man in his early twenties, with the effortless grace and expensive cut of Orange-Blood nobility, strolled over from the adjacent section. A faint, mocking smile played on his lips.
"Fu Qiang, so this is the candidate you procured for Langhao?" His voice was light, but the emphasis on 'procured' was a deliberate needle.
Fu Qiang's smile didn't falter, but it grew shallower. "The world holds few jewels as refined as yourself, Third Young Master Li. Our Fu threshold is low. We take what we can get. But, as you know, A'Ye has her own… preferences. She picked this one herself. Must see something we don't." He expertly tossed the conversational hot potato back to the "groom."
Third Young Master Li's eyes, however, weren't on Yao. They were fixed on a figure approaching from behind the Fu family seats. "Langhao chose him? I find that hard to believe. Her standards were always so… particular. Even I didn't quite measure up." The joke held a sharp, unresolved edge.
Langhao, Fu A'Ye, arrived.
She was perhaps twenty-one, a figure of stark, breathtaking contrast. Her demeanor was glacial, an aura of untouched frost that made the vibrant Fu women around her seem like gaudy songbirds. Her hair was night-black, her skin pale as mountain snow. But her eyes… they were the shock. A deep, unsettling , the color of light through ancient sea-ice, or of a predator lurking in a sunken forest pool. A snowfield hiding a venomous, radiant bloom. An iced lake concealing a siren.
Third Young Master Li leaned closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur meant only for the Fu and, unavoidably, for Yao's enhanced hearing. "A man's worth is proven in the trying, I suppose. Tired of the younger brother, so you move on to test the elder? I never took you for one to indulge in… comparative studies. Though, there were always other brothers you could have sampled."
The insinuation was crude, probing, laden with a history Yao wasn't privy to. Langhao took a small, deliberate step away from him, her icy gaze finally landing on Yao, who had used the distraction to put several meters between herself and the brewing drama.
"Ao Ke Si."
Great. Both siblings love their puppet brother-in-law.Yao turned, hands in pockets, her expression a mask of weary tolerance. The truly dangerous ones were Zhou Miao-level maniacs or Zhou Linglang-type flawless operators. Langhao, for all her chilling beauty, had visible pressures and weaknesses. She was manageable.
Langhao rested her arms on the railing, her posture somehow both aloof and inviting. "I have a feeling," she said, and her voice was nothing like her appearance—it was low, husky, woven with a thread of deliberate, captivating warmth. A hook baited with forbidden allure. "You won't make me have to… test another man. Will you?"
She was using him as a shield, a tool to provoke and deflect. Yao held that mesmerizing, treacherous gaze for two full seconds.
"Get the betrothal gifts ready. Gifts in hand, I'll test as many as you need me to." Then she turned and walked away, leaving a small, stunned silence in her wake.
Langhao blinked. Fu Qiang coughed into his fist, whispering, "See? I told you. Seems shiftless, morals questionable, but at his core… a practical man of action." For the right price.
Langhao said nothing, finally taking her seat. One hand drifted almost imperceptibly to rest on her lower abdomen. A fleeting thought crossed her mind: This 'Ox' is nothing like his brother. That boy was all calculated lust and ambition. This one… he doesn't feel like a man at all.
On the arena floor, the brief scandal was noted. Pang Ci and the others wisely stayed silent. They could sense the quicksand their "big brother" was navigating. In the stands, Lian Sujin sneered. "I've heard of that mermaid clan's Langhao. Flirts with every young master in the capital. Can't control the mess she made, so she uses that Ox as a human shield. We might not even need to lift a finger."
She glanced at Qin Minfeng, but his attention was elsewhere, cold and analytical. Chen Sihai, however, was staring with naked jealousy.
Donglong Zhao's voice was clipped. "That's the Li family's Third Son. Powerful, but cautious. He won't move openly with the Xie situation being so volatile. But if we remove the pawn… he might thank us quietly. Focus. It's starting."
A resonant, magically amplified voice boomed across the colosseum. "Examinees, heed. The examination commences in sixty seconds. Proceed through the designated gates. Duration: ninety minutes. Core Objective: Survival."
"Combat regulations are lifted. Danger may be avoided by voluntary withdrawal. Death incurred by refusal to withdraw is the sole responsibility of the examinee. Choose wisely."
The arena exploded into motion. Four thousand figures became blurs. Yao didn't hesitate, streaking towards a tunnel mouth without any attempt at stealth. As planned, Qin Minfeng peeled away from his group and shot after her, a shadow on her trail.
Noting this, Third Young Master Li smiled faintly and gestured to an attendant. A message would be sent to the Lian family head. He didn't care for this pawn the Fu had produced.
In a secluded observation post high on the wall, Li turned to a family diviner. "Well?"
The diviner consulted a small, intricate device. "No positive reading. My sensors detect no nascent life signature."
"A potential complication avoided, then."
Yao felt the spatial warp of the tunnel, a brief disorientation. Her mind, however, was piecing together the cryptic exchange. Li San wasn't asking about me. He was probing about 'older and younger brothers.' The 'older brother' is the key. Langhao was involved with the Li family's eldest son, the one who lost the power struggle. Now Li San, the victorious younger brother, is in charge. He's afraid she's carrying the heir of his defeated rival. The Fu are desperate to marry her off to prove she isn't. A messy, poisonous noble drama.
Not my problem. Deal with the threat in front of me.
The tunnel spat her out into a grim, spiraling stone walkway overlooking a vertiginous drop. Below, tier upon tier, lay the prison proper—a cylindrical abyss of metal and stone, filled with the faint, distant echoes of madness and suffering. The air was cold, damp, and stank of ozone, stale blood, and despair.
Yao didn't descend. Instead, she melted into the shadows of the ceiling, her form blurring as she activated a basic cloaking cantrip. She needed a moment. The puzzle fragment.
In a hollow space between rough-hewn rocks, she took out the enigmatic tile array. The exam wasn't testing information gathering; that would favor the privileged. It was testing raw, applied talent—the kind honed by resources and elite education. This "puzzle" was an advanced Olympiad problem for mages, requiring knowledge of forty-plus interlocking arcane principles and a visionary's grasp of meta-thaumaturgical geometry. Something a trash-planet orphan like "Ox" should have no hope of solving.
An international "Arcane-Math" extra credit question, she mused. But her advantage wasn't a native's education. It was her dual perception—her inherited ocular gifts and the hyper-analytical, almost machinic processing of her other self. She saw not just symbols, but patterns, energy flows, logical failure points.
"Don't seek the right connection. Seek the wrong one. A failed resonance gives more data than a silent one." Water-element principles were the universal solvent, the most connective. She started there, using the water-glyph as her nucleus, rapidly testing adjacencies.
Her fingers flew, her eyes glowing softly as she processed feedback at a superhuman rate. In the arena above, screens flickered to life only when violent mana spikes were detected—showing flashes of combat, quick, brutal eliminations. The scoreboard began to fill. Names greyed out. A curious trend appeared: a block of students, mostly from the three border cities, were at zero or even negativepoints.
"Are they… cementing the cell doors shut?" someone exclaimed from the stands.
Fu Qiang coughed awkwardly as whispers about his "brother-in-law's" tactics circulated. "Strategic thinking! My future in-law is… admirably pragmatic."
Langhao watched the non-action, her green eyes thoughtful. "You said Zhou Linglang shows him favor, overlooks his… past. Is it because of this? This utter lack of conventional honor?"
On the board, Yao's name remained at zero, yet her rank steadily climbed as others were eliminated or penalized. Twenty minutes in, she was in the top two thousand without a single point.
The puzzle clicked. A perfect, ninety-nine piece matrix resolved in her mind, projecting a detailed, three-dimensional map of the prison's seven levels. 100 cells on the first green-difficulty floor, dwindling to 50, 30, 20, 10, 5, and finally, a single, orange-difficulty cell on the seventh. Each level had a crimson marker—a boss. The map also revealed hidden chambers, accessible only with the completed puzzle's spectral key.
Time to move.
She dropped silently to the walkway. The first level was a charnel house of activity. Cells hung open, some empty, some containing grisly remains or cowering, wounded examinees. Powerful figures were long gone, having descended to richer hunting grounds. But one predator remained, waiting.
Qin Minfeng.
Yao didn't need to search. She simply chose a still-sealed cell and blasted the door open, the noise echoing down the corridor.
The prisoner inside was a wizened old man, weeping piteously. "Mercy! I've repented! Take the box, just help an old man up…" He gestured to a small coffer in the corner.
Yao stepped in, her posture feigning avaricious relief. The moment she passed the threshold, the old man's body explodedoutward. His arms became massive, serrated clamshells of bone, snapping shut around the space she occupied with a sound like a guillotine.
Flash.
Light detonated inside the cell. The bone-shells shattered. The old man, now revealed as a grotesque, spidery creature, shrieked and spat a pulsing black pearl that radiated a wave of mind-numbing vertigo. Yao staggered, convincingly. The creature lunged, a sharpened leg-bone aimed at her throat. She twisted aside at the last second, the pearl pulsing again, slowing her. Another flash-bang, and the creature was finally, truly still.
Panting slightly, Yao made a show of dispelling the dizziness and bent for the black pearl.
That's when he struck.
From above, a cascade of golden light. Qin Minfeng dropped like a vengeful angel, his body sheathed in a brilliant, multi-layered aura—defensive shields, kinetic enhancers, sensory sharpening. His sword, conjured from solidified metal-attuned mana, gleamed with a deadly blue-tier sharp. The strike was faster, cleaner, more powerful than anything Chen Sihai or Luo He could muster. It was the strike of someone with Elite LV25 capabilities, masquerading as LV10.
Yao didn't block. Her profile said she was a glass cannon. She flowedaside, the blade scoring a line of sparks on the stone where her neck had been. Qin Minfeng, displaying shocking aerial control, pivoted on a cushion of wind-magic, avoiding her retaliatory light-dart. He landed on the wall, spider-like, and saw her eyes—now blazing with an unmistakable, brilliant azure light.
Blue-tier Ocular Arts! Xie family genes!Rage, white-hot and venomous, flooded him. Those should have been MINE!
Outside the cell, footsteps. Xin Yunhai and three other top Luo Yu examinees appeared at the corridor's end, spotting the scene inside. "It's Ox! Now's our—"
Qin Minfeng made the decision for them. His form blurred. The golden aura shattered, and with it, the metal from the broken door, the hinges, the nearby gratings—all melted and reconstituted into a storm of a hundred needle-thin flying swords. Blue-tier art: Sword-Plumage.
The swords screamed through the air, a blizzard of lethal gold. But Yao was already moving. She didn't retreat; she advanced, her hands whirling. Filaments of light and near-invisible monofilament wires erupted from her fingers, weaving a frantic, defensive net in mid-air. Her agility, honed to first-tier levels, her predictive vision from her eyes, turned defense into a terrifying offense. The wires weren't just shields; they were snares and scalpels.
Zing! Thwick!
The golden swords were caught, entangled, and severed. And within that same net, caught in the peripheral strands, were Xin Yunhai and his companions. They had time only for a flash of shock before the hyper-elastic, razor-sharp wires passed through them. Their bodies pixelated into withdrawal-glyphs an instant later.
A simultaneous, quadra-kill. Collateral damage.
Qin Minfeng's blood ran cold. Impossible!He'd suffered, schemed, sacrificed so much! The gifts from the Lian, the secret dungeons, the near-death encounters! And this garbage-scumhad gotten it all handed to him by the Zhou women!
He didn't stay to fight. Shadow enveloped him. He blurred, moving three times faster than before, a streak of darkness down the corridor, diving into a solid wall with a phase-walk technique.
He fled, terror and all-consuming hatred warring in his heart. She'll chase. She'll want to finish it!
On the spectator screens, the brief, vicious fight had played out. The arena was quieter now. It wasn't the most powerful display of the day—the true top-tier were already dueling horrors on lower levels. But it was the most revealing in terms of disparity. The Li family representatives looked stunned, then grim. Their promising investment was strong, but his enemy was… anomalous.
"A mere three light-element spells, but the attribute spread… top 200 easily."
"Strength around 120k, constitution higher, but the agility… 170k at least!"
"It's the control! And the eyes… Xie blood explains it."
In the Xie section, elders murmured. "A side-branch returnee, barely dipped in the gene-pools of Jingyang… and he manifests at Blue tier?" The calculus was shifting.
Yao, however, was not chasing Qin Minfeng. She was speed-walking to a nondescript section of the level-one wall. Her insectoid companion, hidden, queried her. "Sis, why not kill him? You had a chance!"
"He's still holding back. A final trump card. And I need him to lead me to the other three. A panicked rabbit runs straight to its warren."
At the wall, she placed the completed puzzle fragment. A section of stone shimmered and vanished, revealing a hidden cell. Inside, shackled in null-field chains, was a hulking figure. Level 45. Threat Rating: Elite LV34. It looked up, a grin splitting a face covered in ritual scars. It saw a young girl and licked its lips.
Yao stepped in and sealed the door behind her.
For the viewers, a new screen popped up, triggered by the immense mana signature. It showed only the cell door. Then, from the seams around the door, a light so pure, so intense, so utterly consumingerupted—a photonic annihilation that bleached the screen to pure white for a single, timeless second.
The white light faded. The screen showed the empty cell. A generic "Inmate Eliminated +50" flashed next to Yao's name on the leaderboard. No fanfare. The hidden bonus of 500 points was hers alone.
The spectators blinked. Had they missed it? A flash, and it was over. For a second-tier elite, killing a prisoner quickly was plausible, if impressive.
Behind that cell door, Yao took a deep, steadying breath, dispersing the residual energy from her momentary, all-out fusion with her symbiotic powers. The boss was paste. The true prize—information, a key fragment from its remains—was in her hand.
Now. Now she would hunt.
This time, it would be a slaughter.