Chapter 14: During the Sect Grand Exam

Chapter 14: The Grand Sect Examination (Part 2)

This test is nothing special.

At the same time, Su Xin reached the same verdict.

He'd balked at first when he found out the Celestial Spirit Sect's "Grand Competition" wasn't an ordinary spell contest—after all, isn't cultivation supposed to be about fighting strength? Su Xin hated nothing more than pure theory-talk, figuring that was for old geezers.

But once he saw how deceptively easy the questions looked, and that they were Qi Refining Stage level, Su Xin felt confident again.

Hmph, a third-rate sect like the Celestial Spirit Sect can only scrape this level... right?

That was Su Xin's usual train of thought.

But when he looked up to grab his brush and took in the "exam hall," doubt crept in:

...Third-rate sect, huh?

Even for a spoiled brat like Su Xin, he couldn't bring himself to say that here.

After all, this place was more palace than exam hall.

It was the exact same one he'd spotted from the cloud chariot earlier.

But inside, it was even fancier than the outside—not just the walls, carved from crystal and giant clam shell, but also plush seats of agate and pearl.

But the real showstopper was the Coral Platform smack in the middle of the palace.

Because sea clans lived in three-dimensional spaces, their palaces were built that way too—colorful coral platforms drifted like blossoms high up in the middle of the hall.

When gorgeous mermaids and clam maidens wove between them, landing to dance on the coral, even a True Immortal would stop and gawk.

Su Xin knew because he'd gone to sea clan banquets as a kid with his folks.

That banquet had stuck with Su Xin for years. Too bad dragon clans almost never invited human cultivators, and with sea clan lifespans, throwing a banquet every few years was already partying hard. A human lucky enough to attend once could brag about it forever.

And yet, this tiny Celestial Spirit Sect had gone and built a palace copying the sea clans.

And it wasn't even to host big shots from the Heavenly Dao Alliance—it was for a stinking exam!

The gorgeous Coral Platform had no mermaids twirling—just plain desks plopped on it, with sect disciples hunched over them. A bubble sealed the whole platform, muffling sound and cutting each test-taker off from the rest.

Su Xin was sitting on one of those little bubble-wrapped coral platforms himself.

He glanced around, but there was no talking to anyone.

What a total waste of a gorgeous setup!

Pissed off, Su Xin grabbed his brush and started answering.

But he hit a wall after only three questions.

"Which talisman goes best with the Nine-Fire Explosive Talisman to save the most talismans and get the biggest boom? ...Why pair anything? If one boom talisman ain't enough, just chuck ten more at it!"

Su Xin shrugged it off and picked an answer at random.

The next one was more of the same, so he half-assed another pick.

Third question—no clue...

Fourth question—might as well be alien...

After banging his head against a few walls, Su Xin's patience ran out.

"What the hell are these questions?" Su Xin complained inwardly. He glared at the paper, half-ready to shred it. Then a smirk tugged at his lips. "You think this is enough to trip up this young master?"

Grumbling, Su Xin fished a fancy bronze mirror out of his robes.

He gave it a wipe, aimed it at a coral platform, and—bam—someone else's test showed up on the surface.

Yep, this was a magic tool called the 'Light-Stealing Mirror.'

With this thing, you could punch through Golden Core-level formations and peep into anyone's private digs. Peeking at someone's test with this? Easiest thing in the world.

Cheating, you say?

Nah, Su Xin didn't see it as cheating one bit.

In the Heavenly Dao Alliance or any other sect's contests, Su Xin had always whipped out his folks' artifacts and steamrolled everyone, never caring how unfair it was to bring a Tribulation Transcendence big-shot's handcrafted treasure to a fight between low-level disciples of some nobody sect.

Hey, artifacts are part of a cultivator's power, right?

How's using a tool to get what you want cheating?

Su Xin spun the mirror around, hunting for a good target.

Since he was a "VIP guest" of the Heavenly Dao Alliance, Su Xin's spot was right next to Zhou Hui's personal disciples. For instance, on the coral platforms to his left and right sat a pair of identical "maidens"—clearly twin sisters (?).

Su Xin initially intended to aim the mirror at them, but for some reason, he remembered Yu Wenxuan and the other two inner disciples who had welcomed him.

"Tsk, this 'No-Rolling Immortal'—does he pick disciples based on looks?"

Su Xin felt inexplicably dissatisfied.

Especially since the twins looked only fourteen or fifteen. Su Xin inexplicably felt that looking at them would mean losing somehow, so he moved the mirror toward a farther direction.

The mirror flashed across the faces of various Celestial Spirit Sect disciples:

"That girl looks quite obedient—seems like she's doing well?"

Su Xin looked through the mirror and randomly picked a girl whose paper header read "Gan Tang."

His reasoning was that only girls like her would dutifully memorize such boring theoretical questions. Besides, every stroke of her brush was meticulous, suggesting she was a top student.

Her paper seemed to confirm this guess.

Despite Gan Tang's cautious writing style, she wasn't slow—within the time it takes to burn one stick of incense, she had already answered over thirty questions. But the questions on her paper left Su Xin bewildered. Forget solving them—just looking at the difficulty, they were several levels above his own paper.

"S-she must be an elite inner disciple of the Celestial Spirit Sect, right? Her cultivation level is probably very high, so her paper is different!"

Su Xin told himself this.

He quickly rotated the mirror and picked two more people: "Ah, another pair of twins... This Celestial Spirit Sect has quite a lot of twins. But this time it's a boy and a girl. Let me look at the boy first—maybe his paper is the same as mine?"

He had no idea where he got the idea that papers were divided by gender.

Surprisingly, his guess seemed somewhat reasonable—the boy twin's paper difficulty was similar to Su Xin's. However, after carefully examining it for a long time, Su Xin couldn't find a single question identical to his own.

At this point, a hint of unease crept into Su Xin's mind. He moved the mirror to the girl twin's paper.

This girl's exam was even harder, similar to the one "Gan Tang" had looked at earlier, except none of the questions matched.

"Wait, is every exam different?"

"Are they insane? There are hundreds of people here, and every single one has a different exam!"

"And these exams feel like they never end—I saw someone who'd already answered a hundred questions..."

"And how the heck is everyone answering so fast?!"

He checked several more people in a row and, sure enough, found no matching questions. Su Xin stubbornly pointed the mirror at each person, going one by one, until he finally landed on the exam of a disciple named "Qin Xian."

It wasn't that Su Xin had finally found someone to copy from—it was that the guy had just messed up a question.

And that question happened to be one Su Xin actually knew.

"It's seven-leaf amber, which grows in the earthfire of the southern wasteland valleys. Ha, even I can get that one, and he can't? That dude must totally suck at this."

Su Xin thought smugly.

He didn't realize that by thinking that, he was basically admitting his own grades weren't all that great.

He couldn't help it—after watching everyone else answer, Su Xin's confidence had already taken a major beating.

But watching other people suffer was way more fun than suffering himself.

Su Xin temporarily forgot why he was even spying and watched the guy answer with great interest:

"He got the next one wrong too. Pathetic."

"Hmm, this one's... probably right."

"The flame for refining purple gold? This forging question's a bit too hard—at least Foundation Establishment level... Huh? He answered without even hesitating. He's not just guessing, is he?"

Su Xin instinctively looked up in the direction the mirror was aimed—toward Qin Xian.

*

Qin Xian's seat was actually pretty close to Su Xin's—less than ten meters away.

But Qin Xian was totally focused on his exam and didn't notice anyone spying on him.

Even if he had noticed, Qin Xian wouldn't have had time to care.

He felt like he was screwed: "Cramming at the last minute really doesn't work!"

He had really tried to push through it.

It wasn't like he hadn't improved at all—Qin Xian figured he was probably getting two right and two wrong now, which should score a bit higher than last time. Unfortunately, he'd slacked off too much in the past, and with everyone else working so hard, his rank would probably be about the same as last time—no, this time there were also outer disciples, so it might even drop.

Just as Qin Xian was about to give up in despair, the next question made his eyes light up.

The flame for refining purple gold?

Nice, a forging question!

Unlike Su Xin, who was a half-baked amateur, Qin Xian was a true elite inner disciple of the Celestial Spirit Sect. Sure, he'd crammed the basics at the last minute, but when it came to forging, he was a pro!

As if scared the question would vanish, Qin Xian scribbled down his answer.

Whether his luck turned because of that or not, the forging questions clearly started showing up more often from then on. (By the way, this exam was different from the first one—it was enchanted, so new questions only appeared after you finished the previous one.) At first, it was seven or eight other questions before a forging one; then it became three or four forging questions out of seven or eight; and finally, five or six out of seven or eight.

In his element, Qin Xian was like a fish in water.

He even started to actually enjoy answering questions.

Especially when he breezed through three or four questions, hit a tricky one, and then solved it with his own brains and skill.

After answering who knows how many questions, Qin Xian finally hit a wall again:

How do you make the flame for refining the Seven Star Sword turn more purple?

This was also a forging question, but the Seven Star Sword was a weapon only used at the late Foundation Establishment stage, clearly beyond Qin Xian's scope of study.

He had no choice but to skip it for now.

Qin Xian sighed as he thought this, lifting his brush to dip it in ink, but his movement paused mid-way:

Wait a moment, wasn't the raw material for the Seven Star Sword purple gold? There was an earlier question about the flame for refining purple gold. Generally speaking, to make a flame turn purple, you refine the flame, and the best way is to add a companion substance—ideally something that grows within that flame... Hmm, hadn't he seen a similar question somewhere?

Qin Xian flipped rapidly through the earlier questions.

He knew full well that doing this for one question was inefficient—he could've just waited and come back to it—but right now, Qin Xian only wanted to know the answer.

He suddenly found a spark of the drive he had when he first started learning forging.