The Headmaster's Summons

Ever since Chen Nan's performance yesterday, he had concluded that no upperclassmen would come looking for trouble with him again. After all, this was merely a Preparatory Academy in a medium-sized city.

More importantly, those students were all just children.

Therefore, once you showed that kind of strength, few people would dare bully you anymore.

That was also why, when facing campus bullying, you had to strike hard and subdue it.

Chen Nan did this to leave himself more time to devote to cultivation.

Otherwise, once people got used to bullying you, it would never end.

Sure enough, when Chen Nan appeared again the next day, the students on campus practically detoured around him. No one dared come up and pick a fight.

The only two displeased with Chen Nan were Wang Bodan and Zhang Hua.

The latter's dissatisfaction came entirely from the arrogance in his bones. In his view, he was the one who ought to be feared by everyone in the academy. What was Chen Nan supposed to be?

Leaving aside the childish thoughts behind it, Chen Nan attended classes and cultivated as usual today. His formal, regular life at the Preparatory Academy had officially begun in earnest.

Chen Nan was extremely diligent. He studied nearly every kind of knowledge related to Transcendents.

Moreover, with the AI System's assistance, much of his learning became incredibly convenient.

At the very least, memorization posed virtually no problem for him.

The brain's memory capacity was already astonishingly vast, let alone Chen Nan's, fused with the AI System.

He categorized every piece of knowledge he encountered here and stored it all in his brain. Whenever he needed it, he only had to retrieve it by category, achieving results at the speed of light.

This also made Chen Nan's roommates greatly admire him.

Chen Nan was like the surface of an ocean left beneath the blazing desert sun for a thousand years. Now that he had encountered the sweet rain of knowledge, he greedily sucked it in, not letting a single drop escape.

Even ravenous thirst could hardly describe Chen Nan's state. Other than eating, drinking, and answering nature's call, he was either cultivating or buried in the library.

A month later, the results of the student strength assessment were released.

With the strength of Zero Rank Level Three, Chen Nan stood above all new students. Even Zhang Hua, who was utterly unconvinced by Chen Nan and had all kinds of auxiliary cultivation methods, had only just crossed into the mid-stage of Zero Rank Level One.

One had to know that only a month had passed!

To enter a Transcendent Academy, students needed to reach at least the middle stage of First Rank. Even so, more than seventy to eighty percent of Preparatory Academy students had to endure until their sixth year before qualifying to take the Transcendent Academy examination.

In other words, their general standard was an increase of around 0.25 levels per month. Usually, it took three or four months to advance one level.

That was the strength level of these Transcendents selected from ordinary commoners. Naturally, it had a great deal to do with their platform and resources. Take Zhang Hua, for example—he had also advanced to Level One and a half in a month.

That was not because his talent was so exceptional, but because he had resources.

Of course, Chen Nan's progress was not entirely due to talent either. The greater reason was that he used the AI System, making him practically a cheat user. But others did not know that, so they could only say that he was a genius!

This immediately made the headmaster of Wu City Preparatory Academy unable to sit still.

At the beginning of November, he summoned Chen Nan to his office.

This Headmaster Li Nanchao was meeting Chen Nan for the first time. Chen Nan also had a rough idea of why he had summoned him. To Chen Nan, this was an opportunity, because he wanted to increase his cultivation speed faster and enter a Transcendent Academy as early as possible.

The moment they met, both wore smiles.

In Chen Nan's eyes, Li Nanchao was not an unpleasant man. Though already in his forties or fifties, he was rosy-cheeked and looked rather young. He was not particularly tall, but he carried the bearing of an official from head to toe.

After inviting Chen Nan to sit, he took his own seat and said kindly, "I'll open the skylight and speak plainly. A child with talent like yours absolutely cannot be wasted in the slightest. That would not only be a loss to you; it would also be a loss to the country and its people."

See? When a leader spoke, the level was immediately different. In an instant, he could elevate it all the way to the country and its people.

Faced with such a towering hat being placed on his head, Chen Nan took it off in his heart, though outwardly he nodded in agreement.

Seeing that Chen Nan lacked the arrogance of a genius, Li Nanchao was even more pleased and continued, "Therefore, the academy intends to cultivate you with all its strength.

Top-tier teachers, top-tier learning materials, and top-tier cultivation resources will all be yours to use.

However, there will be certain conditions."

Chen Nan asked, "What conditions? If they are things I cannot accomplish, then I would only be failing to live up to the headmaster's good intentions."

Li Nanchao smiled. "I believe you will certainly be able to do them.

First, I require you to take the Transcendent Academy examination next year and enter Luojing Transcendent Academy with a national top-three result.

Second, I require you to always acknowledge that you are a student of Wu City Preparatory Academy.

Lastly, if there are any news reports or interviews with you, you must speak well of the academy.

If you can do all of that, not only will every resource I provide be free, but when you enter Luojing Transcendent Academy, you will also receive a scholarship of one hundred thousand yuan."

After hearing this, Chen Nan felt that Li Nanchao's demands were not excessive at all. Moreover, neither stood above the other. One sought profit, while the other sought fame.

Naturally, profit could give rise to fame, and fame could produce profit—it was simply a cycle. More likely, Li Nanchao could use the fact that he had cultivated a genius like Chen Nan to rise another step higher.

But none of that had much to do with Chen Nan.

On the contrary, he had neither financial means nor the social finesse to obtain such excellent resources. It would have been harder than climbing to heaven.

The plan Li Nanchao offered made things much more convenient. Everyone took what they needed, and neither owed the other a favor.

Thus, Chen Nan cautiously agreed.

From that day onward, enormous changes took place in Chen Nan's daily life and meals.

For his daily meals, he began dining on the fifth floor of the cafeteria.

The food there was specially made and could provide slight assistance to cultivation. Since it was consumed three times a day, even if the effect was slight, accumulated over time, it became a tremendous benefit.

As for cultivation, Chen Nan entered a special cultivation room. Inside was a helmet-like device whose function was to disperse the heat generated in the brain through cultivation.

This had always been a cultivation bottleneck restricting Chen Nan. Otherwise, his progress would have been even more terrifying.

During cultivation, the heat generated by brain cells increased ever more rapidly the further one progressed, practically rising in a straight line.

Therefore, physical methods such as wearing an ice cap could not disperse the heat in time.

But this helmet could swiftly dissipate the heat generated by brain cells, greatly increasing the limits of cultivation.

Besides that, this cultivation room also provided an advanced Meditation Qi Yin Art. Its effect in accelerating meditation was roughly thirty percent stronger than the one Chen Nan had used before.

And Chen Nan had now reached Zero Rank Level Three, so he could also cultivate a spell technique.

These spell techniques were divided into five grades from low to high: F, S, T, Fr, and Ft. For Wu City Preparatory Academy, the highest-grade spell technique books it possessed were only T-level.

Li Nanchao was also quite generous, handing him a T-level spell technique book called "Thunderclap Art" for him to study.

This Thunderclap Art was a fairly powerful offensive spell technique, but Chen Nan valued it for more than merely its offensive power.

Just as he did in cultivation, he wanted to find certain patterns.

Cultivation had its laws, and spell techniques surely had laws as well. Chen Nan had already gained a deep impression of this.

In fact, over the past month, Chen Nan had never given up researching cultivation methods. He had basically determined that whether it was so-called "meditation" or "body activation," both were processes that activated human cells using electromagnetic waves or nuclear radiation.

Cultivating in such a manner would inevitably lead to one result: after "meditation," the brain would emit special electromagnetic waves through the nervous system.

As for how those electromagnetic waves interacted with the electromagnetic waves in the environment, and what effects they could produce, Chen Nan had no examples to verify.

He only understood some of the descriptions in books, such as what sort of incantations and mental fluctuations could release what kinds of spells.

A thick spell technique book actually contained only one or two spells. Apart from that, the overwhelming majority consisted of formulas, explanatory terms, and various calculations.

Chen Nan also discovered that those so-called incantations were not, as the novels he had read described, some sort of language used to communicate with elements.

Their function was more like that of the Meditation Qi Yin Art: influencing the brain's mental fluctuations.

Some books also mentioned that one could abandon incantations and cast spells through powerful mental fluctuations alone. It was simply extremely difficult, far less effective than incantations produced through scientific calculation.

After a month of effort, Chen Nan had also gained a rough understanding of exactly how this world's power system worked.

Although there were Transcendent powers and magic here, mysterious beyond measure, they were also inseparably connected to science and technology.

Yet some things still could not be explained by science. This seemed to correspond with the relationship Chen Nan had previously imagined between mysticism and science.