Xu Yixuan and He Datao stared blankly, unable to process what they had heard.
When they finally recovered, the first thought that came to both of them was remarkably similar: how on earth did Qiao Sang manage to joke with such a straight face?
Honestly, although the examples were painfully few, there were high school students who had raised their pet beasts to the advanced level.
But that only happened in their third year, and almost always in the second semester.
One way to qualify for the special entrance tests held by top academies was to place first in the province in a government-organized campus competition during one's three years of high school.
The other was to pass the D-rank Pet Tamer assessment.
And one of the most important requirements for registering for that assessment was owning an advanced pet beast.
In other words, even if you placed first in the province in the National Campus Beast Taming League, without an advanced pet beast, you couldn't take the D-rank Pet Tamer assessment and still wouldn't qualify for the top academies' entrance tests.
The importance of an advanced pet beast went without saying.
That was also why, if someone's pet beast evolved to the advanced level during the National Campus League, they almost never kept it under wraps. Instead, they publicized it widely to raise their school's profile.
Nobody considered that showing off.
With intermediate pet beasts making up 99% of the pets owned by competitors in every school's grade three section, anyone with an advanced pet beast already had both feet firmly in the regional tournament, never mind their future prospects.
Someone like that had no reason to wait until the last moment in the Provincial Tournament to show off.
So what if people knew? When the difference in strength