Evil Authors

As everyone was still puzzled, golden words began appearing on the curtains around the arena. They gradually overtook the black words that had originally filled the curtains, spreading at an extremely rapid pace and squeezing the black words out.

"Oh my god! They've already taken up half the space." A scribe stared at the curtains, now half covered in golden words and half in black, and exclaimed in surprise.

"And judging by the situation, they'll keep squeezing them out." A scribe beside him frowned.

"If more than a third of the space is squeezed away, that means this Epic-grade book has failed the test, and Master Scribe Xun Ling's hopes of becoming a fourth-grade scribe will be dashed." Another scribe spoke with some concern.

The main factor in deciding whether a scribe could advance was the book they had written. In a book battle, if one book squeezed an equally ranked book down to less than a third of the space, that proved its quality was far too poor. Even if it had reached that grade, it would only have done so by relying on too many external aids; its own foundation was insufficient.

Those external aids referred to using paper, brushes, ink, and the like to forcibly improve a book's quality, even though its actual content fell far short of that level.

In such a case, it could be concluded that the scribe's writing ability had not truly reached that grade. The Author Assessment Guild would therefore not grant them a pass. The scribe would have to return and continue studying diligently, improving their writing ability, and come back for the assessment once they were strong enough.

But Master Scribe Xun seemed to have deliberately kept his brush, ink, paper, and inkstone from being too powerful, specifically to prevent