The witches' tournament format was still terrifyingly long. This time, the groups had stopped bothering with all that "rigorous, solemn, serious" nonsense.
Each group simply had sixty-four people, and two would advance. That was it!
And because the Eileen Cup was short on manpower, the grouping was even more unreasonable—more excessive.
Among the sixty-four witches in Jiang Han's group, there were only three elite witches, fifty-five archwitches, two top-tier witches, and four apex-tier witches.
That was counting herself as an archwitch, of course. If she counted herself as an apex-tier witch instead, then this group was basically the Seven Sisters taking turns playing a game.
That was the bad news. Back when Jiang Han had advanced, there had only been three top-tier witches in her group, and the rest had been fairly weak. So now, with six formidable opponents, Jiang Han knew her chances of advancing were slim. Professional websites had put her odds at just eight percent—and that was only because Black Cat Cat Han had performed so brilliantly last time!
There was good news too: the upper-tier witches in this group were generally rather green. They couldn't grasp the industry's pain points, couldn't replan established tracks, and their underperformance had formed a perfect closed loop. The upper-tier witches and archwitches had become one, deeply interconnected, implementing mutually beneficial key-path cooperation. With big-data gameplay feeding back into the system, they were rolling out a new model of perceptual linkage between archwitches and upper-tier witches.
In plain language: most of these upper-tier witches were theoretical test-solvers. They lived off their innate advantages and research results. Mainly because Anjie had given them encouragement by proving that "inventors can compete too," they had signed up. In reality, even archwitches specialized in combat might not necessarily be able to handle them.
So this