Final Exam

The cultural course final exam was using the classrooms, so morning self-study was canceled.

At home versus at school, the only difference was a few moments of light and shadow. He ate breakfast quietly, returned to his desk, and opened his book again. The morning light outside the window traced his silhouette across the pages.

Pages turned, pen tip scratched.

[You studied earnestly for one hour, Scholar experience +6]

[Class: Scholar lv3 (229→235/400)]

"Phew~" He let out a long breath of stale air and closed the book. His timing was precise to the second.

Time to head to school.

Outside the senior year teaching building at Qingshi No.3 High School, the smart security gate swept silently past, a green light flashing once.

Li Wen practically rode the tail end of the last wave of people as he rushed into the designated exam classroom.

Just as he stepped through the doorway, the air still held the lingering echo of voices that had just settled. The invigilator was distributing thick answer sheets row by row.

He had just received his own pure white answer sheet when the test paper, reeking of ink, landed on his desk right after.

"Ding ling ling--!"

The sharp bell, like a horn signaling an assault, abruptly tore apart the last traces of restlessness in the classroom.

Chinese exam.

Only one hundred and twenty minutes.

Li Wen's hand pressed down on the test paper, his eyes sweeping downward like a hawk's.

His target locked in the first instant—all the basic questions.

The rustling sound of pen tip meeting paper immediately became the main theme of his seat.

He entered a state like an efficiency machine: read the question, write, fill in the answer.

Fill-in-the-blanks, classical poetry dictation, basic reading comprehension... all the fortresses he was determined to conquer fell one by one at a steady pace.

The big questions that demanded heavy time investment, the obscure classical text interpretations—he cleanly bypassed them.

Time slipped away silently beneath his pen tip.

Forty minutes later, his desktop was cleared of all obstacles, leaving only a blank essay answer sheet.

Writing the essay—this was the only fortress Li Wen had in the past, and the only stabilizer left.

Argumentative essays relied on accumulated standard material, neat handwriting on the page, to scrape by with a safe, unremarkable score.

He took a deep breath and set pen to paper. His speed was deliberately controlled, every character striving for square, upright form.

"...The blade is sharp. Yet its essence lies in the wielder's heart. If the heart has a thousand cliffs, the edge knows no retreat; if the will pierces sun and moon, the blade can split the sky..."

An eight-hundred-character argumentative essay on martial arts and willpower, laid out steadily. When the period at the end of the final sentence fell, exactly ninety minutes had passed.

Thirty minutes of blank time.

He set down his pen, his knuckles slightly stiff from sustained tension.

His gaze turned to that "zone to be conquered"—the high ground of skipped questions, requiring deeper knowledge and understanding to scale.

At the edge of his forehead, the familiar dull ache quietly surfaced again. "Absolute Focus" was like a trump card not yet played, but the chips were already being overdrawn.

Math: thirty minutes! Chinese, English, history... each subject: fifteen minutes! The plan had been tempered in his mind repeatedly.

The limit usage time far exceeded the safe red line of one hundred minutes.

But he was betting on the rest intervals between exams—especially that lunch break—the potential for his body to recover.

"...Shii!--"

A sharp whistle, like an ice pick, suddenly pierced the gradually fermenting anxiety and unease spreading through the classroom!

The fifteen-minute countdown rang out.

Before the whistle had faded, Li Wen's eyes snapped shut, then flew open an instant later!

"Activate—[Absolute Focus]!"

The world vanished!

Sound waves, light and shadow, the dust in the air, the hurried breathing of the examinee beside him... everything sank into an unfathomably deep sea of silence.

Only the test paper and the mission to fill every blank on the answer sheet remained at the center of his vision.

The coordinates of the difficult questions he had previewed earlier now became the clearest input targets in his high-speed mental processor.

Rustle! Rustle! Rustle!

The pen tip raced across the answer sheet, the friction sounds merging into a single stream—no longer writing, but a precise, swift output of commands.

The last two analysis questions in reading comprehension, the tricky translations of classical function words and content words, the deep imagery interpretation of ancient poems... all the blank fortresses, faced with the storm of his high-speed analysis, interpretation, and information integration, fell back step by step, flattened by the hard traces of his pen.

"Shii! Shii! Shii!—Exam over! Everyone stand up! Stop writing!"

The cold broadcast command and the sharp final bell crashed down like a hammer, shattering the absolute fortress of silence he had built.

Snap. The tip of the pen left the answer sheet as the last punctuation mark settled, rolling off the desk with a faint clatter.

Li Wen stood up calmly, eyes lowered, and strictly followed procedure—test paper, answer sheet, scratch paper—stacking them neatly from primary to secondary.

He raised his head, his gaze sweeping past Wei Wu, who had just twisted around in shock from the front row.

That face, written with the surprised expression of "You're done already?" left no trace in his mind.

He picked up the single document bag on the desk, his eyes fixed straight ahead on the bright sunlight spilling in through the classroom door.

Language arts was just the beginning.

Behind it lay five more subjects, six rounds of grueling battle, and the war drums were already pounding.

Galactic Calendar Year 226, January 10th.

The morning sunlight spilled across the plaza of Qingshi No.3 High School, but it couldn't dispel the excitement and restlessness thick in the air.

The last day before the winter break for senior three had finally arrived.

Yet, for the densely packed senior three students sitting in class formations on the plaza, the appeal of the holiday was far less than the main event to come—the Martial Arts Assessment.

This was the day they all, whether "martial arts students" aiming for the martial arts college entrance exam or "academic students" focused on cultural subjects, had been most looking forward to.

Not because the break was in sight, but because this would be their only chance in months to fight unrestrainedly and to their heart's content.

Unlike the cautious, touch-and-go practice sessions on ordinary days, afraid of injuring classmates or themselves.

Here, in the projection of the virtual world, pain and death were merely cold system prompts, with no effect on their real selves.

The long-suppressed battle intent and accumulated techniques finally had an outlet.

To ensure absolute fairness, just like the cultural exam, every student faced standardized virtual enemies uniformly generated by the central system. The only difference was swapping the pen and paper for the flash of blades and shadows in the virtual world.

Qingshi No.3 High School had only four Virtual Pods, each worth over a hundred thousand or even several hundred thousand credits.

With nearly a thousand students across twenty-one classes in the entire senior three year, it was clearly impossible to conduct the assessment simultaneously. Conducting it in batches had become the norm.

Thus, a special school rule had also emerged—the remaining batches of students would watch a live broadcast of their classmates currently taking the assessment on the massive screen standing imposingly in the center of the plaza.

This not only killed the boredom but also served as an invisible spur: no one wanted to embarrass themselves in front of the entire school.

The plaza buzzed with noise, almost everyone discussing the upcoming battle.