Final Assessment

The cultural-subjects final exams were being held in classrooms requisitioned as exam halls. Morning self-study was canceled.

Whether at home or at school, all he was fighting for was a fleeting moment. He quietly finished breakfast, returned to his desk, and opened his books again. The morning light outside traced his profile across the pages.

Pages turned, and his pen scratched softly.

[You studied diligently for one hour. Scholar experience +6]

[Profession: Scholar Lv. 3 (229→235/400)]

"Whew~" He let out a long breath, expelling the stale air from his lungs, and closed the book. His timing was down to the second.

It was time to head to school.

Outside the senior-year teaching building at Qingshi No.3 High School, the smart security gate silently scanned him, flashing green.

Li Wen practically sprinted into his assigned exam room on the heels of the last wave of students.

The moment he stepped through the door, the fading echoes of voices still lingered in the air. The proctor was distributing thick answer sheets by row.

He had just received his own pristine white answer sheet when the exam paper, still carrying the scent of ink, landed on his desk.

"Ding-ding-ding—!"

The shrill bell rang like a charge horn, abruptly tearing through the classroom's last vestiges of commotion.

Chinese.

Only one hundred and twenty minutes.

Li Wen placed his hand on the exam paper, his eyes sweeping downward like a falcon's.

He locked onto his target at once—all the basic questions.

The scratch of pen against paper immediately became the main tune at his desk.

He entered the state of an efficiency machine: read the question, put pen to paper, fill in the answer.

Fill-in-the-blank questions, classical poetry recitation, basic reading comprehension... One by one, he conquered every stronghold he was determined to claim, at a steady pace.

He cleanly bypassed the major questions that would take a great deal of time to wrestle with, along with the obscure classical Chinese passages.

Time flew by silently beneath his pen.

Forty minutes in, he had swept the battlefield clean. Only a blank essay answer sheet remained on his desk.

Essay writing—this had been Li Wen's sole fortress in the past, and his last reliable anchor.

Argumentative essays relied on standard examples accumulated over time and neat handwriting, enough to scrape together a safe score without doing anything either outstanding or disastrous.

He took a deep breath and began to write. He deliberately controlled his speed, striving to make every character square and dignified.

"...A blade is sharp, yet its true strength lies in the heart. When the heart rises a thousand fathoms, the edge knows no rival; when one's will pierces sun and moon, the blade can split the heavens..."

His eight-hundred-character argumentative essay on martial arts and ambition unfolded steadily. When he put the final period down, exactly ninety minutes had passed.

Thirty minutes of emptiness.

He put down his pen. His knuckles had stiffened slightly from remaining tense for so long.

His gaze shifted to the "territory yet to be conquered"—the challenging questions he had skipped, high peaks requiring deeper knowledge and understanding to scale.

That familiar dull ache quietly stirred deep in his temples again. Absolute Focus was like a trump card he had yet to play, yet he had already spent its chips in advance.

Math: thirty minutes! Chinese, foreign language, history... Fifteen minutes per subject! He had honed the plan over and over in his mind.

The maximum time he could use far exceeded the hundred-minute safety limit.

But he was betting on his body's ability to recover during the breaks between exams—especially during the lunch break.

"...Whew—!"

A shrill whistle like an ice pick suddenly pierced the anxiety and unease slowly filling the classroom!

The fifteen-minute countdown began.

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

"Activate—[Absolute Focus]!"

The world disappeared!

The roar of voices, the shifting light and shadows, the dust in the air, the hurried breathing of the examinees beside him... Everything sank into an unfathomably deep sea of silence.

At the center of his vision, only the exam paper remained, along with the mission of filling the blank answer sheet.

The coordinates of the difficult questions he had previewed now became the clearest input coordinates in his rapidly spinning mental processor.

Scritch! Scritch! Scritch!

His pen raced across the answer sheet, its friction forming an unbroken stream of sound. It was no longer writing, but the precise, rapid output of commands.

The final two reading-comprehension analysis questions, the tricky translations of classical Chinese content words and function words, the deeper interpretation of imagery in ancient poetry... Every blank fortress crumbled before the storm of his thoughts as he rapidly analyzed, interpreted, and integrated information, then was flattened one by one beneath the hard strokes of his pen.

"Whew! Whew! Whew—Exam over! Everyone stand! Stop writing!"

The cold broadcast command and the shrill final bell struck like sledgehammers, instantly smashing the wall of absolute silence he had built.

Click. As the final punctuation mark landed, his pen tip lifted from the answer sheet and rolled across the desk with a light tap.

Li Wen stood up, his expression calm. With his eyes lowered, he strictly followed procedure, stacking the exam paper, answer sheet, and scratch paper neatly, from most important to least.

He raised his head, his gaze passing over Wei Wu in the row ahead, who had just turned around in astonishment.

The face wearing a surprised expression that said, "You're already done?" left not the slightest impression on him.

He picked up the only thing on his desk, his ID pouch, and fixed his gaze on the bright sunlight streaming in through the classroom door.

Chinese was only the beginning.

The long, brutal battles across the remaining five subjects and six exams were about to begin. The war drums were already beating.

Galactic Calendar, Year 226, January 10.

The morning sun shone over the plaza at Qingshi No.3 High School, but it could not disperse the excitement and restlessness hanging in the air.

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

Yet for the senior students packed across the plaza, seated by class, the coming vacation held far less appeal than the main event ahead—the Martial Arts Assessment.

For all of them, whether they were "martial students" aiming for the Martial Arts College Entrance Exam or "academic students" focused on cultural subjects, this was the day they had looked forward to most.

It wasn't because vacation was near, but because this would be their only chance in months to fight without holding back, to battle to their hearts' content.

Unlike their usual cautious practice, where they stopped as soon as one side gained the upper hand, afraid of hurting a classmate or injuring themselves.

Here, within the projections of the Virtual World, pain and death were merely cold system notifications, with no effect whatsoever on them in reality.

Their long-suppressed fighting spirit and accumulated techniques finally had an outlet.

To ensure absolute fairness, just as with the cultural-subjects assessments, every student faced standardized virtual enemies generated by the central system. The only difference was that the exam papers in their hands had been replaced by flashes of blades and swords in the Virtual World.

At Qingshi No.3 High School, there were only four Virtual Pods, each worth hundreds of thousands, or even tens of thousands.

With twenty-one senior classes and nearly a thousand students, it was obviously impossible to hold the assessment for everyone at once. Conducting it in batches had become the norm.

And so, a special school rule had emerged: students in the remaining batches would watch live broadcasts of their classmates taking the assessment on the enormous screen towering in the center of the plaza.

This would both stave off boredom and serve as an invisible goad: no one wanted to embarrass themselves in front of the entire school.

The plaza was alive with voices. Nearly everyone was discussing the battles about to begin.