First Impressions of Mingde Hall

The soul-engine train pulled in, and Huo Yuhao stepped out of the carriage into a blast of scorching air.

A refined-looking middle-aged man wearing gold-rimmed glasses came forward and said quietly, "Advisor Huo, I'm Number Nine. I'm here to receive you."

"Mm." Huo Yuhao responded indifferently.

Without any unnecessary pleasantries, Number Nine led him into an inconspicuous soul-engine car, which merged into the river of steel.

Outside the window lay a true city of the future. Their destination was the heart of this city—Mingde Hall.

When that impossibly vast cluster of buildings came into view, even Huo Yuhao felt a powerful visual impact.

That was not a building complex. It was a fortress of steel!

Countless towers speared into the clouds. Complex elevated corridors and tracks connected them, while innumerable small soul-engine aircraft darted among them like industrious bees. The entire complex was covered in a layer of energy film nearly invisible to the naked eye, occasionally refracting rainbow halos beneath the sunlight.

"Good grief... this place is far more impressive than Light of Truth's old headquarters!" Sky Dream Iceworm exclaimed in the sea of consciousness. "How much money would this have cost?"

Huo Yuhao ignored it. His [Spiritual Detection] had already spread out like spilled mercury.

[Scan initiated...]

[Analyzing... The energy fluctuation frequency around the building complex is 37 hertz. Stable. Possesses warning and basic defensive functions...]

[48 aerial patrol units and 112 ground patrol squads detected. All are soul-engine puppets...]

[The underground energy network is extraordinarily intricate. The primary energy core is hidden three thousand meters underground. Energy reaction intensity... off the charts!]

"We're here." Number Nine stopped the car by a side entrance, his expression grave. "From this point on, your identity is Tang Yu, an exchange student sent by the Heaven Soul Empire. Remember, here, you're only an ordinary student with a bit of talent."

He handed Huo Yuhao a student badge and a uniform.

"Mingde Hall's rules can be summed up in one word: grind!" Number Nine lowered his voice. "From instructors to students, everyone here is insane. They worship technology above all else. Whoever has the best skills is king. Otherwise, you're trash."

"Here, no one cares about your background or your soul power level. They only care about your research results. There's an assessment every month. Finish at the bottom three times in a row, and you pack up and get out. No exceptions."

"You've been assigned to Outer Student District Seven. Keep a low profile for now. Don't stand out. Understand?"

Huo Yuhao accepted the items without saying a word.

Keep a low profile?

Within his [Thought Palace], a real-time three-dimensional defense map of Mingde Hall had already been completed.

[Analysis complete. Mingde Hall's defense system consists of three layers: outer physical patrols, middle energy detection, and a core area combining a Mental Barrier with spatial disturbances.]

[Preliminary scan has identified seventeen exploitable defensive vulnerabilities.]

[Analysis of internal personnel's emotional fluctuations: generally under high pressure, excitement, and anxiety. Competition outweighs cooperation among students.]

Seeing his silence, Number Nine assumed he had been frightened and sighed.

"Anyway, be careful. Your mission is to 'sense,' not to come here and invent things. Don't get yourself killed."

After passing through three tightly guarded identity-verification checkpoints, Huo Yuhao finally entered Mingde Hall.

He was brought before a student dormitory building.

"Room 703 is yours." Number Nine pointed. "All the daily necessities are inside. The library and beginner laboratories are open to all students. Your access card is integrated into your badge. I'm leaving."

After speaking, Number Nine hurried away, as if staying another second in this place would suffocate him.

Huo Yuhao pushed open the door to Room 703.

It was a single room of roughly twenty square meters. A bed, a desk, and a private bathroom. Clean and tidy, but every corner carried a cold metallic feel.

The conditions were a thousand times better than the woodshed at White Tiger Duke's Manor, yet the invisible sense of oppression was exactly the same.

He had barely set down his simple luggage when [Spiritual Detection] picked up activity in the surrounding rooms.

In Room 702 next door, a young man was frantically engraving formation arrays onto a metal plate. His soul power fluctuations were around the Soul Ancestor level, but his spiritual power was intensely focused, sweat soaking through his clothes.

In Room 704 across the hall, a girl was calibrating a mechanical arm, muttering to herself about complicated formulas and parameters.

In the entire building, there was hardly anyone resting.

Everyone was like a wound-up machine, operating madly without pause.

"Damn, did these people get pumped full of stimulants or something?" Even Sky Dream Iceworm was dumbfounded. "Do they really have to work this hard? Even cultivation isn't this cutthroat!"

"This is why the Sun Moon Empire can remain ahead of the continent." Huo Yuhao's consciousness replied calmly within the [Thought Palace].

He could sense that these students were indeed extraordinarily gifted. Pick any one of them at random, and they would count as a genius in the Heaven Soul Empire.

But their thinking had been shackled.

They were all following the technical paths laid down by Mingde Hall, frantically "optimizing" and "improving" them, yet few ever considered whether that path itself was the only choice.

"Kid, this place is like a turtle shell. How are you supposed to steal anything?" Sky Dream Iceworm asked worriedly.

"Who said I was going to steal?" Huo Yuhao's consciousness brought up the blueprints he had previously conceived for "fixed-installation soul-engine shells" and "soul power battery standardization."

"I'll make them line up and beg me to hand over their technology."

He did not remain in the dormitory for long, instead heading directly for Mingde Hall's public archives.

The archives were more than ten times larger than Shrek Academy's library. Rows of metal shelves rose all the way to the ceiling, holding not paper books, but soul-engine recording crystals that gave off a faint glow.

He walked over to the retrieval station and placed his student badge on it.

[Student: Tang Yu. Access Level: 1. Authorized to view public-area materials.]

Huo Yuhao did not browse through those advanced technical theories. Instead, he directly searched the categories "Project Challenges" and "Bounty Tasks."

He needed an entry point.

A stage where he could reasonably display those "ahead-of-their-time ideas" of his.

Pulling out "fixed-mounted soul cannon shells" right away? That would be idiotic. It would be the same as telling everyone, "I've got secrets. Come investigate me."

What he needed was to find a problem that even Mingde Hall was struggling with, then offer a "plausible" solution through an unconventional line of thought.

His fingers slid rapidly across the light screen.

[Project Name: Research on Energy Attenuation in Third-Generation Soul Ray Guns.]

[Project Name: Plan to Improve the Energy Conversion Rate of the "Hive" Shield.]

[Project Name: Stable Long-Distance Transmission of Soul Power Signals...]

As he examined the projects one by one, Huo Yuhao's Thought Palace operated at high speed, comparing and analyzing those problems against his own knowledge base.

At last, his finger stopped on one project.

[Bounty Project: Research into the Sustained Firepower Bottleneck of Individual Soul Cannons.]

[Project Description: Current standard-issue individual soul cannons rely on continuous soul power input from soul engineers. Their firing intervals are long, the drain on users is enormous, and battlefield survival rates are low. A solution is urgently needed to increase firing frequency and lower the threshold for use.]

[Bounty Reward: 30,000 contribution points, access level raised to Level 3, and one month of core laboratory access.]

This was the one.

Wasn't this stage tailor-made for his fixed-mounted soul cannon shells?

What they were agonizing over was how to make the faucet pour water faster and harder.

What he was going to do was hand them an entire case of bottled water and tell them it was time to replace the faucet.

He did not accept the task immediately. Instead, he downloaded every piece of related information on the project into his badge.

Then he turned and left the archive, heading toward the beginner laboratory.