Pearl High School

"Pay attention, students. The spell competition will bring together elite students from middle schools across the country. They will be your greatest competitors in the college entrance exams."

"If you can beat them today, you'll be able to beat even more people in the college entrance exams..."

"Qi Ming, Ji Songzhi, Liao Yongjun, Zhang Jingjing—you are the pride of No. 1 High School. Your teachers hope you can strive for gold medals in the competition."

"..."

"The rest of you need to keep your spirits up too. Try not to hold the school back!"

The teacher leading the group spoke passionately, placing great importance on this spell competition.

And rightly so. Though the National Hundred-Schools Spell Exchange Competition had the word "exchange" in its name, it was, in reality, still a competition—a competition of an exceptionally high standard.

The Spell Tournament was organized by Changhai City's Pearl Education Group, whose full name was actually "Pearl Education Group Affiliated with Jade Pivot University."

Jade Pivot University was a top-tier cultivation university on par with Ten Thousand Arts University. Both schools were famous for their spell education.

The National Hundred-Schools Spell Exchange Competition would award one hundred gold medals, three hundred to five hundred silver medals, and three thousand bronze medals.

More than fifty thousand participants entered the competition, every one of them an elite from their respective schools. Winning a medal was extraordinarily difficult.

Silver and bronze medals carried more symbolic significance, while gold medals meant something entirely different.

Based on the distribution of gold medals, Jade Pivot University would allocate resources to various high schools, including but not limited to spell manuals, the latest spell lesson plans, spell-training equipment, and more.

One hundred high schools, one hundred competition gold medals.

In other words, each high school was expected to win an average of one gold medal to be considered up to standard.

This time, Pingjiang No. 1 High School had registered more than five hundred students. Their greatest hopes rested on super top students like Qi Ming, the class monitor of Class One.

It was worth mentioning that Zhang Jingjing was also a strong contender for a gold medal.

Her overall grades were not particularly outstanding, placing her roughly among the top hundred students in her grade.

Zhang Jingjing was not exceptional in athletics. The reason she could frequently rank within the top hundred was entirely due to her astonishing spell talent and outstanding spell grades.

Across several senior-year mock exams, Zhang Jingjing's spell grades had consistently ranked in the top two. More precisely, she had only come in second once; every other time, she had been first...

Qi Ming, Ji Songzhi, and Liao Yongjun were slightly weaker, but each had their own strengths.

As for the other five hundred students...

Including Jiang Ran, they were all ordinary people there merely to make up the numbers.

A competition gold medal and a competition bronze medal were completely different things.

The Feitong Passenger Coach continued flying smoothly.

In less than an hour, they would arrive at Tianlu's capital, Changhai City.

"Da Peng, I wasn't around earlier. Did the teacher say what rewards there'd be for winning a gold medal in this spell competition?" Jiang Ran asked curiously.

"Rewards? He did..."

"I think there'll be cultivation methods, martial techniques, and prize money."

"Prize money?" Jiang Ran immediately perked up.

It was not that he was greedy for money. It was simply impossible to get by without it.

He still had two million yuan in unregistered Bearer Passes that he had not used, but those were gray assets that could not really be brought into the open. He could only spend them discreetly and could not use them for large public payments.

High school students had few opportunities to earn money. If he could get more prize money, he definitely could not let that chance slip away.

"Come on, what are you thinking about..." Tao Dapeng said carelessly.

"With the likes of us, even getting a bronze medal would be tough. Is a gold medal something we're worthy of even looking at?"

"Stop thinking about it, Ran. I heard there's a place in Changhai with amazing marinated seafood. We can sneak out and have a meal there when we get the chance..."

Jiang Ran curled his lips and said nothing more.

Actually, he really wanted to tell Tao Dapeng—those two were not the same.

Qi Nourishment Perfection. The Mystic Spirit Body had been forged.

After repeated testing throughout the journey, Jiang Ran had confirmed something.

The improvement brought by Qi Nourishment Perfection was enormous. The most obvious change was that his mind had become incomparably clear. His thoughts were far sharper than before, and his intentions flowed as though guided by divine aid.

The same Water Ball Technique had once taken three or four seconds to cast. Now, he could complete it in less than half a second.

And that was only the Water Ball Technique. With more advanced spells such as Torrent Technique and Flame-Raising Technique, his casting speed would not slow down—it would become even faster.

Those profound spells in the eyes of ordinary students were now practically equivalent to elementary arithmetic for Jiang Ran. There was not the slightest difficulty to them.

Winning a spell competition gold medal no longer seemed so out of reach.

They soon arrived in Changhai.

Looking down from the flying coach, the entire city was immensely magnificent.

Changhai was called Changhai because it bordered the sea to the east. Seawater flowed into the city and formed a great river, and high-rises lined both banks, creating the Changhai of today.

Pearl High School was located in Changhai's Haidong District.

The flying coach landed in the parking lot, where more than a dozen flying vehicles from different schools were already parked.

The dozen or so teachers leading the team from Pingjiang No. 1 High School took the students to check in at Pearl High School first, where they received identity wristbands.

Afterward, they moved together into the dormitory building Pearl High School had prepared in advance.

It had to be said that Pearl truly deserved to be an education group directly affiliated with Jade Pivot University. The Pearl High School campus was astonishingly huge, spanning tens of thousands of mu—nearly ten times the size of an ordinary high school.

The spell competition was held in the Spell Hall, a professional spell-training venue.

Walking amid the crowd, Jiang Ran looked over the various facilities inside the Spell Hall, his eyes filled with curiosity.

Spell force-testing steles, spell-practice sand fields, five-element spell training ranges...

There were even professional freezing training chambers and mental tempering chambers!

"This is way too luxurious..."

"Why doesn't our school have any of this?"

"Pearl is the best high school in Changhai. How could Pingjiang compare to them..."

It was not just the teachers and students of Pingjiang No. 1 High School who were envious. Among all the teachers and students who had come here, almost no one could remain calm.

Normally, a high school could only afford one large stadium, which had to accommodate both physical training and spell training.

Professional spell venues were too expensive to build, and their immense wear and tear required costly maintenance. Ordinary middle schools simply could not afford them.

"With an environment like this, it'd be hard for your spell grades to be bad," Jiang Ran could not help sighing.

Children from big cities truly were different. Even someone with the most ordinary Low-Grade Spirit Root would definitely improve tremendously under such superior conditions.

There were two paths to learning spells: either one possessed extraordinary talent and comprehension far beyond ordinary people—but such geniuses were few.

Most people relied on repeated practice, over and over again.

This was where professional spell-training equipment showed its value. A first-year student at Pearl Middle School could practice the Fireball Technique a hundred times every day and identify even the smallest casting mistake each time.

Meanwhile, high school students in small cities could only cast spells in empty areas of the field, and whether their casting was flawed depended entirely on whether their teachers could spot the mistakes clearly enough.

Jiang Ran fell silent and slowly walked away.

There had never been such a thing as absolute fairness in this world. Poor families could produce outstanding children, but the word "effort" carried such tremendous weight.

By lunchtime, the participating teams from all the major high schools had all arrived.

The spell competition officially began at two in the afternoon.

There was no buildup. It began with a satisfying exam—written tests.

Jiang Ran had never felt that taking an exam could be such an easy thing.

He knew everything they tested, and everything he wrote was correct.

Even for some major questions he had never seen before, he only needed to think for a moment to arrive at the answer.

"So this is how great it feels to be a top student..."