The advantage Old Man Vernal had mentioned was fully borne out in the trials that followed.
While the other students of Astronomy 08-1 were undergoing Fleck Preparation, the five hunters of the You Zui Hunting Team had already left camp and begun their exploration—though on the first day, Li Meng had obediently remained at camp, preparing common potions for her teammates while wolfing down four or five meals a day of Old Man Vernal's chickpea mash.
Using food to acclimate to the New World's environment was the oldest and safest method of Fleck Preparation.
Over the next six days, Zheng Qing led his hunting team in sweeping through the uncharted areas marked on the map at a pace of one completed objective per day, progressing from easy to difficult. Thanks to their head start, the areas they chose were always a little less dangerous than those selected by the others, allowing them to complete the basic exploration tasks more quickly. This gave them more time to rest and ample time to finish additional trial tasks.
It created an extremely favorable positive feedback loop.
By the end of August 29, the second-to-last day of the trial, the scores on the Trial Tokens of the You Zui Hunting Team's six young wizards had risen from sixty at the end of the first day to an average of one hundred and fifty, firmly holding first place on the overall rankings.
Of them, aside from Li Meng, the other five could earn almost ten points from basic objectives every day, with only slight differences in their bonus scores.
For example, on the second day of the trial, Fatty Xin used a potion he had brewed to clear out a nest of Deng's Termites, earning five bonus points. On the third day, Zhang Jixin shattered