Toddling, Advancement!

"Finally!"

Lin Xuan looked at the panel notification that had appeared in his mind, secretly thrilled.

Advancing through grinding experience was nothing new to him. Both the True Meaning Five Elements Fist and the True Meaning Swimming Dragon Step had advanced step by step from Lv.1 to Lv.2 this way.

That did not even include the throwing skill, which progressed even faster.

Of course, different skills had different advancement difficulties. Throwing was clearly far easier to advance than the two martial arts methods.

As for talents, none of Lin Xuan's three current talents had advanced yet, including Nutrient Absorption, which he had obtained first.

In fact, the initial progress bars for talents were much higher than those for skills, which alone showed that talents were the hardest to advance.

Nutrient Absorption ultimately relied on daily meals to accumulate progress, and except under rare circumstances, he ate roughly the same amount every day.

Therefore, even now, Nutrient Absorption still needed several dozen more points before it could advance, which translated to just under a month.

Toddling, on the other hand, had reached the advancement threshold despite starting later, because walking and training every day increased its progress, while the improvement of the True Meaning Swimming Dragon Step also helped it.

"Advance!"

Naturally, Lin Xuan had nothing to hesitate over and directly chose to advance it.

The next moment, a new panel notification appeared in his mind:

Talent Toddling available advancement paths—

Path One: A Thousand Miles in a Day, focused on sustained speed

Path Two: Mystical Swiftness, focused on explosive speed

"Sustained speed and explosive speed..."

Seeing the advancement options provided by the panel, Lin Xuan made his choice after only a brief moment of thought.

"Advance—Mystical Swiftness!"

Not long after he made that decision, the panel information in his mind changed:

Character: Lin Xuan

Age: 3 years old

Attributes: Constitution 13.23, Spirit 11.21

Titles: Premature Infant (equipped), Nemesis of Evil (3/10)

Talents: Mystical Swiftness (0/10000), Nutrient Absorption (968/1000), Gibberish Learning (233/1000)

Skills: True Meaning Swimming Dragon Step Lv.2 (192/200), True Meaning Five Elements Fist Lv.2 (178/200), Throwing Lv.3 (315/400), Roar Lv.2 (88/200)...

Class: Martial Artist Lv.2

Seeing Toddling vanish directly from the talent column and Mystical Swiftness appear in its place, Lin Xuan felt his whole body become much lighter.

He had not felt tired to begin with. Instead, as Toddling's proficiency kept rising, he had become increasingly energized.

As for why he had taken the initiative to help Hua Yiren, on one hand, he still felt Toddling's proficiency was not increasing quickly enough and needed a human-shaped weight to raise the difficulty. On the other hand, he had a fairly good impression of Hua Yiren.

If it had been Xiang Beifeng instead, he probably would not have been interested in helping.

As for the concern some people had—that helping others might get them eliminated—Lin Xuan had never worried about it at all.

Vice Dean Pei's earlier words had actually made things quite clear.

This assessment was not simply testing the candidates' strength. Otherwise, they could have just held an arena tournament.

Besides, Mech-Energy Users like Xiang Beifeng possessed combat power in the early stages that absolutely surpassed Martial Artists.

If a second-realm Martial Artist like Xing Yan truly fought Xiang Beifeng, Xiang Beifeng might very well defeat him instantly.

Since the Spark Program was meant to select geniuses truly worthy of cultivation, it naturally could not ignore such factors.

By Lin Xuan's guess, if the first stage had tested willpower, then the second stage was likely testing adaptability.

Most candidates had failed to realize this, perhaps because they were too young and had experienced too little.

Especially those children from great families. They had encountered few setbacks since childhood, so when faced with troublesome situations like this, they had no idea what to do.

"Still, some people probably figured it out long ago..."

Lin Xuan's gaze swept over several figures among the candidates.

One of them was the youth whose feet had first sprouted mechanical tentacles to reduce his burden. He looked about the same age as Xiang Beifeng.

Then there was another youth not far from the three of them, about Hua Yiren's age and dressed in a brown suit. He had also been among the first to use his supernatural ability to make up for his lack of stamina.

Clearly, none of these people were pushovers.

In comparison, Xing Yan and Hua Yiren were somewhat lacking.

It was worth mentioning that Lin Xuan's Nemesis of Evil title had gained another point of progress after the previous Scarlet Church incident.

After all, he had contributed to stopping those people.

"...Wait, something seems off."

After calming down from the joy of Toddling advancing into Mystical Swiftness, Lin Xuan quickly thought of a terrifying possibility.

Why were they still climbing the stairs?

They had been climbing continuously for more than half an hour since entering this tower.

He could not determine the tower's exact height, but from the rough glance he had taken earlier, he could tell it was probably less than a hundred meters tall.

At an ordinary floor height, that would only amount to twenty or thirty stories.

Although they were not climbing particularly quickly, they were still faster than an ordinary person's normal pace.

After climbing for more than half an hour at this speed, even if the tower really were over a hundred meters tall, they should have reached the top already.

Yet they were still climbing endlessly upward, the spiral staircase beneath their feet seeming infinite.

"There's something wrong with this tower."

Lin Xuan had already realized that the tower they were in likely held some hidden secret. Otherwise, such a bizarre situation could not have occurred.

"So the increasingly heavy pressure I felt earlier wasn't an illusion?"

Lin Xuan figured out a few things.

He had noticed earlier that while climbing the stairs, Toddling's proficiency was increasing no slower than when he usually practiced the True Meaning Swimming Dragon Step or trained with weights.

Especially after he started pulling Hua Yiren along, the effect was even more obvious than when he normally ran with weights.

He had found it strange at first, but only now, after realizing that the tower truly had a problem, did he roughly understand what was happening.

"Nearly a hundred people were eliminated in the first stage. By now, several dozen more should have failed to keep up with the main group. If the elimination rate is similar, at least several dozen more people will have to be eliminated before this ends."

Lin Xuan looked at the number of people remaining and had already guessed that this stage would not end so quickly.

However, there were still only a few people who could see that.