A few seconds later, Ye Lin took a deep breath and forced the words out:
"Lord Patroller!"
"What if I can become stronger? I don't believe I'm truly worthless, let alone that I have no potential!"
"If that were really true, you wouldn't have come looking for me!"
"I still have three exams before the seventh. Until then, I don't believe anyone stronger will come to kill me! As you said, one fourth-tier fighter is worth over a thousand third-tier fighters. With the system's penalties in place, even the Starshatterer Alliance couldn't pay such a steep price!"
"Three exams-no, two. Give me two exams' worth of time, and I might still be able to...!"
"You have no chance of reaching the fourth tier."
Before Ye Lin could finish, Loren cut in coldly:
"Without psionic energy, you can never grasp the embryonic form of a rule."
"Don't delude yourself into thinking you can enter instances and grow stronger before your seventh exam."
"The Starshatterer Alliance has its own vassals, too. They can follow you into your next exam at any cost. Starting a makeup examination also has a cooldown. During your three days of rest, you can start no more than three!"
"Not only that, while the difficulty of makeup examinations is fixed, the tasks assigned vary according to your strength. If you'd kept taking makeup examinations from your first exam onward, you might have caught up with them. But you're too far behind now. Even ten times the effort would be meaningless!"
As he spoke, Loren sneered, as though shattering Ye Lin's last illusion:
"Besides, do you have that many permissions?"
"If you'd started saving permissions from your first exam, you might have scraped together a few suitable exams. But out of the ones you've been through, you'd be lucky