Proposal Rejected

Morning rays reddened the summit of Gaidu Mountain.

Yet inside the all-glass hall atop the mountain, with its sweeping view and superb lighting, the atmosphere was anything but pleasant.

Compared with the instructors the students usually saw, the people seated here were all unfamiliar faces, and their average age was clearly higher than that of ordinary instructors.

This was the academy's High Council, a body with authority surpassing even the Professors' Guild.

Many of Dingchuan Academy's orders were issued through this body.

Dingchuan Academy's president, Tang, was the council's honorary chairman.

The six vice presidents were the council's true decision-makers, while its ordinary members were the Dingchuan Pillars who held professorial status.

These reclusive professors were the true core supporting Dingchuan Academy's standing within the Federation.

They opposed dictatorship and arbitrary rule, championed democracy and fairness, and pursued decisions that maximized benefits as the academy's direction for development.

The council was generally held once every six months, though it could be convened on short notice in the event of major matters.

The current situation was precisely such an emergency, because the academy's Exchange Competition was only a month away.

The Academy Competition evaluated the overall quality of students from each academy. Their performances directly reflected the academy's teaching standards and student quality, after which the academy rankings would be reassessed.

Student performances were calculated according to the weighting coefficients of each subject, and the final score would determine Dingchuan Academy's ranking for the following year.

As one of the five A-level academies, Dingchuan had ranked last for nine years. If it suffered another defeat in October's Academy Competition, it would likely finish at the bottom for a tenth consecutive year.

Yet that was not even the real crisis. Behind Dingchuan Academy, those outstanding B-level academies had long been eyeing its