Chapter 18

By then, Wen Jing had already rushed right up to Tan Wenshan.

"What?" Tan Wenshan's pupils contracted, and he hurriedly raised his hands to respond.

How did her speed suddenly increase so much? No! Her mastery of the Energy Amplification Method gives her more than a 150% boost! Was the intelligence wrong? Who was setting him up?

The speed Wen Jing displayed now was clearly a notch above what she had shown in her previous fights.

With this degree of amplification, her bursts of power were already enough to close the gap between her and the top autumn-class students whose compatibility had reached 5%.

Yet Tan Wenshan was both shocked and furious, feeling only that he had been caught in a conspiracy.

Little did he know, the information had been correct.

When Wen Jing grasped the Energy Amplification Method during her first elective class, her amplification had indeed only been 150%. But two days had passed, and her proficiency had improved again. It was actually 170% now!

As the saying went, learning was like rowing upstream: if you did not advance, you fell behind.

But Wen Jing was the reverse. She would never fall behind. She would only ever improve!

Bang!

Tan Wenshan's leg sweep missed. Wen Jing, meanwhile, sprang up as though she had been waiting for him to move, kicked him in the chest, then followed through by stepping on his joint.

Only then did Tan Wenshan understand why the others had performed that way.

As he exchanged blows with Wen Jing at close range, his entire offensive felt as though it had sunk into a pool of sludge. It was as if she had anticipated the trajectory of his attacks ahead of time, and she was dictating the rhythm of every attack he made.

He could only watch himself sink deeper and deeper, helpless to do anything. Every move was wrong, and every idea he had was within her expectations.

Unfortunately, Tan Wenshan had realized this too late.

Earlier, he had thought the others looked like complete dumbasses. Now the people outside the fight thought he looked like a complete dumbass too.

This was a crushing disparity in pure technique. They had basically all learned from the same textbooks. When fighting in the Trial Tower, Wen Jing had still needed to familiarize herself with the guardians' moves. Against them, she did not need to at all.

Wen Jing's understanding of the textbooks far surpassed every one of theirs!

If the autumn-class students each took their single strongest specialty and placed it within the proficiency rankings on her panel, it would barely qualify as "proficient" at best. All her martial subjects-combat arts, weapons, and movement techniques-were at perfection.

At Mystic Radiance Academy, someone might have been able to recognize it. But before awakening, the gap between the students of Red Earth Academy and Wen Jing was so enormous that they could not even perceive it.

This was a level that had made even Tainuo, who had seen countless people, call her a genius, and had almost made even the lofty Luosi lose his composure.

Unless they could fight against their own instincts, they could not even execute their combat skills in front of Wen Jing.

Her earlier appearance of being beset by danger had merely been an act to lure Tan Wenshan into the fight.

To catch the bandits, first catch their king.

She had seen from the start that winning six matches alone would not be enough. Only by dealing with Tan Wenshan could she truly end this farce of a welcome party.

Now that she had hooked her fish, Wen Jing stopped acting and unleashed her strength, defeating Tan Wenshan with crisp efficiency.

Boom!

After slamming Tan Wenshan heavily into the ground and leaving him completely unable to resist, Wen Jing grabbed him by the collar and headed toward the pool.

"What are you doing? Let go of me! Wait-"

Tan Wenshan, whose nose was broken, realized what she was doing. His eyes nearly bulged out in panic as he cried out in a muffled voice.

Throwing the others in was one thing, but who had given her the nerve to do this to him? Did she not know who he was?!

Intimidated by Wen Jing's strength, the autumn-class students failed to react in time to come forward and save him.

With her long legs and quick pace, Wen Jing dragged Tan Wenshan to the poolside in just a few steps.

As they drew closer and closer to the pool, Tan Wenshan struggled desperately. It was as though he could already smell the vomit inside through the molecular particle layer. The pool had more vomit in it now than at any other point!

But no matter what he did, he could not break free of Wen Jing's grip. His face flushed red with the effort.

"Stop."

Just then, a cool female voice rang out.

Tan Wenshan froze at the sound, and a light of hope shone in his eyes.

But instead of stopping, Wen Jing shifted her grip, hoisted Tan Wenshan up, and threw him straight toward the pool.

"Stop!"

With this second shout, a figure stepped over the crowd and descended from above.

The newcomer had ear-length hair, fair skin, and an icy bearing. On the chest of her school uniform was a golden feather insignia that ordinary uniforms did not have.

"The Operations Department..." Someone present recognized it.

The Operations Department was a branch of the student council that answered directly to its president. It recruited only the most talented students in each year and offered the very best training contracts. Every member possessed exceptional combat strength and formed part of the core team competing in the annual Academy League, receiving great attention from both the student council and the academy.

The person who had appeared was Ji Shuang, a member of the Operations Department.

Ji Shuang moved like thunder. While Tan Wenshan was still tracing a parabola through the air, she actually condensed a block of floating ice out of energy in midair and sent it crashing toward him in the opposite direction.

A superpower!

The first-year students watched in wonder and envy. For low-tier awakened such as E-ranks and F-ranks, their "mana bars" were not long enough, so most needed over 10% compatibility before they could use their own superpowers. That generally only happened several months after enrollment.

The person who had appeared was not just an upper-year student, but a genius student from the Operations Department.

Just as Tan Wenshan was about to be knocked back by the floating ice, something unexpected happened-

Wen Jing moved from the poolside and attacked him again!

Ji Shuang's eyes widened in surprise. She had not expected Wen Jing to keep attacking even after she had arrived.

But now that she was right there, she certainly would not let Wen Jing succeed.

The moment Ji Shuang acted, her energy intensity exceeded the activity center's safety threshold. Even the music and dancing robots that had been performing all along stopped.

As she gathered energy to take shape behind Tan Wenshan and block him, she thrust a palm wreathed in cold air straight at Wen Jing.

She did not intend to hurt her, only to force Wen Jing to abandon this action.

Yet the next instant, Ji Shuang saw Wen Jing suddenly bend backward as though her body had gone limp. Before her disbelieving eyes, Wen Jing narrowly avoided the palm and used the opening to deliver a sweeping kick to Tan Wenshan.

The energy Ji Shuang had sent around behind him immediately condensed into floating ice and struck.

Tan Wenshan was a person whose weight was unevenly distributed across his limbs, not a round ball. Without any other forces acting on him, the counterforce from the floating ice's impact would indeed have pushed him back.

But the angle and force of Wen Jing's kick were extraordinarily precise.

It adjusted the angle at which the floating ice struck Tan Wenshan, making the resulting combined force send him into the pool in a spectacular stone-skipping fashion.

A hair's breadth of difference could lead a thousand miles astray.

For experts, victory and defeat sometimes came down to a hair's breadth.

Splash...

With a distinctly unusual splash, Tan Wenshan carved a wrinkled ripple across the surface of the pool full of viscous liquid.

Ji Shuang stared blankly at Wen Jing, utterly shocked.

Even with her current strength, she could not understand how Wen Jing had done it.

Technique? No, it was more than mere technique...

But the others present were even more astonished than Ji Shuang herself.

Everything that had happened earlier, even Wen Jing defeating Tan Wenshan, could be attributed to Wen Jing being truly strong, or to the autumn-class students being truly useless.

But this was an upper-year member of the Operations Department! Even she had failed to save someone from Wen Jing.

Was she really F-rank? Could there have been an error during her assessment? This thought surfaced in quite a few minds, and the more they considered it, the more suspicious they became.

Wen Jing looked at Ji Shuang before her, an eager gleam in her eyes. "Are you going to avenge him now?"

Coming back to herself, Ji Shuang instinctively looked toward the pool.

"Ah... help... glug... urgh!"

Thanks to the recovery abilities of an awakened, Tan Wenshan had regained some mobility by now. But he would have been better off without it. Because of the prank he had devised, he now had to reap what he had sown and swim through the vomit before he could get out.

Disgusted, Ji Shuang immediately withdrew her gaze in revulsion, then shook her head at Wen Jing.

She was a second-year summer-class student. Fighting a first-year who had barely been at the academy for two days would be utterly shameless.

Ji Shuang had been tasked with keeping the welcome party under control and preventing trouble. It did not matter who won or lost. If Wen Jing had not been about to throw Tan Wenshan into the pool, forcing her to intervene under the student council's internal regulations, she would never have shown herself.

Now that the deed was done and he had already been thrown in, Ji Shuang certainly was not going to stomach the disgust and fish him out.

And so, this genius from the Operations Department merely gave Wen Jing a long, searching look before turning and leaving.

This bout of bullying aimed at the new students was over, and everything was settled.

Everyone present focused their gaze on Wen Jing.

There was gratitude, fervor, admiration, complicated feelings, fear... but they all instinctively watched Wen Jing, waiting for her next words.

Wen Jing was no stranger to such looks.

Completely at ease, she turned her gaze toward the cyber stage not far away.

"Keep the music playing, keep the dancing going!"

Chapter 18

The welcome party ultimately ended on a perfect note.

After Tan Wenshan and the others climbed out of the pool, they suffered tremendous psychological damage and were taken away by cleaning robots to be washed, utterly distraught.

With their central figure gone, the other autumn-class students could hardly stay either and likewise slunk away.

For the first time, the welcome party truly became an event for the new students. This place had always offered all kinds of entertainment and

delicious food

, but the new students of previous years had never been able to enjoy any of it. Instead, they had merely been part of the entertainment.

Even some of the servers who had been forced to wear skintight outfits stopped caring about the student council assessment. They tossed aside their trays, towels, and everything else, and happily joined the crowd to have fun.