With final exams for cultural subjects underway, the classrooms were requisitioned as testing centers, and morning self-study was canceled.

Between home and school, he was merely fighting over moments of light and shadow. He quietly finished his breakfast, returned to his desk, and once again opened his book. The morning light outside the window etched his silhouette onto the pages.

The pages turned, the nib of his pen scratching against paper.

[You have studied diligently for one hour. Scholar EXP +6]

[Profession: Scholar Lv. 3 (229 → 235/400)]

...

"Hooo..." He let out a long, turbid breath and closed the book. His timing was perfect, down to the second.

’Time to head to school.’

Outside the third-year academic building of Bluestone Third Middle School, an intelligent security gate scanned him without a sound, flashing green.

Li Wen practically rode the tail end of the last wave of students as he rushed into his designated exam room.

As he stepped through the doorway, the lingering echo of chatter still hung in the air. The proctor was distributing the thick stacks of answer sheets down the rows.

He had just received his own pristine white answer sheet when the test booklet, reeking of fresh ink, landed on his desk.

BRRRING—!

The piercing bell, like a battle horn signaling an attack, abruptly tore through the last vestiges of restlessness in the classroom.

The Chinese Language exam.

Only one hundred and twenty minutes.

Li Wen’s hand pressed down on the test booklet, his eyes sweeping over it like a hawk.

He locked onto his first targets—all the basic questions.

The scratching sound of pen on paper immediately became the dominant theme at his desk.

He entered a state of machine-like efficiency: read the question, put pen to paper, fill in the answer.

Fill-in-the-blanks, classical poetry memorization, basic reading comprehension... all the strongholds he was determined to conquer, he took them down one by one with steady speed.

He cleanly and neatly bypassed the major questions that required a great deal of time to wrestle with, as well as the abstruse classical Chinese interpretations.

Time flew by silently at the tip of his pen.

Forty minutes. He had cleared the field, leaving only the blank essay portion of the answer sheet on his desk.

Writing the essay—this was the old Li Wen’s only fortress, and his last remaining stabilizer.

For an argumentative essay, he could rely on his accumulated stock of standard source material and neat handwriting to scrape by with an unremarkable but safe score.

He took a deep breath and began to write. He deliberately controlled his speed, striving to make every character neat and proper.

"...The blade is sharpness itself, yet its being resides in a single will. When the will is a thousand fathoms deep, the edge is unstoppable; when ambition pierces the sun and moon, the blade can part the heavens..."

The 800-word essay on the Martial Dao and ambition unfolded steadily. As the final period fell at the end of the last sentence, exactly ninety minutes had passed.

A half-hour of blank time remained.

He put down his pen, his knuckles slightly stiff from the sustained tension.

His gaze drifted to the "territory awaiting conquest"—the high ground of the major questions he had skipped, which required deeper knowledge and understanding to ascend.

Deep in his temples, that familiar, faint ache began to stir. "Absolute Focus" was like an ace he hadn’t played yet, but it was already demanding its price in advance.

Math: thirty minutes! Chinese, Foreign Languages, History... fifteen minutes for each! The plan had been forged and reforged in his mind.

The total usage time would far exceed the one-hundred-minute safety limit.

But he was betting on the recovery potential of his body during the breaks between exams—especially the long lunch break.

"...PHEEEW!—"

A sharp whistle, like an ice pick, suddenly pierced the anxiety and unease that had been slowly fermenting in the classroom!

The fifteen-minute countdown had begun.

Before the whistle’s echo faded, Li Wen’s eyes snapped shut, then flew open a moment later!

"Activate—[Absolute Focus]!"

The world vanished!

The waves of sound, the light and shadows, the dust motes in the air, the rapid breathing of the student next to him... everything sank into a fathomless sea of silence.

All that remained in the center of his vision was the test booklet and the mission to fill the blank spaces on his answer sheet.

The coordinates of the difficult problems he had scouted earlier now became the clearest input data for the high-speed processor of his mind.

SWISH! SWISH! SWISH!

The tip of his pen flew across the answer sheet, the friction a continuous blur of sound. It was no longer writing, but a precise and rapid output of commands.

The final two analytical questions of the reading comprehension, the tricky translations of functional and content words in classical Chinese, the interpretation of deep imagery in ancient poetry... all the empty fortresses crumbled before his thought-storm of high-speed analysis, interpretation, and information synthesis, flattened one by one by the hard lines of his pen.

"PHEEW! PHEEW! PHEEW!—Exam is over! All students, stand up! Stop writing!"

The cold, broadcasted command and the shrill, final bell struck like a sledgehammer, instantly shattering the wall of absolute silence he had constructed.

CLACK. The moment the final punctuation mark was set, the pen left the answer sheet, rolled across the desk, and made a soft sound.

Li Wen stood up, his expression serene. With his gaze lowered, he strictly followed procedure, stacking his test booklet, answer sheet, and scratch paper in a perfectly neat pile, from most to least important.

He lifted his head, his gaze sweeping past Wei Wu in the front row, who had just turned around in astonishment.

That face, with its shocked expression that screamed, ’Finished grinding already?’, made no impression on him.

He picked up the single ID pouch on his desk, his eyes aimed straight at the bright sunlight pouring in from outside the classroom door.

Chinese Language was just the beginning.

With five subjects remaining, it was a long war on six fronts, and the drums of battle were just beginning to sound.

...

「Galactic Calendar, Year 226, January 10.」

The morning sun bathed the plaza of Bluestone Third Middle School, yet it couldn’t dispel the excitement and agitation that filled the air.

The last day before the third year’s winter break had finally arrived.

However, for the third-year students packed into the plaza, seated by class, the allure of the holiday paled in comparison to the main event that was to follow—the Martial Dao proficiency assessment.

For all of them, whether they were "martial students" aiming for the Martial Dao college entrance exams or "cultural students" who focused on academics, this was the day they had all been eagerly anticipating.

It wasn’t because the vacation was in sight, but because this would be their only opportunity in months to fight without restraint, to their hearts’ content.

This was different from their usual practice sessions, where they had to be careful and pull their punches, afraid of injuring a classmate or themselves.

Here, within the projection of a virtual world, pain and death were merely cold system notifications that had no effect on their real-world selves.

Their long-suppressed battle intent and accumulated techniques finally had an outlet.

To ensure absolute fairness, just like with the academic assessments, each student would face a standardized virtual enemy generated by a central system. The only difference was that the test booklet in their hands was replaced by the gleam of blades and the shadow of swords in the virtual world.

Bluestone Third Middle School possessed only four virtual pods, each valued at hundreds of thousands, or even several hundred thousand, units.

With twenty-one classes in the entire third year and nearly a thousand students, it was obviously impossible for everyone to be assessed at once. Conducting the assessment in batches had become standard practice.

Thus, a unique school rule had come into being—the students in the remaining batches would watch a live broadcast of the ongoing assessments on the massive screen that stood majestically in the center of the plaza.

This both staved off boredom and served as a form of silent encouragement: no one wanted to lose face in front of the entire school’s faculty and student body.

The plaza was buzzing with voices, nearly all of them discussing the impending battles.