Chapter 261: Where the Hell Did You Bring Me?

Sometimes, raising the difficulty only made people more eager to rise to the challenge.

That was especially true of Ember’s arrogance. Anyone who hesitated or backed down in the face of a challenge was never going to make it very far down this path in the first place. And so, Gustav’s harshness and iron-fisted methods had instead come to be seen as a rare opportunity to prove oneself. Even the fact that he had once ignored every protest and pressure from all sides and passed exactly zero candidates did nothing to change that.

Among the more than eleven hundred applicants this year, how many were simply trying their luck? And how many truly believed themselves favored by the Divine Mandate, ready to meet any difficulty head-on?

“You’ve become the peak everyone wants to conquer, my friend.” Jiang Tongguang sighed with emotion. “The younger generation is coming for you now, all scrambling to see who can reach the top first.”

Of course, gathering this many apprentices in one place came with its own problems. They came from different backgrounds, different legacies, and different factions. Quite a few of them had old grudges with one another, and some were bitter enough to border on blood feuds.

Jiang Tongguang’s eyes lit up.

“Oh, I have an idea!” He clapped his hands and raised a finger. “What do you say we rearrange the seating and put some of them together?”

Gustav looked over expressionlessly. All he saw was undisguised excitement and anticipation written across Jiang Tongguang’s face, as if he was saying, I’m bored. I want to see some bloodshed.

Forget it. Gustav should never have expected anything better from this man. He looked away and ignored him.

“Whether they’re truly a gathering of outstanding talents or merely a crowd of mediocrities, we won’t know until they’ve been through the fire.” After a moment of thought, he added, “A thousand candidates is still too many. For the first round, let’s eliminate eight hundred.”

The tower beneath their feet gave a faint tremor. Streams of spirit matter emerged from the broken outline, rising and intertwining as they traced out the magnificent shape of a tower soaring straight into the sky.

From the very top of the tower came the clear, resonant toll of a bell. Countless souls gathered like speckles of light before they entered the tower and vanished without a trace.

The examination had begun.

***

It was nothing like what Ji Jue had imagined.

The very first round, the written exam, had been arranged inside the large building. It felt almost like attending a public lecture at Tianmen University, with each examination room taking the form of an enormous tiered lecture hall. No, this place had probably been used for masterclasses during some of the association’s larger conferences.

The candidates entered according to their assigned numbers and took their designated seats. The exam papers were already waiting on their desks. They had simply been placed facedown, with no concern that anyone would peek at them in advance. After all, the papers and the entire lecture hall had been sealed off. Unless a master personally intervened, no one could turn the paper over if they tried. Even if they somehow managed it, they would only see a blank sheet.

The hall was utterly silent. No one dared whisper to their neighbors. Every candidate sat upright at their desk, tense and ready.

At the front, the proctor held a pocket watch and waited in silence. When the second hand returned to its starting position, a bell rang through the building.

“The examination has begun.”

After making the announcement, the middle-aged proctor closed the door and took a seat beside the lectern. Folding his arms, he looked off to the side with complete indifference. He didn’t even bother warning anyone against cheating.

When Ji Jue turned over the exam paper, he finally understood why. There was simply no need. The entire examination consisted of a single sheet of A4 paper. The print was large, the lines widely spaced, and the text did not even take up a tenth of the page.

Name, age, gender, candidate number... And then? That’s it?

Ji Jue sat there holding his pen, staring blankly at the page for a long while before looking up at the proctor.

The proctor did not bother responding to the low murmurs spreading through the room. His expression practically said, Do it if you want. If not, get out.

After thinking it over, Ji Jue finally filled in the blanks one by one. But while he was writing, a distant bell seemed to ring in his ears, faint and lingering. He couldn’t help yawning and rubbed at the corner of his eye. He was getting sleepy.

Wait, something was wrong.

Ji Jue became alert. His eyes snapped open as he looked around, only to see examinees collapsing onto their desks. Some even slid from their seats and fell beneath the tables.

One after another, people hit the floor with dull thumps. Then, his vision went black.

Bang!!!

A tremendous crash sounded beside him, and Ji Jue jolted upright as though waking from a brief dream. Beside him sat a box that had just been dropped to the floor, stuffed with a chaotic heap of parts.

“Stop standing there like an idiot. Something’s been wrong with the island for a while. The contamination is spreading way too fast, and everyone needs these urgently. Fix them.” The person who had given him the instructions was too blurry to make out clearly. After speaking, they turned and left.

For a long moment, Ji Jue simply stood there in a daze, looking around. There was an old furnace, a pile of battered instruments, and two machine tools covered in dust beneath protective cloths, as though they had not been touched in years. The place was drafty from every direction.

Calling it a workshop was already generous. It was little more than a workroom buried deep underground, with even its basic spirit matter isolation on the verge of failing.

Ji Jue was still stuck on what had happened in the examination hall the moment before he lost consciousness. Where the hell had they sent him? Was this even still Starpivot?

After a long moment of confusion, he thought it through and analyzed the situation carefully. All right. He probably hadn’t been transported to another world. Even now, he could still sense the layers of restraints imposed upon his soul.

He raised a hand and gestured toward the furnace, but nothing happened. There was no Pacifier, no Deus Ex Machina, and no blessing. Aside from spirit matter reserves that were only marginally greater than an ordinary person’s, he had practically nothing.

He lowered his head and rummaged through the box, which contained a little of everything. It consisted mostly of gray tiles used to reinforce the workshop’s seals, along with two heavy protective suits, a handful of mismatched tools, two rusted pickaxes, and a shovel.

The most important items were the core components of two sets of equipment, both containing blessings. One appeared to be the production unit of a water generator. The other seemed to be the core of some kind of large-scale force-field esoterism.

This was probably what the exam was about. Was the entire exam practical?

Ji Jue scratched his head, completely baffled. Why hadn’t they given him even the slightest hint? Surely they didn’t expect him to figure everything out by guessing?

Despite his confusion, his hands didn’t stop moving. After sorting everything into categories and arranging the items by difficulty, he began inspecting the crude workshop.

Aside from the furnace, there was basically nothing here. The spirit matter reserves were better than nothing, but they were barely worth mentioning.

More importantly, after Ji Jue had the furnace running for a while, there was a crack. A moment later, a large amount of spirit matter dissipated as he stared blankly at it, and the flames vanished without a trace. What the hell? This piece-of-junk furnace... actually went out?!

Worse still, while all this was happening, Ji Jue had checked the workshop’s material stockpile. There was so little that even a mouse would have left in tears. Aside from some basic metal supplies and a pitiful handful of materials, there was nothing else. It was completely empty. On the other hand, there was no shortage of secondhand equipment and assorted junk.

The place was practically a recycling dump. In all the places Ji Jue had been over the past four months, he had never seen a workshop this miserable. Even Dalton’s rundown workshop had at least been more or less functional.

At this rate, they might as well shut the workshop down and go find jobs at a factory. Why put themselves through all this?

Ji Jue walked over to the basement door and pushed it open. Beyond it was an empty flight of stairs, with voices faintly drifting down from above. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get out. It was as though an invisible wall had sealed the way.

Mm. Classic game design. An invisible wall.

What lousy developers. They couldn’t even be bothered to give him a pop-up saying, “Come back and explore this area later.”

Ji Jue searched around for quite a while before finally finding a radio. After calling into it repeatedly, he eventually got a response. “Hello? Hello! Anyone there?”

“What is it?”

“There’s nowhere near enough material in the storeroom,” Ji Jue said. “Can you send some more down?”

The voice on the other end was rough and cold. “You might as well ask me to hand over my damn life while you’re at it. This isn’t your first day here. Figure it out yourself! We need those things urgently, so you have to get them fixed. Got it?”

You might as well say your mother’s grave urgently needs tending too, before it gets overgrown with weeds!

Ji Jue was so irritated he almost laughed. Even if I were a nuclear-powered donkey who could turn your mill without being fed, I still couldn’t conjure materials out of thin air. What, am I supposed to dismantle that mountain of junk and use it to repair these things?

Wait...

His gaze settled on the towering heap of scrap. Slowly, he raised an eyebrow. “Well then. Don’t blame me for doing things my way.”

The person on the other end fell silent.

Inside the basement workshop, all he could hear was the pounding rain outside, punctuated by the occasional distant rumble of thunder. Beyond the narrow window, everything was blurred behind the curtain of rain. There wasn’t any heating in the workshop, and his hands were already trembling from the cold.

For now, the first priority was getting the furnace repaired and running again. Otherwise, he was going to freeze to death before he accomplished anything.

Ji Jue sighed, rolled up his sleeves, grabbed his tools, and crawled inside the furnace. Good thing he was used to making do with next to nothing. Otherwise, he wouldn’t even have known where to start.

After giving it a rough inspection, he could only say that there was a very good reason the workshop had fallen into such a miserable state. From top to bottom, the furnace was made up of parts scavenged from who knew how many different machines and cobbled together into one. The spirit circuits inside conflicted with one another, the four sections were badly out of balance, and even the temperature control sequence was completely busted.

The whole thing was only a step away from being hauled off to the recycling yard. Which, frankly, made it fit right in with the rest of the place.

Fortunately, the actual problem wasn’t too serious. The air vents were simply clogged solid with ash.

Ji Jue gritted his teeth, grabbed a hammer, and started pounding away. After swallowing a mouthful of dust, he finally crawled back out, coughing fiercely. Then he fed spirit matter into the furnace again. This time, a warm flame finally sprang to life in the cold underground workshop.

Ji Jue sat down on the floor and wiped the sweat from his face. Before he could even breathe a sigh of relief, he whipped his head toward the window. Something had just flashed past outside. It had moved incredibly fast, and it looked like some kind of reptile. What the hell was that? Isn’t this exam starting to feel a little too creepy?

He scratched his head, his brows knitting together. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off.

Even so, he kept on working. He started with the gray tiles that were already riddled with damage. The broken ones went into the furnace to be melted down and recast, while the ones that were mostly intact had their cracks patched with other alloys. As long as they could still do their job, that was good enough.

Despite calling them gray tiles, they were actually metal constructs. The dark gray alloy was commonly used to build the outer isolation layer of a workshop. It was cheap, practical, and reliable enough that even Professor Ye’s workshop used plenty of it.

Ji Jue had spent enough time doing this sort of grunt work that none of it was particularly difficult. And having long since grown accustomed to crude, makeshift working conditions, he quickly settled into the job.

Meanwhile, however, countless other apprentices taking the exam were completely at a loss. Faced with unfamiliar surroundings and a mountain of work, they had no idea where to even begin. Some couldn’t even get their furnaces started.

High above in the tower, Jiang Tongguang sighed. “It’s only been four minutes, and more than ninety candidates have already been eliminated. Don’t you think the scenario you picked is a little too harsh?”

“It’s nothing more than basic tool maintenance and making use of scrap. If they can’t even handle that, what business do they have becoming craftsmen?” Gustav watched the scenes unfolding across the countless floating displays and gave a dismissive scoff. “If they’re eliminated here, it’s probably for the best.”

The real torment hadn’t even begun yet.

At that very moment, Ji Jue turned around, his guard up. As a deafening rumble shook the entire underground workshop, the dilapidated structure lurched violently. Then, a bloodcurdling scream came from outside the door!