Free Fighting Level 2 (0/20) → Level 3 (0/30).
In that instant, the fifteen moves of Free Fighting grew ever more refined in his mind; even their follow-ups and the ways they flowed together turned crystal clear.
His Mana circulation became instinct — if he threw a strike, the Mana would shift on its own into his hands and feet. Thanks to the passive breathing of the Zhou Tian Qi Gathering Method, managing Mana during Free Fighting had grown effortless; he marveled at how much that method helped beginners — in breathing, body forging, even combat.
But the exam was about to start. Zhang Yu breathed a while to recover, then hurried to the exam hall.
The first session of the afternoon was the Dao arts exam. The second was the martial combat practical.
The Dao arts exam was chiefly about recognizing and using talismans.
After all, at the Qi Refining realm you couldn't yet command true Dao arts — only draw on knowledge and Mana to drive talismans, which is why three years of high-school Dao arts courses revolved entirely around them.
Of these, *fu* meant charm and *lu* meant registry. Together, "talisman" referred to the secret arts by which a person communed with deities and harnessed divine power.
---
Inside the computer lab.
Zhang Yu sat before a computer, silently running through everything he knew about talismans.
Not far away, Zhao Tianxing was urgently flipping through the textbook, memorizing the points he feared forgetting. Bai Zhenzhen was dozing, entirely unruffled.
A bell rang; the students carried everything unrelated to the exam to the front desk, returned to their seats, and moments later the papers surfaced on their flickering screens.
Question One: Which of the following talismans belongs to the Great God of All-Ways Travel of the Transportation Department?
The answer surfaced instantly: the Transportation Department was one of the Eight Divine Departments of Kunxu, with authority over every road, air, and water route — its principal deity, the Great God of All-Ways Travel, in charge of city roads. Through His charm one could summon any surveillance within the city's road network — said to know three hundred years ahead, down to the finest detail.
Zhang Yu moved on to the options.
There were four in all: a spiraling nest of sigils, a scrawl of looping strokes, a flurry of flourishes, a dense nest of characters funneling into a blocky seal.
"All four are the opening of a charm, and by style they're all principal deities of the Transportation Department... Hah, psyching me out from the very first question? Should be the vehicle-surveillance charm — option D?"
He mulled it over and picked D, whereupon the next question popped up.
"Of the following talismans, which one does NOT belong to the reporting charms?"
Zhang Yu blinked. "Reporting charm? Never learned that. Another out-of-syllabus question?"
Frowning, he picked whichever looked right and moved through the multiple-choice questions, then faced the fill-in-the-blanks and essay problems, where the difficulty shot up.
Things like "Please compose a physical-examination charm, respectfully inviting the Great God of Vital Spring of the Health Department to inspect your stomach for lumps." And "What charm can instantly subdue three Mana-less mortals thirty meters due north? Please sketch it. Here are the three mortals' details and the surrounding environment..."
"Damn it... Can't I just knock the three mortals unconscious myself?"
Just as Zhang Yu was sweating out a binding charm, he heard a chair scrape back. He looked up and saw his classmate He Dayou finishing his paper and preparing to leave.
Zhang Yu recalled that He Dayou had placed third in last month's exam, and that he was — like Qian Shen — staggeringly rich. Only, where Qian Shen fixated on scores, He Dayou loved flaunting his wealth and had almost no dealings with Zhang Yu; handing in early like this was a form of showing off.
For talismans were a subject that could only truly be mastered by throwing money at it — the exam where the line between poor and rich was drawn most sharply, and which many people called "the language of the rich."
To be concrete: by drawing charms, one could mobilize the power of the Eight Great Gods. But school taught only the basics. To learn more advanced charms — or charms the school never taught — you had to buy registry books, which came with exorbitant purchase prices, membership fees, donations to worship the gods, faith levels, and other lavishly expensive things.
The charms a registry book offered rested above all on money: spend enough to amass a high faith level, unlock more permissions, and grasp advanced drawing methods. Only then came the qualifications for hard practice — one-on-one charm conversations with the gods, charm error-reporting, charm optimization under divine guidance — and that grueling practice was expensive too. Violate the gods' rules, and you'd be punished: a fine at the mild end, bankruptcy at the severe.
Every time Zhang Yu studied talismans, he reflected that it was a thoroughly unjust course — the best points-grinding subject for the rich, the surest way to widen the gap with the poor. No wonder they called it the language of the rich. Zhou Tianyi had once said talismans weren't even the priciest thing in Dao arts; arts reserved for after Foundation Building would drown a university student in debt.
---
Having barely survived the Dao arts exam, Zhang Yu stepped out to find a crowd gathered around He Dayou, checking answers.
He Dayou smiled lightly, fished out a jade tablet, and traced scrawling strokes across it. With a ripple of Mana, a golden phantom slowly emerged.
"This is the answer talisman of the Great God of All-Knowing Inquiry," he chuckled. "If you have any questions, just ask Him." Many students gasped, staring enviously at the jade tablet.
A voice spoke beside Zhang Yu — Bai Zhenzhen: "That's a registry book, isn't it? And with a jade-colored casing too. This guy's been planning this flex for ages, hasn't he?" Zhang Yu turned to see her, twisted all over with jealousy.
"How'd you do?" he asked.
"My best was wasted — at least a quarter of it was charms we never learned," she said peevishly. "Last year the exam was 20% out-of-syllabus; this year it's aiming at 25%? Keep this up and by the real exam, half the paper will be stuff they never taught us. These people have no shame. Better I don't end up against any of those rich brats in the combat practical, or I'll beat them straight to a fail."
On the other side, He Dayou seemed to sense their gazes, turned, and gave them a polite smile; Bai Zhenzhen instantly switched to a breezy air and nodded back. He Dayou then walked toward the combat hall with a few companions.
He Dayou was the kind of kid who could write a primary-school essay titled "My School-Board-Member Father" — because his father really was a school board member of Songyang High.
Yet for all his silk-lined upbringing, he felt his life was anything but easy, for he was merely one of his father's thirty-some children — only by passing round after round of assessment and family KPI had he become one of just two cultivators among them. His mortal siblings, to repay upbringing debts, had long since gone to work in their father's company. "It's true I'm a rich kid, but this is down to my own effort and talent," he reminded himself. "I earned my father's investment. Those poor bastards think I only got here because of him? A bunch of naive fools."
With thoughts like these, He Dayou had always looked down on the poor who were also bad at academics; once he entered Songyang High and learned its hidden rules even more deeply, he came to despise the smart poor too. "They have no idea... from the moment they're born, they never had a way out. Maybe they're no longer even the same species as us."
Until the change in one person broke the calm of his heart. Watching Zhang Yu grow, these past fifteen-odd days, more and more industrious — even whipping the whole class into a frenzy — he felt sick. "These poor bastards... counting their loan repayments on their fingers, dashing to part-time work after class, scrimping to cultivate, dreaming of sudden riches and an immortal life. They have no idea who they're really competing against. How ugly poverty makes them."
He couldn't stand Zhang Yu's frantic striving, as if hard work alone could beat people like them. Especially after the rumor that Zhang Yu had been taken on as a Golden Core True Person's apprentice — which he confirmed through his connections to be false — his revulsion hit some kind of peak.
"Deliberately refusing to clear it up, wanting to borrow the tiger's might, are we?" So he planned to use the combat practical to put this poor wretch in his place.