There was one senior waiting for him inside the room when he entered. It was expansive but empty and bare save for the door and a window at a far end letting in the mid-morning breeze, and the senior gestured for him to sit down, smiling politely. As he sat, Gyuvin realized it was the same senior who’d taken down their names when they first arrived. She was dressed in the uniform of Seven Star Manor, white robes dotted with red embroidered patterns.
“The test will commence shortly. I will put you under an enchantment, and you will enter a simulated battlefield where you will be free to showcase your skills and abilities.
“Am I allowed to ask how long the simulation will be?” Gyuvin asked, wide-eyed. “Can I be injured, or is there a chance I might die inside or something?”
The senior seemed to sense his unease, and smiled soothingly. “The simulation is a controlled environment. You will not be physically injured while facing any of the obstacles within, and you will not meet any sort of high level demon or enemy you are not expected to be able to handle. If you are killed within the simulation, you will simply be frozen, and resume after a penalty of ten seconds. You will be ranked based on how fast you can eliminate all enemies and clear the simulation.”
He nodded. “Okay, I understand. I’m ready to begin the test.”
“All the best, Kim Gyuvin.”
The senior pressed two gentle fingers to his forehead, and the enchantment surrounded him like nightfall.
Gyuvin awoke on a field of dry grass. There was forest surrounding him in the distance, every direction he could see. The air was balmy and warm, like the towns surrounding the foot of Meteor Court during the hottest of summer days.
A distant howling sounded from behind him, somewhere within the copse of dense foliage. The trees were so close together he couldn’t see past even the first row of them, the darkness starkly contrasted with the intense sun beaming down on his head. Gyuvin summoned Yuexi, the polearm glowing gold as it materialized in his hand, thrumming softly as if to tell him I’m here.
The howling echoed again, except this time it sounded more like a demonic screech, and this time the sound reverberated through the empty clearing from all around him. Panic began to well up in his throat, though he tried his best to suppress it.Â
How was this in any way an enemy anyone his age would be expected to handle?
The first demons broke through the trees, the ground shaking from the force of their feet on the hard-packed dirt. Gyuvin used qinggong and reached the pack in a second, slashing with Yuexi relentlessly as they pounced on him. The polearm’s jade speartip was soon covered in thick, black demon blood that smelled like death, but the demons kept coming, and by the time he had broken his way through them all, the air around him was heavy with demonic energy.
Gyuvin returned to the center of the clearing after finishing off the first wave. He remembered that the howls had sounded from all around him. The test was far from over.
As if enraged on behalf of their fallen comrades, the demonic screams echoed again, even louder than the previous time. Before Gyuvin even had the time to process anything else, a second wave of demonic entities burst from the shadow of the forest, closing in on him from all directions.
Gyuvin unleashed a repulsion talisman, sending it flying straight ahead of him. The demons right in front of him stumbled backwards, knocked back by the enchantment, but a dozen others immediately flooded over to take their place. He used three more in each cardinal direction, but nothing seemed to be very effective. There was no way he was going to be able to hold them off long enough to defeat them one by one.
“Yuexi, cover me!”
Yuexi responded immediately, an array of glimmering gold expanding to shield the area he was standing on. He couldn’t expand the barrier very far because it would consume too much spiritual energy and attention at once, besides, he had never really been a defense-focused cultivator. Gyuvin’s grasp of barrier techniques was average at best, enough for some rudimentary protection, but nothing that would stand for long against a flood of demons like that.
“Ah, I guess I’ll have to use it after all…” he sighed. Closing his eyes for a brief moment, he tested the spiritual reserves he had left in his core. He needed more than three quarters of his energy in order for the special ability to work.
Yuexi’s jade-plated speartip glowed blue and Gyuvin felt a surge of energy buzzing in his chest, bigger than any he’d ever felt before.
“Yuexi, it’s raining!”
At the sound of his words, a massive golden array opened up above Gyuvin’s head, faintly marking out the shape of a crescent moon, and a second later slashes of heavenly light began to rain down onto the earth like droplets of rain amidst a storm. The demonic entities flinched and screamed at every drop that touched their bodies, burning them where they stood with heavenly light too pure for them to withstand, immobilizing the entire army of a thousand demons where they stood.
Rain was his special ability, a skill unique to Meteor Court. It was designed to imitate a shower of meteors, heavenly light raining down around him as far as the eye could see. He’d trained with the sect leader himself to learn how to use Rain ever since he was twelve, but even then he’d never been able to hold it up for more than around ten seconds. The range of this technique was wide and very quickly destructive to demonic entities, but the downside was that it was incredibly draining on his cultivation, which he already knew was volatile at best.
Surprisingly, as he counted down the seconds in his head, the familiar feeling of a bottle in his chest emptying out, signifying his cultivation draining down, didn’t come to him, and he held Rain for a few seconds more before letting it stop, the array folding back into itself, clearing the sky once more.
There were just a few stragglers left that hadn’t been fully defeated by the heavenly light, but Gyuvin made quick work of them with Yuexi. The second the polearm stabbed into the heart of the last demon, the scene around him fell away, and within the timespan of a blink he found himself back in the empty room at the training camp in Sky-Ascending Peak.
Yuexi had dissipated from his grasp. He could still feel his heart beating fast, both from exhilaration and exertion, and his core in his chest slowly winding down from the sudden spiritual surge caused by the use of his attack technique.
“Congratulations on clearing the test,” the senior said to him, smiling. “Please gather your belongings and leave. The next cultivator will be here soon.”
Gyuvin stood, heading out of the empty room and back in the direction of his living quarters. As the noon sun rose high above, breaking through the clouds shrouding the Sky-Ascending Peak, the ranking board in front of the main hall scrubbed itself blank with an enchantment, and rewrote.
Rank 1. Kim Gyuvin.Â
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