"Now — who still wants to take the exam?" Ferrell added, giving the crowd a moment to properly absorb what he had just told them.
This time, only a few dozen hands went up to withdraw. The rest held their ground despite the shock. They weren't willing to quit over this. Withdrawing now meant it was over — no second chance next year. If they were going to be crippled, they would at least earn it by trying. At least we tried, they told themselves.
Ferrell understood exactly what was going through their heads. He didn't stop them. If they wanted to court disaster, that was their choice to make. He couldn't be blamed for it.
"The exam itself is straightforward. All of you will enter an illusory magical artifact — a constructed world where monsters roam freely. Some are strong. Some are weak. Killing monsters earns you points. The top fifty participants by point total will pass. Killing other participants, however, is not permitted.
"There is a twist. Points can be transferred to another participant at will, with a single thought. Furthermore, there are exactly one thousand monsters within the illusory world. You will have six hours.
"That's all. You may form parties if you choose."
Alzer frowned as Ferrell finished speaking. The test was more complicated than it sounded. A thousand monsters split among roughly a thousand remaining examinees — and only fifty spots. Points varied by monster strength. Since killing participants was off the table, the only path forward was hunting, which made the whole thing a race dictated largely by spawn location. Anyone dropped into a sparse zone was already at a disadvantage before they'd done anything. Luck played an enormous role in this. If his starting position was barren, there was nothing skill could do to compensate.
"Now that the rules are clear — the examination begins."
A wash of blue light swept over the crowd the moment Ferrell finished speaking. Alzer's surroundings blurred and dissolved. When the world resolved again, he was standing inside a forest of impossibly large trees, their canopies swallowing the sky above him.
"An illusory world."
He wasn't unfamiliar with illusory magical artifacts — he had owned one in his past life. They came in various forms. Some were built for individual use. Some, like this one, generated entire constructed worlds. Others simply deceived the senses without creating anything real. His had been the third type.
Alzer scanned his immediate surroundings. Nothing alive. He started moving. After thirty minutes of walking and checking in every direction, he still hadn't found a single monster — only silence and massive trees.
Could it be that my starting zone has no monsters at all?
If that was the case, his luck was genuinely terrible. He was certain that while he'd been walking in circles, other participants had already been racking up kills. Then something on his wrist caught his eye — a faint glow. A tattoo marked with ancient patterns had appeared on his skin. On instinct, he channeled a thread of mana into it.
A screen of light materialized in front of him. It displayed a ranked list of names with point totals beside them. He scrolled until he found his own — near the bottom, with zero points. Not the absolute lowest, but close enough to matter. If he stayed empty-handed, passing was impossible.
He noticed two buttons in the lower-left corner of the display. Two were white, one was black. He tapped the first white button — it flipped black, and the black one turned white. He understood immediately: the black button indicated the currently active view.
The light screen shifted into a map. Red dots scattered across it, most of them moving. A blue dot sat in the northwest — his position, he assumed. The red dots varied noticeably in size.
The larger ones must be participants with higher point totals. And dots like mine — the small ones — haven't earned anything yet.
He studied the movement patterns. Nearly every dot was clustering.
They've already figured out that grouping improves their odds.
In thirty minutes the situation had already stratified. Hunting monsters alone wasn't going to get him into the top fifty — not from this position. He needed to think differently.
Alzer rubbed his chin and turned the problem over quietly. A plan began to take shape — rough, with gaps, but workable. The first step was information. He needed to understand what was actually happening before he could exploit it. As the old saying went, know the enemy and know yourself, and you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. The map showed him positions. It told him nothing about alliances, deal structures, or which groups were dominant. He needed to be among people to learn that.
He began moving toward the densest cluster of dots on the map.
An hour later, he arrived.
The area was dense with participants, most of them arranged into loose groups. Negotiations were clearly underway between several factions — people talking in low voices, gesturing, clearly working out terms. Monster corpses littered the ground nearby, already stripped of whatever they were worth.
Alzer found a tree at the edge of the clearing and sat against it. He still had zero points. From the northwest to here, every monster he might have found had already been killed by whoever reached the zone first. At this rate, he wasn't just behind — he was out.
"Wait — is that Prince Charles?"
The exclamation came from somewhere in the crowd. Heads turned. A group was approaching from the east, led by a golden-haired young man — the same one who had raised his hand to speak with Ferrell outside the illusory world. Alzer hadn't paid close attention at the time, but looking now, there was no mistaking it.
Prince Charles. Almond's younger brother.
He hadn't expected to see him here. In his previous life, Prince Charles had pursued the path of Divine Commander, not scholar. His talent had been exceptional — arguably surpassing even Almond's. He had died young, sacrificing himself during a monster wave, his potential never fully realized. By Alzer's reckoning, the man was one of the most genuinely righteous people he had ever encountered among the royal bloodline — quick to help, slow to judge, nothing like the rest of his family. It was precisely that quality that had gotten him killed before his time.
Alzer had crossed paths with him exactly three times in his past life.
He watched the prince move through the crowd, already drawing attention and deference, and felt the outline of something useful take shape in his mind.
"You'll do," Alzer murmured. "You're going to be my chess piece."