Battle Frenzy

Although they held combat prowess with considerable importance, one cannot forget that the 10 great families were on the level of the federation’s parliament. Towards a ruler, having a properly functioning mind was much more important than fighting strength. This included the seemingly crude brother Lan, Divian, who was easily able to answer the questions in the test paper.

The 3-hour long captain arena quickly came to an end. For the past few arenas, the outside world was able to gain a read of the approximate standard of the participants. However, there weren’t any broadcasts or highlights of the captain arena. What’s more, one would only know the scores in an announcement 3 days later. Therefore, the outside world could only speculate about the final result. This led to their discussions and attention being focused in the official discussion forums of the CHF. Scouring through every post, people tried to form a somewhat obscure prediction and so-called internal information.

However, this was apparently useless, as the truly powerful squadrons had completely tossed the 2nd competition round at the back of their minds, so there was no need to consider them. Their absolute strength and self-confidence caused them to not need to care about their points and qualification. Having seen the performances of the various squadrons in the 2nd competition round, some people with acute foresight had already started to make preparations and counters in response.

Naturally, it was easy for people to do it if their target squadrons had simple formations. However, there were squadrons who had complicated formations. At this moment, the busiest squadron was the Divine Dragon Academy.

Being the leader for the Divine Dragon Academy, Zhao Zijun was held in great expectations by his family. The lineup of the Zhao Family for this CHF was definitely not weak. However, wanting to compete for the championship would be extremely difficult for them. There were too many strong opponents, with them even being unable to guarantee to enter the top 4. It’s definitely not enough to purely rely on victories and strength. What it required was for Zhao Zijin to devise and plan strategies. Changing impossibilities to possibilities was the strength of intelligence.

During the previous competition round, the actions of the other squadrons could be said to be rather direct. Be it trying their best or concealing their strength, there seemed to be no room for them to adjust their actions. However, the Divine Dragon Academy’s results of every earlier arenas had been controlled precisely by Zhao Zijun. Regardless of who he sent up to participate, the resulting score would always end up to be the same as what he had meticulously planned for. He wanted to control the Divine Dragon Academy so precisely that it would end up between 5th to 7th place in the score rankings for the 2nd competition round! Regardless of the lack of announcement by the CHF committee about the final competition arrangements, Zhao Zijun had his own understandings about them. After researching about the competition rules, placing his squadron within the 5th to the 7th position would allow them the greatest possibility to avoid meeting strong opponents in the earlier matches, which would be the best way to preserve the fighting strength of his squadron.

The ability to dissect the competition rules with such detail to predict up to 90% of the intentions the CHF committee had. People with such ability would already be considered outstanding leaders if placed within other squadrons. However, what Zhao Zijun wanted to do was clearly not only limited to these.

“It’s time to spill that little matter of the Seer Family,” said Zhao Zijun as he played with a string of rosewood prayer beads in his hands. Naturally, he wasn’t doing so to pray to the gods or worship Buddha, but due to the enjoyable faint fragrance coming from them. “Being a junior of an aristocratic family, yet beating up commoners and forcefully raping women. Hehe. This is a favorite topic of all the bored people in the federation. If they caught wind of such a matter, it’ll be impossible for that fellow to get rid of all of that filth even if he is to shed his skin. Without their mainstay heavy soldier, the threat from the Seer Family will be considerably weakened.”

“Yes! We can collaborate with that little boy. However, about that woman….she definitely won’t be willing to let it go.” replied his subordinate with some hesitation.

The “evil man rapes woman” matter that Zhao Zijun was referring about was actually just a small case of jealousy. It’s said that the girl in the picture was fickle minded, with the whole issue due to her previous boyfriend being too unintelligent, upright and wanting to make a big hoo-ha about it. Zhao Zijun had already got the “previous boyfriend” to his side, though it can’t be said about that girl.

“Unwilling to let it go?” Zhao Zijun’s action came to a stop, before faintly raised one eyelid. “It’s just a woman. There’re hundreds of thousands of methods to make her talk.”

Cold sweat immediately appeared on the forehead of his subordinate, who promptly replied in approval.

Zhao Zijun continued to play with his praying beads, “What’s the update on the investigation about those few people.”

“There isn’t any grease on Tariq, that heavy soldier from Vallance. He’s of commoner birth and had a background that’s considered to be clean. There’s local influence over there that had set their sights of him ever since he was little, helping him in studies, though they had their limitations in their scholarship to him. His father is a gambling addict, causing their family to be in quite a bit of debt.”

“Haha. The troubles of commoners…”Zhao Zijun laughed out before saying. “Find someone to contact that gambling addict of a father and give him some money, before letting him rack up even more debts. Don’t rush this matter, and just focus on controlling the gambling addict dad. That heavy soldier’s somewhat interesting. Although he isn’t a threat at all to us, there’s no harm in trying to obtain some future muscle.”

“There’s also that Grai from Tianjing Academy. That fellow’s more interesting. His information looks rather clean. He’s from the Christ Family located in the northern regions of the federation, a small aristocratic family that had appeared 100 years ago due to their small businesses in the northern region. At the peak of their prime, their family had only managed to reach the wealth of a county. They’re considered to be the most common of the common examples.” speaking till here, the expression of his subordinate turned splendid before continuing. “However, looking from the matters that this Grai had done, there’s something fishy about them.”

“Firstly, not long after starting school, he had donated to Tianjing Academy a library that’s quite big, valuing at about 300 thousand credits. This isn’t an amount that a small aristocratic family can pull out just like that. There lies the problem. It’ll be normal if he is weak. However, his performance was extremely good, so there’s no point in his donation. Secondly, although his family originates from the northern region, he had actually chosen to go to the northern regions as his choice for a backpacking holiday not long ago. After my investigation, I found out that he clearly wasn’t especially familiar with the ways and culture of the northern regions. Being a junior of a 100-year-old aristocratic family whose roots were from the northern regions, this doesn’t seem right. What’s more, there’s still the information about the few other people from Tianjing Academy…”

The Zhao family’s intelligence network wasn’t much inferior to the Mo Family. In fact, from certain unique channels, they were able to match up the latter. Therefore, it wasn’t strange at all for them to be able to obtain this information.

Zhao Zijun quietly listened to his subordinate, while the prayer beads moving in his hands continued to increase in speed.

Tianjing Academy had always been his secret target. Naturally, the main reason was due to Carolyn and Gui Hao. However, that “shit” squadron had actually managed to pull off movie-like miracles in succession, appearing as though they would be able to enter the final competition without needing his help at all. To him, it was essential for the Tianjing squadron to get promoted to the final competition. Regardless of the presence or absence of a relationship between Wang Zhong and Carolyn, Zhao Zijun had to make it into something. Gui Hao was completely perfect with his exception of being too much of a perfectionist. Therefore, Zhao Zijun wanted to insert a needle in to turn the clear water murky.

“Interesting…” Zhao Zijun gave a soft pinch at the ring of prayer beads in his hand. “Don’t care about Tianjing’s matter for the time being. It’ll be enough just to observe them. I hope they don’t disappoint me!”

…

Towards the majority of the squadrons, the days leading up to the announcement of the final scores were filled with nervousness and trepidation. The test paper scoring team of the CHF committee were in full swing. There were many outstanding answer scripts submitted. Although there was a considerable amount which had gotten rather high points for the first half of the questions, the real heavyweight was in the discussion question.

The people in charge of marking the answer scripts were high ranking scholars from the Federation’s Institute of Science. Diesel was overall in charge of the scientific aspect of the CHF. Frankly speaking, he wasn’t too satisfied with the participating students. To him, the current students have assumed that strength was everything. However, they have failed to understand that there was always a limit to one’s strength.

Contrary to that, the strength of science was limitless. What’s more, possessing an extremely far-reaching and wide view would be extremely helping for one’s individual strength. He didn’t mean for everyone to be able to become scientists, but for them to at least be able to have some standard in it.

Most of the participants have basically written about the common topics written by past students or nonsensical stuff. Therefore, there truly wasn’t many answer scripts that were able to catch his eye.

A large majority of the students wrote nonsensical rubbish, with the number having an adequate understanding and developing hypotheses towards runes and dimensions being extremely scarce. After looking through them, a few of the high ranking scholars could not help but to shake their heads in succession.

Those who came out from the Institute of Sciences all favoured knowledge over martial prowess. The question paper for the captain arena was created by the most outstanding bunch of people in the federation. However, the outcome was truly too disappointing and had also proved that the pursuit of martial strength was the greatest hindrance to the thirst and pursuit of scientific knowledge.

Naturally, there were also some pretty good ones in there, like Carolyn and Laura, who had rather deep and thorough understanding towards runic patterns and life. Their writings had shown a somewhat similar fit with the research results revealed by the old Potter. Naturally, this was extremely understandable, thus it wasn’t able to shock or astonish Diesel. After all, the future father of runes of life was Laura’s biological father. Other than the 2, there were also a few more people, like the Martial Ghosts Divine Emperor’s Gui Hao, who had a master like understanding of the current runic system in play within the federation. From it, he had managed to pan his focus into other scientific domains where he wasn’t good at, allowing him to explain his future thoughts about the development of runes on a macroscopic level.

It had to be said that even Diesel was captivated by Gui Hao’s thesis. What he was looking out for wasn’t purely about the level of one’s scientific knowledge, but how wide and far one’s vision was. Gui Hao’s incisive understanding towards the government and scientific structure of the federation made him appear completely unlike a youth that has not even reached 20 years of age. What’s more, his proposed concepts were considerably detailed and compliant to reason, causing Gui Hao’s score to be of the top 3 in Diesel’s preliminary rankings.

“Professor Diesel, would you mind taking a look at this script?” all of a sudden, a script marker handed a script over with a somewhat helpless expression plastered to his face.

“What’s the matter?” after marking a few good answer scripts, Diesel was in a slightly better mood than before.

“About this… I feel that I’m slightly unable to grade this script. I hope you can help to give your evaluation.”

The script marker was a high ranking scholar from the Institute of Sciences, therefore his vision was definitely top class. While reading this particular script, he had felt that the student was simply talking about a bunch of nonsense. However, the more he read, the more frightened he grew, as he started to be unable to judge whether the student was sprouting gibberish or something based on reason and logic. Nonetheless, this topic was indeed new and incomparable to the rest.

Feeling curious, Diesel took the script over while casually looking at the name written on it. “Tianjing Academy, Wang Zhong”.

Wang Zhong… where did I hear this name from?

“A hypothesis on the origin of the hyperdimension…” reading the topic, Diesel could not help but laugh out. “What a bold subject to write about. Although he writes in a modest way, it really appeared extremely conceited. Can a student even think about stuff like origins?”

The students of this generation are either ignorant, incompetent, or bite off more than they could chew. Questions about the hyperdimension were the main research topics in the Institute of Sciences. However, in the past dozen of years, they had not been able to advance their war past theory. Only the old Potter had managed to make a sudden leap in his comprehension, allowing them to make a quantum leap in progress.