—THWACK!
A wooden blade struck a young man's shoulder. He staggered, but before he could recover, Yohan was already upon him and a second strike landed against his chest.
"Enough."
The examiner stepped between them, raising a hand.
"Candidates, retreat."
Yohan lowered his sword. Across from him, his opponent stared back with a grimace, visibly bewildered.
Yohan felt much the same.
He glanced down at the wooden sword in his hand.
...That was it?
He had expected to struggle. At the very least, he had expected to feel nervous. Instead, every movement had come naturally.
He hadn't consciously calculated the distance, timing, or even the angle of his strikes. His body had simply responded before his thoughts could catch up.
Nevertheless, one duel can't decide everything.
Yohan stepped out of the arena as the next pair was called.
A portly, slightly younger middle-aged man sat at a wide desk-bench at some distance from the arena, his thinning hair receding slightly above a broad forehead and a neatly trimmed moustache framing his upper lip. He watched each duel with a measured expression, occasionally writing something into a digital notepad as soon as a match ended. This was where the first stage of the NMAE was being conducted, on the main ground of the school.
"Candidate 19 and Candidate 25, come forward!"
The assistant examiner called out, and two more students stepped into the arena.
Yohan left his wooden weapon on the deck at the edge of the arena and took a seat on one of the metal-framed chairs among the other participants. Some waited nervously for their turn, while others appeared almost eager. A total of forty-four students had participated, four more than Yohan had expected.
Nearly half of them, however, seemed to be here less for selection but more for the sheer thrill of fighting or love of the game, they said. Violence, for reasons Yohan couldn't entirely comprehend, appeared to be entertainment to them. The examination simply offered a convenient opportunity to indulge those impulses under the respectable guise of career ambition or personal development.
For many of them, getting selected was merely a secondary objective. Yohan found that slightly concerning and slightly stupid.
And, of course, every candidate there was male since Yohan's current school was an all-boys institution.
As he sat there, he noticed a few students glancing at him—their expressions hovering somewhere between apprehension and open displeasure, almost bordering on outright antagonism. Yohan paid them little attention.
He remained indifferent, though a faint frown had frozen on his face. He had already been in a foul mood since completing that nasty ritual the previous day. But after everything that had happened since then, his mood had only grown darker.
The first reason was nothing short of a straight-up mockery of all the deranged effort and hardship he had gone through.
Today's phase of the exam was nothing more than a test of basic skill, tactics, natural talent, and physical ability. At this stage, everything was deliberately kept crude and straightforward.
No Qi.
In other words, using Qi was strictly prohibited.
It hadn't been mentioned anywhere in the examination guidelines that this phase would exclude Qi, but considering that the NMAE was ultimately meant for Awakened Seekers, particularly in its later stages, Yohan had naturally assumed that he would at least be allowed to use his Qi from the very first phase.
Apparently not.
What made him want to both growl in frustration and feel a little proud was the realization that he might very well be the only student here capable of drawing out Qi in the first place.
Seeking the Core and actually awakening it had been far more arduous and rare than he had initially assumed, especially among students from a school of this tier. Most of the people sitting around him came from roughly the same economic background as he did, and for families like theirs, becoming an Awakened Seeker wasn't exactly the most practical career choice.
The first phase didn't even require an entrance fee or any particularly demanding qualification, which explained why so many students had simply come to test their luck.
It was obvious why most lower-middle-class families, which made up a large portion of the students here, preferred civilian careers over becoming Awakened. A career as a Seeker demanded years of training, enormous resources, relentless effort and above all, a willingness to take risks that simply weren't worth it for most ordinary families.
Yet being Awakened came with advantages that civilian professions simply couldn't offer. Their opportunities were far more versatile and, in many ways, everlasting. They weren't restricted to a particular company, profession, or even a country's official institutions. An Awakened could find work almost anywhere in the world, provided they possessed the ability and reputation to back it up.
Officially registered Awakened were even more valuable. There were certain tasks they could perform with a flexibility that even the latest technological advancements still couldn't quite match.
So, in the current age, becoming Awakened wasn't an urgent necessity for survival rather…one of the necessities for survival in broader perspective. Even prosperous for some.
Yohan, however, hadn't even figured out the Nexus Principle behind channeling and manipulating Qi, let alone learned how to manifest it at will.
Not to mention, he was here to attend the first phase of the exam immediately after emerging from that surreal ordeal of Awakening.
Yet Yohan was still apprehensive about accepting that he had actually awakened his Core. In fact, a part of him almost wished he hadn't. That was another reason for the disquiet and trepidation lingering in him since he woke up this morning from what he preferred to call a basic sleep.
The reason for this was how he awakened his core.
Normally, a Seeker would Seek the Essence and gradually awaken their Core, but Seeking wasn't the entirety of the Awakening process.
Once a Seeker reached a certain threshold through Seeking and shaping their Core, there would eventually come a moment when they realized they had reached the threshold of Awakening. From there, they were only one step away from becoming truly Awakened and that final step required them to sleep with as clear and placid mind as possible. Because what happened during that sleep was considered the most crucial part of the entire process.
The Seeker would dream.
This was known as Dream Manifestation.
Dream Manifestation was considered the most vital stage because the dream a person experienced at the very brink of Awakening would usually give them an inkling, a revelation, or at least an intimation of the Innate Trait they were about to awaken.
Only after experiencing that dream and undergoing the subsequent Blossoming would a person truly become Awakened.
However, Yohan's method of Seeking had been anything but ordinary.
That damn ritual had apparently replaced both the conventional Seeking process and the Awakening dream.
Ordinary Seekers experienced Blossoming near the end of their sleep, which meant they usually remembered little more than a hazy dream and a vague residue of whatever they had experienced during Awakening.
Yohan, however, had experienced it while fully conscious.
The ritual hadn't allowed his consciousness to rest during the transition. It had dragged him through the transformation itself, forcing him to remain lucid while his Core underwent the fundamental process of Awakening.
So what was the problem?
Being lucid during Blossoming wasn't necessarily a problem. It might even have been an advantage.
The real problem was what was supposed to come before it.
Dream Manifestation.
Blossoming was supposed to be the culmination of the manifestation of one's Innate Trait. The dream was what gave a Seeker their first clue about what that Trait actually was.
And Yohan?
He didn't have the slightest inkling of what his Trait was. That was why he had been so reluctant to accept that he had truly awakened.
He had even tried sleeping again afterward, hoping that perhaps the ritual had merely disrupted the usual sequence and that his Dream Manifestation would come naturally later.
…It didn't.
Not a single damn dream or even a fragment he could remember having.
Which left Yohan with a rather unpleasant possibility.
He might have awakened his Core without ever discovering his Innate Trait.
And if that was actually possible...
He might have just fucked himself for life.
Of course, there were other improvised ways of gaining some insight into one's Trait, such as Hit-and-Trial or Innate Trait Divination. Neither, however, could be considered more reliable than Dream Manifestation. Even Innate Trait Divination often felt less like an answer and more like being handed another riddle.
Innate Traits were the innate specialities of an individual, something that couldn't simply be learned or acquired through ordinary means. Every Seeker possessed a Trait that was more or less unique to them. Similarities could exist, particularly because of lineage, but the abilities and attributes granted by a Trait could only be obtained through the natural manifestation that accompanied Awakening, certain rituals, potions, or other enigmatic means.
Innate Trait was the umbrella term.
Beneath it were two primary expressions: Innate Attributes and Innate Abilities.
The Trait was the root.
The Attribute or Ability was how that root manifested after Awakening.
An Innate Attribute was a permanent or semi-permanent quality of a person's body, mind, soul or Qi. It generally didn't require conscious activation and simply existed as part of the individual.
An Innate Ability, on the other hand, was a specific supernatural function that could be consciously used, triggered under particular conditions, or sometimes activated instinctively.
Typically, when someone awakened their Core, they awakened a single Innate Trait. That Trait could then manifest in several forms.
An Attribute-type Trait manifested primarily through an Innate Attribute.
An Ability-type Trait manifested primarily through an Innate Ability.
And a Composite Trait possessed both.
There was, however, another category.
A Latent Trait.
These were Traits that a person failed to discern or decipher during Dream Manifestation. Instead of revealing themselves clearly, they remained dormant or obscure, sometimes for years and sometimes for an entire lifetime, unless the Seeker eventually encountered a clear revelation through pure coincidence, an abnormal experience, or some other extraordinary circumstance.
Strangely enough, Latent Traits often turned out to be the rarest and most unique. Sometimes, completely unprecedented even.
Unfortunately, there was another side to that rarity.
If Yohan failed to gain any insight into his Trait despite already becoming Awakened, there was only one category he could be placed in.
A Latent Trait holder.
Since unlike others his case was completely different, that sounded absolutely terrible than fortunate.
The manifestation of a Trait depended on multiple factors: bloodline or lineage, the nature of one's Core, subconscious will, soul, mind, physiology, and several other aspects of the individual.
There were also exceptional factors that could influence a Trait, such as the environment in which the Awakening took place, one's accumulated experiences, ritualistic experiments, or even some form of external resonance with another creature or existence. Those, however, belonged to the realm of extremely rare and unorthodox cases.
Among all these factors, lineage was believed to exert the strongest influence on a Trait. It established a hereditary tendency, or perhaps more accurately, a certain Trait spectrum. Someone born into a particular bloodline could therefore develop a Trait similar to those of their predecessors. Similar, however, didn't necessarily mean identical.
It's kinda like this, as far as I learned.
Lineage determines the potential. The mind interprets it, the soul anchors it, the subconscious distorts it, the body gives it form, and... the Core decides what survives or... what attunes with its nature, I guess.
He scratched his forehead.
Ugh... am I really supposed to learn all this before even getting admitted to the academy?
A faint sigh escaped him.
Then what the hell are they going to teach me there?
Don't tell me I'll end up having to research this stuff at some ridiculous biomolecular level.
As Yohan watched the other candidates clash one after another, the frown on his face deepened. Half of his attention remained on the matches, while the other half wandered back to his own situation.
There was nothing particularly remarkable about the candidates from his school. Their movements and fighting styles looked excessively mundane from Yohan's perspective.
Guess I had set my standards a little too high after watching those prodigies on the internet...
Most of them seemed far more concerned with how hard they could swing a wooden sword at their opponent and injure them than with actually figuring out how to win or get better scores.
Typical human behavior. Yohan casually slicked a few loose strands of hair back with his fingers.
Even this phase of the examination was divided into several sections, though the overall focus remained on the students' physical capabilities, combat skills, and natural talent. There was no simple concept of winning or losing here. Only the three highest-performing candidates would be selected, and those three would proceed to prepare for the next phase.
Yohan had already done fairly well in the physical tests.
Actually, very well.
He had scored the second-highest overall, particularly in the sprint, endurance, strength, and reaction tests.
Now the students were being put through formal duels to evaluate their balance, coordination, forms, techniques, and practical combat skills.
The whole examination was rather simplistic by Yohan's standards.
What surprised him more, however, was how seriously it was actually being conducted. He had expected the supervisor to sit around half-asleep, occasionally scribbling something down without giving much thought to the students in front of him.
Instead, the man was genuinely paying attention.
He watched every movement, made notes after each duel, and seemed to actually care about the candidates' performances.
Huh. At least they're taking this seriously.
For the first round, the matchups were decided by randomly drawn numbers. Once the round was over, however, the same students could be called back into the arena for another duel regardless of whether they had won or lost their previous match. Their next matchups depended on the scores and overall judgment given by the supervisor.
So, in the end, simply winning a duel wasn't enough.
Yohan had no idea how many students would qualify for the next round, or how many would remain after that.
One thing was certain, though.
Only three out of the forty-four would ultimately be selected.
Yohan had dominated his first duel with barely any struggle. Now he simply waited to see whether the supervisor would call his name again, his eyes cold and blank as he watched the matches continue.
He had dominated his first duel with barely any struggle, now waiting for his second round if he qualified as per the supervisor judgement with cold blank eyes.
"Everyone stay ready after the exam, it's going to be super...fun...!"
One of the students standing around the chairs said it in a hushed voice to his friends. Yet Yohan could tell the remark was meant for him.
The direction of the voice, coupled with the faint edge of his perception, made that much obvious.
Yohan gave a brief, blank look to his side toward the speaker.
Of course.
It was the glasses guy.
The same one who always seemed to be looking for an excuse to provoke him. He wasn't even participating in the examination, just merely standing among several other students from the same grade, watching the proceedings since students of this grade were allowed to observe the exam.
"What are you looking at, sucker?!" the guy said, his voice still low but visibly agitated as he took a step toward Yohan.
Yohan simply turned his gaze back toward the duel unfolding in the arena with indifferent calm—not responding at all.
A few minutes passed.
His attention eventually drifted toward the large analog clock near the principal's room and noticeboard, its face clearly visible even from a distance.
Evening was only a couple of hours away.
Just then, several names were called out, one of them was... Yohan's.
A faint smirk surfaced on his face with a curt sigh —turned his eyes toward the supervisor and murmured under his breath,
"It sure is going to be fun."