The day of the tournant.
Sam went to the Apollo Academy at the dawn. The main gate of the academy is flooded. Not with just participants, but with hundreds of participants who registered for the tournant.
Even before they could enter the gate, one of the Elders ca out and said.
"This year, the number of participants has increased by many tis compared to the previous years. So, we made special arrangents. The preliminaries are going to be held within the Hub's simulation area.
All the participants will be given the sa simulation. In an environnt where they need to fight beasts of a very special kind. The more beasts you kill, the higher your score is going to be and the top 16 participants will enter the final tournant.
Now, all of you please collect your participation token in the academy and go to the Hub."
The Elder announced and left.
The participants sward the academy and started collecting the participation tokens from many special counters arranged for them. Everyone who took the token went to Hub.
As they co, they are imdiately allotted to a simulation room.
There are around a hundred and fifty simulation rooms within the hub and all of them are filled instantly. Pearl who also ca for the tournant didn't go with the first batch of students, instead, she is busily communicating with her team mbers.
She is on the look out for all the marked targets and gauges their performance. She is fine with going last as long as she establishes her goals. There is no point in trying to hurry since the playing field will be equal for everyone.
To her surprise though so of the candidates on her list didn't appear for the tournant.
They registered for the tournant, but they just didn't show up. This made her a bit stumped as she didn't understand why they even registered if they weren't coming. The confusion ate her up a bit.
For a control freak, unpredicted moves from the target is a nightmare.
Sam who is keeping an eye on her himself, saw her confused and frustrated expression and smiled.
After so ti, the participants who entered the rooms in the first batch started coming out one by one. When the person ca out, the spot was imdiately taken away by soone else. The tests are going out pretty quickly.
After around an hour, all the mbers in the first batch ca out, except for one.
Five elental king. One of the marked candidates in Pearl's list.
He is the last mber in the first batch and he stayed there even after so of the participants who went in later ca out. When he ca out, he looked pretty beat up. He looked like he was carrying the ntal and physical fatigue of over a thousand battles.
The only good thing about it is that he didn't have any actual injuries on his body.
So, the recovery would be good.
Five Elental King took the support of so of his classmates and walked over slowly while taking so dicine. Pearl locked his eyes on him, trying to get any information from his body language.
But to her surprise, halfway through to the exit he changed his direction and walked towards her.
He stopped right in front of her. Even when her lackeys tried to stop him from approaching, Pearl herself let them be and looked at Five Elental King curiously.
"Do you really think you can have everything under your control? You can keep an eye on and my peers in my own academy and you try to record every single detail of our lives and you even arrange things so that we would be disturbed ntally and we wouldn't know a thing that it was you behind all of this?
What do you think of yourself as?
You might be smart, but not as much as you think you are.
Make sure that your lackeys don't cross the top sixteen and have to compete with in the tournant. If I et one of your lackeys, I will snap them in half."
He walked away, ignoring the shocked expression on Pearl's face.
Her body shuddered uncontrollably. Five elental king just dictated her whole plan, the whole secret plan that she had been working on from her secret room for more than a month in just five seconds.
When he thought of how she believed everything was in her control and the look of ridicule the five elental king gave her, she felt like her whole world was crumbling.
The competition went on with her still in shock and panic.
Her mind worked at an insane speed as she thought of how Five Elental King might have known about her plan. He is looking for flaws in her execution. And while she stayed in those thoughts, it is finally her turn to enter the simulation room.
She is one of the last few that are left there.
By the ti she ca out the preliminaries would be over and they would be ready to go to the next and final round.
Pearl entered the simulation room in the sa daze. She finally woke up when a gust of chilly wind hit her face.
The area simulated looked like a Tundra region, but the whole thing was dark. Even with her heightened senses as a divine plane cultivator, she could barely see far in that darkness and her spiritual senses were being hindered by so force.
Then only she realize that that mysterious force is not just hindering the spiritual senses, but her ntal will as well as her physical state.
She could feel this weird force trying to enter her body and disrupt her circulation.
The feeling is also very weird. It is like her energy's purity is being compromised. It is very similar to corrosive effect.
And the cold, if not for her water elental affinity she would have had a hard ti from shivering. The atmosphere is surprising to think that Divine Plane cultivators would feel this much cold. The simulation effect is indeed beyond her expectations.
But that is just the start.
Because the next mont she saw a pair of ice blue eyes appear in front of her.
A cat-like figure appeared from the darkness. It was barely twenty ters before her and Pearl wasn't even able to sense it until then.
When that cat ca closer, she got a better look. It looked like a leopard. It has white fur with ice blue colored hue and black spots.
The leopard looked nacing with its mouth wide open. And that mouth is glistening with blood-red color. Ice energy roared around the leopard as it jumped at Pearl.
Pearl hurriedly created a water shield in front of her.
The leopard's strike crashed the barrier and pushed Pearl back. The attack is much more powerful than she initially thought and she noticed one more thing. When the claw made contact with the water barrier, the water froze before it broke and turned into smithereens.
The leopard didn't stop.
It leaped at Pearl and for the next few seconds all she could do was dodge, finally, she regained so of her sense and started fighting back.
As the leopard leaped at her, she created the water barrier once again, just when the cat was about to hit the barrier, it turned into a water spear and drove straight into the belly of the cat.
Since the barrier disappeared, the claw almost hit Pearl on her face, if not for the spear driving the leopard away, she would have been hit.
But the leopard didn't die. The spear didn't manage to penetrate its skin. It barely scraped past the upper layers.
The leopard showed excellent agility as it used so weird movent techniques to attack Pearl. But after a few exchanges, Pearl managed to nail down the Leopard with water spears stabbing it in the eyes, mouth, and nose to the rear of its body.
The leopard lay down on the ground and blood spilled out while the water spears solidified and beca ice.
Pearl heaved a sigh as she looked around and the next mont, she felt a stabbing pain on her left heel.
She looked down and saw a giant snake with ice-blue skin which acted as a perfect camouflage in that land of ice biting into her heel.
The bit is so strong that her boots which would put a high-grade armor to a sha were easily penetrated. Even the formations inscribed on it were of no use.
She started losing the sense of feeling in her leg and felt an ice-cold sensation creep up her knee and thigh.
He hurriedly jumped up.
The snake still held on as it injected ice elental poison into her body.
Pearl slashed it with a water blade and killed it off, before taking a potion that was specially made for her.
She once again regained the feel on her leg. But there is no relief because this is just the start.
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