Chapter 33: The Written Exam

Chapter 33: Chapter 33: The Written Exam

After such an astonishing result from Aegon, Clara, Marcus, and Zane were blow away. They had thought this distant cousin of theirs was of commoner breed because his father was a commoner, but from the time they learned he had awakened an A-Rank Grimoire, their expectations of him had grown a lot.

?And now, seeing such an incredible result on the Mana Aptitude Test, they had no choice but to look at him differently.

?Even the grumbling Marcus was quiet as Aegon stepped down from the obelisk, shining under the spotlight.

?He had inherently thought he was superior, but now he was learning the true reality.

?Bloodline cannot dictate everything.

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By the time the sun reached its zenith above the Imperial Capital, the final batch of applicants stepped away from the Pillars of Solomon.

?Out of the 100,000 hopeful youths who had marched through the academy gates at dawn, 70,000 had already been ruthlessly culled.

Both failed nobles and commoners were forced to exit the Academy with tearful faces.

The remaining 30,000 candidates who passed, were smiling joyfully.

But suddenly, Chief Proctor Ronin’s voice thundered from the sky as he gestured toward a colossal domed structure.

?"Do not celebrate yet, maggots! Surviving the first stage only means you have enough mana to serve as cannon fodder! Now, move into the Grand Auditorium for the Second Stage: the Written Examination! You have fifteen minutes to find your assigned seats before the doors are sealed!"

?Without wasting a breath, Aegon, Clara, Zane, and Marcus moved with the surging crowd toward the towering marble coliseum.

?Stepping through the bronze archways of the Grand Auditorium felt like walking into the belly of a hollowed-out mountain.

Eanhanced by high-tier spatial expansion sorcery, the interior stretched far beyond its exterior dimensions. Exactly 30,000 individual desks of polished dark oak floated in midair, arranged in ratusan concentric tiers that spiraled all the way up toward a vaulted ceiling painted with ancient constellations.

?Following the glowing numbers on their registration badges, the four cousins separated to take their seats across different rows.

Aegon stepped onto a small levitation platform that carried him up to Desk 4,812 near the middle tier.

?Below the central podium, twelve elderly scholars wearing the silver-trimmed robes of the Imperial Scholar Council stood in a circle.

As the last applicant sat down and the heavy bronze doors slammed shut with a deafening boom, the head scholar raised his staff and struck the marble floor.

?Hum!

?A translucent dome of golden runic light expanded across the entire auditorium, isolating every floating desk within a three-meter barrier of silence and visual distortion.

?"The anti-cheating array is now active. After your 3-meter barrier, every other desk will appear blurred to your eyes, and not a single whisper of sound or mana can pass through. If anyone attempts to summon their Grimoire or probe the barrier with spiritual energy, your paper will burn to ash on the spot. You have two hours to complete all one hundred questions. Begin!"

?With a synchronized snap of the scholars’ fingers, a thick five-page parchment booklet and a self-inking raven quill materialized on all 30,000 desks at once.

?Around the hall, the confident smiles on the faces of the surviving noble heirs lasted for less than ten seconds.

?The moment the examinees flipped open the first page, a unanimous tension spread over the auditorium. Even through the visual distortion of the barriers, Aegon could see silhouettes all across the tiers stiffening in their seats.

?Three rows down to the left, Marcus stared at the first section as if the words were written in an alien language, cold sweat already soaking through the back of his collar. A few tiers higher, Zane was furiously biting his lower lip, his quill hovering frozen above the papers.

Even Clara, who had spent the past six months memorizing every royal textbook in the Noiré house, saw her confident expression crumble by the time she reached the bottom of the second page.

?The Imperial Scholar Council had not designed a test for ten-year-old children. They had drafted a brutal academic gauntlet meant to humiliate anyone who relied solely on rote memorization.

?Aegon, however, leaned back comfortably in his oak chair and scanned the first page with a faint smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

?Question 14: During the War of the Broken Crown, why did the Third Emperor abandon the impregnable fortress of Highvale to establish the current Imperial Capital within a low-lying foundation? Explain the strategic and arcane reasoning.

?To 99 percent of the youths in the room, this was a tricky question. Every standard history book across the thirty-three kingdoms taught that the Third Emperor moved the capital to encourage trade along the central rivers. Anyone who wrote that textbook answer would receive zero points.

?Aegon didn’t even need to think. He had spent three sleepless nights in his past life designing the geography of the Imperial Capital.

?Picking up his raven quill, he wrote smoothly across the parchment. With the invisible Ring of the Focused Mind keeping his thoughts crystal clear, his hand moved with effortless rhythm. He detailed how the foundation sat directly atop the convergence of seven subterranean dragon-mana veins, allowing the Third Emperor to stabilize the floating mana towers and power the three concentric city walls without draining the royal treasury.

?Without pausing for a single second, Aegon flipped to the second and third pages, which covered Arcane Geometry and Elemental Counter-Theory.

?Question 47: An enemy caster deploys a triple-layered B-Rank Glacial Prison using sixty-four frost runes. Assuming your mana reserve is thirty percent lower than your opponent’s and you only possess a C-Rank Fireball spell, calculate the exact geometric weak point of the frost array and the mana frequency required to shatter the barrier in a single strike.

?Across the auditorium, thousands of examinees were frantically sketching messy diagrams in the margins, pulling at their hair as their calculations collapsed into dead ends. Even prodigies from the capital’s grand duchies were sweating profusely, struggling to compute 64 interlocking runic variables under time pressure.

?To Aegon, it was no different from elementary arithmetic. He was the one who had invented the magic system’s runic logic in the first place, and after spending days inscribing microscopic circuits with ATUM, his grasp of arcane geometry surpassed most of the scholars standing at the podium below.

?Scratch, scratch, scratch.

?The tip of Aegon’s quill glided across the paper like a skating blade on ice. He didn’t even bother using the scratch paper. He wrote down the precise coordinates of the nineteenth and forty-second frost nodes, followed by the exact harmonic ratio needed to destabilize the array from within.

?By the thirty-minute mark, while the vast majority of the thirty thousand applicants were still wrestling with the first forty questions, Aegon turned to the final page: Grimoire Origin and Ancient Lore.

?Here, his eyes narrowed slightly as he read the hundredth and final question at the bottom of the sheet.

?Question 100: According to the orthodoxy of the Imperial Scholar Council, what is the theoretical limit of a Grimoire’s rank, and why do unrecorded ’Black-Page’ or ’Origin-Class’ Grimoires violate the natural laws of the world?

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