So, I said these standardized exams were just like the US ones, right? Turns out they don’t take out any of their really “hard hitting” moves for the PZATs, like this was beyond crazy. I read about these subdimensions in the Xanxia novels back on Earth, but they were always shown as these “Once in a lifetime” or once a decade opening events. Then I came here and read about them, although it was stated they were more like private training ground, where you could fight hordes of monsters for the experience, although they didn’t get the same benefits as actual fighting, something to do with them being called “mirage worlds”. Turns out there is a GIANT testing subdimension, and the lines, I swear they are bad. Literally miles long, but they move fast, like really fast. Some Technique I hear keeps things going smoothly, forces you to “keep up”, when people in front of you start moving. At one point one of the people watching over the line, to prevent a problem from occurring, was told that it was decided the line needed to “speed up”, and he was needed to cast a speed and stamina buffing Technique, I thought it was overkill when I heard that, boy was I wrong. Somehow the miles long line I saw was just the overflow line, and once I saw the space open up, I saw people everyone begin sprinting, like a starving kid seeing the last bit of food, type of sprinting. Pretty sure I ran a 40 yard dash in under three seconds, I was gasping for air near the end there.

When Lady Zhou told me to some stretches in that morning before I left to the special testing building, I assumed that was some “calm your inner Qi” bs, not that I didn’t do it mind you, but seemed like a weird piece of advice at the time. Now? I feel like I should’ve trained for the waiting line. Then again, she also did want me cultivation higher, that sneaky little woman. This wasn’t even the last of the trickery either, as Lady Zhou told me they do these tests weekly because of how many people take, and fail, the test. What she didn’t tell me was that there are some weeks where the numbers are far higher, they call these weeks the Quarterly Testing Weeks. As you can tell, there are four of these weeks, but what you can’t tell, is that these weeks, your score in the test, and how fast you complete the tests, matter, since these are the only weeks where the scores and times are publicly tracked. Not just “oh my s”nephew got a 100 percent, great job”type of public tracking, like people bet on who would get certain places, how fast they got within a ten second range, that type. Pretty sure I saw a girl wearing clothes advertising some fast food chain in the capital, and I thought the U.S went crazy with sponsorships. So yea, I’m here just mouth wide open at the absurdity, absolutely certain Bao Bao and Lady Zhou made a bet on my reaction. After I kept seeing one of the line proctors, I became certain there was a betting pool somewhere about me, knowing for sure that proctor was taking notes on me.

Somewhere along the way I began to get desensitized to it, that is until I saw my name on the Leaderboards. I cursed Lady Zhou yet again when my name rose into the top 500. Admittedly that didn’t seem as high to me, until I did a very rough counting of the people based on how fast people were being processed, as I had already been here a couple hours. That massive sprint I had gone through earlier, that had happened three more times, so every half hour. Then I noticed those sprints coincided the endings of a testing session. Some quick mental math and damn, ten thousand people have gone through so far. With these only being maybe a fifth of the way through the day, it meant that there was going to be fifty thousand people going through on this Quarterly Testing Week. After I did some maths in the percentage the betting ranks were putting me I was amazed. I, an unknown kid to the Capital and Provincial elites, was expected to make the top tenth of a percent. I saw some rumblings when my name came up, apparently I knocked off some super wealthy merchants son. Do merchants have a Young Master? Apparently they do, some Butler came up to me and showed me a mirror, turns out it is some “ Mirror Link” device that acts like videochatting. You can guess how that went, “ Young Master this, Young Master that” almost bored to death of all the threats to my life he was making if I didn’t throw the test and kowtow to him. Despite coming from the Capital and everything, this guy was only a rank 2 young master, I laughed when he admitted that. One [Young Masters Right] and he was gone, admittedly the little fella fought the skill a bit, but I won out in the end. Poor kid was crying after that, luckily the kid was very far behind me, so I didn’t need to worry about interference. With all this hype and the extra practice I did, the test wasn’t actually hard at all. Looking back on it, I found out people who are like me, take the PZAT dozens of times before they get a good grade and feel comfortable with making a high place on the leaderboard, and I my score on the PZAT would’ve given me a top 5 percent score apparently. So that last minute cramming I did? Yea that got me in the top 500. In fact it got me to the 420th spot.

“Nice” was all I said when I saw that. After all that, I started seeing people congregate around, and locate, everyone in the top 500. I moped out of that testing hell dimension before people figured out who I was. I got lucky when I got back, Lady Zhou and Bao Bao were out on some errand again, presumably cover for a family meeting about me. I made myself a mini feast, even snuck some rice wine, and got rowdy in my room before passing out for the night.

[Path of Knowledge Rank 10]

[Path upgraded, Path of the Scholar Rank 10

[Technique: Scholars Filing Cabinet obtained]

[Path of the Young Master Rank 4]

[ Path of the Young Master Rank 5]

[Technique l: Let’s Trade Pointers obtained]