Chương 90: Book 2 Chapter 4: Exceeds

The next day, Mo Jian was back in the examination hall. The second day of the Imperial Examination was the one he had been quietly looking forward to. The first phase had tested reading comprehension, classical knowledge, and the ability to write coherently for hours without one's wrist giving out, all reasonable measures of a person's fitness for civil office, and all things Mo Jian had spent genuine effort preparing for. He had no illusions about his performance. He'd done well enough, but he hadn't excelled.

This phase was different. This phase tested cultivation. Since the format placed candidates of the same realm together, the second round was meant to assess depth of skill rather than raw power, or so the official literature claimed. In practice, that principle had a fatal flaw: sub-stages were not considered. An early-stage Core Formation cultivator might be examined alongside someone at the late stage. Age and experience weren't factored in either.

Which meant Mo Jian, who had been deliberately holding himself back from advancing to Nascent Soul for months, and who currently sat at a level of cultivation that could generously be called the peak of Core Formation if you squinted and didn't ask too many questions, was about to be compared against ordinary Core Formation cultivators. So, he was not, technically speaking, worried. He was not worried about Bai Ning, either.

She was a genuine, veritable genius, and even though she had only entered Core Formation less than a year ago, her strength and skill were already such that he would confidently wager on her victory against a mid-stage Core Formation cultivator. More importantly, her grasp of cultivation mechanics was even stronger than his. He might possess greater knowledge and power, but proportionally speaking, she shone brighter.

Thus, he walked into the examination hall with the particular stride of a man who has nothing to prove and is extremely aware of it. And no, he was not swaggering, no matter what some people might say. The room he was led to was unlike the hall from yesterday.

Wide and handsomely appointed, it had the feel of a place that took itself seriously: tapestries and scrolls on every wall, small braziers dangling from the ceiling beams on lacquered chains, incense that smelled faintly of chrysanthemum and pine drifting in lazy spirals through the sunlit air. Tall windows along one side spilled afternoon light across the floorboards in long golden rectangles, sending dust motes drifting like slow, drowsy stars.

Near the door sat a low table covered with an assortment of objects Mo Jian did not recognize. A small silvery pot puffed faint steam. A bell with no clapper. A bowl of softly hissing liquid. A polished metal block threaded with snowflake-like veins. Other instruments he had no name for. He gave them a brief, curious look, then forgot about them. Because the room had been divided in two. A sheet of what appeared to be ordinary rice paper stretched from wall to wall across the chamber's midpoint.

Everything beyond it was shadow. He could make out a seated silhouette on the other side, the vague suggestion of a person, but when his spiritual sense reached toward the screen, it stopped dead, as though it had walked into a cliff face. The silhouette stirred.

"Welcome, candidate. Are you familiar with the particulars of this exam?" The voice was just as ambiguous and distorted as the shadow. Mo Jian could not have identified the speaker even if he tried; it sounded completely neutral, like a stone given the ability to speak. Mo Jian blinked once before answering.

"Only in the most general sense, honored… examiner. If it is not too much trouble, I would appreciate an explanation." The figure behind the screen nodded.

"Of course." A small shuffle of papers from behind the screen; the examiner settling in.

"The specifics of the second phase are kept deliberately vague. There is little that preparation can accomplish here, beyond simply being a skilled cultivator." The shadow shifted slightly, posture straightening.

"I will conduct a series of trials to assess your control over qi, the weight and stability of your spiritual sense, the condition of your natal artifact and the strength of your bond with it, and your practical proficiency across foundational disciplines: alchemy, talisman crafting, puppet control, formation work, and others." A brief, practiced pause.

"All information you reveal here remains fully confidential. This screen ensures that I have no knowledge of your identity, background, or sect affiliation. Your evaluation will be entirely impartial." Another pause. This one felt like punctuation.

"Do you have any questions?" Many, but none he particularly wanted to voice aloud. Besides, the most important one, about how confidential confidential actually was, had already been answered to his satisfaction. In any case, he was not especially worried about his secrets getting out. In fact, considering what he intended to do in the long term, some of those secrets becoming known was inevitable. It might even help him eventually; a strong reputation would be a boon in court.

The only secret he absolutely did not want revealed was that of the Netherworld Scorpion. Even then, he was not overly concerned about it during this examination. It was possible to determine whether a natal artifact housed an artifact spirit, but any technique used on the Heaven-Enshrouding Ding would only return a blank result. The Netherworld Scorpion could not be sensed by anyone except him. It was a true trump card, one that rendered any opponent at the Nascent Soul realm or below a trivial challenge. Though…

even if he had never had the opportunity to test it, and hopefully never would, against an immortal, he suspected it would not work. Putting that thought aside, Mo Jian simply shook his head, ready to begin.

"Then we will begin." The examiner's voice settled into the brisk, professional cadence of someone who had done this many times and expected it to proceed smoothly.

"Please generate a qi light and steadily increase its intensity until I instruct you to stop." Simple enough. Mo Jian raised one hand, palm up, and lit a spark of cerulean qi above it. He let it grow at a measured pace, feeding it in careful increments, watching the color shift. Pale blue to sky-blue. Sky-blue to periwinkle. Periwinkle to ultramarine, then to cobalt, then to a deep and saturated navy that threw blue shadows across the opposite wall.

"Impressive control," the examiner said, voice carrying a note of professional approval.

"You may continue increasing." He continued. Navy shaded toward midnight. Midnight toward something that was blue only in the strictest technical sense, so saturated it was almost violet, almost black, the color of deep ocean water seen from very far above. The light had become bright enough that the room's warm afternoon gold had been entirely displaced by cold cerulean. He was, he realized, starting to blind himself slightly.

"That will-" the examiner began. Mo Jian increased it once more, just a fraction.

"-that will be sufficient," the examiner finished, in a tone that had shifted almost imperceptibly from professional approval to something shocked. Mo Jian extinguished the light. A pause from behind the screen. Then the quiet scratch of something being written.

"Very good," the examiner said, back to smooth.

"Next, please take the block of qi-holding metal from the table and imbue it with as much qi as you can manage. The shifting of the snowflake pattern indicates the strength of your qi." Mo Jian glanced toward the table and immediately spotted the block of metal threaded with snowflake-like patterns he had noticed earlier. Walking over, he picked it up. It was cool and faintly textured, clearly a variant of Bin Steel, though one he hadn't encountered before.

The snowflake veins running through it were delicate, fine as frost on glass. He held it up and began feeding qi into it at a modest trickle. The patterns on its surface shifted immediately. The crystalline branches split and spread across the metal's surface, dividing and subdividing until they covered the entire block in an intricate lattice. Where two patterns met, they merged and re-formed into new shapes entirely.

The color shifted, from dull gray to pale silver, from silver toward something almost white, clean and cold as winter light. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"Excellent," the examiner said warmly.

"The clarity of the pattern suggests a remarkably stable qi foundation. Please continue at the same-" Mo Jian increased the flow by the smallest amount he could manage, worried that holding back too much might reflect poorly on his score. The block exploded. It went with a sharp crack, like a ceramic pot dropped on stone, and the fragments scattered in every direction at once, clattering against the walls, skittering across the floor, bouncing off the tapestries.

One piece struck the rice-paper screen with a dull thunk and dropped to the floorboards. Silence. Mo Jian stood with his empty hand still raised in the correct position, palm up, at exactly the right height to have been holding a block of metal. He lowered it slowly, his ears a little red from embarrassment.

"... You broke it," the examiner said. It was not a question. It also didn't sound like a reprimand. It sounded like a man looking at something that should not have happened and attempting to make sense of it.

"How? That level of qi is not something an ordinary Core Formation cultivator should possess." Mo Jian coughed lightly.

"Ah, I've been at the final stage for a while. Nearly at the peak, you might say."

"That block," the examiner said, in a careful, controlled tone, "is rated to the full peak of Core Formation. It has never broken before." A pause.

"In fifteen years."

"I see," Mo Jian said. He tried an excuse, "Maybe it was faulty?"

"Mm." The sound was entirely neutral. Mo Jian had the impression of frantic writing. Then, with the quiet decisiveness of someone who has chosen to simply move forward: "Please summon your natal artifact and hold it above the steam from the silver pot. The steam's color indicates the condition of your artifact and the depth of your bond with it."

Determined to remain inconspicuous for the rest of the test, Mo Jian summoned the Heaven-Enshrouding Ding from his body in a muted flicker of light, keeping it shrunk to the size of a finger. He walked over to the table and let the tiny ding float out from his palm, guiding it to hover above the silver pot. The steam rising from the vessel curled lazily around the small blue-black cauldron. Almost immediately, the steam began to darken.

It shifted from faint white to a deeper silver, and then that silver slowly turned gray.

"Black is the darkest result," the examiner explained, composure fully restored, professional and precise once more.

"No change indicates a newly bound treasure, one that has received little refinement." Mo Jian nodded, watching his ding hover above the pot like an actual cooking vessel. If he didn't know better, he might have said the artifact was enjoying its full-body steam bath. The vapor darkened. White to silver, silver to gray, gray to deep charcoal. The examiner hummed approvingly.

"No artifact spirit," they noted.

"And the bond is quite mature. That depth of color suggests years of dedicated refinement. Now if you'll-" The steam went black.

"Black, as expected. Good, now-" Once again, they were interrupted. The pitch-black vapor rising from the silvery pot was no longer merely black. It began to devour the light. Shadows stretched from every object in the room, leaning toward the silver pot like flowers toward the sun, except inverted, like flowers toward an abyss. The afternoon light bleeding through the windows narrowed and bent.

Shade and brightness alike drained from the air in long, silent tributaries, pouring into that single curling column of dark. For a moment, a very small, contained moment, it looked like a hole had been opened in the world. Mo Jian yanked the Heaven-Enshrouding Ding away from the steam at once. Immediately, the room snapped back to normal. The steam returned to faint white. The shadows fell back to where shadows belonged. The dust motes resumed their slow, drowsy drift through the afternoon light.

Mo Jian stood very still. He looked at the screen. The examiner's shadow had not moved. It sat exactly where it had been sitting, in exactly the same position, staring at the silver pot with the focused intensity of a person who was no longer entirely sure what reality was doing.

"Honored examiner," Mo Jian said. Nothing. He coughed. The shadow startled so violently it nearly knocked over whatever it was sitting on. Papers scattered. The examiner caught them, Mo Jian could tell by the frantic rustling, and then held still for a moment, presumably gathering themselves.

"How," the examiner said quietly. It was not really a question. Not really anything in particular. Just the word, released into the air. Then, as if realizing they had said it: "I- no, my apologies. That was inappropriate." Another pause, shorter.

"Let us continue." The words carried the specific resignation of someone who very much did not want to continue but could see no dignified alternative. And so it went. During the test meant to measure the intensity of his core flames, Mo Jian melted the testing crystal, a beautiful object, faceted and pale green, the kind of instrument that looked like it had been made with great care over a long period of time, into a shapeless puddle, that cooled back into an opaque lump with no facets and no purpose.

"That was," the examiner said, after a long pause, "an expensive crystal."

"I'm sorry," Mo Jian said, and meant it.

"No, it's-" The examiner stopped. Started again.

"It is fine. The result was unambiguous." The next trial was about aura. It involved the bell with no clapper. The examiner explained, in their usual precise and neutral tones, that a cultivator's aura, when directed at the bell, would cause it to ring at a pitch corresponding to the aura's weight and density, producing a faint chime for a modest result, and a clear ring for a strong one. Mo Jian directed his aura at the bell. The bell rang.

It rang so loudly and so suddenly that Mo Jian took an involuntary step backward. The sound filled the chamber completely, bouncing off the walls, rattling the braziers on their chains, sending the tapestries swaying. Dust shook loose from the ceiling beams. From behind the screen, at considerable volume, the examiner shouted: "THAT WILL-" Mo Jian withdrew his aura. The ringing died, gradually, like a wave retreating from a shore.

"-do," the examiner finished, into the restored silence. A pause.

"Thank you." Mo Jian pressed his lips together and said nothing. Even when the nature of the tests shifted away from these basic measures of qi and related abilities toward the foundational disciplines, he still found ways to surprise both himself and the increasingly beleaguered examiner. The puppet control test, for example, should have passed without much fanfare. Mo Jian had never seriously used puppets.

He knew the basics, of course; any cultivator with a working knowledge of the path did, but they were not his preferred method of spellcasting. Early on after his transmigration, he had briefly considered acquiring one for simple chores and errands. But really, what was the point of having a disciple if he could not offload such things onto her? After that realization, he had never explored the idea again. A puppet was essentially a wooden construct carved with formations and restrictions that allowed it to move.

Such constructs could be powered by their controller's qi, embedded spirit stones, or even by drawing on the ambient qi in the surrounding world. To actually control one, however, required the cultivator to extend their spiritual sense and divide it into threadlike strands, like puppet strings, to guide the puppet's movements. More advanced constructs could even operate semi-autonomously, where the cultivator's spiritual sense functioned more as a set of instructions than direct control.

Since he was not a puppeteer and had little experience with such things, Mo Jian had expected his performance to be mediocre. He approached the test with appropriate humility. Apparently not. The moment his spiritual sense swept into the test puppet (a small, childlike wooden figure made of joints and hinges), it sprang to life with startling alacrity.

It moved smoothly, precisely, anticipating each instruction almost before Mo Jian finished forming it, walking, stopping, picking up a small weighted object, setting it down, turning, and bowing, with the crisp, fluid motion of a far more sophisticated construct than it appeared. Mo Jian rubbed the bridge of his nose. He had, he realized, forgotten that his spiritual sense was also considerably beyond what was normal.

Behind the screen, the examiner said nothing for several seconds after the puppet concluded its final movement. Then: "Are you… have you trained as a puppeteer?"

"No," Mo Jian said.

"I see," said the examiner, in the tone of someone who did not, in fact, see, but had accepted that seeing was no longer something available to them today. By the time the day was drawing to a close and the strands of sunlight streaming through the windows had begun to fade, the poor examiner had the air of a war survivor. Mo Jian found it (and was not entirely proud of this), a little amusing.

He was almost tempted to send the Netherworld Scorpion through the screen just to see the shocked look on their face, but no. He should exercise some restraint.

"That… that concludes this part of the examination," the examiner said, sounding like a man who had singlehandedly stormed the cave residence of a demonic Nascent Soul cultivator and witnessed things mankind was never meant to see.

"If you would please wait here for a few minutes, the third section of the examination will begin shortly." That brought Mo Jian up short.

"Wait, what?" he said.

"Isn't the interview supposed to happen tomorrow?"

"Normally, yes." The examiner's composure was genuine now, back on familiar, scripted ground.

"However, there is no fixed date for the third round. The examiners may schedule it at any point within a week of the second phase, at their discretion." A brief pause.

"For this cohort, it has been decided that all candidates will proceed to interview immediately." Mo Jian frowned.

"No one mentioned that."

"No one was informed beforehand," the examiner said.

"That, too, is part of the test." He turned the thought over. Catching candidates off-guard, tired from a full day of testing, before they'd had time to rest or prepare. It was probably meant to reveal how they performed under pressure. He didn't love it, but he understood it.

"I see," he said simply. The examiner gave a small nod behind the screen.

"Then please remain where you are." And just like that, the examiner's shadow vanished. Mo Jian blinked and looked again, but yes, the examiner had departed by some method he had not even noticed. So that was the second phase finished. A quiet stillness settled over the room once more. Without the constant back-and-forth of tests and instructions, the chamber felt larger than before.

The incense still drifted lazily from the braziers overhead, and the last strands of sunlight spilling through the windows had begun to fade into the dull gold of approaching evening. Mo Jian clasped his hands behind his back and waited. He glanced at the low table beside him, where the various tools of the test still sat scattered about, or well, what remained of them, at least.

The shattered fragments of the qi-holding metal had been swept aside into a small pile near the wall, while the test crystal he had melted had hardened into a misshapen puddle. He looked at both and felt a mild, belated twinge of guilt. He rubbed the back of his neck. Perhaps he had been a little too enthusiastic. Still, it was too late to worry about that now. The door behind the screen opened. Footsteps entered the chamber, not just one pair, but several. Mo Jian straightened slightly.

A moment later, shapes appeared behind the rice-paper screen. One shadow, then a second, and finally, a third. They moved into place on the far side of the barrier, their silhouettes settling into seated positions. Though the screen still blurred their forms beyond recognition, there was no mistaking the quiet authority that filled the room. Heavy, in the way only powerful cultivators could be. Mo Jian rolled his shoulders once and slowly drew in a breath, steadying himself.

Whatever questions they intended to ask, this was not a moment where carelessness would serve him well. On the other side of the screen, one of the shadows shifted slightly. Mo Jian braced himself. The third round of the Imperial Examination was about to begin.