After hearing the old wolf announce the hour, everyone looked around.
Nothing happened.
The group looked at each other helplessly. The more it was like this, the more uneasy they became.
Suddenly, Li Qingxian took out "World Peace," which had white characters on a black background.
They saw that the first stroke of the first character on the scroll had actually turned from white to red.
Everyone else took out their own exam papers, but aside from Li Qingxian’s, none of the strokes had changed color.
Songg Baige said, "Could it be related to the ’find a friend’ game? Other than that, we did all of Ye Han’s other games with him. It shouldn’t be that he has something we don’t."
"Very likely." The group looked at Li Qingxian with envy.
Li Qingxian pointed to the ’World Peace’ exam paper and said, "We can make a vague inference now. ’World Peace’ has a total of sixteen strokes. It seems that every half an hour, a tally is made. If you complete all the games, you get a ’red stroke’ reward, which we can tentatively call one point. In theory, if we can collect sixteen points and turn all of ’World Peace’ red, we might pass this Cyan Cloud Examination."
Songg Baige nodded and said, "It’s also possible that even if we can’t get all sixteen strokes red, as long as our score is higher than others, we might survive in the end. Of course, it’s best to get them all red if we can. A full red scroll will definitely have a special reward."
"Don’t think about rewards!" Li Qingxian said.
"Yes." Songg Baige immediately realized his greed.
Suddenly, the earth trembled, and a rumbling sound rose and fell.
"Look at the giant children," Wang Buku said.
The group hastily looked around, and leaping onto the rooftops, they saw five giant children running toward the city gate through which they had entered.
The city walls didn’t even reach the five giant children’s knees.
At the same time, a daze fell over everyone’s vision, as if they had been transported into the air. They looked down from above, and below them was the area just outside the city gate.
The place where all the candidates had entered.
They saw two small giant children guarding the gate, chanting loudly: "Golden lock, silver lock, with a great big RUMBLE, the iron lock seals the gate."
BOOM!
The city gate slammed shut.
The two giant children guarding the gate disappeared.
Outside the city gate, more than two hundred candidates remained. Some were panicked, some were bewildered, and others were cursing loudly.
’How could the gate close after only half an hour?’
Li Qingxian gazed outside the city, experiencing the strange phenomenon.
The five giant children, like five great buildings, charged toward the two hundred-plus candidates outside the gate.
The five giant children squinted, their eyes flashing with black light, and they all giggled, saying the same thing.
"Let’s play a game, let’s play a game, everyone play a game together."
The children standing beside those two hundred-plus candidates let go of their hands, and their bodies swelled up rapidly, as if they were inflating balloons.
In a short while, they became just as large as the other five giant children.
The two hundred-plus candidates looked up in despair at the giant children, who stood like towering walls, making them feel as if they were in a vast maze.
Before the children, the city walls and houses seemed like random structures piled up on a sandy beach.
"What should we play?" many of the giant children shouted.
One giant child yelled, "Let’s play ’Break the Rope’!"
"Yay, yay, Break the Rope! Yay, yay, Break the Rope!" All the giant children clapped their hands and shouted, jumping up and down and kicking up clouds of dust.
The two hundred-plus candidates coughed in the billowing dust, shaken so hard they became dizzy and couldn’t stand steady.
"You all link into a big rope, and we’ll all try to break through! You all link into a big rope, and we’ll all try to break through..." The children sang joyfully.
One of the five giant children waved a chubby hand, and the two hundred-plus candidates began to move involuntarily, forming a single line, holding hands, and blocking the space between the giant children and the city gate.
The candidates looked up blankly at the giant children.
These people didn’t even come up to the top of the giant children’s feet.
"If we break through, and you’re not holding someone else’s hand, you lose, okay!" a giant child said with a grin.
The two hundred-plus candidates were still dazed, but they instinctively tightened their grip on the hands of the people next to them.
Suddenly, their expressions changed drastically. They looked down at their own fingers and saw that they seemed to have turned into sharp tree roots, piercing into the wrists of the person beside them.
Their own wrists were similarly pierced by the fingers of the person on the other side.
Those root-like fingers spread under the skin, growing rapidly upward until they reached the shoulders, bulging out from the skin in a bruised, blackish-green mass.
Their arms, linked in a line, resembled a long rope.
Their groans and screams were drowned out by the children’s nursery rhymes.
"Breaking, breaking, break the rope, break the rope and enter the Imperial City..."
The two hundred-plus giant children, singing nursery rhymes, charged at the two hundred candidates holding hands.
SQUISH SQUISH SQUISH...
There was no collision, no resistance. It was like elephants trampling an anthill.
Dust flew everywhere as massive white feet stomped over the two hundred-plus candidates.
The giant children ran to the city gate and looked back.
The dust settled, revealing human-shaped puddles of meat paste in each of the giant footprints.
Blood flowed slowly, and muscles twitched faintly.
Utter silence.
Like a watermelon rolling over a mosquito full of blood.
"Playtime’s over!"
The children walked forward, giggling.
The city gate swung open. The children shrank as they ran, and in the end, all but five of them returned to their normal size, entered the gate, and vanished.
The five giant children ambled back to their original positions with grins on their faces.
Calm returned to the area outside the city.
Everyone’s vision blurred for a moment, then returned to normal.
The twenty-four people looked at each other, their gazes vacant, their minds filled with the image of giants trampling the candidates.
Seventh-Grade Cultivators were like ants.
Li Qingxian felt a distinct change in his Life Mansion. A possibility occurred to him, and he said, "Please keep an eye on things for me. If another game starts, wake me up. I’m experiencing a strange transformation and need to enter my Spirit Platform."
After speaking, Li Qingxian casually pulled out a chair, sat down, and sent his consciousness into his Spirit Platform.
Songg Baige, Wang Buku, and the others immediately walked over to guard Li Qingxian.
A few people frowned slightly but didn’t say anything, merely waiting in silence.
Wang Buku noticed their odd expressions and said, "Ye Han must have discovered something extremely important, something that involves all of us, or even this Deceitful Cyan Cloud Examination. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be so abrupt."
Those few people’s expressions softened.
Li Qingxian entered his Life Mansion and scanned his surroundings. He discovered that the rockery in his Life Pool had actually started spouting water from its peak, forming a waterfall that cascaded into the pool below.
Along with the cascading water, there was a familiar aura.
Qi Fortune.
There were now ten more Qi Fortune Fish in the Life Pool.
Li Qingxian observed carefully. The glow on the surface of his Life Mansion was brighter than it was yesterday.
The aura of his Life Mansion had strengthened by a small margin.
His Destiny Stars also seemed to have been nourished by a powerful force.
The changes to A Drop of Water Becomes a Lake and Accumulated Soil to Mountain were the most obvious. The great lake’s diameter had increased by several dozen zhang, and the mountain peak had inexplicably grown by more than ten zhang.
Li Qingxian used his Life Disc to perform an Inference. He found that over the past hour, small amounts of Qi Fortune had been inexplicably entering his Life Mansion. Right after the deaths of those two hundred-plus candidates, another large wave of Qi Fortune had surged in.
The total increase in his overall Fate Grid’s Qi Fortune was roughly equivalent to a quarter of that of a normal Seventh-Grade Cultivator.
However, the Qi Fortune he had actually received was ten times the amount of this increase. He didn’t know if the other nine-tenths of the power was hidden away or had simply vanished.
’Wait...’
Li Qingxian did a quick calculation and found that the total amount of Qi Fortune he had received in that last wave was roughly one percent of that from all the candidates who died.
’It seems it’s true that when candidates die, their Qi Fortune is distributed to the others.’
’But there are over thirty thousand candidates. On what grounds do I directly receive one percent? Logically, shouldn’t I be getting around one thirty-thousandth? How could I possibly receive a full three hundred times the Qi Fortune?’