The man exhaled quietly.
He's like me back then…
He, too, was an Awakener. But unlike those who awakened at age 16 or 17, he'd only awakened three months before his own college entrance exams.
Too late to do much.
And so, he enrolled in a cultivation academy.
A slower path, yes. Even now, he was still stuck at comprehending a law.
But going there had made him stand out. In a school filled with cultivators, he was a dragon among snakes. He'd flourished there.
It wasn't that Awakener Academies didn't want every Awakened. Far from it.
But the Federation had long since put a system in place to balance power.
Cultivation organizations still held sway across large parts of the continent. If every awakened individual flocked to the same dozen high-tier Awakener Academies, the balance of power would collapse.
So, the Federation enforced limits—quotas, admissions rules, special regulations—to ensure Awakeners were still distributed across other academies and institutions.
