The Shanghai Awakening Center.
The air inside was a suffocating physical presence, thick with the stench of adolescent sweat, cloying perfume, and the sharp, metallic tang of raw ambition. It was a cocktail of desperate hope and gut-wrenching fear, an emotional stench that Qin Mo found far more offensive than the sulfur pits of the Abyssal plane his Demonic Cultivator avatar called home.
He stood motionless amidst the sea of trembling teenagers, a lone, still rock in a river of anxiety. To them, this vast, domed hall of polished alloy and holographic light was a sacred temple where destinies were forged. To Qin Mo, it was just an elaborate, and rather primitive, ant farm.
And today was feeding day.
'A dome of reinforced plasteel, fifty meters high,' his mind noted with the casual disdain of a cosmic observer. 'Impressive for this era on this planet, perhaps. It would make a decent pre-school gymnasium in any of the Galactic Core worlds.'
A polite but unenthusiastic ripple of applause broke out. On the central stage, a girl bowed stiffly, her face pale. The giant screen above her displayed her result: [Talent: B-Rank, Earth Wall]. A solid, respectable, but ultimately unremarkable talent. Good enough for a comfortable life in the city guard. The crowd acknowledged it, then immediately turned their attention back to the list of names, waiting for a real star.
They didn't have to wait long. A sudden, collective gasp sucked the air out of the room. The screen blazed with an aggressive, emerald fire.
[Student: Wang Feng] [Talent: A-Rank, Wind Blade] [Spirit Power: 92/100]
The youth on the stage, Wang Feng, radiated an arrogance that was a force of nature in itself. He had the handsome features of a matinee idol and the smug smirk of a man who had never been told 'no' in his life. As he accepted the thunderous applause, the emerald light of his result coalesced around his hand. Tiny, razor-sharp blades of pure wind energy, each no bigger than a finger, danced and swirled in his palm, a dazzling display of his innate power.
From the VIP boxes, a portly man who was clearly his father clapped enthusiastically, nodding at the other powerful figures around him. On the floor, the teachers beamed. "As expected of the Wang family's talent!" one exclaimed. "His genes are truly superior!"
'An A-Rank Wind Blade talent,' Qin Mo's mind analyzed, utterly unmoved. 'Decent control for a novice. He can manifest and manipulate low-density wind constructs. On this backwater planet, that's enough to be hailed as a heaven-sent genius. How laughable. That level of power wouldn't even qualify to be a junior maintenance crew member on a garbage scow in the Xylos Sector. Their job is to use wind blades to scrape cosmic barnacles off the ship's hull.'
His gaze drifted for a moment, an indifferent lens scanning the crowd, and landed on a single anomaly. Su Liying. The school's goddess. She was frowning, but her attention wasn't on the triumphant Wang Feng. Her clear, intelligent eyes were fixed on his section of the crowd, on him.
'An interesting variable,' he noted. 'Her soul perception is unusually sharp. She can sense the 'stillness'. A minor anomaly in the dataset.' He dismissed the thought. It was irrelevant to the current, boring proceedings.
The screen flickered. His name appeared, stark and simple. [Student: Qin Mo]
The effect was instantaneous. The buzzing excitement from Wang Feng's success vanished, replaced by a cold, spreading silence, which was immediately punctured by whispers and snickers. It was the sound of a joke everyone was in on.
"It's him. The 'perfect attendant'." "I can't believe he actually showed up. Does he have no shame?" "This is going to be the highlight of the day! The biggest joke of the year!"
Qin Mo began to walk. The insults were a physical wave, but they parted before him, unable to touch his profound indifference. 'A bunch of children throwing meaningless verbal stones,' he thought. 'Boring.'
He stepped onto the stage, his every movement calm and measured. Wang Feng, who was still lingering on the side of the stage to savor his glory, watched him with a cruel, mocking smirk.
Qin Mo stood before the Spirit Origin Orb. The examiner looked at him with unconcealed disdain, as if he were looking at something unpleasant he had stepped in. "Place your hand on the Orb. Let's get this over with."
Qin Mo obeyed. As his palm touched the cool, smooth surface, his consciousness brushed against it, not as a supplicant, but as an inspector. [Target: Spirit Origin Orb.] [Composition: Low-grade energy crystal matrix with silver-alloy conduits.] [Function: Basic spiritual resonance detection. Flaw: Unable to detect soul-bound or non-elemental conceptual abilities. A primitive design.] [Threat Level: None.]
He wasn't being tested. He was giving the test. And the Orb had failed.
Naturally, it gave no reaction. It remained as dark, silent, and dead as a common rock. The hall was silent for a moment. Then, the screen above delivered the verdict, one line at a time, each acting as a cue for the crowd's rising derision.
[TALENT: NONE] A few coughs, quickly turning into outright laughter.
[CULTIVATION POTENTIAL: 0] The laughter grew, becoming a wave.
[SPIRIT POWER: 0] The wave became a tsunami. The entire hall exploded in a roar of mockery. It was the sound of a thousand people's relief that they were not him, their joy in witnessing a failure even greater than their own anxieties.
"A perfect triple-zero! This is historic!" "He's not just trash, he's a monument to trash!"
Wang Feng was the conductor of this symphony of scorn, clutching his stomach and pointing. "Qin Mo! You are a city treasure! You've set a new record for uselessness that will never be broken!"
The examiner sighed, his voice dripping with annoyance. "Result: No aptitude. Assessment complete. Step down. Next!"
Qin Mo pulled his hand back. His face was a perfect mask of indifference. He turned, his eyes sweeping across the crowd for a fraction of a second, and then he walked away. He didn't need to run. He didn't need to hide. Their opinions, their world, their entire system of values—it was all less than worthless to him.
'This farce is finally over,' he thought, the noise of the hall already being filtered out by his consciousness, processed as meaningless background static. 'Time to check on the real world.'
His mind crossed an infinite void in a nanosecond. He was no longer in the hall. He was light-years away, an observer to a scene of true, magnificent power.
A lone figure stood on the jagged surface of a shattered moon. His Saber Saint avatar. His face, an older, wiser version of Qin Mo's own, was calm as he faced an entire fleet of Abyssal warships. They were living things of shadow and bone, their weapon ports glowing with the light of captured, dying stars.
The Saber Saint raised a single, slender hand. From the void, motes of starlight gathered, drawn across light-years to answer his call. They coalesced, spinning and weaving into a blade of pure, condensed starlight that hummed with enough power to unmake a sun.
That was interesting.
Someone bumped into him hard, a deliberate, jarring impact. "Watch it, Zero."
Qin Mo didn't even register the touch. He was already a universe away. The Awakening Exam, this entire world's grandest and most sacred ceremony, was just a boring sideshow.
The real movie was just beginning.