He Bi shook his head. "Didn't you notice? From the start, that Waste Star girl's goal was to get out of the melee. She had almost escaped, but, targeted, had to loop back and keep dodging."
He had noticed her earlier than either Jin Ling or Cheng Gong.
From the moment the burly hulk, Chen Cheng, set his sights on her, he had been paying attention.
Chen Cheng was the "blockhead son" of He Bi's elder cousin—family of a sort.
So from the very start, He Bi had kept a keen eye on the big oafish nephew—thus he had not missed the details when he gave chase to the Waste Star girl.
Jin Ling listened to He Bi in silence, thoughtful.
It seemed He Bi truly did rate the girl from a Waste Star.
But as for people from Waste Stars—she truly could not see what there was to recommend.
In recent years, none from Waste Stars had passed the Second Military Academy entrance exam. She had nearly forgotten the outcome of that girl who had come from a Waste Star ten years ago.
If this Waste Star girl He Bi favoured did enter the Academy, perhaps she would simply repeat her predecessor's path.
So thinking, Jin Ling shifted her attention back to Zhao Qingyan—only to be left speechless when she saw that, after receiving the Waste Star girl's pastries, Zhao had declined to linger and left the melee directly.
To Zhao Qingyan, at that moment, nothing mattered more than finding a quiet place to savour delicious sweets.
When she had taken the pastry tin, she had already been itching to taste one there and then!
But out of respect for fine food and a sense of propriety, she would never allow herself to sample delicacies in a place of flying sand and stinging grit, with a melee roiling and chaos blaring on every side.
So, quitting the melee was her first decision.
…
On the simulated planet where the Alliance Second Military Academy entrance exam was being held—
Across the boundless desert, the night's cool had done nothing to take the heat out of sand baked all day by a scorching sun.
On the quiet, empty sands, a patch of ground suddenly rustled. Before long, someone crawled up out of the sand.
Lan Grace wore the standard tan, rough polyester uniform issued to Waste Star natives before the exam; her clothes were thick with sand.
"Ptui, ptui—" She spat several times. Only then did the grit stop catching on her teeth.
The daytime melee had only ended a little over an hour ago. After slipping clear, she had burrowed into the sand, lying low and listening to the sounds outside.
Many had lost their qualifications in this melee and been eliminated outright.
Most were natives from Waste Stars, but a fair few were the legitimate examinees from other planets.
Just as Lan Grace had foreseen, it would only take three short days on this simulated planet for the number sitting the Alliance Second Military Academy exam to drop to less than a tenth.
Those whose nutrient solution had been snatched and whose signal buttons had been switched off had lost their qualification and had been scheduled for return the same day. As for the "survivors"—
The exam continued…
The most dangerous place was the safest—"darkness under the lamp" and all that.
So, once she left the melee, Lan Grace had hidden under the sand nearby and thus dodged day one.
While lying low didn't cost much physically, the drain on the mind was huge.
Add to that the way her skin had been slow‑roasted scarlet by the hot sand—her whole body burned with pain.
If the sand had been any hotter, she might have been steamed done beneath it.
So while her method to‑day had been a bit of a dodge to get by, in truth it was not smart overall.
A few lungfuls of cool night air eased the heat within her.
Desert nights were cold—an extreme opposite to the days. At their coldest, they could freeze a man to the bone.
Dragging herself along, Lan Grace walked a while before she simply could not go on.
After most of a day under the sand, and with severe dehydration, her strength was running short.
She had to find water fast, replenish what she had lost, and recover her condition.
Otherwise, at this rate, even if her signal button wasn't taken, her body would give out first and she would be forced to quit the exam.
Finding water in a desert was hard enough. What's more, any oasis would also mean competitors taking the exam.
Lan Grace was almost certain—if she were spotted, a nasty fight would be inevitable.
Never mind anything else—just her conspicuous yellow‑brown outfit that marked her as a Waste Star native might as well have had words written across it:
"I'm weak. Come finish me off."
She thought a moment, then took out her last two mid‑grade nutrient vials. She tipped one back first, to restore herself a little.
As for whether that was wasteful—she no longer cared.
Only by keeping her body in peak condition could she hope to secure more food sources.
In other words, she could afford to eat—and had the will to earn it.
After a rest, with the mid‑grade nutrient topping her up, the weakness in her body eased quickly. But the skin pain persisted—tormenting.
Rolling up her sleeves, she looked down at her swollen arms—black with a flush of red—and could well imagine how frightful her face must look now.
She had been blackened by cosmic radiation on the Waste Star; now she had been baked under desert sand into this state.
Lan Grace realised that ever since she came to this world, her looks had been on a one‑way slide—never to return…
"Sigh~" Heart‑sore, she glanced at the many discarded empty metal boxes on the sand not far away. She walked over, picked up two, and tied them to her belt with strips torn from her clothes.
Useless to others, they still had a second use for her.
In a dry desert there ought to have been some animals, but as this was a simulated planet used solely for assessment, only the environment existed—no animals at all.
That forced Lan Grace to abandon any thought of hunting for food over the next month. She could only hope that, under environmental simulation, the plant side of things would offer something edible.