Chapter 34: Four Star Training Room.
"Well, this is unexpected," Zhu Rong murmured as he looked at the number of credits on his academy identification talisman.
After he finished, he took the large stack of question sheets he had answered and brought them to the reception.
The clerk, seeing the enormous number of pages, didn’t know what expression to make.
In the end, he could only tell him to wait while he sent the sheets to the department that would check each one before giving him his reward.
The quantity of sheets was large, and it took a long time before they could examine them all.
The elders assigned to verify the validity of the answers looked exhausted by the end of the process.
At first, they were surprised by the sheer number of sheets;
then they grew angry, not because of the questions, but because of the sarcastic tone in which they had been answered.
If it weren’t for the fact that the answers were complete, albeit unpleasant in tone, they would have rejected them.
This lasted until they continued reviewing and ended up in the same state as Zhu Rong, frustrated by most of the questions asked.
They understood why the tone used in the responses was sarcastic and often angry, and in fact,they were glad he had answered them,
because they realized that if it were them, they would have decided to go and personally check if something was wrong with the heads of these students.
In the end, this led them to give Zhu Rong not only the full reward but also an additional one for the great contribution he made in clearing the entire board.
He had waited a few hours before receiving his credits.
With the 700 credits he was supposed to get, he was thinking of renting a three star room, compared to the one star room he had been using until now.
And this was because now that he had also answered that final question worth almost 200 credits, plus some other fairly important ones left at the end, he had more than enough to afford a room like that.
Yet when he finally received the deposit, he found himself with a full 1,200 credits.
1,200 credits!
an amount that in the past he could only earn after almost a month of steady missions.
He asked if there had been a mistake, but the clerk told him it was because he had answered all the questions on the board, and this was his reward since they were all correct.
He hadn’t even known such a thing existed:
" if I’d known earlier I wouldn’t have wasted so much time," he thought, remembering how he had waited three hours to receive the credits.
If he had known about this rule, he probably would have stopped by the mission hall yesterday to pick up the credits today, giving himself three more hours to cultivate.
In the end, he shook his head and didn’t think about it anymore.
With the credits he had, he could comfortably cultivate in a good room for the entire time left before the test day,
so he didn’t waste any more time and went to book a training room, this time with a slightly higher density.
At first, he had thought about one with three stars, since it fit within his 700 credit budget,
but now that he had over a thousand, he could get a four star one and use the remaining credits to also choose an element.
Normally, a room with normal spiritual energy density would be more than fine, but he would have to go through the process of condensing that energy and turning it into fire element energy before assimilating it into his fire core.
But now, with the credits he had, he could just take one already with the fire element and cultivate directly, skipping that step which would only take more time and cause some Qi loss in the process.
The guy at the reception hadn’t expected to see Zhu Rong so soon, so when he saw him asking for a four star room, he couldn’t help but be a bit surprised and asked if he was sure.
Zhu Rong had booked it for two days, but he knew the semester end test would be in less than two days.
Checking out early would be a waste of credits, so the clerk advised him to only take it for one day, but Zhu Rong said he didn’t mind.
In the end, he paid 1,000 credits for two days and another 100 for the addition of the fire element.
He thought it was a waste of credits, but in the end, he couldn’t do anything, they were his credits,
and as far as he knew, he could spend them however he wanted.
The clerk, as his superior, gave his advice; whether Zhu Rong took it or not was up to him.
Zhu Rong arrived at the assigned room and placed the talisman in the designated space before entering.
As soon as he closed the door, he could feel the high density of spiritual fire energy present there.
He knew that unlike low level rooms, high level ones had high level spirit stones connected to them.
A high level spirit stone could be enough for an average family to support several generations, and such a stone, or owning a modest piece of land, building a nice house on it, and still having enough money to live comfortably for a few decades.
The density of spiritual energy condensed in these stones was huge, enough to supply these training rooms for a long time.
After all, these rooms were meant for first and second stage cultivators;
there was no way their absorption rate could be so high as to quickly exhaust the stone.
That is, under normal circumstances...
Zhu Rong had already noticed that the absorption rate of spiritual energy in his body was very high when he used the Elemental Extremity Dao technique.
He wondered if the stone would hold up for the entire time he planned to stay here.
"Well, either way, it’s not my problem. I doubt they’ll blame me if I accidentally drain the stone, right?"
He said to himself as a strange smile appeared on his face.
If someone had seen him, they might have wondered if the person in front of them was a 17 year old boy or some old pervert ready to do something bad.
He sat down in the center of the room, where a circle was drawn on the ground to mark the point of maximum intensity for better efficiency in absorbing the room’s spiritual energy, and began to cultivate.
Immediately, with the first breath of air, he felt a overwhelming surge of spiritual fire energy, and for a moment he was happily surprised as he gathered it into his dantian.
Since it was already fire element energy, he just needed to condense it into his fire core, and so he did.
Soon, the energy reached its destination, and as if sensing his presence, the slightly glowing core suspended in midair began to react, while an invisible force emerged from it, capturing the spiritual energy just fed into the dantian.
Before long, a vortex of spiritual fire energy formed with the fire core at the center, relentlessly absorbing the energy input.
Zhu Rong was once again amazed by this.
He remembered that in his past life, these cores had a slightly faster absorption rate when dealing with energy of the same element,
but the speed of consumption he was seeing now was many times greater than back then.
He wondered if this was also a consequence of his deformity.
"Looks like I won’t need a day to break through after all."