Jobless Transmigration: I'm the only one who loves monsters.-Chapter 117

Chapter 117:

Only, this branding iron was filled with an inexplicable icy coldness that seemed to lower the temperature of the very air through which he ran.

If looks could kill, he knew without a shadow of a doubt that he would already be dead a thousand times over, his body reduced to ash and his soul scattered in the wind.

But even while that furious glare was locked on him as he ran, while every instinct screamed at him to turn and defend himself, he did not slow down in the slightest. He could not slow down. He was too close now, too near to success, to let anything stop him.

’ Time to end this!’ The thought blazed through his mind once more as his pedestal came into view, and with a burst of speed that surprised even himself, he reached it in the blink of an eye.

His hands moved with desperate urgency now, placing the pieces he had collected from the others, the pieces from the old man, the pieces from Gunter and Leo and Adrian and Amy, the pieces from Snow and Grey and Emma, and finally, finally, the piece he had taken from Lucinda’s own puzzle, fitting each one into its proper place within his own incomplete design.

In less than a few seconds, the puzzle began to take shape before his eyes, the scattered fragments resolving into a coherent image that slowly revealed itself as something familiar.

It formed what looked like a flower, a distinctive bloom with petals arranged in a pattern that tugged at his memory until suddenly, with a flash of recognition, he placed it. This was the academy emblem, the same symbol he had seen adorning the examiner’s uniform earlier, the mark of this institution and everything it represented.

"Don’t you dare run from me!" Lucinda’s angry voice emanated outward just as he positioned the last piece, her words carrying all the venom and fury that had been building since their first encounter at the gates.

At the same moment, she began chanting another incantation, magical energy gathering around her with such intensity that the very air seemed to crackle with power.

But before she could complete even a single syllable of that spell, just as she was about to unleash whatever destruction she had planned, the pedestal beneath Lucuis’s hands suddenly began to tremble.

The trembling came in form of a deep vibration that started in the stone itself and spread outward through the floor in concentric rings.

BRRRRRR

That very sound quickly filled the hall and captured everyone’s attention immediately.

Lucinda’s chanting faltered and died as confusion replaced fury on her features, her forward momentum slowing almost unconsciously as she tried to understand what new development was occurring.

"W-What? What’s going on here? What is happening to that pedestal?"

All around the hall, examinees gasped in unison as they witnessed the examiner himself emerge out of thin air directly in front of Lucuis,

His eyes filled with the same calm he always possessed.

Most of them could not see what those closer to the front could, nor could they notice the strange gleam that flickered within the old man’s eyes as he gazed down at the young man who had just completed his puzzle.

But those near enough to observe such details saw it clearly, a gleam that was none other than genuine praise, a flash of sincere admiration for what had just been accomplished.

The examiner had been thinking, in the moments before this development, that perhaps the first test would end up going on far longer than he had initially anticipated. He had been prepared to wait and observe, in other to let the examinees struggle and fail, until they could eventually figure things out on their own or not at all.

He had no intention of helping them, nor did he possess any desire to intervene in their process.

But against his own expectations, against the judgment he had formed over decades of conducting these examinations, someone had actually managed to decipher the true meaning of the test. Someone had actually passed, and passed in a way that demonstrated genuine insight rather than mere luck or coincidence.

There was one thing the old man did not quite understand, however, one aspect of this young man’s behavior that puzzled him despite his decades of experience with the unpredictable nature of examinees.

"Why did you reveal your method out in the open like that?" His voice emerged calm and measured, genuinely curious rather than accusatory or suspicious.

Inwardly, he truly wanted to know the reason behind this choice, this decision that seemed to contradict everything he understood about human nature in competitive situations.

Having figured out how to pass the test, since he discovered the hidden mechanism that so many others had missed, he believed that anyone else in Lucuis’s position would have chosen to keep that knowledge secret, indirectly using such a method to eliminate the competition and secure their own position.

That was simply how these things worked, after all. That was the nature of competition, the reality of examinations designed to separate the worthy from the unworthy.

And yet this young man, this first son of the Morningstar household, had instead chosen to reveal his method to everyone present. The old examiner found himself genuinely curious about what possible reason could justify such an apparently self-destructive choice.

As for the other examinees scattered throughout that vast hall, those who had been watching this entire drama unfold with varying degrees of confusion and astonishment, a single thought crystallized in their minds.

If they could not understand what was happening by now, and piece together the meaning of what they had just witnessed, then they didn’t deserve to pass this first test in the first place.

The young man standing before them, the same individual who had been at the center of so much controversy since his arrival, had somehow managed to decipher the hidden mechanism of this examination and complete his puzzle before anyone else.

To think that he had been the very first one to clear the first stage, that realization filled most of them with genuine awe and amazement, their expressions shifting from confusion to respect as the weight of what he had accomplished settled upon their understanding.