Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!-Chapter 88, Lin Yi Reviewing Ranking System

Several days had passed since the first class.

The rhythm of Heavenly Phoenix Academy had established itself quickly. Morning seminars, afternoon independent study, evening access to the training facilities for those who wanted them, and a continuous background awareness of the assessment system tracking everything that happened in between.

Lin Yi sat at his desk in his dormitory room with his datapad open and the combat training terminal running a passive scan in the corner. It was late enough in the evening that the corridor outside was quiet. He had been sitting here for approximately forty minutes, and in that time he had reviewed everything he had gathered about how Heavenly Phoenix Academy actually worked, not the orientation summary, but the functional reality of how standing was determined and resources were distributed.

He pulled up the ranking display:

1st Level A — Current Academic Rankings

1st: Han Yue

2nd: Mei Lihua

3rd: Wen Jiahao

4th: Lin Yi

5th: Zhao Tianming

6th: Zhang Ruoxi

7th: Chen Yanming

8th: Luo Peng

9th: Wang Hao

He looked at the numbers without particular concern. Fourth in class. The assessments so far had been purely academic, written evaluations and seminar participation scores covering dimensional rift classification, monster taxonomy, formation theory fundamentals, and a timed scenario analysis that required candidates to walk through tactical responses to three simultaneous dungeon-level emergencies. No combat component yet.

Han Yue was first because Han Yue had clearly spent significant time studying the theoretical framework of hunter work alongside developing his combat abilities. His seminar contributions were precise and well-sourced. His scenario analysis had received the highest marks in the class from Instructor Fang’s evaluation. Lin Yi had read the evaluation summary when it was posted and acknowledged, without resentment, that Han Yue had done the work.

Fourth was accurate. The monster ecology module had been the section where Lin Yi’s practical wilderness experience gave him a genuine advantage over students who had primarily studied in structured academy environments, but formation theory was an area where his background was comparatively limited. He had filed this as something to address. He had not yet addressed it fully.

Wang Hao was ninth. This was not a reflection of Wang Hao’s intelligence. It was a reflection of the specific academic demands of an institution populated almost entirely by students who had spent years in structured learning environments with access to resources that Jianghe’s academy couldn’t match. Wang Hao was working. Lin Yi knew this because Wang Hao’s light was on past midnight most evenings and because he had twice knocked on Lin Yi’s door to ask for clarification on formation theory concepts that Lin Yi was also in the process of learning, which had produced two conversations that were genuinely useful for both of them.

Lin Yi closed the class ranking and opened the overall first-year display:

******1st Year Overall Rankings — Combined Level A and Level B******

1st: Han Yue

2nd: Mei Lihua

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.

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8th: Lin Yi

Eighth overall among first-year students. The Level B cohort contained students whose academic preparation was stronger than several of the Level A students across certain modules, which the ranking reflected accurately. This would change when practical assessments began. Lin Yi was certain of that in the straightforward way he was certain of most things about his own capabilities. But certain was not the same as complacent, and he noted eighth with the same attention he had given fourth.

He scrolled further. The full academy ranking incorporated all years and placed him somewhere in the lower third overall, which told him very little useful because second and third-year students had accumulated ranking points across multiple semesters of both academic and practical assessment, and comparing cumulative scores against a first-year student’s opening weeks was not meaningful data.

He set the ranking display aside and opened the file he had been building on sect structure.

This was the part that interested him.

Sects at Heavenly Phoenix Academy were quasi-guilds, student organizations that functioned as the primary unit of collective competition within the academy’s practical assessment system. The rules governing them were specific and had clearly been refined over years of student behavior pushing against the original boundaries.

Minimum membership: three students.

Maximum membership: ten students.

A student could belong to only one sect at a time.

Sects could be formed by any combination of students across year levels.

Sects dissolved automatically if membership dropped below three.

A sect leader could be challenged and replaced through internal vote or formal combat record petition.

The resource sharing component was the element that most clearly explained why sects mattered beyond the obvious social dimension. Every point of score and every unit of experience generated through sect-affiliated activity, dungeon clearances, wilderness expedition results, combat assessment performances conducted under sect banner, was distributed in full to every member of the sect simultaneously.

Not split. Distributed. If a sect generated one hundred experience points through an expedition, every member of the sect received one hundred experience points. If a sect cleared a combat assessment and generated fifty score points, every member received fifty score points, each counted individually toward their personal ranking.

The implications of this were not subtle. A high-performing member of a sect effectively multiplied their output across every person in it. The inverse was also true, lower-performing members gained access to points and experience they could not have generated alone, at the cost of reducing the sect’s average performance metrics in assessments where the collective result was what was evaluated.

The incentive structure this created was straightforward. The most talented students wanted sects with other talented students, because a sect of eight high performers generated eight times the practical assessment opportunities while distributing the full results to each member. The average student wanted proximity to a high performer for exactly the same reason, because the distributed scoring meant being in the right sect was worth more than performing well alone.

Lin Yi pulled up the sect rankings from the previous session.

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