Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!-Chapter 97, Xie Yanran (2)

"Did you just suggest that a student who placed first in the regional examination, broke the Dragon God Tower record, and cleared a Grade 6 plateau alone, was cheating?"

The member recalibrated visibly. "I’m saying the numbers don’t add up."

"The numbers add up exactly," she said. "You just don’t like what they add up to." She held his gaze for a moment. "Don’t say anything else."

He didn’t.

She turned back to Lin Yi and continued walking as if the interruption had not happened. Lin Yi walked beside her.

"They get defensive about the sect," she said. "Crimson Vanguard has been first-ranked for two consecutive sessions. Someone turning down an invitation registers as an insult to them. It isn’t one. But that distinction requires a level of perspective that not everyone in any group manages consistently."

"I know," Lin Yi said.

"Does it bother you?"

"No."

She smiled.

"No," she repeated. "Of course not."

They had reached the junction where the academic building’s wing split toward the first-year seminar rooms and the upper-year lecture halls.

She then stopped, and turned to Lin Yi, "Can I ask you something that isn’t about the sect?"

Lin Yi looked at her. "Go ahead."

"The Celestial Lord Blade," she said. "Mythical grade. It’s your primary weapon isn’t it? You used it in the Dragon God Tower." She paused. "That’s not something a first-year student is supposed to have. Mythical-grade weapons are not available to most hunters regardless of their level or their budget." She looked at him. "Where did you get it?"

"It dropped," Lin Yi said.

She held his gaze for a long moment. "A Mythical-grade weapon dropped," she said. "And you picked it up."

"Yes."

"From what monster?"

"A dungeon event," he said. "Before the regional examination."

She was quiet for a moment. "The Celestial Emperor’s Abode," she said. "The Hazardous-tier event dungeon. It surfaces once per year."

"You cleared it."

He didn’t deny it.

She exhaled through her nose, the sound of someone updating a mental file that had already been revised several times. "Alone," she said. "As a first-year student before the regional examination."

"Yes."

She looked at him for a long moment. Not with awe, she was past the age and experience level where that was her dominant response to new information. With something more measured. The assessment of someone who was trying to build an accurate picture and had just been given a piece that changed the shape of it significantly.

"You’re not just strong," she said. "You’re something that doesn’t have a category yet." She said it plainly, as an observation rather than flattery. "The academy is going to struggle with that. Most institutions do when someone exceeds what the framework was built to describe."

The corridor was moving around them, students passing on both sides, heading to their morning sessions. She glanced at the time on her datapad. "I’m going to be late if I keep standing here," she said. She looked at him one more time. "The invitation is still open. Not because I think I can change your mind today. But because the right time exists for most decisions, and I’d rather be positioned correctly when it arrives." She paused. "And because I think you’re worth the patience."

She said the last sentence in the same tone as everything before it. Level and clear. Not angled toward anything. Just true.

She turned and walked toward the upper-year lecture hall. The three Crimson Vanguard members went with her. The one who had suggested cheating walked past Lin Yi without looking at him, which required visible effort on his part and produced a result that was more telling than looking would have been.

Lin Yi watched them turn the corner. Then he looked forward, toward the first-year seminar room ahead, where Wang Hao had almost certainly already arrived and was probably reviewing notes with the focused determination of someone fighting a knowledge gap through sheer application of time.

He walked toward the room and thought about what she had said.

Something that doesn’t have a category yet.

He had heard versions of this before. Jianghe Academy. The tournament. The examination hall. The Dragon God Tower monitoring room, based on what Principal Zhou had later relayed about the observers’ reactions. People arriving at the edge of their framework and describing what they found there in whatever language they had available.

He wasn’t surprised by it. He had stopped being surprised by it some time ago.

What stayed with him, as he pushed open the seminar room door and took his seat, was not the observation itself but the precision with which she had made it. Without performance. Without the dramatic framing most people applied when they encountered something that exceeded their expectations. Just the statement, clearly formed, delivered without needing a response.

Wang Hao looked up from his notes when Lin Yi sat down. "You look like you just had an interesting conversation."

"Somewhat," Lin Yi said.

"Xie Yanran again?" 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Lin Yi looked at him. "How did you know?"

"Because you took three minutes longer than usual to get here from the residential wing, and the only person in this building who could make you stop and have a conversation you didn’t plan to have is the leader of the top-ranked sect in the academy." Wang Hao set his notes down. "What did she want?"

"The same as last time," Lin Yi said.

"And?"

"The same answer as last time."

Wang Hao nodded slowly. Then a thought crossed his expression that produced a small, knowing smile that he did not fully succeed in suppressing. "She’s very persistent," he said.

"She’s thorough," Lin Yi said. "There’s a difference."

"Right," Wang Hao said, in the tone of someone who considered those two words to be doing a lot of work in that sentence. He looked back at his notes. "The expedition scores post this afternoon," he said. "I’m expecting things to get loud when they do."

"Probably," Lin Yi said.

Instructor Fang walked in. The room settled. The morning seminar began.

Outside, Celestial City continued its ordinary motion. Somewhere in the upper-year wing, Crimson Vanguard’s members were presumably filing into their own lecture hall, one of them significantly quieter than he might otherwise have been. And the expedition results were somewhere in the academy’s system, waiting for the afternoon to make themselves public.

Whatever the ranking looked like when it posted, the conversation this morning had already moved something. Lin Yi filed that away without assigning it more weight than it deserved.

He opened his datapad and turned his attention to the seminar.