The examinees looked much more at ease after the fourth test was behind them. And why wouldn’t they? They had already come this far. All they needed to do was to get through the interview.
The interview was the stage where a instructor handpicks the student they wish to teach. To many people, this was one of the most important stages of the selection test because it was the stage where they appealed to their ideal instructor in hopes of being chosen by them.
For those who had already communicated with their instructors beforehand though, the interview round was just a formality. Chuck was one such example. He had made contact with the old instructor since a long time ago, and today they shared a fairly close relationship with one another. Once he had gotten through the fifth test, he would be leaving immediately with the old instructor. He did not need to wait for the final result with trepidation like the other examinees.
“Have you decided yet, Cillin?” An instructor asked.
Cillin took a moment to organize the examinee files in his hands before answering, “Mm. I’ll go to the third interview location.”
“The third interview location?” Another instructor took a glance at the files before muttering, “I don’t see anyone particularly special in that area though…?”
Yvonne was at the first interview location. Chuck and a few well-performing examinees were assigned to the first interview location as well. It was why a lot of instructors were scrambling for the right to oversee the first interview location. Unfortunately, not everyone would be able to get their wish.
Compared to the “prestigious” first interview location, the overachievers and underachievers in the second and third interview location were evenly distributed. Naturally, the instructors who failed to get a spot in the first interview location were a bit miffed. That didn’t stop them from plotting to get the examinee they wanted before the other instructors though. The reason they were a lot more proactive than before was because Guan Feng’s show-off had dealt a huge blow to their ego. Now, everyone wanted to secure an excellent student of their own and show off to their colleagues.
So far, it seemed like the reform was a positive one. There were a lot more examinees who met the instructors’ expectations than before. In fact, most of the instructors had already made their pick beforehand, meaning that the interview was nothing more but a formality. No matter how poor an examinee had performed in the AF1 five tests, the fact that they survived until the end meant they were qualified to join the affiliated schools. At the very least, they were better than those who dropped out in the middle for one reason or another. There were examinees who were contacted by the instructors before the selection test even began, but of course they belonged to the minority.
At first, the instructors were surprised that Cillin would volunteer to go to the third interview location. After all, he absolutely could abuse his relationship with Guan Feng and win a spot in the first interview location if he wanted to. Is Guan Feng really satisfied with just one new student?
Then, they recalled Guan Feng’s modus operandi and realized that the sonuvabitch never cared for procedure when picking his students. If there really was someone he wanted among this batch, he would’ve gotten them before the selection test had even begun. It was the advantage of being high on the totem pole. They were given the privilege of taking shortcuts and making the first move before anyone else.
After withdrawing the files of all the examinees in the third interview location, Cillin went straight to the interview hall.
At first, the examinees waiting outside the third interview hall were pretty dejected. It was because they knew that those who received their interviews in the first interview location were practically guaranteed to enter the affiliated schools, and the instructors were of exceptional quality. That changed when Cillin walked into the third interview location. Everyone—especially those who did pretty well during the shooting test—felt as if Guan Feng himself had stepped into the interview location. If this wasn’t a golden opportunity, they didn’t know what was!
The interview hall was round-shaped. The instructors were also seated in a circle. The examinee would take a seat at the center where they would be stared at by every instructor from every direction. Suffice to say, not everyone possessed the mental fortitude to perform well in such a setup. To put it in simpler terms, it was nerve-wracking and or heart attack-inducing to undergo an interview like this!
However, most of the examinees quickly discovered that their nervousness slowly faded over time. More accurately, most of their anxiety had transformed into utter confusion as they fended off one weird question after another. By the end of the interview, quite a lot of examinees were confuzzled to the point where they wondered if they were living a lie their whole life.
It was interesting how people reacted when they were subjected to various forms of embarrassment and pressure. The ones with a fair bit of mental fortitude could usually respond to the instructors’ bullshit questions with bullshit answers of their own. The straightforward ones would turn red and reply “I don’t know”, and the reserved ones would not be able to say a single word even after a long time had passed.
In contrast to toward the examinees’ constipated looks, the instructors only smiled and said not a word about their answers at all.
In fact, every instructor had a scale in their hearts, and they could tell which examinee was a good fit with them just based on their responses. The questions weren’t meant to be answered. They were just a method to expose a facade of the examinees’ true character.
Of course, there were also instructors who picked their students based on their looks. A look into their history would reveal that every man and woman he had ever taught were extremely attractive no matter where they went. As for the instructors who were focused on engineering and other relevant applications, they preferred recruiting male over female because male usually had greater stamina and the willingness to do hard labor. On the rare occasion they did recruit the fairer gender, the woman was guaranteed to be a strong one.
As the examinees came and went, everyone except Cillin had chosen the examinees they wanted. Not only that, Cillin hadn’t asked many questions at all during the interview. He was perfectly content to give away examinees he didn’t want to the other instructors.
The colleague sitting next to Cillin snuck a glance at his perfectly blank name list before thinking to himself: I knew Guan Feng isn’t planning to get another student. He already has his hands full with Tang Qiuqiu, not to mention that no one—not even the popular Yvonne—can match that girl in terms of shooting skills.
The door to the interview hall opened once more, and a timid and frail-looking girl walked in. Her looks were ordinary, and her attire was plain. She visibly tensed up when she sensed the atmosphere of the interview hall. She was trembling unconsciously despite her best attempts to control her nerve.
The girl was one of the candidates who had won a quota through Return, but she clearly wasn’t as open as her peers.
Rung Ruo was twenty years old and a commoner. She had a small accessories store under her name, but otherwise she was as ordinary as it gets. The reason she was chosen to participate in the selection test was because her bounty score in Return was exceptional, and because she also answered many questions that weren’t put up for reward. Her education level was low—she had had to give up on schooling due to her family situation—but she was able to make up for it via self-study.
She was the main reason Cillin had chosen to come to this interview location. He kept an eye on everyone who was recommended through Return including their forum replies, activities so on, but Rong Ruo drew his interest more than the others. He was particularly curious about some of the videos she uploaded when she answered some questions.
Rong Ruo’s accessory store was pitifully small even compared to the other shops on the street where she lived, much less her competitors. It wasn’t without its niche advantage though. For starters, every accessory in her store was hand-made, though it wasn’t so much a choice as it was a necessity. It saved her a lot of money in terms of cost. Second, she had one type of accessories that was completely unique and unobtainable in any other accessory store.
The shapes of those accessories were incredibly regular in the sense that it almost looked like a product of nature. In fact, Cillin couldn’t spot a single cut mark on those accessories. Of course, it was possible to create an accessory of that level via machine-processing, but Cillin didn’t believe that was the case because the cost alone was worth several times her store. Moreover, the prices of those particular accessories were incredibly low; so low not even the lowest noble would spare them a single glance.
Back to the present. The instructors had shot Rong Ruo a couple of questions, but the poor girl wasn’t able to answer a single question up until this point. She was so embarrassed that she bowed her head and avoided looking anyone in the eye. Unfortunately for her, many of the instructors were also in no mood to ask her questions because they were fatigued from all the examinees they had interviewed.
It was when the atmosphere was getting awkward when Cillin spoke up, “Most of the questions you answered on ‘Return’ are about bond energies, but judging from your official education level, you should not have been able to answer them. Are you self-taught?”
“Y… yes…”
Before Cillin spoke up, Rong Ruo was so dejected that her eyes had turned red. It took her a great deal of willpower to stop herself from breaking into tears. Her father was waiting for her to finish at a hotel on the capital planet right now, and she knew full well how he and her mother would feel if they learned that she was eliminated. They would hide their disappointment or sorrow behind kind smiles, and she would feel all the worse because of it. She never expected Cillin to ask a question until he did.
According to some of the gossips that circulated among the examinees, the amount of questions you received during an interview was a good indication of how much an instructor was interested in you. If they were incredibly interested in you, then they would ask a lot of questions. Otherwise, they would stop after just a couple of cursory, mandatory questions.
Rong Ruo looked up and stared at the young man who asked her a question. She knew him. Of course she knew about him. Even if he wasn’t the main subject of the examinees’ gossip for the past couple days, she would’ve recognized him because she was one of those people who greatly benefited from the Return he established. Her housemates and even the girls in the hostels talked about him a lot. In Rong Ruo’s opinion, assuming that everything the people said weren’t too exaggerated, she could never hope to be affiliated with someone like him… right?
She turned even redder when she came back down to earth and noticed that Cillin was looking at her.
“You a series of accessories called ‘Water’ in your store, am I right? Do you mind if I take a look?” Cillin asked. He noticed that Rong Ruo was wearing a bracelet that looked like it was made of crystals from the moment she had walked into the interview hall.
“O… of course!”
Rong Ruo hurriedly took off her bracelet and passed it to Cillin with both hands. They were literally shaking as she did so.
Cillin accepted the bracelet before shooting her a comforting smile. “You don’t have to be nervous. You did very well.”
Meanwhile, the instructors were all staring at Cillin with strange looks in their eyes. At first, they believed that Cillin was just giving Rong Ruo a lifeline because she was a Return candidate, but they could not help but wonder if he was actually interested in her after he asked her for her bracelet.
However, no matter how many times they checked out her appearance and her file, they just couldn’t find anything special about the girl at all. Her looks were nothing special, and her stats were perfectly average. In fact, she did pretty poorly in most of the tests, and to call her shooting skills trash would be an insult to said trash. The only thing that kept her from being written off completely was the written test. Her overall score was hanging by a thread to put it bluntly.
Guan Feng would never accept a student like her. They knew that much.
Cillin ignored their strange looks and looked at the bracelet in his hands. The bracelet was made of a string of bean-sized beads that looked like translucent gems. Each bead had a different shape such as prism, star, square and so on. They were all very regular shapes, and he felt like touching water when he held it in his hands. After he analyzed the material composition of the beads for a bit, he wasn’t surprised to find that these “crystals” were mostly made up of water molecules.
It was very similar to the substance that the Xi Family used to freeze the massive sea overlords into crystalline specimens.
Cillin was very happy with this discovery as a matter of course. His widening smile caused the instructors to shoot him even stranger looks, and Rong Ruo to feel even more uneasy. She couldn’t fathom what the young man was trying to do. Every girl had a Cinderella dream of her own, but Rong Ruo had experienced too much in life to believe it would come true. She was a lot more rational than most girls at her age.
“Can you describe to me how you made this?” Cillin asked.
Rong Ruo instinctively opened her mouth, but she stopped herself at the last second. She would repeat the action a couple more times as she wrestled with hesitation, her hands clenching together so hard that her face was completely red.
“Ah, it’s okay if you don’t want to answer.” Cillin returned the bracelet before adding, “Keep it up.”
Cillin nodded at the team leader of the interview hall to indicate that he was done with his questioning. After the instructor looked around and found that no one else had a question for Rong Ruo, he declared, “Next.”
There was a short lull before the next examinee entered the interview hall, so some of the instructors asked immediately, “Is Guan Feng planning to recruit more students, Cillin?”
“No. Teacher Guan is satisfied for now, and you know he usually seeks out his students himself.”
“That’s true.” They nodded knowingly before continuing, “But why are you interested in that girl then?”
Cillin simply added Rong Ruo’s name to his list before saying in a joking tone, “She’s mine. Don’t you dare take her from me.”
Seriously? Who on earth would fight you over such an inferior stock? Of course, their answer was a lot more polite than their real thoughts, “Relax, most of us are maxed out already. We couldn’t recruit more even if we wanted to.”
It was only then the instructors recalled that Cillin himself was qualified to take an examinee under his wings. Although he hadn’t graduated yet, he was an honorary scholar of the RAS. Theoretically speaking, he was qualified to take a student even if his allowed quota was lower than normal.
There weren’t many examinees left after Rong Ruo. The interview ended shortly after that.
Now that the selection test was truly over, all that was left to do was wait for the final results to come out; to pray that they would receive a message on their communicators soon.
Basically everyone who passed all five tests would be accepted into the affiliated schools. Moreover, there were many instructors who weren’t assigned to help out with the selection test, but had a quota in their hands. With that in mind, the amount of examinees who would be walking away disappointed should be few and far between.
On the way back to the hostel, Rong Ruo spotted a lot of examinees who had finished their interviews discussing if they would receive the notice to enter AF1 or AF2. Some of them were also gossiping about the instructors. Most of these people did well in the selection test, so they weren’t overly worried about the result. Some were even packing their stuff and leaving because they had already received a notice. Yes, they were the ones who had made contact with their instructors before they even attended the fifth test.
When Rong Ruo returned to her unit, she discovered that her four housemates were discussing more or less the same thing. Two of them asked immediately after noticing her return, “How did it go, Rong Ruo? Was there an instructor who paid extra attention to you or something?”
“You were at the third interview location, right? I heard that Cillin was there. Did he ask you a question?”
Her other two housemates stayed where they were and simply looked at Rong Ruo with scorn. They were nobles, and they personally believed that a lower class civilian like Rong Ruo did not have the right to enter the affiliated schools at all. If it wasn’t for the systemic reform, a commoner with no backer like her would never even be able to enter this planet. That said, they weren’t so heartless that they would kick the commoner when she was down.
It wasn’t long before the robots visited their unit to give them their communicators. The two noble girls were the first ones to receive their communicators. The two girls who spoke with Rong Ruo received theirs not long after that. Rong Ruo was the last person to receive her communicator because the communicator was distributed based on their final score, and hers placed her near the bottom of the ranking.
But who cares if she received her communicator last? The important thing was that he got one. This time, all four girls were looking at Rong Ruo with great interest.
“I heard that anyone who passed through all five tests would receive a communicator,” one of the noble girls said.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Turn it on already! I want to know which school you’re heading to, and which instructor you’re getting!” Another girl urged.
Rong Ruo sucked in a deep breath before opening the communicator. A hologram screen appeared above the device, and the first thing they saw was—the massive head of a cat.
“Hello! You’re Rong Ruo, right?”
Everyone in the unit: “…”
