“Hah! No wonder this Xia Fei was rejected by the system. Who made him dabble in so many fields, even learning a few fiend arts. His blood is also a mess. It seems like one of his ancestors had a connection with the fiend lineage, though not one that’s too serious.
“This little blood wouldn’t have posed a problem. After all, the Fiend race was powerful in ancient times, and ancient clans with long legacies couldn’t escape being connected to it at some point, but he also learned fiend arts, which is a grave mistake. It’s only natural for the system to reject him.” The whitebearded elder was pointing at the long string of numbers on the screen when he said this.
Xia Fei had learned numerous things in his lifetime, so it was hard to say which two Whitebeard was referring to. They were actually from the Fiend race?! This was something that Xia Fei could never have imagined. He did not even know what the Fiends were.
The beardless old man snorted. “I only want to know how he managed to get in even after the system rejected him?!”
The two of them fell silent, both shaking their heads. The screen showed very clearly that Xia Fei had been rejected by the system all this time. Even when he killed Feng Jianting and tried to get into the Pentalink Star Gate, he had still been rejected, but in the blink of an eye, he had somehow gotten in!
“Did something go wrong with the system? Impossible! The Five Higher Universes have been operating on this system for countless years, and something like this has never happened before. At that instant, the system lost its function as if it had taken a nap.”
“The system’s momentary break let this problem in, and now the unfortunate us must suffer. We’ve clearly lost out because of Xia Fei, but we can’t do anything to him.”
In his view, Xia Fei was a huge problem. He was clearly a human, yet he had somehow learned the skills of the Fiends and almost caused a system breakdown.
They were not the owners of the system, and they only had the authority to deploy countermeasures, not to edit the system records. If they removed Xia Fei, someone might come to inspect and find out easily what had happened.
Sighing, Nobeard said, “Forget it. Since the trouble has entered, let’s just keep watching.”
Whitebeard nodded, and the video continued to play. As the two of them watched Xia Fei tear through the trials, they grew more and more shocked, their eyes widening and their jaws dropping.
Frowning, Nobeard said sternly, “It’s now very clear what happened. Rapidly passing the trials has a multiplier effect on the points, and using unusual methods to pass has its multiplier, too. These numbers have increased exponentially and appeared explosively, so the calculations must’ve been simply too convoluted!
“However, not even the complexity of the calculations could make the system crash; the bigger reason was Xia Fei’s use of extraordinary methods to pass each trial! Take that first trial as an example; it’s actually a very ordinary combat trial. He just needed to kill enough people to pass smoothly, yet Xia Fei did no such thing. Be it a matter of luck or something else, he found that pair of children hiding and killed them! Heavens! The battle was so intense, and no normal person would pay any attention to two harmless children, let alone kill them!
“That second trial, too! It’s a very normal test of patience. Anyone who can endure the pressure for thirty minutes will be granted the right to pass, and the longer one lasts, the more points they’ll get, but Xia Fei?! The moment he saw that it’s a stalemate with no way out, he resorted to a self-destructive method just so he could break out!
“Crazy! Only a crazy person would do such things! Does he know how much danger he’s just put himself in? Getting off with his two arms severely wounded was actually quite lucky! If I were there and as crazy as he was, I would’ve died tens of millions of times! The system went to great lengths to design this exquisite stalemate as a form of an endurance test, but he broke it!
“In the third trial—oooh! I loathe him so much! It’s a test of judgment, and Xia Fei only needed to realize that those illusions were fakes to pass. It’s such a simple, simple test, but the result? Xia Fei used some method to somehow find the hidden nerve hub, and then he destroyed it!
“According to the normal process, destroying a hub is extremely against the rules! The system should’ve immediately expelled him! The problem was that he had attacked too quickly, too viciously! If he had kept attacking, he would’ve started attacking the system itself! Following the principle of avoidance, the system decided to let Xia Fei pass in order to protect itself!
“The system is intelligent. It originally didn’t plan to let Xia Fei pass, but because Xia Fei was too violent, it had no choice but to let him through; otherwise, the system itself would’ve been finished. This is something that has never happened before! How should Xia Fei be scored? How many logical calculations would the system have to go through to reach a result?!
“Considering that the system is already under immense pressure from how fast Xia Fei got through the first two tests, when a problem appeared on the third test, the system couldn’t keep up. The number of calculations needed to score Xia Fei surpassed all the other 890,000 warriors put together, and that’s how the system crashed!”
Nobeard grew more agitated the more he talked, and by the end, he was yelling and waving his fists in the air. He clearly hated to his bones the unconventional Xia Fei.
In truth, Xia Fei’s methods would leave anyone angry, turning simple tests into complicated ones, but that was just how he was. Xia Fei was like a stubborn cockroach that had an extremely intense desire to survive; he preferred to use his own methods to resolve problems.
Following the rules? He had never followed the rules in his life!
Stomping his feet, Nobeard turned around and walked away, muttering, “It’s no good. I have to find out what’s going on, or else my head is going to explode!”
…
Xia Fei was very bored, for the system had suddenly stopped.
Unlike the others, who were still in the middle of their tests when the system had paused, with everything else around them frozen, Xia Fei had been thrown into a dark and silent space.
*Whoosh!*
Two beams of white light shot over, and two blurry figures appeared; they were none other than the mysterious elders Whitebeard and Nobeard.
Xia Fei, who had just lit a cigarette, seemed not to care about their abrupt arrival.
“You are Xia Fei?” Nobeard straightened up and asked.
“Yes, who are you? The operators of the God-Demon System?” Xia Fei asked back.
“The God-Demon System? That’s a pretty good name; unfortunately, it’s not accurate,” Whitebeard said. “Don’t think too much about who we are. First, we have something to ask you.”
Seeing that Xia Fei had no reaction, Nobeard asked, “In the test, why did you kill those two innocent children?”
Xia Fei chuckled. “Innocent? If those two were innocent, then there’s probably nothing in the world that isn’t innocent. Two little children in the middle of a battlefield? That just doesn’t make sense. Plus, they were silently observing the battlefield. If an ordinary child was left on the battlefield, they would be scared to death while frantically looking around. Those warriors killed anyone they saw, so why didn’t they attack those two kids? There’s definitely a problem there.”
Whitebeard frowned and asked curiously, “Maybe those two kids were the bolder and more curious sort, and the others took pity on them. You think that everyone is as ruthless as you are?”
Xia Fei replied calmly, “There’s a tattered backpack on the ground, and there were several books inside. The one on the very top was a physics book. That’s a little too early for a little kid, right? The book was light yellow and green, indicating that it had been coated in poison. When I got close, that girl hugged me while the boy went for his backpack. So? Do you need me to go on?”
Whitebeard and Nobeard were both rendered speechless. Xia Fei’s analytical abilities were just shocking. In that brief moment, Xia Fei had noticed many strange details. This was the real reason he had killed those two children!
“What about the second test? You knew that you had only a one-in-ten-thousand chance, but you still broke free of the energy link, suffering heavy injuries. Why is that?” Whitebeard asked.
“Survival!” Xia Fei replied firmly.
“‘Survival’?” The two elders repeated Xia Fei’s words in surprise.
“Yes, survival is the number one law of the jungle! Other than taking a risk for my survival, I couldn’t think of anything else. Besides, a one-in-ten-thousand chance is still a chance; if I had just kept using up my energy then, I wouldn’t have even had that.” Xia Fei admitted this frankly.
The two elders were shocked once more, for the entire process had only lasted tens of seconds. In other words, Xia Fei had needed only around a dozen seconds to finish analyzing the situation and did what he needed to do. While his analytical abilities were impressive, what was even more impressive was his decisiveness. Without even blinking, he had chosen that thin chance of survival!
Whitebeard was about to ask another question, but Nobeard suddenly stopped him, and the two projections disappeared.
“Why did you stop me? I was going to ask him about the third trial,” Whitebeard asked unhappily.
Nobeard sighed. “There’s no need to ask. He’s one of those legendary freaks. He’s not a fiend, but he’s got a fiendish personality. He’s capable of doing the craziest of things.”
The two elders both sighed. How had they run into a monster like Xia Fei? To tell the truth, the system was built in consideration of people who were not of a particularly high level, and so the first phase had been very simple. They were all basic tests for combat power, judgment, perseverance, intelligence, and so on.
Alas, Xia Fei was an extremist, making these simple things very complicated and catching even the system off guard that it crashed. After all, this system was designed for millions of ordinary people, not for a monster like Xia Fei.
What should they do?
The two elders began to think. Although they had pulled Xia Fei out of the system, they had to give him some points so that he could go into the second round. However, they were troubled by just how many points they should give him.
Suddenly, Whitebeard’s eyes twitched, and his body froze.
“The sy-system… system…” Whitebeard stammered.
“What’s wrong with the system?” Nobeardturned around and followed Whitebeard’s gaze.
Xia Fei’s name had somehow returned to the chart, and it had gone from fourth from the bottom to the very top, flying past all of his 890,000 challengers!
The dark red bar shot straight into the heavens! The number displayed was an astronomical number that nobody had seen before!
The Whitebeardand Nobeard had manually pulled Xia Fei out of the system, but the system had skipped over them and once more accepted Xia Fei! It had even given him an unbelievably astronomical score that had never been seen before!
It was shocking, but this was not all that the two elders were surprised about.
What truly left them surprised was that small line next to Xia Fei’s name.
