Shen could tell the dummy's movements were from a performative art, though he had never seen it before. It started slow and straightforward: place the feet at key positions, twist the body, and move the arms.

  When participants repeated the dummy's movements correctly, the tutorial teleported both a few dozen yards ahead. It let everyone see who was doing better or worse than them.

  The first levels passed were easy, and few trainees had any issues.

  At level 10, things got more complicated. The speed increased, and the movements became more complex. Shen still had no trouble copying them.

  Level 20 had the dummy crouch and twist and move around.

  Level 30 had it move at peak E agility speed, and the movements are so many it took most people hours to memorize, Shen included.

  At level 40, the dummy started jumping while moving its legs and arms. More and more people were left behind as Shen shared first place with a few dozen others.

  Then came level 50.

  It was a simple middle boss, but a boss it was.

  The dummy started rotating and twisting its body midair from then on. Shen had no trouble with his Zephyr-Gale Footwork, but he had trained it for... had it been months? For a long time already. He had seen cultivators use the Gale Footwork multiple times before, had the moves memorized, and hadn't needed to get everything perfect on the first try.

  Like many performative arts, the one they were learning was needlessly complex for extra impressiveness. Though some moves of the Zephyr-Gale Footwork had him twisting in the air to dodge, it aimed to be as effective as possible. The performative art was something else altogether.

  A girl in her late teens put them all to dust at that point. She performed flawlessly on the first try on most levels and kept going. Shen believed she should be a professional acrobat or something of the like.

  A few tries later, he reached level 51, and it wasn't easy. Mistake after mistake, he barely advanced. He could perfectly see how he started taking more and more from his E+ agility to succeed. He had never considered this a way to improve his motor coordination, but once again, the tutorial gave them a learning opportunity with a challenge.

  When he was still at level 83, the first girl's dummy disappeared, and she squeed in shy glee. She had passed.

  Many others were ahead of Shen, though fortunately, not many looked to be sixteen-year-olds. However, looking back, he saw many of similar age to his getting very close.

  It was evident that he was having difficulty in the most common places. The true elites in motor coordination were ahead. He was the first of the rabble, and he guessed only because of his learning ability upgrade.

  It seemed he had just found another weakness of his, up there with stupidity and arrogance.

  The learning ability upgrade was just enough for him to keep the lead of the ragtag for the rest of the way. He was glad he had taken the class that had informed him of how vital learning ability was and decided to focus on it.

  Then he reached level 100.

  Level 100 was a complex movement set of thirty-six hundred steps and fourteen thousand and four hundred full-body movements. The entire thing was hard to memorize and even harder to execute. Everything had to be done fast to keep enough momentum for the many jumps and twists.

  Shen took way, way too long there. Maybe days, maybe weeks. Hundreds of others reached him, and some moved ahead, passing the stage.

  He ended up requiring both the learning ability upgrade and the Concept of Zephyr to succeed. The former helped him understand how one move connected to the other and gave him better muscle memory when he did something right; the latter helped with subtle improvements.

  Shen stepped, jumped, and twisted. His arms had to be at the right place to increase momentum at times and decrease it at others. His legs opened and closed and bent, and his bones snapped multiple times as he pushed his body into positions he had never tried before.

  It was strange, hard, and required all his focus.

  When he finally succeeded, it felt exhilarating.

  Shen was teleported ahead to the victors' position and wasn't surprised when more than fifty sixteen-year-olds still trying their best were evolved by light right then.

  They had been expelled; Shen had been the last of his age group in the US to make it.

  Shen sighed in relief and sat down to meditate on the challenges he had just overcome. Learning how to push his motor coordination had felt significant, and he would rather not forget it.

  Alicia was standing in the vast grassland again. The magic competitors from the US formed a line to her sides, each a few dozen yards away from the next.

  Alicia felt confident about passing the stage. The previous one, about creativity, had just helped her realize how to do many, many things she had never thought of before. It was obviously by design, and she had just won that stage.

  She wasn't great at strategizing, but she could tell that wasting her best spells on weak enemies would be dumb. This was also a stage about properly determining how to kill things with the least effort possible.

  A goblin materialized, and she willed a simple string of fire to appear around its neck. She had thought of suffocating the monster, but she miscalculated.

  Alicia hadn't used her Concept of Destruction against monsters yet. She had used it against Void Spawn, who behaved differently when attacked, and the elite humans who had mostly also reached E-rank.

  Against the neck of the pitiful G-rank, the flames were much more dangerous. The thing's soul resisted her will, but the fire was powerful enough to quickly burn its neck away until it was beheaded.

  She already knew the soul only innately protected against willpower. The physical part of spells still damaged whatever was in contact with them.

  Now, she learned that Concepts were also not so easily defended against. If she had to guess, you probably needed a Concept of your own used in the same area to fight an enemy Concept. That was good to know.

  | Feral Weakened Goblin (G) | 23,627 → 23,628 AP

  The monster turned into light, and she was teleported to its position. Her mind felt refreshed, probably because of the willpower regeneration. A stronger-looking goblin instantly appeared thirty yards ahead.

  She hadn't expected such an easy time or the feeling of refreshment, so she wasted valuable moments in surprise as the creature looked around, realized where it was, then sprinted at her. She created a tiny ball of fire in front of its neck, and when its soul reached her spell, the battle of wills prevented the creature from simply going through.

  However, there was more happening there than a mere battle of wills. The speed of the goblin's soul aided it somehow, and Alicia felt a strong pang to her mind as her will went not against its soul but also its momentum.

  Her will held, but she made a note to consider that in the future.

  The goblin had been sprinting, so the abrupt obstacle at neck height made it backpedal and fall to the ground. Alicia controlled the tiny ball of fire to continue attacking its neck until it created a hole in it, and the creature turned into motes of light.

  | Goblin (F) | 23,628 → 23,638 AP

  She was teleported, and a horned rabbit appeared next.

  Alicia barely noticed its fur. Instead, she looked at it as mere walking AP and quickly thought of the weakest spell she could use to kill it.

  She really liked that stage.

  At long last, the wait ended. The system distributed the rewards, netting Shen 10,000 AP. Then it was lecture time.

  Shen thought that warning should've been given much earlier, as some hatred might have already seeped into people's hearts. Yet, it was doing it now. Why? It said something about people reaching this far, so it was targeting those who would lose, but wouldn't they have to go through the standard tutorial anyway?

  Then he realized they might just quit the standard tutorial without completing it. Fail it on purpose if giving up wasn't possible. Or even just ignoring what was said there because it wasn't the Pioneer Tutorial.

  The Guardian System had said nothing about removing the power of those who ceased being Guardians. That was proper. But what if the elites who got eliminated at the last stage decided just to go on a killing spree in the hopes for AP?

  He had been wrong; it was good they were told this now that the end was so close. Everyone was greedily drinking from the system messages, looking for any advantage they might learn to win.

  Shen approved that only those with real power could hold political power in the Alliance. The Eternal Empire was like that too. Even if some functions were delegated to weaker cultivators or mortals, it was essential to have someone mighty in command to prevent them from being intimidated into corruption and to be around to deal with extraordinary emergencies.

  However, he disapproved that Guardians were only accountable to departments of a higher rank than theirs.

  In the Eternal Empire, the laws for mortals and cultivators shared some similarities, but there were still many differences. Yet, all cultivators were under the same rules, except the Immortal Emperor himself, who was the law.

  If you created tiers of people with the same responsibilities but less accountable than others, you brew corruption. The weak would pay the strong to use their greater leeway. The strong would abuse that to oppress the weak. Politics would rule where the good of all should rule instead.

  The more he learned about the Alliance, the less he liked how it treated their mighty.

  But there was nothing he could do about it, so he moved on.

  That was interesting. Shen had received a message with a yellow uppercased title before, the one about the system breach.

  That was it. There were no new messages for a few moments.

  Then the system surrounded them in light and finally took them to the very last stage of the Pioneer Tutorial.

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