So the time passed.

With the spring festival over, everyone got straight back to work, refreshed and renewed. For the teachers of East Saffron’s 32nd Preparatory Academy, that meant exams. Or at least the looming threat of exams, which— even though they were still more than a month away— felt all too uncomfortably close for most of them. It was really easy to look at their students and marvel at how they were going to possibly learn everything they needed to in the little bit of time they had left before they had to sit down and take their second exam.

For Mingtian, that was doubly a problem. He would not say it was because he’d submitted an egregiously, unfairly hard exam to the exam committee, and luckily for him there was nobody in the entire realm with enough power to press him into answering… probably. He very pointedly did not think about how Yuxan, a no-name basically mortal, had managed to pressure him into teaching formations at the academy.

Of course, a return to school brought with it some other tricky problems. Or hilarious problems, if you took a step back from the immediacy of them all and managed to look at them from a distance. There were plenty

of these, from all sorts of random sides— like how Kana Jie had goofily interjected himself into the feud between the teachers for the various grades, who’d only gotten more vicious as the school’s funding supply had begun to visibly dwindle. Or Yuxan’s constant and unsubtle attempts to butter him up.

In his personal opinion though, the absolute best of the lot was everyone’s reactions to Avyr’s advancement. It was absolutely hilarious. Xinshi had never been all that antagonistic in the first place, but Guandong… it was the classic ‘my backer is more powerful than your backer—’ until it wasn’t, and he wasn’t, and she had to shut up and actually be polite for once. That plus her horrible imitation of what she thought cultivator society was actually like… well, it made for an entertaining show, to say the least.

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Suzhong was, of course, ecstatic to have such a powerful cultivator when it came to his Applied combat classes. Guxi… not so much. Yuxan tried his best to bury his head in the sand and pretend he wasn’t outranked by a student in his own school, and folded pretty easily to the councilwoman’s demand that they exclude him from sparring. That was unfair, but… understandable. Xinshi didn’t spar with his juniors, focusing more on the individualized training he was no doubt getting from his family’s hired help, so nobody could even cry unfairness about that… though, of course there was plenty of that to be had elsewhere.

Luckily, no assassins showed up to try and deal with the cat… preemptively. Much as he didn’t like her, Mingtian didn’t actually want to have to kill Guxi. Actually removing the head politician of the precinct would have created a whole kerfuffle he really wasn’t interested in involving himself in…

Bao was extra upset he was once again outranked in his own classroom. Nin was happy. Jie confided to him on one occasion that he’d already had no idea what to do with a Shedding cultivator in the room, much less an Opening cultivator, which carried with it in the precinct a certain sort of aura of true power that made the whole thing only that much more awkward.

He’d been a little afraid that Avyr would be ostracized from what few friends— tenuous as that phrase could be used to describe the interaction between Avyr and his group mates— but that turned out to be an unfounded fear. Or well, a reasonably founded fear that failed to materialize against the situational necessity of needing their smartest group member on speaking terms if they wanted to actually pass their classes, as it were.

So it went

So the weeks fled by, closer and closer to the final exams—

Soon.

Mingtian sighed, leaning against the windowsill of his office and looking up at the sky so far above… soon, they’d have to actually take their exams, and see if everything had been worth it after all. He was confident in them… but not so confident that he was sure. It was, after all, very difficult to be completely sure of anything.

Hopefully…