"It's out?" Fang Yu spotted the pinned notice at once — Public Notice: First List of Recommendations for the New Calendar Year 60 College-to-University Transfer — and clicked straight through to look, his spirits lifting.
The list was not long. Ten names.
Wuling Martial Arts Junior College took five thousand students per intake, and had fifty transfer places a year in total, of which twenty were recommendation places, and the recommendation list came in two batches.
Ten in each batch.
"I'm not on it?" Fang Yu's eyes dimmed a little, then went back to normal.
"Of course."
"The first recommendation list is set by the end-of-term assessment results from the end of June." Fang Yu turned it over. "On Life Tier alone, my overall ranking is only somewhere past a hundred."
"But on martial skill I'm in the top ten."
"And by age I'm on the younger side of this intake."
"Taken all together, I should be somewhere in the top fifty," Fang Yu thought. "My odds of being picked were never good to begin with, and on top of that I haven't awakened a Void Star Aspect. The chance of making the first batch was very, very low."
The transfer places.
First came every student's Life Tier and martial skill scores; those two could not be faked. Then came the grade of the Void Star Aspect, which stood for a kind of future potential.
And last, age was taken into account as well.
Where two martial junior-college students had similar results, for instance, the younger naturally had the advantage... For a young warrior inside the Golden Age Bracket, even half a year more of training made a visible difference.
Which was exactly why missing the first recommendation list was no more than Fang Yu had expected.
Only.
Human nature being what it was, even when you knew the outcome, you kept a sliver of hope alive as long as the dust had not settled... Fang Yu was no exception. But he had his feelings back in order in a moment.
"Still."
"If the assessment were run again now and the list drawn up from that, my odds would be a great deal better." Fang Yu was quite calm about it. It was only ten days since his martial skill had broken through to Great Completion in Subtlety.
Great Completion in Subtlety was not rare among martial university students. Over half of the Void Star Aspects they awakened were Middle Aspects, after all.
Lower Aspects were uncommon among them.
The strength of those Aspects made tempering the body with Star Force highly efficient, and with more training resources on top of that, by the end of their third year their Life Tiers were generally Level 16 and climbing; the strong ones reached Level 20 or higher.
A strong body nourished a stronger spirit, which made sensing and perceiving one's own sinews, bones and muscle bundles easier — and they had better martial teachers to guide them, too.
For all these reasons their martial skill naturally rose fast.
Life Tier and martial skill support and reinforce each other.
Junior-college students were another matter.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred Void Star Aspects awakened by martial junior-college students were Lower Aspects... low-grade Aspects, fewer training resources; among third-year martial junior-college students, even reaching Level 14 was uncommon.
Add teachers of a poorer standard.
Add the fact that junior-college students were generally less willing to work — and so, as a rule, their martial skill was nothing much.
"The gap between a good university student and a poor junior-college student is wider than the gap between a man and a dog," Fang Yu thought. Only someone inside a martial junior college knew how bad a junior-college student could be.
Was the difference just that junior-college students had worse Void Star Aspects?
No!
As Fang Yu saw it, the Void Star Aspect was the smallest of the differences between junior-college and university students... A student who awakened a Lower Aspect but had a decent talent for skill and worked hard enough would stand out over three years of high school. He would not sink as far as junior college.
The genuinely outstanding junior-college students.
They were usually people like Fang Yu... a fair talent for martial skill, but no Void Star Aspect awakened before the entrance exam.
"On effort."
"On sheer grind, I'd say I'm no worse than those university students. What I lack is one chance." Fang Yu turned it over. "No Void Star Aspect? Great Completion in Subtlety gives me a real hope of making up for it."
Before the breakthrough, Fang Yu's martial skill score had already been in the top ten... and after it, Fang Yu reckoned he had a hope of competing for first in martial skill in all of Wuling Martial Arts Junior College.
The fourth-years had graduated, after all.
"I didn't make the first recommendation list."
"In a month, on August 15th, before the fourth year formally begins, there'll be another assessment." Fang Yu drew a deep breath. "That decides the second recommendation list."
"And if I miss that too, the last list has to wait for the combat selection in September... A month later means a month less inside a university, and that affects how far my training gets."
Over the years.
The high school entrance exam, the college entrance exam, the second-year selection assessment, and now this transfer... they had long since taught Fang Yu one thing. A person's life may allow infinite room for error, but that is only true at the bottom.
A junior-college student can live very happily too.
But if you want to set foot on the summit of the martial path, the genuinely good chances are few.
"There are fewer and fewer good chances left to me."
"All I can do is give everything."
***
He shut the laptop.
His grandfather was still in the reclining chair with his magazine, and Fang Yu went down to the basement.
An ordinary detached villa had two basement levels, generally used for a card room, a home cinema, storage, a wine cellar and so on.
But Fang Yu's home had only one, eight metres high and a hundred and fifty square metres in area, and apart from a row of cold cabinets it held weapon racks, wooden dummies, a punch-force tester, a blood-qi scanner, a skill imaging analyser and any number of other machines and instruments.
It was, plainly, a small indoor martial arts hall.
"Dad really did think it through." Fang Yu thought.
This indoor hall was another thing Fang Ping'an had done so that Fang Yu and his brother and sister could train the martial path conveniently, sacrificing a great deal of the comfort of the home... which was more than most fathers could manage.
True, once he started school Fang Yu had spent less and less time at home.
But every time he came down to the basement hall, he remembered how, back in secondary school, his father had made time between business matters to spar with him and help him train the blade.
Hiring a warrior to spar with you cost far too much, after all.
"Hoo!" He opened a cold cabinet.
Fang Yu took out the box on the top shelf, a crystal case in red and white, the silhouette of some abstract beast printed on the front, the flame-red logo of the Starlight Group in the upper right corner. The packaging felt stiff and solid, finished in a matte film.
Blood-Qi Compound.
"A small group's product. You can tell just looking at it — a bit low-rent next to the eight great groups'." Fang Yu thought. "It wins on price, though."