Chapter 12.1
It was almost 10 o’clock when Bai Jing removed his earplugs.
Within a few minutes, a chubby boy panted and pushed open the door, looked around the room, and then plopped down next to Bai Jing, a smile brimming on his round face: “Hello, my name is Jin Mao.”
“Bai Jing.” Bai Jing looked sideways at him and introduced himself politely.
He could tell that this teenager’s family was well-off, because he was wearing fine quality clothes, a space storage that could store objects hanging around his neck, and the latest light brain style on his wrist; he just didn’t know why he was sitting with him.
“Bai Jing is it? You have a nice name.”
Jin Mao, a self-effacing teenager, smiled at Bai Jing, took a look at the teenagers sitting in the back row, rolled his eyes and whispered:
“Heh, I just can’t stand those rich kids with their haughty expressions, looking down on this and that all day long, what’s the big deal? Here, the strongest is the one who can pass the final exams.”
“Is the exams hard?” Bai Jing caught the word keenly.
He had wanted to look up the notes about the training and the exams, but had only found scattered texts on Starnet, so it was clear that the content of the exams hadn’t been made public.
“It’s very difficult. Although the apprentice gambler’s apprenticeship is not high level, it’s a necessary path to become a Stone Gambler, and the exams questions are extremely perverted every year.
And no matter how many people sign up, only the first 100 are taken each time, the pass rate is simply frighteningly low.
Like those in the back, many of them are taking the exams for the second or even third time. Cough, I am also taking it for the second time.”
Jin Mao scratched his head, a little embarrassed. Last time he didn’t even get into the top 500, not to mention the top 100.
There were a lot of people who took the gambling apprentice exams every year. As few as a few thousand and as many as ten thousand, and the competition was fierce.
And this year, there were eight training rooms, with more than sixty students in each training room, so going by this number, it meant there were more than five hundred people taking the exams in Proxima Star alone.
He was afraid that the number of people from all the planets in the Empire together was even higher than in previous years.
“Cough, although the questions are perverted, the top thirty who pass the exams will all receive the appropriate points: 5 points for the top ten, 3 points for 11-20, and 2 points for 21-30.”
“The requirement for a level 1 Stone Gambler is that you have to have a 5 point score. If you can get into the top 10, you can be promoted directly from a Gambling Apprentice to a level 1 Stone Gambler!”
Jin Mao said somewhat excitedly, his face turning red when he said the latter part.
That was five points. According to the rules, one point for every bet up, which meant five points was five winning bets.
Even according to the probability of losing nine out of ten bets, one would have to make at least fifty bets on rough stones to do so; if one was unlucky, there was no telling how many times it would take…
After listening to Jin Mao’s words, Bai Jing silently set a goal in his mind, which was to obtain a spot among the top 10 in the exams at any cost!
As long as he became a level 1 Stone Gambler, he would be able to represent the Gu Group in gambling battles and also be able to repay Gu Yuanzhao’s favor as soon as possible.
At exactly 10 o’clock, a middle-aged man dressed in a white vintage robe with a five mango pattern embroidered on his chest arrived at the training room.
His expression was very serious, and as his sharp gaze swept around the classroom, the room suddenly fell silent.
The middle-aged man inserted a black memory chip into a holographic device, adjusted the angle then started to introduce himself:
“My name is Gao Ling, you can call me ‘Teacher Gao’. Today we will learn how to distinguish the field mouth of the rough stones and the type of crust from the origin and characteristics of the planet.”
Bai Jing followed Jin Mao’s example and plugged the virtual port on his desktop into the light brain. For a moment he felt like he was on a somewhat barren planet, with violent wind and sand pounding in his face. Bai Jing immediately raised his sleeve to shield himself.
“The wind and sand on Planet Karrl is so strong that many of the raw jadeite stones are buried beneath the surface, and after thousands of years of movement, a unique coarse yellow sand cortex has formed….”
With the teacher’s explanation, Bai Jing who was in the middle of it could feel the changes of the earth’s crust, the ups and downs of the mountains and could see the trajectory of the rough stones’ movements clearly.
After he exited the virtual space, looking at the training room in front of him, Bai Jing’s heart was filled with shock. This immersive realism took his breath away, and at the same time he was impressed by the characteristics of Planet Karrl.
Gao Ling displayed the image of Planet Karrl’s rough stones in three-dimensional form right in front of the classroom, and began to explain from the origin of the rough stones, the crystal structure of the skin crust, the degree of surface coarseness, the color classification, etc…
Bai Jing listened with great fascination, and whenever Gao Ling finished explaining a knowledge point, he would quickly record the key words in his notebook while playing it back in his head at a multiplied speed, his pen literally flying over his notebook like a fly.
Jin Mao was taking notes on the electronic screen of his light brain, but when he saw Bai Jing take out an ancient Earth notebook, his eyes widened in shock.
“Laughing my ass off, what’s that civilian holding, where did he get that old antique?”
The teenagers in the back laughed out loud when they saw it, causing Gao Ling to knock heavily on the lectern, “Quiet!”
Bai Jing was calm and collected, the pen in his hand not pausing for a moment. He preferred the feeling of the pen falling on the paper to an electronic screen, because it made the knowledge in his memory much more clear.
The only reason he survived the crisis-ridden post-apocalyptic world was because of his excellent learning ability and extraordinary adaptability, otherwise he would have been buried in the mouth of a zombie.
Right now he knew too little and had too weak a foundation in interstellar and field opening knowledge, etc., but as long as he found the right method and practiced hard, he believed he wouldn’t lose to anyone.
As Bai Jing took notes, he thought to himself, it wasn’t enough to just to write down the key words in class, he had to go back and review them a few more times and try to be able to recap them completely.
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Something I’m curious to see if they’ll broach: a lot of zombie novels where the zombies have cores also tend to have an upgrade path for awakened hunters utilizing those zombie cores to improve their mental power, strength, ability, etc. Are the genetic repair solutions just a modified variant of that for our MC? Can he throw more money at his abilities and end up as a SSS class monster stone gambler? Will he end up needing to find another solution for that? I’m curious how it’ll develop if the author decides to include this feature, given that they’ve already directly drawn a parallel between zombie cores and jade.