The Sect Leader System

Wan Ai stood in front of a table with a cloth draped over it, shielding everything beneath from her sight. Before her was a crowd of way too many people, and walls concealed her views of her fellow contestants to each side.

If only the front was blocked, too.

She couldn’t believe she was in the finals of the alchemy competition. It wasn’t that she didn’t think she was as good as the members from the bigger sects. She actually had a lot of confidence in her diligence and in the techniques and manuals that Master had provided her.

No, the reason she had trouble giving credence to the reality of her situation was that she was willingly doing her best each round even knowing that victory meant more attention on her. Before she’d started the tournament, she was confident that, if she made it past the first round, she’d have deliberately underperformed in the next one.

After easily winning the initial contest—the mites had been present on all the sets of herbs, but she’d been the only one to notice—she obviously advanced to the second round. In that one, she’d also faced off against nine other participants with only the top finisher moving on. That time, she’d discovered that her heating array was faulty, with a full quarter of the circle putting out significantly less qi than the rest, meaning she had to continuously rotate her cauldron while stirring the mixture.

Despite all the contestants in that round having won their section of the previous one, three of them somehow didn’t notice the problem with the formation. Of the seven that did, Wan Ai’s pill turned out to have the greatest purity, giving her the victory.

The third round went similarly, with her discovering that her cauldron had a defect, a dead zone that would not conduct qi. That was a chore to maneuver around since she literally couldn’t let any of the mixture touch the dead portion while at the same time ensuring that each part was heated evenly.

Very difficult. Her purity barely made it to seventy-one percent, a truly dreadful result. Luckily or unluckily, her nine opponents all did even worse.

That win put her, along with Bai Xinyi, into the top fifty and the subsequent fourth round. For that one, they competed in groups of five, where they were given a recipe for a pill Wan Ai had never even heard of. In studying the preparation instructions, though, they’d seemed off to her.

Talk about a difficult choice. She generally liked following rules. If someone in authority gave her instructions, she did her best to comply with those directions. On the other hand, her every instinct told her that the recipe was just plain wrong.

Despite the risk of failure or, worse, looking like an idiot with so many people watching, she went with her gut. It turned out that her gut was right, and she coasted to an easy triumph.

Bai Xinyi instead followed the recipe and didn’t make the finals.