The Five Professionals Academy was in the shape of a pentagon and was about 5 stories high. Each of the 5 sides of the pentagon building belonged to one of the 5 main professions and other professions that aligned to it.
Ning was currently in his own mind as he followed the two people towards the Alchemy wings of the academy.
'I wonder what it will be like. Will it be similar to the Volunteer exam? Or maybe the beast taming exam from the Mist Origin sect,' he wondered.
The two men soon reached a girl who was registering the people for the entrance exam.
'Am I late? Or am I too early?' Ning wondered as he looked at the utter lack of individuals registering for the exam. 'Or did people get registered beforehand and are now inside the classes already?'
The two people quickly registered and walked into the class behind the girl. Ning walked up and asked to be registered.
"Fill this," the girl handed him a talisman. Ning quickly filled in a talisman with information as close to the truth as it was. He was then stuck on a part.
"Umm… What should I put on this Alchemist grade part If I've never been officially tested?" he asked.
"You don't have a grade yet?" the girl asked in shock. "Then why are you taking this exam? You know that passing this exam is really hard if you don't have quite a high amount of knowledge right? She asked.
"Oh, I know the things. I've just not been officially tested," Ning said with a smile.
The girl squinted her eyes but quickly moved on. "Just say Ungraded in that segment then," she said and Ning did so. After that, he handed the talisman back to the girl.
The girl quickly checked if there were any possible errors. "Looks good. Alright, hand over 100 Spirit Stones," she said.
"What?" Ning asked in surprise. "Why would you need 100 spirit stones?"
"It's a price for the exam. Don't worry, if you pass, the 100 stones will be handed back to you," the girl gave him a weird look.
'Damn it, they should have mentioned it in the notice,' he thought. Thankfully, he was now a Nascent Soul cultivator and had come across quite a few places where Spirit stones were priced almost as cheap as gold coins.
He took out 100 spirit stones from his storage, thinking he would definitely give them back. Once he was properly registered, he took the entrance card he was handed and walked in.
As soon as he walked in, he saw a large number of people that filled the room to nearly a brim.
'That's… not a lot of people,' he thought. Considering the hundreds of thousands that came to the city in the last month, the nearly thousand people he was seeing was very low.
'It's low even when compared to just the amount of people walking up the stairs,' he thought. He walked to an empty seat while trying to find Ender along the way.
Unfortunately, he wasn't here.
"Oh, there must be more than one room then. No wonder there are so few people here," he finally realized. He looked around, a little surprised at how many old people were actually in the room.
"Did they focus on Alchemy so much that they stopped cultivating for a little while?" Ning found it quite funny that people could be so invested in an art form that they would risk losing near eternal youth to do so.
He looked around a little more and was surprised that most of these people were in the Nascent Soul realm. "Hm… is it okay to show my cultivation base without worry? Will I not get treated as a commodity in this academy?" he wondered.
He really did want to stop the concealment skill he had learned during the last century that helped block a portion of his cultivation base.
After a little more thinking, he decided to wait before he did so. He would be lying about his strength even if he really showed his true cultivation base, so he decided to keep concealing for now.
"Still, it's amazing just how many Nascent Soul realm cultivators there are in this academy. Makes me wonder why they can't advance any further," Ning thought. He was still thinking of ways to help Hyesi and Anya, and the thing that he had settled on was to help them leave the planet.
That was the only way he could possibly do it. Since the planet didn't have a lot of Qi, there was no way he could let them stay here. However, he himself couldn't teleport out of the planet without a 10th of the Planet's energy in his body, and that was just absurd.
He would need to think of other ways for sure. He had thought of simply flying out of the planet, but the closest habitable planet was still about half a light-year away according to the system.
Even a light second cost him about 4.5 Billion energy to teleport once he flew out of the planet, so that wasn't possible either. Besides, taking two people, and possibly their family with him was just not possible.
"Sigh, let's not think about that for now. I will help them when I can," Ning thought as he shook his head.
After a minute or two, a very old man with white hair and a mustache walked into the room. He wore a dark red robe with a Golden Star that had a carving of a leaf on his chest. He also had a few bronze stars just below the large golden one and each of them had a different imprint on them.
'He must be one of the starred individuals just like Ender's sister,' Ning thought. A bit of murmur appeared from the people around him as they started whispering about the old man a little.
'Is he famous by any chance?' Ning wondered. He had spent the last month holed up inside his room, so he wouldn't know that.
"Ahem." The old man coughed to catch everyone's attention.
"Good morning, everyone.. I am Jezeere Praxton, a professor in the academy, and I will be your Examiner for today."