3 more days had passed and 3 more days of competitions were gone too. For the past 3 days, the competition was focused on problem-solving using pills.
The participants were given questions such as what ingredient would give a certain feature to a pill, or what pill would heal which damage.
There were many such questions and each day had a maximum of 100 points assigned to them.
By the end of the 6th day, only 2000 of the original 50,000 people were left. And of them, 2 people had exactly 600 points.
The people at the tower as well as everyone around were quite surprised. They didn’t think there would be 2 people that would ever do everything correctly in all the competition so far. Even the person at the third rank was at least 5 points behind.
By now, the group of people had pinpointed who the two people with 600 points were. One of them was a young man with a generic face and hair and wore white robes. Another one was a hooded figure that people couldn’t recognize aside from the cloth itself.
“They really are quite talented, aren’t they?” someone asked as they watched the remaining 2000 people participate in the third event that was fully shown now on the 7th day.
“Truly. Woah, that hooded figure already remembered the entire recipe? No way,” another person said.
“Look, that young man stood up too,” someone else said.
The two figures walked up and rewrote the entire recipe from scratch and handed it to the staff and went back for another one.
They had 10 recipes to remember in total and 5 hours in total to remember them all. Each mistake cost them a point for up to a maximum of 10 points per recipe.
The group of people watched the points for this competition go up by 10 for both of them.
“Hmm… that young man truly is quite good,” Ning said.
“What about the hooded kid?” Ely asked.
“Oh, I’m not talking about alchemy,” Ning said. “I’m talking about the amount of effort one had to put in to learn it all. I don’t think the hooded child had to go through as much trouble to learn it all as the young man.”
“Although, I do have to say they are both incredibly lucky in their own way,” Ning said.
The competition continued and soon the winners were revealed to be the same 2 young people with full 100 marks.
2 more days went by and the total number of participants dropped by 80% once more as only 400 participants remained.
The people started gathering back on the tower to watch the competition unfold. The 400 different participants entered the secret realm once more and got ready for their competition.
“So, what is the challenge today?” someone asked.
The host had started explaining down below, but these people didn’t care about him at all. Since Tsado was here to explain the rules of the competition, they didn’t care about anyone else.
Tsado was more than happy to explain, but before he could, the Saint Alchemist stood up.
“Everyone, I would like to genuinely thank you from the bottom of my heart for indulging this old man’s final wishes. I had stupidly given away my life in the pursuit of Alchemy, and I did learn a lot.”
“However, I got no human connection, no relationship formed with anyone. I lived for over 3000 years long, but every second of that was lonely.”
“Now, the end of my days are coming and I regret it all. However, that does not mean that I don’t take pride in what I’ve learned. I spent my life learning Alchemy, and the knowledge I acquired will be useful to everyone.”
“So, before I passed it along to just anyone, I had this little competition set up to find the perfect person to take my inheritance.”
“I, Gyron Heldi once again thank you all for coming here.”
The old, crooked man bowed in front of everyone, and the people immediately started explaining how it was unnecessary.
Ning watched and smiled as the old man was treated with the respect he deserved.
“The old man lived a sad life, but his sadness won’t be in vain,” Ning said softly.
“Don’t you know more than him?” Ely asked.
“Maybe, maybe not. I don’t have omniscient knowledge of Alchemy, so what I know definitely isn’t everything. So, there might be places where he knows more than me,” Ning said.
“I see,” Ely said.
The Saint Alchemist sat back on his seat and Tsado stood back up to continue explaining since he was cut off.
“Everyone, today is the final day of the competition, so there will be a single task for the contestants to do and that is to make all 10 of the pills that they had memorized from the 7th day.”
“They will be provided with all the necessary ingredients and will be given exactly one chance to make a pill.”
“They have exactly 10 hours and in that 10 hours, they will have to finish all 10 pills. Depending on the grade of the pills they will make, someone here will become the Saint Alchemist’s disciple and inheritor for sure,” Tsado said.
The group of people, especially the ones that still had their children in the game were very much looking forward to seeing their performance.
The competition started and people could start seeing the contestants making pills inside the secret realm.
“We have to focus on just those two right?” someone asked.
“Maybe, maybe not,” someone else said.
“What do you mean?” the first person said.
“Do you guys think they will make 10th-grade pills?” the second person said.
“Of course not,” another person answered.
“What about 9th-grade pills? Or 8th grade?” the second person asked again.
“Hmm… I would say 6 is the highest possible, maybe 7. Definitely not 8 or 9,” someone said.
“Yeah, so we don’t know how their performance will be. It’s very much possible that someone else will make pills that are better than theirs. In that case, there is some chance of the gap being closed,” the second person.
“Well, you keep saying that, but look,” another person said.
“What?!” a surprised exclamation appeared from the crowd as they looked up in the sky and saw two 8 back to back. Both of them belonged to the two people.
“While you kept on talking, both of them made 8th rank pill. Dear lord, they must be very talented to do that in under 3 minutes.”
Even Ning was surprised to see them make pills that fast. ‘Did two behemoths of an alchemist appear at once?’ Ning wondered.
He wanted to look it up with the system, but the mystery intrigued him. He would wait for the answer to come out on its own.
‘That kid though is using a really weird technique,’ Ning thought silently at the young man. Ning couldn’t really find anything unique about the robed figure aside from their speed.
In another 5 minutes, another two 8 points were added to both of their rankings. The crowd was shocked once again.
Not only were they good at making pills, but they were also incredibly fast which was really surprising to them all.
“I wonder where they got their skill,” Ning thought.
While the others took 10 to 15 minutes to make a single pill at the fastest, the two best ones took mere 5 minutes.
Right in front of everyone’s eyes, they made 8 different 8th-grade pills, gathering a total of 64 points, going head to head against each other.
However, on the 9th pill, a problem occurred. No one could tell if it was from fatigue, or from not memorizing the recipe correctly, but the young man made a mistake. A very small mistake, but one that was very much costly.
When he went to submit that pill, it turned out that it was a 7th-grade pill, compared to the robed figure who made an 8th-grade pill.
The young man felt the world crash down beside him. He would have to make a 9th-grade pill to make sure he equalized their total points again, or he would lose for sure.
The young man was devastated, but he kept his cool and got onto making his pill.
“Aish, he lost,” someone said.
“Poor child. It was a good run too,” another person said.
“Truly. I wonder if he was hasty,” another person said.
Time slowly passed and the young man was getting close to making his pills once more. He could tell that he was definitely making a good pill, but he couldn’t be confident that it was a 9th-grade pill.
The sadness was clearly visible on his face and it struck the heart of many others that watched the competition.
He finished making the final pill and brought it out to look at it. He sighed when he realized that there was no way the pill was in 9th grade.
He started feeling dejected, especially since the 2nd place didn’t have anything to gain. It was all for the first place.
He was about to call it quits when suddenly he heard a round of gasps from all around him. He quickly looked up to see everyone was looking somewhere.
He turned his face in the same direction and saw that the hooded figure was done with their pill too. ‘Did he get 9th rank?’ he thought and got even sadder.
But then the hooded figure opened their palm and a bunch of dust dropped from their hand.
The young man looked in surprise. The hooded figure had just destroyed their last pill.