In retrospect, maybe the curriculum had been a bit overambitious.

At least he got to stand in the room all imposing-like, arms crossed as he glowered at the students taking his test— just like any good cultivator holding a class should. He’d thought that the material was simple enough— though, granted, it’d been half a semester and he’d been forced to make the whole thing in a week, and he’d leant towards the side of theoretically complete instead of theoretically doable, just in case Guxi’s play was to knock his class off the schedule due to unsuitability to teach of something like that.

Watching them fumble their way through the semester test— which he’d thought was rather lenient, working off the curriculum he’d written out— he fought the urge to wince. Or laugh— seeing some of his normally composed students sweat bullets as they stumbled their way through the exam was hilarious, and the sheer horror

on the students who hadn’t paid attention during his lectures… he committed those to memory, for later review. Only for academic purposes, of course, and not because he’d giggle at the way they looked at the paper in front of them like it’d personally stolen all their money, kicked their dog, and humbled them in front of their entire sect.

Not even Xinshi was immune— the boy usually breezed through all his classes with almost effortless ease, no doubt because of tutors or something, but the test wasn’t rote memorization. Actually, it was the best sort of a question— a single question for five of the entire six hours he’d been given, with no clear right answer but a lot of wrong ones.

Again, lenient. He could’ve asked them to make a specific formation, but that would’ve just been way too mean…

Hm, more people watching. Of course, none of them knew that his spiritual sense was extended throughout the classroom like they would’ve if he was teaching in the sect, which made them way too unwary with their actions. Some poor kid in the back row had all but given up on the test entirely, and had started doodling images of qilin and phoenixes along the margins of her paper. Another was writing and erasing expletives cursing his… well, best not to get into what exactly

he was writing about him, amusing as it might have been.

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Guandong had made a mathematical error at the top of her topological simplification, to which she’d furiously stabbed her pencil into her paper before breaking into tears. Avyr was scowling at his paper as if he was trying to burn a hole through it with his eyes, and every so often sinking into contemplative sort of expression. The outworlder kid was working on something inspired, and Raya had all but given up herself, having chosen the most obvious and most wrong course of action.

Of course, Lily had finished a beautiful formation in the first like… five minutes and had moved on to something a few orders of magnitude more complex to idle away her free time.

So it went. Time passed, and he stood there unmoving through it all.

Then, the fifth hour arrived. He’d set no alarms and nothing noticeably changed from one moment to the next, but he knew. For how could a cultivator connected so intrinsically to sunlight not be able to tell the time of day? “Time’s up.” A few kids groaned. More than one snarled. The sound of heads hitting desks, too, resounded through the room. “Drop your pencils; finish the line you’re working on and drop your brush.” One poor kid’s paper burst into violet flame the moment he stopped, and Mingtian grabbed the fire extinguisher before calmly walking up to him and blasting his desk full force. Of course, he looked just as composed as ever, but he was laughing internally. Those things were always so much fun.

It was a mark of how their lectures usually went that nobody even reacted.

He left the fire extinguisher next to the boy— just in case— before walking back up to the front of the classroom to complete the last step of his evil and devious plan. “I hope all of you are confident in the formations you’ve designed.” That got a chorus of groans and half-muttered comments of annoyance from the students— “because for the last hour of this exam, you’ll be demonstrating them in front of the class.” Dead silence.

Well, couldn’t win ‘em all.