Enshrined by a Bowl of Rice

Chapter 5: First Humiliation

Three days passed quickly.

Chen Xifan did nothing to prepare. Zao Xin, on the other hand, showed up every day asking “want to do a practice run,” “I can be your sparring partner,” “I’d probably go down in one second but the moral support still counts” — Chen Xifan deflected every attempt with a single “mm.”

The morning of the assessment, the corridor in Fire Hall was quieter than usual. Normally the low-ranked students were up early and restless — the walls were thin enough that you could hear someone roll over in their sleep. Today, nobody spoke. The air held a particular, physical kind of tension, like everyone was clenching something between their back teeth.

The assessment grounds were at the center of the academy. A round open-air arena, protective inscription runes carved in a full ring around the floor, spectator seats stacking up on all sides in tiered rows, the highest level almost level with the second-floor windows of the teaching tower. Chen Xifan walked in and glanced up — a ring of sightlines pressing down from every direction, everyone looking down at the center of the floor. It felt like the bottom of a vertical well.

Grain Hall students occupied the best positions in the middle tiers. Li Feng sat at the center, posture identical to the one he’d held at the opening ceremony — spine straight, hands folded over his knees, pale gold eyes sweeping the grounds in a calm, inventory-taking arc.

Zao Xin had squeezed himself into a corner at the very edge of the spectator seats, wooden rod clasped to his chest, feet bouncing against the stone steps. When he spotted Chen Xifan entering, he shot up from his seat and threw both arms in the air: “Xifan — come on — !” The volume reached three rows in every direction. People turned to stare.

Chen Xifan pretended not to know him.

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First round: written theory exam.

The proctor — an old professor — distributed the papers by hand. The sheets were yellowed, the text handwritten in ink, the script so precisely uniform it raised the question of whether this professor had spent his entire career copying examinations.

Chen Xifan opened the first question.

Describe the optimal transmission pathway for magical energy through the meridian network, and prove your conclusion.

He read it three times. Every character was familiar. Together they made no sense.

But the underlying logic came through clearly enough — it was asking about the optimal flow of an energy through a pipe network. Meridians were pipes. Magic was fluid. Optimization meant minimum resistance, maximum efficiency.

He picked up his pen.

Fluid mechanics. Flow distribution in pipeline networks. Pressure drop minimization. He turned the problem over in his head — this barely needed university physics. A variation on Bernoulli’s principle. He substituted pipe diameter for meridian width, flow velocity for magical transmission rate, pressure differential for the power gradient between dantian and periphery.

Fifteen minutes. Done.

He looked around. Most of the other students were still wrestling with the first half of question one, expressions suggesting they were attempting to decode a personal riddle. A few Grain Hall students were writing quickly — reciting a memorized answer. The signs were obvious: sentences uniform in structure, vocabulary fixed, not a single word their own.

Chen Xifan deliberately dropped points on the later questions. The third question had a cleaner derivation path he could see plainly, but it was too clean — it would look wrong. He added two extra layers of working, took the long way around to the conclusion, made it look like something he’d arrived at through effort rather than at a glance.

When the papers were collected, the old professor flipped through Chen Xifan’s from first page to last. He reached question one. He stopped.

He brought the paper closer and studied it for a long moment, eyes narrowed. Then he set the paper down, turned to look at the four-decade-old textbook sitting on his desk.

He stood up. Picked up the textbook. Walked to the window. Opened it. Threw the textbook out.

The teaching assistant startled: “Professor… that was a handwritten copy… the only one.”

“I know.” The professor returned to his chair, his voice perfectly level — the particular calm that didn’t come from peace of mind.

The assistant ventured carefully: ”…Shall I go retrieve it?”

“No need. It no longer has any reason to exist.”

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Second round: magical control test.

At the center of the arena stood a crystal maze — a palm-sized cube, interior channels packed dense as a headache, branching paths numerous enough to make your scalp crawl. The rules were simple: send a thread of magic into the maze entrance, guide it through every channel, release it from the exit. Speed and accuracy, equal weight.

Candidates came up one by one. Magic had color — a point of dull-red light crept cautiously through the maze, hesitating at each junction, backing up and rerouting when it took a wrong turn. The fastest candidate took four minutes.

Chen Xifan stepped up.

He pressed his palm to the entrance face of the crystal maze and pushed in a thread of magic.

The entire maze lit up.

White light poured in from the entrance and in a fraction of a second packed every channel, every branch, every dead end. The crystal maze became a lamp with a sudden power connection — white light blazing through from the inside out, all at once.

Several examiners stood up simultaneously.

Chen Xifan cursed internally.

Too much. Way too much force. He’d used what he’d calculated as minimum — and it had come out like a fire hose aimed at a teacup.

He switched tactics immediately. Instead of pushing magic in, he pulled it back out. He began withdrawing the excess from every channel one by one, leaving only a thread along the correct path. The way you’d use a straw to sip off the overflow from a glass filled past the brim.

Seven seconds. Flooded to a single strand of light, seven seconds. The white line followed the correct path through the maze and drifted out the exit.

Fastest in the field. But the faces around the arena had settled into confusion, not admiration.

“Why did he do it backwards?” one examiner murmured to the person beside them.

No one could answer. Because in this world’s common understanding, nobody ever needed to worry about the problem of having too much force.

Two rounds completed. Rankings posted — Chen Xifan in second, Li Feng in first.

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Third round: one-on-one combat. Pairings by draw.

Chen Xifan reached into the draw tube and pulled out a bamboo slip with a number on it. When the presiding examiner read out his opponent’s name, he showed no reaction. But from the spectator seats came a sharp noise from Zao Xin — because the figure walking up from the other side was Li Feng’s lackey: the same one who had attacked Zao Xin and pressured Chen Xifan into changing dormitories.

The lackey recognized him too. A smile spread from the corner of his mouth — the slow, deliberate kind. The sort of smile you aim past a person, using them as its material.

“Fire Hall trash.” The lackey rolled his wrists, deep-blue embroidery catching the light for a moment. “You should be grateful your opponent is me and not Lord Li Feng. At least I’ll go easy on you.”

Chen Xifan stood at the far end of the arena, hands in his pockets. He had taken no defensive stance.

Please just finish this quickly. He wanted to go back and sleep. He’d been up too early.

The starting gong sounded.

The lackey skipped the preamble. Hands formed the seal; a bolt of deep-blue magical energy coalesced into a fist-sized sphere and slammed toward Chen Xifan with the full pressure of a Grain-bearer behind it. The air groaned under the compression, and several Fire-kindlers in the front rows of the spectators instinctively leaned back.

The sphere hit him and scattered, the way a cup of water scatters against a cliff face. The cliff stays the cliff. Chen Xifan stood where he’d been standing, hands still in his pockets, school uniform without an additional crease.

The lackey’s casting hand hung frozen in mid-air. His smile had set.

The entire arena was silent for one beat.

Chen Xifan walked forward a few paces, stopped in front of the lackey, and reached up to pat him on the shoulder.

“Did you just…” He tilted his head, expression of genuine confusion. “Sorry — I spaced out. Did you do something?”

The lackey’s face went from white to red, from red to grey.

“You—!”

He attacked in a rage. Second shot, third, fourth. The deep-blue spheres came faster and harder with each pass; eventually he was casting with both hands simultaneously, veins standing out at his temples, each strike carrying the intent to reduce the other person to ash.

Every hit landed on nothing. Each one striking Chen Xifan was like dropping a stone into deep water. Chen Xifan even yawned — a genuine one, he’d gotten up too early.

The lackey’s attack rate slowed. He’d run dry. He bent forward at the waist, gasping, sweat dripping from his chin, arms shaking.

Chen Xifan looked at him.

Enough.

He raised his right hand, index finger and thumb pinched together. He pushed the force down, pressed it to the lowest point he thought he could control — any lower and there’d be nothing.

He flicked.

A white thread of light shot from his fingertip, thin as a needle. The moment it connected with the lackey’s chest, the Grain-bearer’s body responded as though struck by an invisible truck — he flew backward, crossed half the arena, and embedded in the stone wall beneath the spectator seats. Rubble scattered. Dust rose.

White.

The whole arena had seen it. That light was white. Not dull red, not amber, not deep blue — white.

The assessment ground fell into dead silence. No cheering, no gasps, not even whispered commentary. Everyone was processing what had happened in that one second — a Fire Hall student registered as Dew-gatherer had, with a single flick of the finger, put a Grain-bearer into the wall.

Chen Xifan lowered his hand.

His expression held the exhaustion of someone who can finally leave — victory, satisfaction, and relief had all been evicted to make room for it. He turned and walked toward the arena exit, pace unhurried.

Then, from the spectator seats, came applause.

A single pair of hands. Rhythm uneven. Gap between claps inconsistent.

Zao Xin had stood up. He was clapping, eyes lit like two fully charged energy crystals.

“That was something!” His voice rang out clear through the silence. “Do another one!”

Everyone around him was staring. Zao Xin paid no attention. He stood there in the corner at the far edge of the spectator seats, clapping alone, clapping hard and happy, as if he was watching the best performance of his entire life.

Then a handful of commoner students rose — three, five — joining the applause in ones and twos. Zao Xin’s clapping had given them the impression that it might be allowed.

In the middle tiers, a noble girl did not clap. She sat in the Grain Hall section, chin slightly raised, watching the figure walking out of the arena with an entirely new gaze — clear of assumptions, stripped of prior conclusions.

Li Feng had not moved. His eyes had stayed on Chen Xifan throughout — on the fingertips of his right hand, specifically.

“As I thought.” His voice was low enough that only the empty seat beside him could have heard it. “You’re standing in the wrong position.”

The tone carried something that had been absent from the opening ceremony until this moment — seriousness. Untempered. Unambiguous.

Chen Xifan walked out of the assessment grounds with Zao Xin’s applause still sounding at his back. He didn’t turn around.

A faint residual sting lingered at the tip of his finger from the flick. One more degree of force, and the lackey wouldn’t have been embedded in the wall.

He would have gone through it.

Chen Xifan pushed his hand back into his pocket and quickened his pace.