Chapter 2391: The Competition Begins

Half a month later, all majors related to Mythallars at all universities within the Red Heart Alliance held an inter-collegiate Maze Defense Competition at the same time.

As the preliminary round for the Alliance-wide grand final, the competition held at each university involved only offense and no defense, and the target Mythallars used for the preliminary selection were notified to each school at the same time.

At Chixin University, the school set the competition venue in an open-air plaza on campus; on the day of the competition, crystal cubes appeared in the center of the venue, arranged in a staggered and orderly fashion.

Xia Duo received the notification that every competing team—that is, the class unit—was assigned a Semi-plane space, inside of which was the target Mythallar for the competition, and their task was to attempt to seize its Mythallar Permission or safely dismantle it.

Before entering, Instructor Tuto asked with concern: "Maruente, do you have confidence?"

"Yes! At the very least, we won't just be going through the motions!" Xia Duo said in a deep voice.

Over the past month, he and the other 24 classmates had spent almost every waking moment, day and night, preparing for the competition; compared to the effort and gains involved in this, the experience of observing the upperclassmen's confrontation training was nothing at all.

It wasn't just Xia Duo; even the other classmates felt that their current state was excellent, even exceeding their usual performance.

……

After entering the crystal cube on the plaza with his classmates, the first thing Xia Duo saw was a pure white space, and then a gentle yet dignified voice told him that he had one day to make an attempt.

"Everyone, report the connection status of the Spirit Thought Network." Xia Duo issued the command in the Mind Link, while simultaneously sending out some judgment information from subconscious interaction.

What he worried about most was that the school, in order to prevent cheating—or more accurately, to prevent him from using the Inspiration Headband, an asymmetric advantage that other teams did not have, to achieve a higher score—would impose restrictions.

But soon, Aotuomu and the other classmates gave feedback in the Mind Link one by one; the Spirit Thought Network was completely normal, and no interference had been received.

Thinking about it carefully, it was actually normal; since they had brought both lower and upperclassmen to the same competition venue, as long as the operations in the competition were performed by the individuals themselves, there was no such thing as not being allowed to use asymmetric advantages.

"Very good, first check the Mythallar status and search for available interfaces."

Unlike the group confrontation training in the preparation stage, everyone was in the same team now; the mere increase in the number of people on the surface caused the team's power to directly double.

The implicit improvements were even greater; the most critical point was that the efficiency and results of the Spirit Thought Network's inspiration collisions and conscious interactions did not grow linearly with the number of participants, but were closer to exponential growth.

Although the number of participants had doubled, Xia Duo felt that the ability of the subconscious to collaboratively process various problems had at least tripled or quadrupled!

Almost at the same time his command was issued, following the process from previous training, all members of the team began to use the methods they were best at to check the Mythallar status.

And soon, all this data was summarized to Xia Duo; while Xia Duo was having normal discussions and analyses with them in the Spirit Thought Network, he was also presiding over similar discussions and analyses at the subconscious level.

The subconscious's collaborative processing ability was more efficient, and it could feed back the process and results to the conscious mind in the form of a flash of inspiration.

The actual manifestation was that the Class Four team analyzed most of the information about the target Mythallar in front of them in just a few words, and during the analysis process, they spoke one after another with extreme tacit understanding, as if the continuous judgments were made by the same person.

The current Mythallar still fell under the category of a Traditional Mythallar, but it did not belong to any Traditional Mythallar they had seen before; Xia Duo saw some characteristics of the Dragon Madness Mythallar in it, thereby verifying the accuracy of his previous guess.

The Red Heart Alliance really intended to draw on the Wisdom of the masses to try to crack the Dragon Madness Mythallar; the two tasks of the competition—seizing permission or safely dismantling—were also what the Red Heart Alliance was preparing to do to the Dragon Madness Mythallar.

Since he had judged that it might belong to the Dragon Madness Mythallar, Xia Duo was actually already cheating; although he had not obtained all the Dragon Madness Secret Scrolls (Mythallar blueprints), he had already obtained nearly two hundred of them!

If nothing else, at least he knew how to connect to the Dragon Madness Mythallar.

This at least saved him the time of searching for the Mythallar interface compared to other teams, and in the Spirit Thought Network, he could make this cheating particularly subtle.

With the answer known in advance, he just needed to keep leaning toward it based on the checked Mythallar status; during this period, of course, he also needed to verify the status of several Magic Net Strings that were suspected to be usable interfaces derived from analyzing the Mythallar status.

After all, the Mythallar in front of them was not a real Dragon Madness Mythallar, but one used by the Red Heart Alliance as a competition target, so it was normal to have some extra interfaces.

Even the real answer might be hidden among these non-Dragon Madness Mythallar interfaces.

Xia Duo would not completely abandon other possibilities just because he knew the suspected answer, but compared to other teams, his team would definitely not miss the one suspected to be the real answer.

After finding several interfaces that might be the target Mythallar, Xia Duo issued a command again—

"Attempt to connect and perform permission verification."

This was a standard step in Mythallar defense and offense; if one did not start with Mythallar Permission, one could only crack it by finding rule loopholes in the Mythallar's own Spell design, which required not only a vast amount of Mythallar Knowledge but also rich cracking experience.

Neither of these was something Xia Duo's team currently possessed; Xia Duo felt that it was unlikely the Alliance would make the preliminary round that difficult, though of course, if a team really did it, it would certainly be very impressive.

Right now, all the operations they performed within the Semi-plane were being watched by the judges outside; if they could crack it from multiple dimensions, that would of course be better, but if they couldn't, forced operations would instead reveal their shallowness.

Xia Duo's team had already discussed their response strategy for the competition—show their abilities as much as possible, but do not take risks.

This was also a conclusion he drew from the Red Heart Alliance's attitude toward the Dragon Madness Mythallar; the Dragon Madness Mythallar covered the entire Main Plane, not just a corner of the Northland, so to safely dismantle it or seize its permission, one must ensure there was no room for error.

Otherwise, there would be a risk of the entire Plane being overturned.

If this were on the Main Plane, perhaps they could migrate to other Habitable Planes, so there would be no need to consider absolute safety when making decisions.

But in the Projection Plane, where Plane Exploration had yielded no results and only the current Plane was available, one must be extremely cautious when making decisions; mutual destruction was absolutely not allowed.

Therefore, in this and future Maze Defense Competitions, stability was definitely a bonus, it was just that Xia Duo knew it in advance, while others might have to go through one or two competitions before they could analyze it, or the Alliance officials might hint at it proactively.