Chapter 2392: Excellent Performance

————Just a little bit more, about five more minutes~~

————

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

As the preliminary venue for the Alliance-wide grand finals, the competition held at each university only involved offense, not defense, and the target Mythallar for the preliminary offense was 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 arranged in a staggered and orderly fashion appeared in the center of the venue.

Xia Duo received the notification: 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 to safely dismantle it.

Before entering, Instructor Tuto asked with concern: "Maruente, are you confident?"

"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 day and night pouring themselves into the competition preparations; compared to the effort and harvest involved in this, the experience of observing the upperclassmen's confrontation training was simply nothing.

Not just Xia Duo, even the other classmates felt very good about their current state, to the point of 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 the attempt.

"Everyone, report the Spirit Thought Network connection status." 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.

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

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

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

Different from the group confrontation training in the preparation stage, at this moment everyone was in the same team; just the increase in the number of people on the surface made the team's power directly double.

The implicit improvements were even greater; the most critical point was that the efficiency and results of the inspiration collision and consciousness interaction in the Spirit Thought Network did not grow linearly with the increase in the number of participants, but were closer to exponential growth.

Although the number of participants had doubled, Xia Duo felt that the subconscious ability 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 their respective specialized means to check the Mythallar status.

And very quickly, these data were all summarized to Xia Duo; Xia Duo was discussing and analyzing normally with them in the Spirit Thought Network, while also presiding over similar discussions and analyses at the subconscious level.

The subconscious 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 performance was that the Class 4 team analyzed most of the information about the target Mythallar before them in just a few words, and during the analysis process, they spoke one after another with extreme tacit understanding, just like continuous judgments made by the same person.

The current Mythallar still belonged to the category of 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 attempt 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 had actually already started cheating; although he had not yet obtained the complete Dragon Madness Secret Scroll (Mythallar blueprint), he had already obtained nearly two hundred copies!

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 exceptionally subtle.

With the answer known in advance, as long as one kept leaning toward it based on the checked Mythallar status, it would work; during this period, of course, it was also necessary to verify the status of several Magic Net Strings that were suspected to be available interfaces derived from analyzing the Mythallar status.

After all, the Mythallar before them was not the real Dragon Madness Mythallar, but one used by the Red Heart Alliance as a competition target; it was perfectly normal to have some other 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 the command again—

"Attempt to connect, perform permission confirmation."

This was considered a standard step in Mythallar defense; 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 could possess at the moment; Xia Duo felt it was unlikely that the Alliance would make the preliminary round that difficult; of course, if a team really did it, that would certainly be very eye-catching.

At the moment, all the operations they made within the Semi-plane were seen by the judges outside; if they could crack it from multiple dimensions, that was of course better, but if they couldn't, forced operations would instead show their shallowness.

Xia Duo's team had already discussed the response strategy for the competition beforehand—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; to safely dismantle it or seize 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 one could migrate to other Habitable Planes, and when making decisions, one would of course not need to consider absolute safety.

But in the Projection Plane, Other Plane exploration had yielded no results, and there was only this one Plane available; when making decisions, one must of course be extremely cautious, and mutual destruction was absolutely not allowed.

Therefore, in this and future Maze Defense Competitions, stability was definitely a bonus point, 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 have to hint at it proactively.