The next morning, Bai Xian Ming went to the Hero League headquarters as usual.
He arrived at 8 a.m. and stood in front of the elevator, waiting for it to come down. In the meantime, he opened his smartwatch and checked his schedule for the day.
[Hero selection for intensive training!]
It was his first task for today, selecting heroes to train under the newly appointed Chief Hero Instructor, Xing Heero.
Ding!
The door of the elevator opened, but Bai Xian Ming did not enter the elevator. The face of a young man flashed across his mind.
Bai Xian Ming immediately turned around and headed towards the banquet hall from yesterday. He remembered something he had forgotten to check.
Before he left the hall, Musashi Noboru apologised and told him that the underground arena had been badly damaged.
He had forgotten to check how badly damaged the arena was. Now that he remembered, he immediately went to the underground arena.
The banquet hall was not far from the main building. It took him five minutes to reach the banquet hall.
With steady steps, he walked towards the private lift. Flicking his ID card, the lift door opened and he rushed inside.
There were three underground arenas and he remembered that they had chosen Arena No.01.
Pressing the button for UA01, the lift door closed and descended. Impatience mixed with curiosity, Bai Xian Ming impatiently tapped his feet on the floor.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
Ding!
The sound was an indication that the lift had reached its destination. Bai Xian Ming took a big step out of the lift, but stopped after two steps.
Bai Xian Ming's eyes were wide open as he looked around. He looked back at the lift to make sure he was not entering the wrong arena.
On the top of the lift was "UA01", indicating that he was in the right place.
He scanned the area again.
"Fuuhhhh... Haaaa!"
"What the hell happened here?" It was rare that Bai Xian Ming cursed. But he did it now.
The arena could not be described as badly damaged. It was far from badly damaged, it was destroyed. The reinforced steel used to build the underground arena was completely ruined.
The centre of the arena was split wide open. From the looks of it, the crack had been cut by a sword.
Not only that, but there were many cuts here and there. The reinforced steel, which was also the hardest steel currently available, was easily cut.
He went to the biggest crack and stood near the cut. The cut in the centre was deep, about 10 metres.
"No wonder the old man told me to ask his clan for compensation..."
"This will cost a lot of money to repair... No, the arena cannot be repaired, we have to rebuild the arena..."
*** ***
Meanwhile, the culprit who destroyed the arena, Xing Heero, was busy with his work.
The Heero Academy would officially accept its first generation of students.
Today, they would make a selection as Heero Academy only accepted 50 first generation disciples.
Standing in the hall of the Martial House, Heero looked blankly at the sea of children in front of him.
He had made a rough selection, lowering the age limit to reduce the number, but it seemed that the number was only growing.
He had planned to take 50 children, but...
"Mnn..." Heero rubbed his chin as something occurred to him.
Last night, he, Bai Xin Yue and Kang Seo-Yeon had discussed that the Heero Academy only accepted students aged 13 and under.
The reason why he only accepted children was because of his other job as a Hero Instructor. He had to train a few or even dozens of heroes, so he planned to train the children in his academy.
His goal was to keep the city safe. He wanted to strengthen the city so that the same thing as the specters attack would not happen again.
"There are more children outside?" Heero asked in a quiet voice.
"Mnn... The hall could only hold 350 kids and there are thousands of kids outside..." Kang Seo-Yeon nodded as she checked the data on her smartwatch.
"I thought there were less than a thousand kids registered!?" Heero was stunned when he heard the number.
Unless he was wrong, the number should be less than a thousand. He was confused because the number of registrations had increased so much.
"Kuhuhu... That's the effect of the Chief of Hero Instructor! Moreover, the public knows that you are the master of two new Emperor Class Heroes..." Bai Shuang'er chimed in from behind with a small laugh.
Heero looked back and asked, "What are you doing here?"
"What? Why can't I be here?" Bai Shuang'er rolled her eyes and continued playfully, "My sister is the director of the academy and my boyfriend is one of the instructors at the academy..."
Then she moved closer to Heero and added with a mysterious smile on her face, "Also, the owner of this academy is my brother-in-law..."
Before she could finish her words, a hand slapped her head.
Ouch!
Bai Shuang'er rubbed her head and turned to the left. She met her sister's gaze, but he immediately avoided her sister's gaze while playfully sticking out his tongue.
After that, Sun Zhou Yi also came closer to his girlfriend and whispered, "Shuang'er, you must be more respectful to my master.
Heero ignored the mischievous little lady and turned his eyes back to the children. The children also looked at him with their sparkling eyes.
"First, close the registration. Second, we will add more quota, we will accept up to 150 students. We will accept more students at the later date. Finally, let's start the first selection!"
Heero handed a sheet of paper to Bai Xin Yue. Ten questions were written on the paper.
Basically, the questions asked the children about their purpose for gaining power and other similar questions.
"Today, let them answer this paper and I will check the answer by today and they can check the result on our academy's official website!"
"We will continue the 2nd round of selection tomorrow morning!"
Heero did not choose his students according to their talent, but according to their character. He did not care about their talents, but he prioritised their character.
He was not looking for good, upright or even righteous disciples, but he did not want his disciples to be evil like most of the Rankers.
Although not all Rankers were evil, most of them left a bad impression on him. He wanted to train heroes, not troublemakers, to protect the city, so that he could live in the city in peace. Thus, he prioritised the children's character over their talents.
With the paper in her hand, Kang Seo-Yeon stepped forward.
"Good morning, everyone! I am Kang Seo-Yeon, the director of Heero Academy and also the person in charge of admitting the first generation of students...!"
Kang Seo-Yeon opened the selection with a speech.
The first selection was a written test, which was easy but also tricky.
The selection took five days. On the fifth day, Heero managed to reduce the number to 162 kids, 12 kids more than the quota.
But Heero had no intention of reducing the number any further. He was going to grind them down mercilessly, which meant the selection process was not over yet.
If they could withstand the hellish grinding, then it was good. But if the children could not withstand the hellish grinding, then they could drop out of the Academy.
This was called natural selection.
In the hall of the Martial House, Heero and 162 accepted students gathered.
"Congratulations! You have all been accepted into our academy, the Heero Academy! I, Xing Heero, promise to train you all wholeheartedly with the help of Sun Zhou Yi, Musashi Hirata and Wang Ping Cai as vice instructor!"
"But you are not officially accepted into the academy yet. In order to become an official, there's one last step you have to go through, the blood oath!"