Once the gates opened. The pre-enrolled cadets all sprinted in separate ways. The sooner they encountered the spirit beasts, the more they would end up catching!
Wen Yu and his group paid no mind to the hyperactive kids and leisurely looked for a shaded spot to go over their plan.
The cadets from both Academies had been previously provided with a map that indicated the different regions of the forest they were going to hunt in.
They were only allowed to hunt in the outermost ring of the forest as that was the safest for their level. As for the inner rings, the cadets were informed to avoid at all costs.
Wen Yu activated the holographic version of the map from his bracelet and the boys and Wen Lin all gathered around him.
He matched up the different habitats in the forest with the characteristics of different spirit beasts. He'd spent the entire night scouring for information on the different types of spirit beasts in the forests surrounding them.
Information wasn't given to them about the particular forest where the challenge was going to be held so Wen Yu just researched about the various forests close to both camps.
He was sure the Spirit masters from both Academies weren't going to choose a forest far from them. Even though the challenge was able to be planned fairly meticulously on such short notice, there was no way they would have had the time to scout faraway forests and place QR tags on various spirit beasts within so quickly.
He was also glad he took his time to research about this as he found out this morning that blockers had cut their bracelets off from the Federation network thereby cutting their access to information.
The only thing they could use their bracelets for now was to check out the map and send emergency signals to their Academy in the case of a mishap but doing that would automatically disqualify the particular team after they were picked up from the forest.
Wen Yu pointed out several spots on the map. The amount of points each spirit beast gave differed greatly. Some simpler to catch spirit beasts gave as little as five points for each and the harder ones could give as high as one thousand points for each.
The disparity was too great and Wen Yu decided the best option would be quality over quantity. They would focus on a particular habitat on each day for all seven days, this would give them ample opportunities to strengthen their rapport as this was the first time they were all working together.
Another reason he chose this method was because of the uneven distribution of strength within the group. Wen Lin and Qi San both had SS rank potentials. They had both just advanced a while ago so were in the early stage of the Green Phase but they were still slightly weaker than true Green Phase Spirit masters.
Huo Lan had A rank potential and was in the middle stage of the Yellow Phase, Duyi's potential was unclear but he knew the kid was also in the middle stage of the Yellow phase.
As for himself...
Wen Yu shook his head in bitterness, there's been no time to assimilate and he still had that wall to overcome but that wasn't the pressing issue for now.
In terms of strength, he couldn't do much to help the group that was why he went all out to make this plan. Qi San and Huo Lan were still unaware of his predicament and he didn't want them to lose badly because of him.
He told himself repeatedly that he would definitely come clean to them... After the challenge of course. He had no idea how they would react so he couldn't risk it now. This challenge was his oneshot ticket into Lingxiu.
If the boys chose to ignore him and stop being close to him after he came clean, he would gladly accept because he felt he deserved it but all that had to come when he smoothly becomes a full-time cadet.
Forgive him for being selfish but this was the only way and he was human too. He was just looking for a way to survive. If this Universe wasn't so harsh, he was sure he wouldn't have wanted to be part of all this but now he had no choice. He was only desperate to survive.
Their little group soon finished going through their plans and decided to enter the forest. The forest chosen for the challenge was called Seven Niche forest.
The reason was because there were seven major spirit beasts that dominated each of the seven habitats in each ring.
That is to say, the outer ring the cadets that were going to compete in had seven major beasts and that was the same for the inner rings of the forest.
The only difference was that the inner rings had even stronger spirit beasts dominating each habitat. Wen Yu and his group had set their sights on several locations quite close to the bosses of each habitat.
Although the closer the spirit beasts were to the 'rulers' of their habitat, the stronger they were and this was because the dens of these rulers were usually built atop or around massive amounts of mutated dead cores.
A dead core was actually a swirling mass of dark matter and was named that way because unlike the living core, dead cores usually absorbed spirit energy from creatures around it.
The only exception was that certain dead cores on planet Dongwu were mutated. This led to a phenomenon where these cores could not absorb spirit energy from the residing spirit beasts. Instead, the spirit beasts had the ability to harness the spirit force that the mutated dead cores refine from spirit energy stolen from plants and visiting spirit Masters.
Another wondrous fact was that the rate of spirit energy absorption from every living creature except spirit beasts at places containing a mutated dead core on planet Dongwu was ten times the amount at other parts of the planet with normal dead cores.
So to other living things, this mutated dead core dens were quite fatal but to the spirit beasts, this was pure bliss. It was also the reason why the dominant hierarchy rarely changed as the more time a spirit beast spends at a location containing a mutated dead core, the stronger it became.
This in turn leads the gap between rulers beasts and other spirit beasts in the same habitat to continuously widen making it quite hard for them to be overthrown.
The team had decided that they would hunt close to the dens of the ruling beasts but not too close because even if the outer ring was checked as safe for them, beasts who have resided close to a mutated dead core for such a long time were bound to, at least, be Medium level beasts.
And this was because mutated dead cores found on the outer rings of the forest were of course not as strong as those found on the inner rings.