At 11:58 PM, five hours before the five hundred Academy Chosen Ones were scheduled to assemble for their morning “Fated Cliff-Jump Ceremony,” the fifty towering granite precipices of the Western Plateau stood shrouded in thick, swirling purple void-mist.
At the edge of Cliff #1 (The Azure-Cloud Fated Precipice), a pair of Rank 8 surveillance crystal-cameras swept back. Moreover, Forth across the wooden diving platform. Transmitting a live black-and-white security feed back to the central fortress where Deputy Proctor Han was currently snoring at his desk with his arm curled around his fifty-million-stone betting pool.
11:59 PM.
Out of the night breeze beside Cliff #1 stepped Gu Changsheng, Empress Luo Qingxue, fourteen-year-old Ye Xiao, twelve-year-old Gu Nian, ten-year-old Su Nuannuan, eleven-year-old Jiang Tuntun, and chubby toddler Little Fifth (Ao Xing).
“First: the security cameras,” Gu Changsheng said softly.
Without even breaking stride, Gu Changsheng flicked two small polaroid photographs—fused inside [Dad’s Care-Package Upgrade Box] to project a 3D holographic loop of an empty, peaceful cliff—straight onto the lenses of the fifty surveillance cameras across the plateau!
On the fifty monitors inside Deputy Proctor Han’s security room, the image froze seamlessly on a tranquil scene of empty granite and drifting mist.
Meanwhile, walking right up to the wooden railing at the edge of Cliff #1, eleven-year-old Jiang Tuntun. Moreover, Toddler Little Fifth peered down over the precipice into the swirling, bottomless abyss of purple-black spatial clouds ten thousand feet below.
