Her meaning was obvious: if you want a taste of Lan Grace's Five‑coloured Bird, forget it.
Chen Cheng knew it too. With Zhao Qingyan here, how could the Waste Star beauty be short of nutrient vials?
But he still couldn't swallow his unwillingness!
The aroma from the bird roasting over the fire was growing stronger and stronger—wafting everywhere. He felt he might be driven mad by it.
Beyond Chen Cheng, within a few kilometres centred on Lan Grace's position, quite a few others had caught the scent.
Not far away, three natives of the Waste Star thought they were hallucinating when they smelled it.
The Five‑coloured Bird that had attacked them had already moved on, and Zhu You's wounds were under control for the moment.
With injuries like his, it would be best to quit the exam and leave the simulated planet—but he couldn't bear to give up the only chance of his life.
If he failed, then even if his Waste Star still qualified to send candidates to the Second Military Academy next year, his turn wouldn't come.
Just then, the three who had been sunk in their own worries suddenly smelled a fragrance they were almost powerless to resist. They forgot their troubles at once.
Zhu You had never smelled anything like it. What on earth was this aroma? It made his heart boil; a feverish impulse rose from his very body—to follow the smell and find it!
The other two felt exactly the same.
"Whatever's at the end of that smell, I want to go and see." The long‑braided Waste Star girl's face had already taken on a dazed look.
She truly could not resist the ever‑richer fragrance.
"I'll go with you," said the other Waste Star native, swarthy and thin, ugly of face—and he started off first, following the scent.
Zhu You hesitated, then dragged his injured body to follow.
Elsewhere, the double‑S genius Ji Chenfeng smelled it too.
As a scion of a battle regiment, his combat power was great—and so was his family background.
His mother was a senior commander; his father a mid‑ranked battle general. From childhood, Ji Chenfeng had never wanted for quality of life—he lacked none of the foods the Alliance nobles ate daily.
As for food itself, he had never had much demand. He had always felt that so long as food met his body's energy needs, taste did not matter.
At first whiff, he immediately judged it to be roast meat.
But meat roasted to smell like this—he had never seen anyone achieve it, nor tasted meat with such a rich aroma.
He couldn't help being curious: who on earth was roasting meat?
More, at this tense moment when everyone was trying to capture Five‑coloured Birds for the exam, someone had the heart to roast meat—their days really were leisurely.
But… on a simulated planet where everyone had only nutrient vials, where had the meat come from?
He froze. Could it be what he thought?
Someone had roasted a Five‑coloured Bird?!
…
Alliance Star, Alliance Second Military Academy, monitoring room.
The three mentors watched in silence the images on the holographic wall.
From the instant the Waste Star girl saw a Five‑coloured Bird, the outcome they had expected kept turning on its head.
They knew the birds' combat ability well.
On the other feeds, too, it was clear: among all sitting the exam, those with the strength to go one‑on‑one with a Five‑coloured Bird could be counted on one hand.
Yet among this hundred‑odd people, a Waste Star girl at the very bottom in body metrics reacted to the birds in a way utterly different from everyone else!
And the birds' reaction to the Waste Star girl was equally abnormal.
The birds that should have chased and attacked the Waste Star girl were instead fleeing in panic—from the Waste Star girl.
The three mentors stared, dumbfounded.
No matter how they looked, they could not understand why the birds felt instinctive fear of the Waste Star girl.
Nor was it only one bird—when Chen Cheng led a second one over, it behaved the same.
From this, one might infer: perhaps all the birds felt that same inexplicable, instinctive fear of the Waste Star girl?
Then the Waste Star girl moved—light as anything, in two or three steps she had caught the Five‑coloured Bird that even S‑grade experts could not capture—and then a scene they would not forget happened…
The Waste Star girl pulled out a dagger! With a rip, she slit the bird's throat!
Watching the bird collapse, struggle in its death throes, blood splashing everywhere, all three mentors fell silent.
The one hundred Five‑coloured Birds teleported into the jungle had been borrowed by the president from the Alliance Star's Institute of Biological Research.
Each bird was expensive, but if one or two came to harm in the course of the exam, that was within the Academy's budget.
Only they had never imagined that birds with such combat ability would die at the hands of the Waste Star girl!
And then their thought was shattered entirely by what came next.
They watched, with their very eyes, as the Waste Star girl lifted the bird's corpse, jogged to the stream all smiles, humming a little tune, and set to work plucking, gutting, cleaning—hands moving with practised ease…
After a heartbeat of stupefaction, Mentor Cheng Gong exploded.
"How could she? How dare she!?"
Given the Waste Star girl's conduct so far, Cheng Gong had no difficulty guessing what she meant to do with the bird.
—Eat it.
Those two words flashed in all three minds.
Mentor Jin Ling stared wide‑eyed.
Mentor He Bi's mouth twitched; he wore a face of amused exasperation.
The Waste Star girl's ways were certainly out of the ordinary—he found himself more and more appreciative of her…
The silence of the other two only made Cheng Gong angrier.
"When the exam ends, I'm reporting this to the president exactly as it happened!"
"And then?" Mentor He Bi asked mildly.
"Though it's bizarre for an exam target to be eaten by a candidate, even if this goes to the president, at most the Waste Star girl will be made to compensate the Academy for the bird.
"And do you think a Waste Star girl has that many Alliance credits to compensate? In the end it's an IOU—debt without end."