To Survive, I Must Pretend to Be a Peerless Prodigy

Year 4396 of the Jiuzhou calendar. Thanks to a reassignment quota, Li Wuya barely gets into Yuhua Spiritual Plant Academy, narrowly escaping the latest round of purges. But this is only a temporary reprieve. Jiuzhou's resources are firmly controlled by the upper classes. Poor cultivators have neither resources nor connections, and even after graduating from the academy, they can only end up in cultivation factories, exhausting their lifespans and wasting away the rest of their lives. That is, until Li Wuya encounters orthodox cultivation techniques and unexpectedly discovers that he can travel between two worlds. The other world he visits has fifty times Jiuzhou's spiritual energy, an extremely low barrier to cultivation, and progress a hundred miles a day. The two worlds' cultivation systems are diametrically opposed, yet perfectly complementary. Resources are scarce in Jiuzhou, so low-level cultivators can only devote themselves to theory. After thousands of years of refinement, its cultivation and deduction system has become utterly complete and beyond reproach. The other world, meanwhile, is rich in spiritual energy and abundant resources, but lacks a systematic foundation for cultivation. Its cultivators rely entirely on intuition and trial and error, making their methods crude and chaotic. A bold plan takes shape in Li Wuya's mind. He will use Jiuzhou's superbly refined theories to pose as a peerless prodigy in the resource-rich other world, frantically gathering rare treasures and rapidly breaking through to new realms. Then he will return to Jiuzhou with the profound cultivation he has built up in the other world and pose as an impoverished genius. Two paths in parallel, two identities in disguise. From then on, he will be a prodigy in both worlds, escaping the fate of the downtrodden for good, securing his place, and rising step by step. But an immediate problem stands in his way: to gain safe protection and the resources to get started, he must enter the academy's gifted class. And the strict requirement for admission is to possess enough cultivation resources to break through to a new realm. The requirements contradict one another, creating a dead end. The entrance exam is fast approaching. To protect the secret of his ability to travel between worlds, Li Wuya has no choice but to take a dangerous shortcut and spend resources in advance to break the deadlock and survive.