Lanqi drifted forward like a gentle breeze, his silhouette blurring in the dim light of the corridor, looking like an emissary emerging from the pitch-black depths of the passages.
Unlike the vast majority of demon students, all the demonic traits on Lanqi were pure white. He looked elegant and harmless, akin to a specialized demon of the medical or support type.
Yet in the eyes of Bachel—the "lucky" demon student caught by Lanqi and Hyperion—this pure white radiance amid purgatory held only endless bizarreness and discord.
For as a victim, Bachel knew all too well what mad, wicked deeds this white demon had just committed in the exam room!
"Why were you running?"
Lanqi stood beside the demon student Bachel. His warm voice brushed past like a breeze across the surface of a lake, yet it carried an immovable gravity.
*You have the nerve to ask me that?!*
The moment Bachel heard Lanqi's question, sparks of fury flashed irrepressibly in his eyes, his teeth grinding with a faint creak from how hard he clenched his jaw!
If not for this miserable bastard, he could have spent two peaceful hours finishing a simple exam and walked away with at least one credit coin!
Now, however, he had to wander these perilous corridors, facing the threat of death at any moment.
Yet the anger that had just welled up in Bachel's chest was thoroughly snuffed out an instant later by terror and his instinct for survival.
If he wanted to live, a mere Tier 2 like him could never afford to provoke the two monsters before him, no matter how much backbone he possessed.
This sobriety and desperate urge to live were precisely why he had survived until now, and even escaped right from under the noses of the two demon proctors.
"If you don't have a credit coin and get caught in the corridors during class by the dean of discipline on patrol, you'll be obliterated on the spot!"
Without time to explain much, Bachel looked frantically down both sides of the corridor as he spoke to Lanqi, practically begging the boy to let him go so he could find a classroom.
Seeing Bachel's panicked state, Lanqi only half-understood the answer, but he roughly grasped why the other demon students would rather dash into life-threatening classrooms than linger in the hallways.
"Do you want these?"
Lanqi drew several coins that looked forged from black gold out of his pocket and jingled them before Bachel's eyes.
The coins in his hand were about half an inch in diameter, well-crafted and substantial, feeling heavy in the palm.
In the dim light of the corridor, the deep black metal reflected a crimson glow reminiscent of purgatorial magma. Circling the Demon Academy crest at the center of the coin was a tight ring of runes inscribed in demonic magic script, rendering them impossible to counterfeit.
Lanqi guessed these must be the credit coins Bachel had mentioned, but asking outright "Are these them?" felt inappropriate, so he phrased it differently.
"?!"
Bachel stared at Lanqi in disbelief, having no idea how Lanqi possessed so many credit coins!
In the end, though, he nodded vigorously.
Lanqi understood at once from Bachel's reaction.
These coins were precisely what they had scavenged from the demon students' corpses before leaving the exam room, most of which were the fruit of Hyperion's efficient looting once she shifted into a thief-like invisible assassin.
"Explain all the intelligence you have on this school, and I'll give you a credit coin. How about this deal?"
Lanqi tossed one credit coin to Hyperion first to ensure her safety, then held up another, looking at Bachel through the gleam reflected off its surface.
"O-Of course!"
Bachel nodded repeatedly, accepting the deal on the spot.
A demon's bargain was generally quite reliable. Besides, this fellow named Bachel carried an air of nobility about him—likely the scion of some noble house in this era's Demon Realm—and for demons, transactions carried the weight of upholding family honor.
"Start talking. To save time, though, pick out the important institutional rules first. Skip whatever I tell you to skip."
Lanqi flipped the credit coin promised to Bachel with his thumb.
To keep Bachel from realizing he knew nothing about the school's rules, Lanqi had chosen to let Bachel volunteer the information himself.
"All right."
Staring at the credit coin and terrified the dean of discipline might appear at any second, Bachel rushed to speak.
"Passing classes in the classrooms earns you credit coins. Surviving in this school outside of class consumes a huge amount of them.
"The classrooms feature all sorts of teaching methods as well as exam formats, but every single one requires wagering your life to learn. Functional areas, on the other hand—places like the library, cafeteria, and infirmary—are generally free of danger, but they cost credit coins to use.
"The school only operates for twelve hours at night every day, divided into five two-hour classes and four thirty-minute breaks. Only during those thirty-minute breaks do the classroom corridors connect to the functional area corridors. Every morning at six o'clock, you have to turn in at least five credit coins to the school to receive five graduation credits. Once you accumulate 4,800 graduation credits, you can successfully graduate from Purgatory Corridor Academy and earn a Demon Realm diploma..."
Lanqi nodded repeatedly as he listened to Bachel.
He now roughly understood the basic operational rules of this school.
Though Purgatory Corridor Academy appeared to be entirely indoors, it was actually composed of countless intricate, winding corridors that shifted at set times. Even senior students would find it difficult to quickly navigate to their desired destinations.
Furthermore, the doorplates of classrooms where credit coins could be earned bore varying numbers of insignia to indicate their difficulty, ranging from 1 to 3. The difficulty also represented the minimum number of credit coins awarded upon passing.
For instance, the previous demon exam room had a difficulty of 1, meaning clearing it guaranteed a baseline reward of one credit coin, with the possibility of additional bonuses for outstanding performance.
"For example, even though fifty points was passing in that exam room, anyone who could score an unbelievable ninety would get extra commendations," Bachel continued without daring to pause.
As for an absurd score of one hundred, Bachel could not even fathom what kind of hidden reward that would trigger, since no student had ever accomplished it.
Someone like Lanqi, who simply demolished the exam hall, would never receive credit coins normally from a demon teacher even if he cleared it.
Yet when Bachel thought about it more carefully, he instantly realized where Lanqi's illicit gains had come from!
This degenerate's way of looting classmates was vastly, vastly faster than honestly taking exams!
"How do you feel about Difficulty 2 and Difficulty 3 classrooms?"
Lanqi interrupted Bachel for the first time, asking the question.
In his head, he ran the numbers: if a student picked Difficulty 1 classrooms for all five periods, ignoring any bonus rewards, they would at most earn five credit coins.
After turning in the mandatory five coins each day, they would have to start from scratch again the next day, grinding through all five classes.
Bachel was clearly one of these wage-slave-like students who barely had any surplus.
Only those demon students skilled and bold enough to frequently pick Difficulty 2 classrooms could steadily pull in more than five credit coins a day, leaving a surplus so they didn't necessarily have to attend all five classes and could even spend some coins in the functional areas.
Chapter 53