[In reality, various mecha-themed colleges are also sending you invitations.]

"Come to our Baiyue College, and you'll be directly assigned a Divine Machine!"

"Our Qinghua Junior College is still the best; it's the top junior college in Taijing Province!"

"Come to our Heyuan Junior College! We'll assign eighteen senior female students to help you learn about mecha."

"And then there's our Lanzhou University of Technology, where they'll assign female and female students!"

"I'm just a freshman, where did this 'junior sister' come from?" you wonder.

[A senior who looks just like both of my junior classmates!]

Yun Shou: "..."

[Heyuan College is so sincere that you can't help but glance at them a few more times.]

The representative from Qinghua Junior College panicked: "We also have many senior female students..."

[Representative He Yuan immediately retorted: "Their senior is terrifying. You can't touch the leather drum. She'll sue you for Xing Sao Rao. You'll run around trying to get justice, but you won't get any!"]

"Don't talk nonsense, she's already forgiven her junior! They've reconciled, what more do you want?"

"It seems I have no choice but to select Kawamoto," you sighed.

"No way!" another college representative jumped out: "Many of the senior female students from Heyuan have boyfriends, and they often accompany exchange students from other Yuantian Regions!"

"Such a thing is possible!?" You glared at Representative He Yuan: "I'm not a minotaur!"

[Representative He Yuan complained, "They all volunteered; our school didn't force them."]

"Brazilian steak? That's even worse." You shook your head repeatedly. At least the steaks you find on those abandoned mining planets cost money; who knows how filthy the free ones are?

Ultimately, you chose "Beichuan Junior College" because they not only gave you a "signing fee" of 100 sixth-generation data coins, but also allocated you a villa on campus and allowed you to bring Xu Wen and another person to enroll with you.

[Although any machine operator could easily accomplish this by asking, the fact that you achieved it as a second-realm student makes the sense of accomplishment quite significant.]

Soon, the competition entered its final 100 round.

You're finding it a bit difficult.

[Your upgrade path is "Divine Machine - Emperor Dragon," but the points from this competition aren't enough to upgrade your mech to that final stage; your current mech power is only 430,000.]

However, some people prefer to choose the relatively low-end "Heavenly Secret" route, which doesn't offer further upgrades. These mechs use cheaper materials and can be enhanced to over a million or even two million functions with a small amount of points. The downside is that this is their limit; to go further, they would have to be completely rebuilt.

"This is a classic case of a top-tier Qi Refining cultivator who hasn't completed the Heavenly Dao Foundation Establishment being unable to defeat a secondary Qi Refining cultivator who has completed the Earthly Dao Foundation Establishment."

[Artillery fire flies overhead, energy clusters, magnetic storm barriers, and light rays.]

On the battlefield, amidst the dazzling light pollution—red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and purple—and the overwhelming barrage of targeted missiles, you have to hone your movement and positioning to the limit just to break into the top twenty.

Online, fewer and fewer people believe you will win the championship.

"Among the top 20, isn't Yun Shou's mecha the one with the lowest performance? He seems illiterate; he doesn't know how to modify his mecha and didn't follow the package instructions, instead taking matters into his own hands."

"No, not at all. His design is actually grand and magnificent, a prototype of a divine machine. It's a pity he didn't have enough points, otherwise he could have stood out from the crowd."

"Functionality trumps everything. People from lower dimensions are ultimately from small places. They may have a long-term vision, but they haven't seen the path beneath their feet."

"Yes, to counter his combat strategy, the other contestants have started to specifically upgrade their mechs, enhancing their area-of-effect attacks. He has no hope of winning."

You scroll through the pile of comments that weren't optimistic about you, nodding in agreement: "That's true. If my actual physical abilities weren't included, I really would have been stuck outside the top ten against attacks that completely shut down any possibility of dodging."

"But there's nothing I can do, I really want to win first place."

Don't get me wrong, this is a mecha competition, not a hand-to-hand combat competition. Of course, you can't possibly tear apart a mecha with your bare hands in front of so many people.

You're just about to break through.

"I was planning to break through to the third realm after winning the championship, but now that's not going to happen."

[Inside the contestant's room, you take out the Extreme Spirit Grass, Qin Dan, and other items, and with precise control, apply them to every corner of your body.]

[Half an hour later, as the competition draws to a close, you have advanced to the third level: Master Pilot!]

[Upon re-entering the virtual pod, the original second-realm mech had been replaced with a basic, low-spec third-realm mech, and all previously used points had been refunded.]

Those few points are hardly enough to enhance the three-realm mechs; at most, they can be used for minor tweaks, resulting in an improvement of less than one percent.

[Because the "General" mech of the Three Realms has a performance value of 3 billion.]

Even if you've just broken through and haven't acquired the essence, you can still utilize 1.1% of its performance—33 million!

“A normal first-level Overlord is worth 9 million,” Yun Shou calculated in his mind.

"Even the second-level divine mechanism only has a function of more than 3 million."

[During the final top 20 competition, when your opponents saw you appear piloting a drastically different mecha, they were quite confused.]

"This is different from the intelligence I gathered before. Is my opponent really that Yun Shou? It seems like none of the other top 20 players have this kind of mecha, right?"

[He was puzzled, but quickly got into position, and a barrage of comments rained down on you.]

[You stroll forward, missiles and beams striking the 27-meter-tall outer shell of the machine, causing explosions and fire. Even a small neighborhood would be razed to the ground by this concentrated attack.]

A stretch of green mountain, extending for over ten kilometers, can be left with patches of bare ground, its verdant greenery burned away, leaving only yellowish-black sand and mud.

However, your three-realm mech... only has some decorative coating scratched off, or some shrapnel dust adhering to it.

"This...how is this possible!?" Your opponent was terrified. He unleashed his full power, raising his resonance to over 80%. Even with his fourth-stage cultivation, he could only sustain this high-burst state for half a minute!

[In less than half a minute, in just the third second, you appeared before him, delivering a seemingly ordinary palm strike. The alloy outer shell shattered like plastic, and hundreds of intricate internal structures exploded.]

[Your palm strike didn't even harm his physical body; his body, seated inside the cockpit, was killed by the natural reaction of the explosion.]

[At this point, you have swept all the way to the finish line, your crown unbreakable. No young college student in the entire airspace can withstand a single blow from you.]

...

(Four o'clock? (ˉ﹃ˉ?))