CH 11.2

“Please attend the training session at 10am on the 1st of May 835, at the Second Block of the Main City of the Proxima Star – Stone-Gambling Branch, and attend the final apprenticeship exams at the headquarters one month later.

The cost of training is 10,000 coins.

Please pay the fee and sign the training confidentiality agreement as soon as possible, thank you.”

Bai Jing completed the payment quickly, signed the non-disclosure agreement and sent it back to them.

A smile appeared in his pretty teal eyes: what he needed most was to learn about gambling on stones in a systematic manner, so this training was like a blessing in disguise that had arrived just in time.

Bai Jing was extremely fortunate because the apprenticeship exams was only held once a year, so if he had missed it, he would have had to wait until the following year, so he had signed up at the right time.

With less than a week until the start of the training, Bai Jing searched the internet for information and began to look forward to it.

Bai Jing took the morning hover car to the second street district of Proxima Star’s main city, which occupied nearly half of the street early in the morning.

The building was an antique European style structure, made even more magnificent by its large size, with an elegant pure white exterior and vivid reliefs.

Closer inspection revealed that the building was coated with an extremely expensive nano-material, which gave it a subtle, restrained sheen and distinguished it from the mirror-like future buildings.

The Gambling Guild was said to have branches on all of the top 20 planets among the more than 100 planets ruled by the Empire, making it an extremely large organization, second only to the Imperial Military.

The Guild’s headquarters was in the main city of the bustling Capital Star Planet, the most prosperous city in the world, a veritable gold mine. After the branches on Incomparable Star Planet and Ninth Splendid Star Planet, the branch on Proxima Star was the third largest.

Bai Jing stood outside the door, taking in the massive palace-like structure, before swiping his light brain on the detector at the entrance, indicating that he had passed the verification.

The robot at the front desk directed him to training room number eight.

The empty training room wasn’t yet occupied because it was still early.

Bai Jing examined the room’s layout and took a seat in the middle of the first row, intending to listen carefully and absorb as much information as possible during the class.

Others pushed their way in after nine o’clock, mostly young boys and girls in their teens. However there were also a few young people in their twenties.

The majority of them were dressed nicely, the boys in silky shirts and trousers and the girls in tailored suits or dresses, some in even handmade couture.

This was normal, as gambling was a money-spinning business, not to mention the fact that a gambler’s ranking relied on points and win rates, and without sufficient financial support, it would be impossible to gain enough points and experience.

When the group of teenagers dressed in luxurious clothes saw Bai Jing sitting in the first row as soon as they walked in, they were all surprised and disgusted.

The skimpy T-shirt and trousers, and the rustic black-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose – this man was from the slums, wasn’t he? The people from the slums now had money to gamble on rough stones?

“Let’s go sit in the back.”

The young girl in the centre of the group was extremely beautiful, with a haughty look in her eyes that couldn’t be ignored.

She was wearing a blue sloping-shoulder dress with delicate diamonds at the end, perfectly cut to flatter her slender waist. The dress was worth a fortune.

She took out her silk handkerchief and waved it in the air in disgust, as if she was afraid of being infected by the ‘poverty’ in the air and sat straight down in the sixth row.

“Okay.”

“Yuxuan, we’ll all do as you say.”

The young girl was Ning Yuxuan, the youngest daughter of Ning Qiu Chen, the second largest rough stones miner on the planet after the Gu Group.

The Ning family was a veritable noble family, and the Galaxy Rough Stones Area on the main street was their property. With the endless resources of materials, it was inevitable that Ning Yuxuan would become a Stone Gambler.

The group surrounded Ning Yuxuan attentively and from time to time made sarcastic remarks about Bai Jing, who was sitting in front of them, in order to curry favor with her.

If they could win the favor of the Ning family’s pearl, they might be able to enjoy a lot of discounts when they went to buy rough stones.

Unfortunately, no matter how much they taunted him, Bai Jing couldn’t hear them. He had sound-isolating earplugs in his ears and was concentrating on his gambling knowledge on the light screen, completely disregarding anything else going on outside.

This was the idea he had gotten when he heard those fans screaming so loudly the last time he was at the gambling house. Fortunately, interstellar technology had developed these small, lightweight earplugs that could be worn at any time.

It was nearly 10 a.m., and there were more than 60 people in the training room, the majority of whom were from wealthy families, with only four or five civilians.

The latter, with their heads bowed and cowering, moved towards the end of the row, eliciting sniggers from the teenagers, but they didn’t dare say anything in retort.

In the large classroom, Bai Jing was the only one sitting in the first five rows, but he looked at ease, without the slightest apprehension or anxiety of being isolated.

An Ge, a teen in the back, looked secretly at Bai Jing, who sat in front of him, his eyes displaying a complex emotion.

He too, was from the slums, but as a child, he had accidentally entered the forbidden zone due to his greed, and was triggered by the cosmic radiation to undergo an extremely rare mutation, in which his mental power level had directly changed from D-rank to top S-rank, and because of this he received financial support from the Shen family.

The Shen family, on the other hand, simply paid for his schooling and gambling training. He was responsible for all of his living expenditures.

He worked late into the night every day for a month before the training, drinking only half a dose of nutrient solution at each meal, and eventually saved 2,000 starcoins day in and day out.

Just yesterday, he had gritted his teeth and spent all of his hard-earned starcoins to buy a set of well-made clothes so that no one would know he was from the slums.

He couldn’t stand the noble childrens’ contemptuous and mocking eyes, which were like daggers, slicing away at his pride inch by inch, rendering him unable to keep his head up indefinitely.

However, he was astonished and envious at this moment as he gazed at the young man sitting in the first row with a straight back and a serene expression; because he couldn’t be so open and peaceful.

His heart was full of emotions as he lowered his head, thin calloused fingers unconsciously squeezing the corners of his shirt. What was the point… of all these?

He didn’t know.

It was just that the moment he saw Bai Jing, An Ge felt that what he had always cared about, didn’t seem so important anymore.