With a single gesture from the host and the word 'go', Alex and the other 4 people entered the dark barrier once more. While the other 4 stayed behind to remember the list and the ingredients in front of them one more time, Alex went ahead and gathered the Plant.
'That's two down,' he thought and looked at the list of ingredients. He was slightly shocked. He returned back to the queue along with the other 4 people.
'So, someone managed to grab an ingredient from the 7's list huh?' he thought. When he checked the list just now, he saw that there were two names that had been grayed out from the list.
The first was the apricot that he had gotten the turn prior, and another one was an ingredient from the group that earned one 7 points.
'The ingredients are going to get taken away faster now that we are coming up on the 4th turn,' Alex thought.
As expected, on his next turn, 3 more ingredients from the list were taken away. Alex grabbed the Demon-Faced Leaf and walked out.
On his 5th turn, he grabbed the Spirit Cow's Milk. By now, around 20 items out of the 100 were taken. This was just going to get snowballed and soon, there would be no more ingredients left to gather.
On the 6th turn, he walked up to the Fire Ox's tendons and grabbed them. A few of the 4 people along with him also grabbed some of the ingredients.
Alex didn't know if they grabbed anything important or not as he would only know what was missing on the other round.
He looked up at the list of the remaining ingredients and was a little surprised. Yet, he also knew it wasn't something he needed to be surprised about.
Dizzying Daffodil was grayed out of the list of names with 10 points. 'Someone got to it before me, huh? I guess it about time people start to obsess over the items with 10 points,' he thought
As of now, including the 4 10-points ingredients, there were only about 50 ingredients in total left.
'I can't think of which ingredients to pick now. I will have to make my choice depending on what is left,' he thought.
On the 7th turn, he walked into the dark barrier and immediately looked up at the list. He saw that there were only 3 names lit up for the 10-points ingredients.
Someone had taken away the Midnight Fox's Blood Essence. Alex gave no thought to what was taken and immediately walked up to the Earth Chrysanthemum's Bud and picked it up before walking back.
'Tsk. There are only 30 ingredients remaining,' he thought. Everyone went through their turn and eventually, it was Alex's turn once again.
It was his 8th turn and so he walked in once more. By now he had gathered 6 ingredients in total. Given that there were nearly a hundred participants, that was one of the best results one could get.
Once he was given the go, he entered the dark curtain for the 8th time and looked up at the list to check what ingredient he could go for.
'Wha?' he was surprised. The list had very few names that actually were not grayed out. They were about 12 in total. The worst part was that all of the 10 points ingredients were taken away.
'Sh*t,' he thought. He quickly looked over to the other list and then to the different ingredients laid out below. There weren't many ingredients left, and he hadn't been concentrating on the remaining ingredients at all.
So, unfortunately, he had to give up on this turn. Alex returned back to the end of the queue and started remembering the position of every single ingredient there.
He wouldn't be caught off guard this time.
2 more turns passed by and Alex took a 5 point and a 3 point ingredient, earning in total 68 points. 'That should be enough to win right?' Alex thought.
He had only missed 2 of the 10 turns, so he was confident that his performance was one of if not the best today.
Once all the ingredients were done and the list was fully grayed out, the host made them all hand over their storage bags for a tally.
In the meanwhile, Alex and the rest of the participants took back their storage bags. Alex checked to see if anything was missing just in case and was relieved that it was all there.
They waited for the results to be done for over 10 minutes, and only then did the host return back from beyond the curtain.
He stood up on the stage and started speaking.
"Congratulations everyone on competing in today's competition. You guys managed to complete the task faster than we anticipated."
"I am now going to announce the results."
"In the third place, with 33 points, is Nan Ren from the Spring Song sect," the host said. A man dressed in the same dress as the fatty from yesterday got happy when he heard the result.
"In the second place, with 42 points, is Jia Fang from Royal Fu Academy."
The young lady in black robes seemed a little disappointed that she didn't manage to obtain first place even though she believed she had gotten a good enough point in the competition.
Alex didn't even need to keep listening to know that he had won. Still, he let the host announce the result before he showed any signs of celebration.
"And in the first place, with an incredible 68 points, is Yu Ming from Hong Wu sect. Congratulations to the winners. The rest of the rankings, you can see on the board behind me," the host said and got off the podium he was standing on.
Alex looked at the list hovering in the air. He truly had gotten quite a lot compared to the rest of the people. With nothing else remaining, he walked back out of the arena, returning to the seating area in the coliseum.
