The selection rankings were posted in full for all to see.
Jiang Chen took a look. Apart from Blue Smoke Island Domain putting on a rather dazzling performance, no two individuals in the top ten hailed from the same faction.
In other words, aside from Blue Smoke Island Domain's three geniuses, the remaining seven came from seven different powers.
Tianzhao Island Domain, despite all their ambition, had placed their best candidate at twelfth — not a single genius of theirs had cracked the top ten.
It was clear this dealt a rather heavy blow to Tianzhao Island Domain's pride.
Huichun Island Domain and Sancai Island Domain each had one genius make the cut, though Huichun's candidate ranked only sixty-first.
Sancai's was even further down — somewhere in the nineties.
Of course, for forces of their caliber, such rankings were perfectly reasonable. After all, in the vast expanse of Myriad Abyss Island, they were nothing more than third-rate factions.
"Haha, looking at these rankings and the caliber of these geniuses, I'd say not all of these factions have sent their very best," Ziche Min remarked with a sigh.
Jiang Chen understood the logic well. "Elder Ziche, these factions may not be as powerful as our Sacred Land, but powers that survive in the cracks between the great forces have their own survival wisdom. I believe their strongest geniuses are still being cultivated privately. Sending them to the Sacred Land? What if the Sacred Land simply absorbs them? The geniuses they've sent have potential, certainly, but they're not necessarily the strongest."
"Mm, you see through it well. Put yourself in their shoes — if we were a small sect, we wouldn't want our best talent carried off by the Sacred Land either," Ziche Min agreed.
"They want to build a good relationship with the Sacred Land, but they don't want to hand over their top prodigies. So they choose the ones with the most potential — or perhaps the most ambition," Jiang Chen offered his own analysis.
Ziche Min nodded. "You've been watching for days now. Any impressions? Which geniuses have caught your eye in particular?"
After all this time observing, Jiang Chen found that very few faces had left a genuine impression. Fifteen days was simply not enough for candidates to showcase very much, and sometimes the more forceful personalities overshadowed quieter talent. Getting a thorough read on any one genius was an extremely difficult task.
However, Jiang Chen possessed an eye for spotting hidden strengths. When he evaluated people and assessed talent, he never relied on conventional methods.
Judging a genius required examining subtle, peripheral details. Everyone came from different backgrounds, had access to different resources, experienced different trials, and received different fortuitous encounters — what they displayed on the surface was inevitably different for each.
Perhaps these fifteen days of selection allowed them to reveal a portion of their abilities, but it was unlikely to fully expose the depths of their true talent.
If one merely judged potential by cultivation level, that was certainly an intuitive metric — but it was also an extremely easy way to miss what truly mattered.
At the very least, Jiang Chen was firmly convinced that among the top ten ranked geniuses — not to say he looked down on all of them — very few truly met his standards.
At this level of talent, if the Sacred Land were willing to invest the same resources internally and put in the effort to cultivate its own, it could produce just as many. Why go out of one's way to seek what was already at hand?
And so, faced with Ziche Min's inquiry, Jiang Chen hesitated, unable to give a definitive answer.
"Don't worry, just speak freely. This is only a selection process — picking wrong costs nothing, and saying the wrong thing costs even less. Think of it as a discussion between us." Ziche Min cast Jiang Chen an encouraging look.