Zixin pressed the formerly white piece of cloth to his sleeve, staining it with even more red, as he swallowed the medicine that had been provided to him. He had known, of course, that a sword wouldn’t suddenly stop hurting just because it was blunted, but he hadn’t been prepared for just how brutal these fights had turned out to be.

During training, the focus hadn’t really been on defeating the opponent but rather on learning from the fight with them, while the fights in the qualification round had usually been ended preeminently once one of the parties had been forced of the platform.

In contrast, the current matches only ended once one of the duelists submitted or was physically unable to continue the fight. Since the stakes were high, this had led to multiple instances of opponents beating each other to near unconsciousness.

Zixin’s first match, the one against Qiao Bai, had been comparatively tame, simply because of how outmatched he had been. Once he had been disarmed, he had lacked any way to try and still fight back.

The following fights had often been much closer calls though, the last one having been particularly bad. Despite receiving ample treatment from the medical staff, Zixin felt terrible. The feeling of the medicine taking effect and starting to knit his skin back together wasn’t helping either. No matter how effective, having one’s flesh forcefully rearranged was very much the opposite of pleasant, the burning itch hurting more than any of his wounds.

Even so, it was a welcome distraction from the chilling feeling of disappointment that was slowly clawing its way forward from the back of his mind. Zixin hadn’t made it. All of his duels were over and he hadn’t managed to secure a spot for the tournament.

Cognitively, this wasn’t a surprise. He had never believed that he could make it, had never allowed himself to believe that. He knew his strengths, but that also meant that he knew his limits. No matter how much he had improved in the last month, he was still just an outer disciple. The fact that he had been able to go head-to-head with inner disciples and even some pillar family members was astonishing in its own right.

Emotionally though, he had naturally hoped for some sort of miracle. He had tried not to acknowledge these emotions, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. This miracle, however, had failed to manifest. Now that his last duel had ended, that fact began to settle in, shredding his hopes and dreams in the process.

Four wins, five losses. Many of both only by a hair’s breadth. Though Zixin knew he should have been thankful for even that much, he couldn’t help but feel bitter. With a little more training, a tiny bit more determination or even just a little grain of luck, maybe things could have gone differently…

He took a deep breath. This wasn’t the time for regret. No matter the overall outcome, today undoubtedly marked the greatest achievement of his entire life so far. He shook his head to free it up, immediately regretting the gesture as he was hit with a sudden wave of dizziness. Yeah, right, he still had that head injury.

A few moments of trying his best not to fall over later, when his sense of directions had largely returned to him, Zixin looked over towards the opening where the fights were taking place. The current duel having just ended, he could spot Chonglin getting ready for his last fight of the day.

His friend had five victories under his belt, owed to the fact that Zixin had been beaten by him when they had fought each other. The days of Zixin winning this matchup were long gone, nowadays it was roughly fifty-fifty.

This put Chonglin into joined third place within the group with two other contestants. He had actually beaten the second place, a boy named Guozhi Zhao, in their duel. With the exception of Qiao Bai, most of the contestants in the group were actually remarkably close to each other in skill. Not that it mattered. In the end, only the number of wins one had accumulated counted.

The last opponent he would fight was Qiao. Zixin felt a sting of guilt: he genuinely wanted to cheer for his friend and believe in him, but he seriously couldn’t picture the girl losing against him, or really any opponent. Over the short span of the last few hours, she had established herself in his mind as an unscalable wall. An untouchable flower, as deadly as it was beautiful.

Their fight had lasted no longer than she had permitted it to last and it had ended no sooner than she had intended for it to end. She had been playing with him all along. A fact made clear by how easily she had been able to end all the other fights against opponents that were clearly on Zixin’s level, if not above.

She was, there was no doubt in his mind, what every child dreamed of being, what every adolescent envied and what every parent prayed for their child to be: A true genius, chosen by the world itself and blessed by the heavens above.

The crowd certainly felt the same way, focusing all of its attention at them, every time she stepped up to fight. Just as she was doing right now, her youthful beaty mystified by her cold, almost melancholic expression. Zixin couldn’t help but bite his lip in anticipation to seeing her fight once more.

…

Qiao was utterly bored. The rush she had felt from in her first fight from establishing her superiority and showing of her skill to the crowd had long since subsided. Not only did her grandfather’s orders leave her no room to draw the following ones out like the first one, which meant she had to end them before they could even begin to unfold, she had also had to discover that, to her dismay, none of the other disciples in her group were even remotely as interesting to fight as the outer disciple.

They weren’t weaker per se, but their fighting styles were much more streamlined and boring compared Zixin’s unfamiliar way of fighting. On top of that, most of them had already resigned to losing against her by the time she fought them.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

All of that had turned this competition into a pointless, boring exercise in waiting for weaker contestants to finish their battles. The crowd’s roar, that had been so exciting to be the center of in the beginning, had quickly turned into a constant nuisance of background noise. There weren’t even any stakes involved for her: Her participation in the tournament had been set in stone from the beginning and she also didn’t need to fight for attention from the pillar families because she was literally part of one.

She could only thank her ancestors that this whole ordeal would be over soon.

Actively working to prevent her boredom from finding its way into her expression or mannerisms, Qiao gave a passing glance towards her opponent. The slightly chubby boy was the second outer disciple in her group and he had actually done even better than Zixin had.

Despite that, Qiao didn’t expect much from this fight. She had watched some of his battles and concluded that his main strength seemed to be strategic prowess and exploiting an opponent’s weaknesses. That strategy had been working well against the less experienced disciples in the group who were simply not accustomed to being challenged in this way. Against her though, it would be a fruitless effort.

She constantly worked on challenging herself in new ways and, as a result, had very few weaknesses that could be exploited. She wouldn’t be drawn in by cheap tricks and feints. Maybe she would need to pretend to be though, in order to draw out this fight.

The boy had a face filled with fearful determination. He clearly knew that he wasn’t her match, but he was also not willing to give up because of that. Some, Qiao knew, would find this kind of spirit admirable. She didn’t, though. It was simply an act of delusion to stand up to a power that one had no chance of overcoming. A meaningless gesture of misplaced trust in some nebulous destiny, code of honor or a miracle.

It was a delusion that suited her purpose though. Or rather her grandfather’s purpose. If the boy was to give up from the start, the entire effort of arranging him to be Qiao’s last opponent would have been for naught.

Not willing to wait even longer than she had to, Qiao initiated the combat. Rushing forward in order to meet the boy, she raised her sword to deliver the first strike.

She didn’t actually get to strike, of course, since the boy immediately delivered a stab that drove her back. The spear he was using gave him a good advantage over her in range.

Following the opening, the two began trading blows. The boy stabbed, Qiao slashed, both of them blocked each other’s attacks. Qiao hadn’t allowed this kind of exchange to happen with any of the pillar families’ disciples, instead opting to disarm each of them before they could even start to fight back.

The exchange itself strongly fed into Qiao’s already preeminent emotion of boredom. Nothing about the way the boy was fighting was interesting. His stabs were slow and methodical, prodding for weaknesses and openings that Qiao didn’t have.

After two or three minutes, Qiao decided that this had to be enough. Her earlier fight against Zixin had already been a great show and this fight’s length would still suffice to create a contrast to her previous battles. It wasn’t the perfect performance, but she wasn’t having any more of this. Ramping up her speed, she moved in for a decisive blow…

… Only to awkwardly retreat again when she realized that she couldn’t deliver it. The boy’s speed hadn’t changed, neither had his technique. This technique however had just prevented Qiao from going through with her attack without receiving a blow herself. Naturally, that was something she would never allow to happen from an outer disciple.

When Qiao tried again, the same thing happened. This hadn’t just been a coincidence; it was a pattern. One that she had failed to notice previously, since she hadn’t really tried attacking in earnest.

Taking a closer look at the boy’s attacks confirmed her assumptions: his moves were entirely focused on not giving her an opportunity to land a good hit. The reason he had bored her so much was that he hadn’t even been really trying to hit her.

Qiao grimaced internally. This would not stand. She couldn’t have some outer disciple prevent her from controlling this fight as she pleased. Moving in again, she began to continuously attack this strange and unusual defense with all the skill and speed she had.

It didn’t take long for her to land a hit to his arm, but it wasn’t a decisive one. The boy flinched, but he kept on fighting regardless. Whenever Qiao tried to land a serious attack, his spear was suddenly in the way. Not by blocking her hit, but by attacking her in a way that would guarantee to hit her, should she commit to the attack.

Like this, she was forced back over and over.

…

Several minutes of attacking later, the boy’s stubbornness was seriously starting to grind on Qiao’s nerves. While she had already landed well over a dozen hits on him, none of them were major enough to prevent him from fighting on. And fight on he did.

He had not yet come even close to hitting her once while himself taking enough punishment that he would have already been unconscious, if they had been using real weapons. She wasn’t even breaking a sweat yet, while he was audibly gasping for air. And yet he wouldn’t resign.

It was the sort of disobedience that Qiao was not only not used to, but that she also felt the immediate desire to stamp out in full force. But that wasn’t possible here. Because for all that the boy was clearly on his last leg, he continued to successfully prevent her from landing a decisive strike.

While that came at the cost of being open to more and more of her minor attacks, it meant that Qiao would need to finish this battle through attrition, rather than through a clean knockout. The thought alone was outrageous!

Qiao redoubled her efforts in attacking, but to no avail. Every time she thought she had found an opening, she’d be forced back once again before she could capitalize on it.

Several more grueling minutes of mounting frustration went by before the boy finally collapsed to his hands and knees. Qiao let out an exasperated sigh; finally, this was over. But as the boy looked up to meet her eyes, all she got from him instead of a resignation, was a grim, defiant look, his hand still grasping onto his spear.

Qiao finally snapped. If the boy didn’t want to give in, he would need to feel the hard and proper consequences for that insulting behavior. Gritting her teeth in order to prevent herself from breaking her image, she stepped forward while rising her sword high above her head. She would knock him out for good and hopefully give him a headache he wouldn’t forget for a while in the process.

Suddenly, her foot having not even touched the ground yet, Qiao’s senses screamed at her. Mistake! This step had been a mistake! Every muscle in her body tensed up in an attempt to jump backwards, but it was already too late to do anything about it.

As Chonglin ripped his spear backwards, sweeping her off her feet, she felt like everything slowed down to a crawl. Every second seemed like minutes and yet she was frozen, unable to do anything about what was happening. Where had she gone wrong? How long had he planned to do this without her noticing? Was every hit she had landed nothing but a distraction? Or was it just an incredible coincidence? She couldn’t tell anymore.

As the thoughts raced in her head, the last thing she saw was the shaft of the spear that Chonglin had swung around in a single, smooth motion, aiming for her head.

Then everything went black.