Wanted to write about the relationship between disciples and masters in general so here it is. Normally this was supposed to be a bit of banter between the three followed by the first fight of the great battle for Elizabeth but as I was writing it veered off in a different direction so decided to roll with it.

When the matches of the 'Great Battle' started every other event had their viewers drastically reduced as everyone's focus turned to the main event.

The system was simple, first will be a series of 10 matches each awarding points. Then the top 32 scoring disciples are chosen and then randomly pit in a 1v1 against each other based on a raffle. The losers are eliminated and the 16 remaining winners are again randomly chosen till only one remains and that disciple becomes the yearly 'champion'.

There were two champions per year one of the outer sect and one of the inner sect and their status for that year are elevated to even surpass the masters as they were blessed by the sect master.

This was a very desired outcome.

All disciples need a master to walk their immortal path, this makes them implicitly subservient to masters, and this can often lead to masters abusing their power over their disciples.

To counter this, many disciples banded together to make the 'disciple league' to protect themselves from the supposed bad masters.

Their leaders are disciples from the core sect itself. (The core sect is made up of the two grand elders and their disciples). These disciples are at the nascent soul and are more powerful than most masters.

Their existence was to review masters and 'teachers' and put their information on a list for other disciples to look through. They also reviewed and categorized the disciples in their league to put them on a hierarchy in their ranks.

This helped the disciples decide if the master or 'teacher' was good for them or not. There were usually a couple of league recruiters at the lower sects who allowed entry into the league and gained access to their resources.

Although not as many disciples, the sect also received an average of three masters a year, and there were far fewer elder positions than elder positions. While some still had the power to hold their own and be independent, quite a few cannot handle the stress of doing everything themselves, after all, most masters joining the sect were still teenagers green to the world.

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They are usually scooped up by the league, then they are systematically brainwashed and turned into 'teachers', who exist for the good of the disciples. A darker outlook would be that they turned into public-use whores who exist to empower the disciples and remove the need for actual masters.

However, this system was not perfect for the empowerment of the disciples. After all, even though, disciples of the league had a non-binding way to get stronger, one must not forget that the essence of the master was very important for the power of the disciples. The 'teachers' tended to be very weak, sometimes even weaker than the average disciple of the same rank.

The only thing that distinguished them from a disciple was their breakthrough destinies which were always powerful. But then the masters did not have the mental fortitude to properly utilize something so intrinsic to them especially as the willpower was brainwashed out of them.

Even though the 'league' controlled a vast majority of the masters in the sect, in terms of pure numbers, out of the 30 or so inner sect masters they controlled only 3, and one of them was only under them because she was so obscene that she made a veteran prostitute seem like a chaste nun.

The actual masters and elders of the sect knew all this and allowed the league to run rampant in the sect.

Why?

It culled the weak masters from ever entering the elder ranks and best of all, increased the overall quality of the disciples they could choose from.

Because they knew an undeniable truth. For any disciple to truly excel, they would need the guidance of a master whose essence was not overall weaker than themselves and had real techniques to teach them, not hogwash forced down the throats of 'teachers' to regurgitate back into the average disciple.

Talent tended to be independent of a cultivation base and too many talents unlocked after they entered the immortal path. These were often reviewed and stored by the league. That was the whole reason the review system existed, to help disciples find masters when they reached the limit 'teachers' could provide.

Now who said that masters could not gain access to these files and use it for themselves? That was exactly what happened and a balance between masters and disciples was reached.

However, the cauldron system spat on the face of this delicate equilibrium, especially in this sect, and was the primary reason why it was so unpopular in this sect. It bound the disciple and master together which the average master hated. It gave absolute power to the master which a disciple of the league hated.

Circling back to why the champions were so desired and how they correlated to all this. The sect master was a reborn realm expert whose blessing held a lot of power in the sect. The elders wanted to use that blessing to empower themselves by cashing it in for some rare treasure while the league used it as a symbol of how the sect master wanted disciples to have power in the sect.

That latter was the very reason cauldrons were never allowed to win, it flew in the face of what the league stood for.

So the tournament was going to be interesting. After all, Eishath entered the outer sect tournament which could only do because of technicality but it was going to stir the pot.