Wenhao’s resistance had been admirable.

Like Xinyi and I, a sect had backed him from the shadows, seeing his potential and willing to push him higher. Seemingly, they didn’t have the patience to just wait to do so during the sponsorship event.

More likely was that they wanted their little investment strong before the event, so that if anyone challenged him, he would be able to claim even more gifts.

His vital energy gave him more strength than I possessed, and he knew internal arts as well.

And for a time, for the first five exchanges, it truly did look like he was on his way to beating me.

Unfortunately for him, I was still undergoing enlightenment.

Namo Tassa Bhagavato Arahato Samma Sambuddhassa.

I could hear the Buddhist chants. Not from the universe or from the lord, but from my memories, memories that were replaying with every beat of my heart, every fresh pulse of agony in my skull.

Each syllable shook me to the core, focusing my mind and my spirit. Vital energy spliced with my cells at an enormous rate, healing my sore muscles as well as hardening them.

On the sixth exchange, this fight no longer became a battle.

It was punishment.

My punch struck through Wenhao’s guard, hitting him in the face, sending him spinning in the air backwards.

I took hard steps towards his downed form, trying to force his way up, and stomped on his shin. The sound of bone breaking rang out through the courtyard and echoed. Wenhao howled.

I crouched before him, taking in his agonized expression, while the crier announced something or other. My victory, right. Not important.

“You wanted to have fun, right?” I said. “Are you having fun right now?”

“You… bitch!” he growled.

“I’ll give you back some of your treasures,” I said to him. “Once I deem you to be ready for them. You have my word on that. Right now though, you’ve got a lot of growing ahead of you. And I’m not talking about martial arts. Do better, Wenhao. Your strength is a blessing, but the best thing you can do with it is to not be so eager to always use it.”

“Lecturing me now?” Wenhao growled. “Taking the high road and pretending you’re some kind of pacifist? We’re the same! You use force to get your way. If you think I’m some kind of villain, then you’re just as bad!”

I stood up from him. “I’ve had this debate with myself a million times before. There’s nothing you can say—nothing you’d even know to say—that would bring a fresh perspective to it. And no, Wenhao. We are not the same.”

I walked up to the crier and gave him my orders for who the gifts would go to. I had a total of three-hundred and thirty years of qi pills, which was an excessive amount, really, and also impossible for a non-Supreme to even fully process. The limit for my soul at the moment had to be around one-hundred and twenty years.

Sixty would go to Mei Ying—added with her own sixty, she’d reach her cap of one-hundred and twenty—, as well as all of Xinyi’s treasures. That left a hundred and fifty left.

Hmmm…

Idea.

I’d give sixty back to both Xinyi and Wenhao, and the remaining thirty back to Wang Qiang, because there was a fine line between punishment and torment. Epic treasures were well and good and all, but internal energy was a necessity that I couldn’t just withhold.

Then again, eventually most, if not all of us, would receive up to ninety years worth of qi. Was it really worth it to give so much back to Xinyi and Wenhao when they were the most likely to rack up additional accolades and receive benefits down the line? No, that would just be spoiling them.

I gave the crier my demands: a hundred and twenty years for me, sixty for Mei Ying, and as for the remaining hundred and fifty years?

“Divide the amount equally among those who were left with zero at the end of the day,” I said. “That is all.”

“Your wish is my command, young master,” the crier nodded insistently.

I took my leave from him, and rejoined Mei Ying’s side to watch the other matches. Just as I had expected, some of our classmates were taking advantage of the weakness and injuries of the classmates that had already fought, and were trying to beat them for their prizes.

The Alliance was quite shortsighted for encouraging so much competition and infighting when we were all supposed to be working together. They just couldn’t get it through their heads how their social norms might differ drastically from ours. We couldn’t just beat the shit out of each other and then be friends the next day.

I’d have to work on making this right when the time came. Peace couldn’t exist without friendship.

Suddenly, I felt a shove from my side. It was Mei Ying. “You really worried me, you know that?” Mei Ying said. “What were you thinking, challenging Wenhao after Xinyi almost bashed your skull in?”

“I was thinking I couldn’t lose,” I said, honestly. “Sorry to worry you. I talked to the shouty guy already. He’s transferred ownership of Xinyi’s stuff to you. Now you just have to hope that nobody challenges you.”

“I’m not too worried about that,” Mei Ying said, looking out at the sidelines, where a bunch of people were looking at us with no small amount of consternation and fear. “I guess I’m with you now, for better or worse. Though I gotta say, I’m glad I picked right.”

“I picked you,” I said.

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“I allowed you to pick me,” she amended. “I’m relieved that I did.”

I looked down at her like she was a pile of dog-poop on the sidewalk.

She returned that look with a surprised one. “What? I’m right!”

“You’ve got a rotten heart,” I said to her.

She groaned. “Fine. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me, you’re the best man a woman could ever hope to have, I’m beyond lucky to be in your presence, oh great lord.”

“Thank you,” I said to her, and then I continued watching the fights. It was rare seeing anyone incorporate the basic forms in any capacity. Most people just defaulted to normal fighting moves, but there was a marked difference between their attempts now and of just three weeks ago.

Right now, they actually resembled martial artists. External artists, albeit. In Earth terms, that would be MMA. Their movements actually connected with the rest of their body, and they knew how to make it work to maximize the force of a strike. It was genuinely impressive to watch now. At least in the sense that I was watching my classmates improve before my eyes. In all honesty, this barbarity wasn’t my cup of tea.

“How did you get so strong?”

“Experience,” I said to her.

“...You had fighting experience?”

I shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Then why did you keep letting Wenhao’s friends pick on you?”

I wonder. Why did I let that happen for as long as I did?

“I didn’t feel like there was anything I could do, against a guy as popular and well-connected as him,” I said. “Which is… true. Even if I was stronger than him back on Earth, nobody would have cared about me. All the teachers sort of… disliked me as it was.” I frowned. “It was weird, actually. I genuinely felt like I had no support system to fall back on. As for my parents… they couldn’t do much to change things, but just the fact that they were there was fine enough.”

“Did you ever want to take revenge?” she asked. “Are you taking revenge now?”

I laughed at that. “I wanted out. Away. Revenge would imply that I wanted to stick around in their presence for even a moment longer than necessary, which I didn’t. I couldn’t say I hated them either. I was… repulsed. Yeah. Repulsed. I wanted to go away because I knew that would solve all my problems.”

“Go away… how?” she asked in a worried tone.

“I couldn’t go to a different school, because my dad had a job nearby, and it was a good school even if it sucked. I felt I’d rather just graduate and leave the country in order to ‘go away’. Sure, staying would have had the same effect since I doubt me and Wenhao would have ended up in the same way, but… I wanted something new. Norway.”

“Norway?” she asked, shocked.

I looked at her and smiled. “Yeah, Norway! I wanted to go to university in a city called Bergen. It rains most of the year, and it’s mountainous and hilly, but it’s really beautiful. I wanted to get a degree in art of some kind, and while I worked on school, I’d do other things on the side, too. I wouldn’t be suffocated by the study culture of our country, and I’d make new friends with different perspectives and values.”

Mei Ying frowned at me. “Really? You just wanted to be lazy all your life?”

“Yeah,” I said with a shrug. “Hell, I still do.”

“What about success or money?” she asked. “I know you could make money at least. Why wouldn’t you?”

“I would make money,” I said. “Enough money. And I wouldn’t stress about it either. That was the goal I set out to achieve: living a stress-free life within my means.”

“I don’t get it,” she said. “Ugh, whatever. Cool. So you had this great life plan you were keeping from the world.”

I raised an eyebrow at that. “You do realize every single human on Earth is living their own lives every bit as complex as yours, right? And if you didn’t hear about their plans, it’s not because it was a great secret. You just didn’t run into this information. Which is normal. Statistically, in your lifetime you will know so little about other humans, if you put it in numbers it might as well be zero.”

“That’s different,” she said. “You’re my classmate. And I make it a habit to know about my classmates. Even you.”

“What do you know?” I asked her, genuinely curious.

“You used to be a musical prodigy back in Wenzhou,” she said, and I looked at her askance. How did she know that? “Won contests left and right. Then you just popped out of the limelight. Eventually, you came to our school, but you never showed any interest towards musical instruments in school. Gifted Kid Syndrome?”

I frowned. “You learned all of that from social media?”

“Social media sees all,” she said.

“Well,” I shrugged. “It’s not that interesting a story,” I said. “I used play a lot of music, then I started feeling like if I continued getting better according to someone else’s definition of good, I’d start to hate music, so I stopped,” I said. “Not much else to it.”

“Just like that?” she asked. “You just stopped playing music because of what others thought?”

Hao, that fat fuck of an old man, roared at me to play at his exacting tempo. In my memory, he looked like a monster looming over me, attacking my soul with his knife words and burning hot breath. Wasting effort. Useless effort.

Destroying potential.

I shuddered. So many years had passed since then, and yet he never failed to make me feel like shit. The effect that adults could have on young children could not be understated. Hao had impressed upon me his hatred, fusing it with my being. A part of me would always feel hated and despised now. It was either that or flipping that feeling around, making it mine, a hatred that shone outwards. It would give me reprieve from the feeling, but it would make the world worse.

“It’s kind of painful to think about,” I said to her honestly. “I had a pretty awful teacher.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“He really hated jazz.”

“Oh?”

“It’s my favorite genre now,” I said with a smile. “I’m not particularly good at it, but I practice whenever the mood hits me.”

“So this teacher killed your will to try hard at school too?”

“Sorta,” I said. “That was the beginning. Eventually, I realized I could live exactly the life I wanted if I put in just the right amount of effort. Then I just stuck with that.”

“I didn’t think you were such a Buddha-like person,” she mocked. “You had the talent, but threw it away for a chance at enlightenment.”

I chuckled. “That's more of a Daoist sentiment actually, but hey, it’s not just me, you know. Quiet quitting is a generational phenomenon. There’s a reason they call us Generation Zen.”

“Nobody calls us that,” she said. “What does that even mean?”

“Ah, it’s… a joke that doesn’t translate very well,” I said. Before I could continue explaining, the fight before me finally ended, and I stepped back into the battlefield and shouted. “Everyone, listen!”

The crowd quieted down, giving me their attention.

“Stop fighting, you idiots,” I said. “If you fight and win, you get too injured to fight and win the next time someone else challenges you. The only one who stands to gain something, guaranteed, is the last-place person. Don’t you see how stupid this is? Just knock it off.”

“That’s easy for you to say?” Zhou Hao yelled. “You won pretty much everything! And you fought three times! Who are you to tell us anything, hypocrite?”

“That’s different,” I said. “I knew I was going to win all three times.”

“Empty boasting!”

“Fuck,” I raised my foot, and then stomped. “Off!” the ground cracked underneath my foot. “Fine! Do whatever stupid stuff you want! Gamble away all your prizes like the idiots you are. It'll be a valuable lesson. Those who seek to enact violence should be ready to lose everything. You're all adults. Do as you please.”

I stomped away from the grounds.