Chương 72: Facing Reality

No matter how much Jin tried to distract himself behind continuing to design the scenario, perfecting the greybeards and getting down their specific annoying holier-than-thou attitude, making sure the texture of the dragon one encountered outside Whiterun was perfect… The day on which the tournament started came as inevitably as the diarrhoea after switching to a vegan diet.

All five inner disciples of the Illusion Room sect disciples were lined up in front of Elder Flower inside the traditional wooden-floored entry hall to the estate they'd inhabited since arriving. Lung Junior looked… proud, his two followers looked excited, Hashimi looked a tad anxious, and Jin probably looked like he had just come from a hard, constipated session in the bathroom. Mostly because he had.

Unfortunately, Elder Flower had been pacing in front of the five disciples for several minutes now and looked like she was going to continue doing so for quite a while longer. Jin looked down at her bare feet, not because he had a foot fetish, but because he wanted to make sure that she wasn't digging actual thoughts into the wood with her insistent left and right.

"Stop looking at my feet, it's weird," Elder Flower suddenly said, causing Jin to shoot up to attention and instinctively salute, drawing odd looks from the other people in the room.

"Today is a monumental day," Elder Flower continued absent-mindedly, her hands resting behind her back.

"Never before has the Illusion Room Sect, or any non-combat focused sect, in fact, gotten so many of its disciples into the intra-sect tournament." Suddenly her gaze sharpened, and she locked eyes with each of the disciples in a row.

"Do you know what this means?" she asked. Jin personally didn't have a clue.

"That we have to try our best?" the lanky-haired disciple asked dubiously. Elder Flower threw him a blank look.

"Fighting?" The man tried again.

"It means," Elder Flower started, "that statistically speaking, one of you might actually pass the first round. You'll all be facing an outer disciple of the Blazing Fire Sect. After all, so many of them passed, 17, or something, that there is no other way of grouping it. During the last month, I've prepared you for at least this one enemy." Jin wouldn't necessarily call throwing fire talismans at them while they sparred, preparing, but whatever floated her boat. Elder Flower continued.

"If none of you pass, you're all on latrine duty for 100 years."

"Can she do that?" Hashimi whispered to Jin.

"Probably," Jin replied before raising his arm. After Flower nodded at him, he asked.

"What if we win?"

"I'm glad you asked," the woman said seriously.

"Whoever wins can feel proud that they gained honour for the sect." She stared absent-mindedly into the distance.

"Also spirit stones, those too."

"Any questions?" she eventually asked. The group shared an unsure look. Nobody had any questions. Elder Flower clapped her hands.

"Then let's be on our way," she said. -/- The straw-haired boy dramatically waved his hands at the unamused Blazing Fire Disciple standing opposite him in the large stone arena and eventually produced the electricity equivalent of a wet fart. The Blazing Fire Disciple, on the other side, stepped to the side and easily dodged the slow arc of light. Then he took a few steps forward as the Illusion Room disciple chanted his next spell, and promptly kicked the boy in the balls. The crowd booed.

Illusion Room Sect 0 Reality 1 -/- The city was madness. If Jin had thought it had been full in the last few days, then today showed him that he'd been too naive. The mortals had arrived early, not having access to high-speed transportation. All the cultivators had arrived today, on the morning of the tournament starting. Flying Swords, flashes of light, and large purple dimensional gates fractured the sky.

"They really went all out, huh?" Jin asked as they arrived at the arena. 32 disciples of various sects, mostly the Blazing Fire Sect.

"How is this safe?" Hashimi asked nervously, looking down at the stone platform they were standing on. It was a circular slab of stone about as wide as a football field, suspended in the middle of the top of the volcano by four large chains of which every link was as big as a house. Black stone inscribed with runes. The stands in which the audience was already roaring were similarly suspended to the rim of the volcano with black stone chains.

Jim could just about make out what must have been the outer ring of the Blazing Fire Sect behind all the people who were about to watch him get his ass kicked. But the outer ring didn't really matter. Jin was more concerned about the lava bubbling underneath all the way at the bottom of the volcano.

"In terms of safety, I suspect it isn't," Jin said calmly, at which Hashimi gulped. -/- Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. The lanky-haired boy ungracefully dodged a large fireball coming for his head. He waved his bone sword in the air to no effect and started running in a circle around the Blazing Fire disciple he was facing.

The red-robed woman looked, if anything, confused and simply spun to keep an eye on the Illusion Room Sect disciple who was really just running in a perfect circle and not even trying to get any closer. Eventually, she simply summoned a large fireball above her head and slammed it down onto the floor. The fire spread in all directions like a tsunami of flames. The lanky-haired disciple was not so lanky-haired anymore after that. He was also not very clothed.

The medical team quickly removed his burned body from the arena. The only reason the crowd didn't start throwing things at that point was likely because if any object fell, it might land on the bottom of the volcano, where the Elders of the Blazing Fire Sect supposedly had their abodes. Illusion Room Sect 0 Reality 2 -/-"I'm not scared of you," a red-robed cultivator with squinted eyes told Jin after the contestants not currently fighting had been ushered to a small side-platform.

"I agree," Jin said tiredly.

"There's nothing much to be scared of. It's just a friendly spar," he said, trying to defuse the situation. The Blazing Fire disciple narrowed his eyes at him.

"Are you looking down on me?" he asked.

"No, I think you're probably stronger than me," Jin admitted seriously.

"They warned me you'd do that," the man muttered thoughtfully.

"Do what?"

"Try to confuse me. They call your sect the Illusion Sect for a reason," the man continued seriously.

"There seems to be some sort of misunderstan-""Well, I won't fall for it!" the man shouted.

"We'll settle this in the arena!" He went towards the other Blazing Fire disciples and their weird red, orange and yellow hairdos. Jin watched him go. Then he suddenly turned around, glared at Jin, pointed his pointer and middle finger at his own eyes before pointing them at Jin.

'I'm watching you,' was the clear communication.

"He seems to be taking you pretty seriously," Hashimi commented from his side.

"God knows why," Jin muttered in response and shook his head.

"God, what now?"

"Forget it." -/-"I can give you anything, money, women, my body!" Lung Junior shouted while kneeling in front of the Blazing Fire Disciple he was supposed to face.

"Just don't hurt me!" the man pleaded.

"Has the match even started yet?" Hashimi asked in a confused tone of voice next to Jin.

"No," Jin answered in a deadpan. He noticed that as more and more Illusion Room disciples went to embarrass themselves on stage, the other disciples in the contestant viewing area distanced themselves from Jin and Hashimi, the only two Illusion Room disciples left.

"Please, I'll clean your shoes, I'll lick your shoes!" Lung Junior screamed between sobs as the Blazing Fire disciple he was facing watched on awkwardly. When Lung Junior tried crawling forward to make good on his promise, tongue lolling, the Blazing Fire disciple hesitated for a second before kicking the man in the face and thus knocking him out. Everyone with enhanced eyesight could clearly see Lung Junior blink his eyes open to check his surroundings before closing then again as he pretended to be unconscious.

Jin glanced to the side where the Elders were seated and saw two Blazing Fire Elders holding Elder Flower by one elbow each to prevent her from rushing into the arena and killing Lung Junior with her own hands.

"If the Purple Cloud disciple helped them pass so they could embarrass the sect, he certainly succeeded," Jin deadpanned, before narrowing his eyes. Although the showing was really too pathetic, Lung Junior belonged to the faction that opposed the sect developing more combat capabilities. The other two disciples were likely in cahoots, after all, they'd done the first stage together. But, they wouldn't, would they? Face was too important to do something like this.

All he knew was that after those three matches, Elder Flower simply sat amongst the other Elders with a faraway look in her face. There might have been a solitary tear rolling down her jade-like face. Illusion Room Sect 0 Reality 3 -/- To her credit, Hashimi lost her match fair and square without any further embarrassment. If anything, she did the sect a service, although it would likely be hard to reverse the loss of face that the other three clowns had caused.

She'd fought smartly, keeping her distance and closing in at the appropriate times, leveraging her superior cultivation level to try and outlast her Blazing Fire Sect opponent. Unfortunately, the girl she was facing proved herself crafty, faking tiredness and entangling Hashimi in a melee which she then ended by blowing both of them up in a deluge of flames.

Being a fire cultivator obviously resulted in her coming out of that exchange with an advantage, and Hashimi eventually had to admit defeat and walk off the stage with a limp and a few burns, but no other real injuries. Her opponent seemed dead on her feet from tiredness, and with a bit more luck, the whole thing could have easily ended in a draw. The crowd didn't boo this time and even gave middling applause.

Illusion Room Sect 0 Reality 3 Mediocre results 1 -/- Suffice it to say, by the time Jin had to get on the main platform and palmed the miniature wooden lance in his fist, nobody had any particular expectations for him. Even the Blazing Fire Disciple he was fighting seemed to have regained his confidence somewhat and walked to the opposite side with a previously unseen swagger.

Jin narrowed his eyes and wondered if winning would grant him more benefits now that everyone else had essentially embarrassed themselves so much that Elder Flower likely wished she was dead. The match started, and the world froze. Jin had worked on two particular skills during the preparatory period he'd received. The first had been refining the control he had of his body. The second was further exploring the phenomena he'd discovered in the desert. His ability to channel qi into his brain and slow down time.

Elder Flower had explained it as one of the fundamental advantages of a more balanced cultivation. Body cultivators could move faster, but mind cultivators could think faster. The Blazing Fire Sect were a spirit cultivation sect, primarily focused on learning and integrating a particular element via spells and straight out manipulation, which had its own set of advantages. But one of Jin's advantages was that. Being able to think clearly and deliberately, even during a fight.

This was why he could see that the first fireball sent his way right after the match had started wasn't too powerful. The air around it was barely moving, and the heat inherent to being above a volcano hadn't increased to a noticeable degree. The fireball was a distraction, a flashbang version, basically. That meant his opponent was trying to corral him either to the left or right. Jin wasn't in the habit of giving people what they wanted, so he chose the third path.

All the necessary calculations passed through his mind in less than a second. Controlling his body through qi increased his reaction time even further. He was shooting towards the incoming fireball barely a moment after it had been cast. The thing about trying to block out the sight of the enemy was that you often also blocked your own view. Jin used the fireball his opponent had created, as large as a car, just enough to block his body, to hide his actions.

The wooden lance in his fist extended to a normal size, and qi was channelled through it. Jin twirled it in front of him and crashed straight through the fireball, expelling qi from all his pores in a short burst to block most of the heat. He came out on the other side to the wide-eyed look of his opponent, who was creating two more fireballs, one over each shoulder. Lying in wait for when Jin dodged left or right. A smirk stole its way onto Jin's face.

"Boo," he said, before the lance in his hand stopped spinning. The non-bladed haft slammed into the jaw of the Blazing Fire disciple, and Jin saw in slow-motion as the man's face shook and the bone jumped in place. The man fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes. The whole thing had taken about two seconds, but a lot had happened. Jin's opponent had tried to corral Jin, but had gotten surprised when Jin chose to jump through the fireball.

That surprise had cost him, as the lance had already slammed into his jaw as he tried to jump back to get space to send out the two fireballs he'd been building. That was the thing about fights. They often ended very, very quickly. Illusion Room Sect 0 Reality 3 Mediocrity 1 Jin 1