Chapter 31: The Champion Tournament – Group Battles (Part 1)

"Well then, it's time to begin! The spectators and participants must be getting impatient! So let's move on to the Group Battles! Oh, and yes!" Gu Bai shook his head, realizing he had forgotten something.

He then explained several rules and safety precautions.

Each participant had an artifact in the form of a transparent droplet, slightly larger than a fingernail, which was attached to their robes over their chests. If the disciple's life was in danger, it teleported them back to safety.

He assured everyone there was nothing to fear and that the participants could go all out. At the same time, he was both calming them and giving them an extra incentive.

He also informed the spectators that there would be 10,000 groups of ten to eleven people each.

Sitting in the stands and hearing this, An gasped, along with everyone around him. At the same time, there would be at least 100,000 people on the Arena. He had only read about such numbers in history books, and even then, only the battles of the First and Second World Wars came to mind.

'They must be using spatial expansion to fit all 100,000 people inside... How many resources will this consume for the Sect alone? And all of this for outer disciple tournaments?' Realizing the scale of this event, An tried to sit more comfortably, taking out some Kavana fruits from his pouch and preparing to watch the show. The opinions of the people around him weren't much different. They had also prepared snacks and were eagerly waiting for the start.

DONG! DONG!

After Gu Bai's speech, the bells began to toll, carrying their rhythm throughout the entire Sect. Simultaneously with the ringing, small flashes of light began appearing all over the Arena. The flashes grew larger and brighter.

BOOM!

A loud clap echoed, and the Arena was submerged in a bright, blinding white light.

An squeezed his eyes shut, trying to avoid the flash. Everyone around in the stands covered their eyes with their hands, some of them simply turned away.

Suddenly, a very loud and unpleasant suction sound was heard, lasting only a moment, and then silence fell. As if everything around had suddenly been placed in a vacuum.

After a few seconds, this vacuum began to fade, and the crowd started hearing sounds around them again. They began to open their eyes, realizing the blinding flashes were over.

'Isn't this a bit dangerous... What if someone without cultivation doesn't cover their eyes in time?' Opening his eyes, An looked around with a dissatisfied expression.

What he didn't know was that these flashes couldn't even harm mortals. The only thing that could happen was temporary blindness, which would disappear without a trace in less than a minute.

Raising his gaze to the projection, he saw that all the participants had already been teleported. The focus of the projection was jumping from group to group.

Each group had been separated from the others. Some were in deep, dense forests, others on the peaks of snowy mountains.

Within the groups, the disciples began getting to know each other without wasting time, learning everything necessary about one another in order to increase their chances of winning. There were, of course, certain groups where no one spoke to each other, turning up their noses.

'Looking at the horizon, I still can't see the edges of these biomes...' Now he saw the true scale of everything happening. The groups were separated by dozens of kilometers. An couldn't even imagine how much it cost the Sect to create such a spatial expansion inside another spatial expansion, since the Coliseum itself also had this function.

"Ahem! Let me repeat the rules of the Group Battles once more! Every seventy minutes, exactly half of all groups will be eliminated! To avoid this fate, groups must earn points! Groups must hunt spirit beasts or find and collect rare spirit plants! A group that is disqualified before the time runs out will lose points in the overall final ranking! Fights between groups are permitted! The winning group receives half of the defeated group's points!" Gu Bai repeated the main rules once more, clearly and slowly, so that even the slowest participant could understand what was required of them.

"And now! The First Stage of the Combat Tournament is open!" Gu Bai clapped above his head, and immediately, cries of spirit beasts began to ring out throughout the Arena. As if they had all awoken from a deep sleep at the sound of his clap.

The groups, scattered throughout the Arena, immediately rushed toward the sounds of the beasts without hesitation.

As soon as the groups started moving, the projections near the Coliseum’s stands split into a hundred smaller ones to cover more groups.

Sitting in the last row, An began examining all the hundred shifting projections. Suddenly, he stopped on one where he saw familiar participants.

….

On the Arena. In a dense, colorful forest.

"Use Fire techniques! One of the White Stingtail's weaknesses is fire Qi!"

"And keep your distance! Or you won't even realize you've been hit until it's too late!" On a small hill stood a tall young man with golden hair and golden eyes, dressed in black robes with golden dragon patterns.

"Obey Young Master Eleo’s orders! And we will win! All together!" Next to him, a girl pressed her entire body against his arm. Her dark curly hair and strict grey robes with white patterns enhanced her unique appearance, especially together with her big, plush eyes.

"I said it correctly, didn't I, Young Master Eleo?" She whispered, looking away, doing everything possible to show her modest and shy nature.

"You did everything right, my Junior Sister Ea!" Young Master Eleo wrapped his arm around Ea Ka's waist, pulling her close to him.

"Ah~" Ea Ka exclaimed, her face turned slightly red.

At the bottom of the hill, fighting the White Stingtail, a slightly chubby young man holding a stack of talismans frowned as he looked up at the cooing couple.

"Zen Do! Stop catching flies with your mouth! Don't get distracted, this is your chance!" One of the group called out to Zen Do.

"Yeah, I got it! I got it!" Zen Do turned back to the White Stingtail and began throwing talismans, one after another.

"SQUEAK!" Feeling the back of its body suddenly catching fire, the creature fell onto its back, curled into a ball, and began aimlessly attacking everything around with its long, spear-sharp tail.

"Watch out! AGH!" One of the group, seeing the tail flying straight at them, turned and pushed the young man right out of the way. In saving him, she took the hit herself.

"SQUEAK!" Feeling that it couldn't put out the flames burning its beautiful fur, the creature jumped up and landed back on all fours. With eyes clouded in rage, the beast prepared to charge, hoping to escape this trap.

"Damn it! Zen Do! You bastard! You fat bastard!" The same participant called out to the fatty again.

"Stop calling me fat!" Panting, Zen Do began throwing out every talisman he could find on himself. Even some protective talismans went into the mix, which earned him several sideways glances from his group.

After several long minutes, their group finally managed to take down the beast, but not without losses. In the end, they lost two people. Both because of their own stupidity, thinking that a cornered beast wasn't so dangerous.

Now only eight of them remained.

Zen Do plopped down on the ground, breathing heavily as he tried to recover his Qi.

"Well done! Keep it up! Even though we lost two of our friends, the experience we gained will help us reach the finals!" Immediately, Young Master Eleo, arm-in-arm with Ea Ka, descended to them and began encouraging and praising them, mostly focusing his attention more on the sisters in the group than on the brothers.

"We can't afford to relax, my friends! Until the first interval, we have... just over twenty minutes left! Onward! To find more!" Young Master Eleo, taking out his pocket watch and checking the time, began hurrying everyone.

"You heard what was said, move! Or do you want to lose and be eliminated in the very first stage?!" Ea Ka chimed in, though her tone was slightly raised now, with a newfound arrogance.

Everyone around threw unfriendly glances at both of them. If not for Young Master Eleo's high cultivation, they would have long since gotten both of them disqualified.

Realizing they had no choice but to listen and follow the orders of this couple, they began to rise.

"Young Master Eleo, did I do everything correctly?" Ea Ka pressed her body against him again, tightly gripping his arm.

"Of course! You did everything right, Junior Sister Ea! Haha!" Not missing the opportunity, Young Master Eleo let his hands wander.

Slowly getting to his feet and listening to them, a barely noticeable killing intent flashed in Zen Do's eyes.

….

On the stands, the last row.

"Oh... It really is a huge white rat with spikes and a tail like liquid metal. Heh..." An sat there, eating fruits, watching a group of eight people fighting against a creature the size of an average car, the White Stingtail, a massive white rat with sharp teeth and claws, and slightly frightening red eyes.

Seeing the growing tension within the group, An understood that something was definitely going to happen. Making a mental note of that group, he began looking for familiar faces on other projections.

….

On the Arena. Between mountains covered in thick snow.

"ROAR!" A massive white bear with a scorpion-like tail rose onto its hind legs, and opened its wide jaws, grabbing a disciple by the chest.

BOOM!

Before the disciple could even cry out, he was teleported off the Arena. Leaving behind only a stunned bear and pieces of the shattered artifact that had been hanging on the disciple's chest just a second ago.

Shaking its head, trying to silence the ringing in its ears, the beast realized its meal had been taken. With eyes flooded with blood, and a scream straight from the depths of its empty stomach, the bear charged at the nearest disciple.

"Junior Sister Miu! Look out!" Someone in the group shouted.

"Ah!" Miu Muye only had time to cry out, frozen in place from fear.

"ROAR!" With a sharp movement, the beast was already next to her. It raised its massive paw in the air, preparing to deliver a devastating blow.

"Phoenix Strike!" From beside Miu Muye, a young man appeared, with long black hair tied in a ponytail and eyes as dark as the abyss. Without a second thought for the danger, he lunged at the beast and placed his open palm against its huge, furry belly.

"ROOOAAR!" A massive blast wave erupted from the disciple's palm, throwing the beast aside with a crash. Because of its clumsiness, the bear smashed through several tree trunks before managing to plant its paws on the ground and stop.

"Junior Sister Miu, are you alright?" The disciple turned and examined Miu Muye, trying to see if she was injured.

"I-I'm fine, Senior Brother Mo~" Miu Muye, blushing slightly from the fear and adrenaline finally hitting her, answered him with a noticeable tremor in her voice.

"Enough with the sentiments! This isn't the time! Mo Fan, help me kill this beast before it disqualifies someone else!" Rushing past the couple, a green-eyed girl shot them a cold glare.

"You're right, Lia Kult! Junior Sister Miu, stay here and just rest for now." Mo Fan, making sure Miu Muye was fine, hurried after Lia Kult.

Surrounding the beast, Mo Fan suddenly looked toward where the others from his group were.

"Senior Sister Ru! Try to bind its legs, and then all together, as a group, we'll attack this beast at once!" Mo Fan shouted to a girl who was with the others, shielding Miu Muye.

Ru Meng nodded, taking a small green stone from her sleeve and squeezing it.

"Wall of Suffering!" She shouted, directing her Qi into the stone.

Immediately, four almost transparent energy walls appeared around her, which instantly began to grow and expand.

As soon as one of the transparent walls passed through the white bear, Ru Meng gave a mental command.

The energy walls suddenly stopped, and began to darken and grow denser. Their transparency gave way to murkiness.

Creating an inescapable square cage, trapping the creature and the entire group inside.

"Sword of Justice!" Without wasting a second, she shouted and pointed the tip of her sword beneath the creature. Immediately, the snow under the beast's paws began turning into water vines that tried to bind its legs.

"ROAR!" Finally realizing what was happening, the beast began throwing itself from side to side, trying to tear apart the water tentacles that were gluing its movements down.

"Attack! All together!" Mo Fan shouted, raising his sword above his head.

In the next instant, a barrage of techniques and talismans crashed down on the beast.

All the energies of different techniques and elements, gathered in a pile right above the creature's head, began to displace the air itself from the amount of chaotic Qi around.

The temperature suddenly rose to the point that some participants immediately began sweating, even though they were dozens of meters from the epicenter.

Covered in attacks, the beast was drowning out its fierce, doomed roars, it couldn't resist for long. With eyes still burning from the injustice of it all, it fell onto the scorched earth.

Already on the ground, its fierce roars turned into whimpers. On its last breath, in its eyes, the unwillingness to give up still burned.

"Stop! It's already dead! Don't destroy its body! Stop, I said!" From the group, a short, skinny young man with dark green hair and black eyes jumped out.

He quickly ran to the beast and, with one sharp movement, jumped onto its back. The disciples standing nearby were stunned by the audacity of this weakling.

"Hey, you! Len Hen! You've been useless with your low cultivation, and now you want to grab everything for yourself?" A young man with a crooked nose stepped forward.

"Ah? No! No! You've misunderstood!" Len Hen, hearing this, slipped on the crusted-over back of the beast and tumbled to the ground.

"I just wanted to take its upper jaw fangs! They're worthless on the market! So I thought..." Pointing at the beast's fangs, he tried to explain himself.

"You thought? Who gave you the right to think anything in this group?" Drawing his sword from its sheath, Crooked Nose continued to advance, snarling at him.

"Enough!" Mo Fan stepped between them.

"Everyone in this group did what they could to defeat the beast! And if he hadn't stopped us just now, we would have destroyed the entire body, down to the bones." Mo Fan, not taking his eyes off Crooked Nose, tried to calm him down.

"What I don't understand is, since when did you become our leader? Huh?!" Crooked Nose, twisting his face, turned to the others behind him.

"From the very moment we got here, he started giving us orders! I decided to keep quiet for the sake of improving our chances in this stage, but! In the very first fight, we lost three people, three! And now he has the audacity to keep bossing everyone around! Who do you think you are?!" Crooked Nose activated his Qi and directed it into his sword.

"Stop!" Ru Meng approached them.

"Mo Fan is not to blame for the three of us being disqualified. They didn't listen, and they themselves caused their own elimination, they didn't assess the situation soberly." Ru Meng stood next to Mo Fan, shoulder to shoulder.

With a twisted face, Crooked Nose spat, turned away, and reluctantly rejoined the group.

"Thank you for your concern, Senior Sister Ru. But I could have handled it myself. His mouth is many times bigger than his courage, he’s all bark and no bite." Mo Fan, throwing a glance at Crooked Nose's back, turned and walked toward Len Hen and the bear's carcass.

"Hmph! Do you think I did this for you? For your information, I swore an oath to the Hall of Justice that I must always judge without bias... besides, I can't stand watching people from the same group fuel conflicts among themselves... Hmph!" Ru Meng turned away and quickly walked in the opposite direction from the fallen beast, hiding a slight blush on her face.

"Thank you, Mo Fan!" Sitting by the beast's head, Len Hen jumped up and thanked the approaching young man.

"You can just call me Brother Mo." Approaching, Mo Fan smiled and nodded to Len Hen.

"Then you can just call me Brother Len!" Smiling back and dusting off his hands, he said quickly.

"Well then, you can take the fangs you wanted so much... And after that, help me butcher the beast and divide everything into seven equal parts." Drawing his sword, Mo Fan began cutting off the once-white, but now blood-soaked fur.

"O-okay!" Len Hen quickly began pulling out the fangs.

"Brother Bulldog, why didn't you attack?" said a disciple walking next to Crooked Nose.

"All because of that damned Ru Meng... We need to find a moment, catch that upstart Mo Fan, and do as the boss told us." Brother Bulldog sat down by a tree, right on the snow. The disciple standing next to him nodded and leaned his back against the same tree.

….

On the stands, the last row.

"It's cool that the projections can transmit sound... Even though, because of all the other projections and people, it's hard for me to make out everything they're saying... but I'm sure that the guy with the strange nose is definitely up to something." An watched what was happening on the projection with interest.

"Too bad... the disciple who ended up in the beast's teeth wasn't Ru Meng..." Munching on his fruits, he muttered to himself. The spectators sitting nearby had long since moved away from him.

Mo Fan's group decided to rest, besides, they still needed to butcher the carcass.

An looked at other projections. In the end, he counted eight groups in which there was someone he had seen or knew.

Watching as they hunted, lost group members, and earned points, the groups on the projections slowly but surely moved toward the lake that united the entire Arena.

DONG!

Unexpectedly for all the spectators, a long bell rang out, this time, the sound was very different from the previous ones.

Everyone heard the sound of the bell, except the participants on the Arena themselves, who were separated from the outside by a massive barrier that suddenly became agitated at the bell's strike and became visible, even from where An was sitting.

As soon as the bell rang, half of all the groups were teleported off the Arena. It didn't matter what they were doing at that moment: hunting, resting, or running away. All at once, as if at the snap of a finger, they disappeared from the projections.

The crowd immediately understood that the first time interval had ended. Some of them gasped and began whispering, having completely forgotten about this rule.

An continued shifting his attention from projection to projection, until he noticed that on one, the first conflict between two groups had finally occurred.

….

On the Arena. The border between the dead wasteland and the winter forest.

"Stabilize your Qi! Don't disrupt the flow! Don't let them break through our defense!" a disciple shouted at the top of his lungs, standing in the middle of the group with his face red from strain.

"H-hold! Hold!"

"Damn it!"

A mass of Qi flew into their energy shield. The moment the two energies touched, the shield began to crack, unable to withstand the pressure of the attack.

Everyone behind the shield, supporting it with their energy, immediately went pale, both from fear and from the chaotic energy leaking out, which even started prickling their skin.

"Ha! Is this all you're capable of? How boring..." Opposite the team hiding behind the cracked shield stood a group of five people, led by a tall blonde with eyes shifting from gold to red and hieroglyphs covering his entire body except his head.

Taking a large step forward, he spread his arms, and began laughing, watching as the shield kept breaking despite all attempts to repair it from within.

"I'll try to distract their leader, and you try to get the upper hand over the rest! There are only five of them, we can do this!" Behind the energy shield, a girl with cold blue eyes and snow-white hair spoke up. Not letting anyone object to her, she quickly circled around the group and ran forward to meet the attackers.

"Sister Lin! B-be careful!"

"Be careful!"

Almost everyone in her group who still had any strength left shouted after her, hoping that their words would somehow increase their chances of victory.

"Hoh? Could it be, the first candidate wishing to fall at my feet? Hah!" The leader of the group, seeing Lin Xue step forward, couldn't help but laugh.

"Brother Devi, let me play with this little sister!" From behind him stepped out a girl with white hair and two pink braids. Her big pink eyes looked at Lin Xue, with both contempt and fierce desire.

Brother Devi looked at Yan Eli and nodded. Yielding this battle to her.

"Little sister, you have no idea how bored I've been all this time, so many expectations unfulfilled! So, be a good little sister and entertain me! Time to play!" Yan Eli, with a slightly frightening smile, raised both hands above her head. Instantly, two daggers appeared in them.

"Beauty of Death! First Form!" With a sharp movement, Yan Eli shot toward Lin Xue like a loose arrow, aiming straight for her heart.

Lin Xue, not losing her composure, activated the artifact hanging around her neck.

Preparing for the attack, she directed more of her Qi into the artifact.

But Yan Eli suddenly, as if rooted to the spot, stopped a few meters away from her and, with a scream, threw both daggers in opposite directions.

The daggers, enveloped in Qi, immediately began flying in arcs. One aimed straight for her heart and the second for her head.

"Ice Wall!" Hearing the whistle of the flying daggers, Lin Xue shouted, and two ice walls formed on either side of her, completely blocking her from the attack.

"Urgh!" The moment both daggers entered the ice walls, the energy at their tips penetrated deep into the walls, tearing their structure apart from within, and showering Lin Xue herself with ice shards.

Exhaling, she suddenly turned her head, looked behind her, and went pale. She realized, there were three daggers.

"AH!" She cried out in pain. The dagger had managed to pierce the artifact's defenses on her back, because Lin Xue hadn't been fast enough to give the artifact a mental command to redirect its energy to her back. Falling to one knee, she felt the dagger enter right next to her spine, just a few centimeters from her heart.

Since the wound wasn't fatal, and didn't threaten her life, the artifact responsible for teleportation off the Arena didn't activate.

Seeing that her attack had been successful, Yan Eli, with a smile that never left her face, rushed toward Lin Xue.

Taking just one step, new daggers appeared in her hands.

Finding herself within arm's reach of Lin Xue, she raised a dagger into the air, aiming directly between her eyes.

"N-no..." Understanding that there was nothing she could do, Lin Xue whispered, and closed her eyes.