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Jin looked around the gathered disciples, feeling primarily a bit out of place. People wielding hammers, swords and their fists, dressed in a variety of interesting styles.
He was wearing the beige robe of the Illusion Room Sect and hadn't yet enlarged the lance pendant hanging on his neck.
Quite frankly, he wished that he didn't have to be here. Fighting it out for some sort of glory of the sect or whatever. Could he fight for the glory of the sect by making Illusion Rooms? Pretty please.
Unfortunately, Elder Flower was of the opinion that their sect needed to be represented in terms of scenarios and actual combat ability.
Too late, he realised that he should have backed Elder Lung's faction. That way, he at least wouldn't have to fight. He was sure that the man wouldn't have been able to run the sect into the ground that fast. It would have survived a few decades for sure, during which time he could have become an Elder and gained enough reputation to easily join another sect when this one went kaputt.
"Jin…" Hashimi whispered next to him. "Are you- Are you crying?" she asked in a worried tone of voice.
Jin idly noted that a group of Elders had appeared in front of the large group on the scorching rock platform they'd been made to wait on.
"No, you're crying," Jin replied and wiped away the sweat under his eyes.
"Attention disciples!" a man in an orange robe and large hair styled after a tornado that was on fire, stepped forward.
"I am Elder Fengbao of the Blazing Fire Sect, and I will be officiating this first trial!" He looked critically at the assembled group. "I expect perhaps a third of you to pass into the second."
Jin looked behind the man, seeing Elder Flower amongst the Elders standing behind the man. Going by the way that the forms of dress and weapons of the Elders aligned with those of the present disciples, he assumed there was one Elder per participating sect.
"Your mission during the next three days will be simple: you are to wander the desert around the volcano of our sect and eliminate heavenly beasts and collect ingredients. There are different requirements for passing, which can only be fulfilled on dusk of the third day, today being the first." The Elder held up a five with five fingers. "You can either present the stingers of five Man-Eating scorpions." Four fingers. "Four horns of the horned desert snake." Three fingers. "Three pairs of wings of the scorching Wingbat." Two fingers. "Two corpserot flowers." The finger went down to one. "Or, if you're brave, the head of one wyrm."
"That seems terribly biased towards the Blazing Fire disciples," Hashimi muttered quietly.
Jin gave her a deadpan look. "You think anyone would host a tournament if it didn't grant some sort of advantage?" he asked rhetorically as the proctor continued.
The Elder continued, ignoring the whispers of the disciples. "The core aspects of a cultivator are their ability to successfully engage with the harsh nature of this world and extract its resources. You may not enter the volcano area of the sect during this time period. You cannot return to this platform after you leave it until the third day, unless you come seeking medical attention, which is a disqualifying act. Combat ability against cultivators will be tested in the brackets later, so at the moment, fighting and killing between disciples are forbidden. However, if you misplace your gains, that's on you." He stepped back. "There are no further instructions, begin!"
Half of the disciples on the platform promptly rushed off, jumping off and running off into the desert.
Jin, for his part, squatted down and tousled his hair. Channelling his qi around him generated a pleasant wind, making himself fairly immune to the sun.
"So, what are we doing?" Hashimi asked, sitting down next to him, sweating.
"Not going to chase individual merit?" Jin asked with a lopsided grin.
The dark-haired girl shook her head. "Fuck individual merit, all my homies hate individual merit."
"Sure, let's team up, safety in numbers and all that," Jin replied as if them teaming up hadn't already been implicit in their synchronous arrival at the Blazing Fire sect. He looked up and saw that Lung Junior was talking with the other two Illusion Room disciples. "We're not the only ones with the idea," he determined as he saw the three disciples nod at each other and leave the platform.
There were only twelve disciples left on the rock a minute after the announcement.
"He's probably going to pay them for the material," Hashimi snorted.
Jin nodded. "He's right to do so in a way."
His friend narrowed her eyes. "But that's not fair."
Jin shook his head. "The tournament isn't supposed to be." He glanced to the side, to the Blazing Fire proctor who'd remained behind while the other Elders had disappeared. He was looking at them. "The rules are vague for a reason. Do you know why?" he asked.
"To not make it too complicated?" Hashimi asked.
"To not exclude too many options. This tournament tests us as cultivators. Now, I ask you, if your sect gives you a mission to acquire item X, does it matter more that you do so while showing off your strength, intellect or whatever else the sect values?" Jin shook his head. "No, the manner in which a cultivator completes a mission doesn't matter; the only thing that matters is that he succeeds. There are several loopholes in the rules which make it possible to pass without fighting much of anything at all."
"Stealing, right?" Hashimi asked.
Jin shook his head and held up a finger. "Stealing is one way, but I can think of four from the top of my head." Second finger. "We can pay someone to hunt for us as long as we give them something more valuable than their passing the test. This is most likely what Lung Junior did." Third finger. "The proctor said that combat between disciples is forbidden, but while flying here, I saw several villages clustered around their respective oases. Outer disciples are only a few times stronger than mortals. I'm sure there are mortal hunters who have the materials we need. Some disciples will doubtlessly choose to raid the mortal settlements, or trade with them."
Hashimi frowned and crossed her arms. "But won't that incur the wrath of the Blazing Fire Sect?"
"All decisions are essentially gambles with different risk ratios. We don't know what sort of deal the surrounding mortals have with the sect, and we didn't spend enough time in the volcano city to find out. I imagine that if the villages are protected, any enterprising disciples will simply have to find out with their bodies. If they manage to acquire the materials through that method, they win; if not, they lose."
"You mentioned there were four methods," she said.
"There are villages," Jin explained. "And while most cultivators might simply think of taking what they need, we need to go there for a much simpler reason, namely to gather information. Who knows, perhaps the villagers have some tasks that are difficult for them but trivial to cultivators that we could fulfil."
"You're right," Hashimi eventually determined. "I've never even heard of a scorching wingbat or a man-eating scorpion."
Jin shook his head. "I actually read ahead on the area, knowing we'd be coming here, so that's not quite the information I meant." He put a finger to the sand gathered on the rock beneath them and drew a scorpion that was approximately the size of a large dog or a small pony.
"The man-eating scorpion is a solitary nocturnal beast that can lurk in the sand for weeks to catch its prey. Its stinger holds a vicious neurotoxin that can down a foundation establishment level cultivator in less than an hour. We weren't allowed to bring equipment, and we were ushered here too fast to buy an antidote in Koncho. The villagers likely have one we can buy. The horned desert snake is similarly deadly," Jin explained as he drew a snake that was about as big as three of himself lying down. "We need antivenom for this bad boy as well."
Next, he drew a human-sized bat. "Scorching wingbat, a species of bat that comes out only at night and captures humans, large animals, beasts and anything it can get its hands on. They take over oases where they raise their prey like cattle so that they can extract blood from them for many years. The proctor didn't mention a specific type of wyrm, which means that the particulars don't matter. Regardless, it's a trick; fighting one is just a suicide mission meant to weed out the stupid." He tapped his chin. "I've never heard of a corpse flower. It's interesting that a plant is deemed more dangerous than the beasts if we'd only need two per person."
Hashimi nodded thoughtfully. "So essentially. We can hunt the scorpions any time during the day, but we don't have a way to find them since they burrow underground. Same with the snakes. Wyrms are out. The bats come out at night and look for prey, but we can't attack one of their settlements because there'd be too many. We don't know what a corpserot flower is."
Jin gave her a thumbs-up. "Basically."
"I mean, it's a flower, how hard could it be to find and harvest one?" Hashimi muttered out loud.
"We don't even know what it looks like."
Hashimi stood up and sent him a thumbs-up. "I have an idea!" She turned around and walked to the proctor, who was looking at her curiously.
Jin walked with some trepidation. Cultivators weren't known for being particularly sane or friendly.
"Excuse me," Hashimi started. "Could you please tell us where we can find a corpserot flower?" she asked.
The proctor smiled at her. "No," he said.
Hashimi nodded. "Thank you, have a nice day." She turned around, walked to Jin and sat down again. "I'm out of ideas," she admitted.
"I never would have guessed," Jin replied sarcastically. He dragged a hand down his face. "The easiest option would obviously be to team up with a disciple of the Blazing Fire Sect, but we'd never be able to trust them. They may just use us as bait. This leaves us with no other recourse but to find a village and see if we can get some information from the mortals." He paused. "I'd suggest we use the first day purely for information gathering. Hunting and failing can waste our energy and get us injured. Hunting and succeeding can bring us into conflict with other disciples who might try to steal our gains. We can't fend them off for three days straight, it's unreasonable."
"But won't the materials dwindle as the days pass?" Hashimi asked worriedly.
"We don't even know where the materials are; it's another one of the things we'd have to learn in a settlement."
"Alright," Hashimi said with a nod. "So, we have a plan."
"Yeah," Jin replied.
But of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy.
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AN: This chapter is a bit short, but I'm building up to something here. This is this worlds equivalent of the chuunin exams and I promise that I cooked. If you liked this story you'll probably like my other two stories as well. One has 110 chapters, the other has 55. You can support me on Patreon if you like what you find. :)