CHAPTER 113: THE FIRST WINNER

Chapter 113: The First Winner

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The limited time the academy had to decide which group would take part in the exploration of the secret realm prepared for the competition made things far more rushed than usual.

Normally, there would have been a proper examination to participate in the competition, then some a preliminary elimination rounds to filter out the weaker ones, and finally a regular knockout tournament.

Now, however, the first two steps had been merged into a single thing to speed up the process.

All it took in each arena was for someone to achieve a certain number of victories to secure a spot in the next round of battles, all wrapped up within two days, putting more emphasis on the strongest of each group while quickly eliminating those who couldn’t keep up.

There were only two ways to be eliminated: either by getting injured badly, which was unlikely, though not impossible, or by losing five times.

As for winning, aside from obtaining ten victories, there was also the possibility of advancing if no one in your group was willing to fight you anymore.

And right now, that was exactly what was happening in arena number eight, where Zhu Rong, after defeating his first two opponents, had instilled fear into the rest of his group, making them back down at the mere thought of being his next target.

If that continued, Zhu Rong would advance directly, and that didn’t sit well with everyone.

So two others stepped up, thinking they had a chance since they had already studied his first two battles.

Unfortunately for both, neither managed to land even a single strike, ending up flat on the ground like the others with just one blow each.

At that point, with even the most stubborn eliminated, no one else dared step forward.

Seeing this, the Referee, who also understood their fear, decided to end it and declare Zhu Rong the first winner of that arena, granting him a spot in the next phase of the tournament.

Needless to say, many were not happy hearing that, but no one dared complain, because they knew it was useless and meaningless to do so.

They couldn’t face him, nor could they even exhaust him to give those after them a chance of finally defeating him.

If they had tried to keep fighting him, he would have racked up ten victories; if they hadn’t, he would have passed anyway.

Whatever choice they made, he was going to advance, something everyone understood very clearly after watching him crush the others.

So all they could do was swallow their dissatisfaction and move on with their battles.

"Who would have thought he’d be the first to win," one student muttered, knowing Zhu Rong’s reputation at the accademy.

Just like him, many others were surprised at the sudden strength of this student who, despite not having fought much, had already shown his skill level by winning with so few moves.

This made many doubt the rumors surrounding him, and those from other classes started to wonder if this was some kind of scheme or something else.

The imagination of the participants was vast, and the theories they came up with were more outrageous than the last.

Some thought he had been faking weakness to strike at the most favorable moment, like now.

Others thought he wasn’t even the same person, that the real weakling had probably been someone else with the same name.

None of this, however, mattered to the one at the center of these discussions, who, seeing that he was done here, simply decided to leave.

The competition would go on for hours, and the first phase would last a total of two days.

Having secured a spot in the next stage, he was free until then, so he decided to continue cultivating.

He didn’t care about the other arenas, nor about who else would pass or not.

The only thing that mattered was that he advanced and secured his place in the group of five. As for the others, he wasn’t interested enough to care.

So, under the eyes of both students and instructors, all of them astonished, Zhu Rong left the place.

He had become the first winner of an arena, and soon more would follow.

Just like Zhu Rong, many in the other arenas fought their way through, winning one battle after another until they had either defeated ten opponents or until no one dared to challenge them anymore.

This happened in two other arenas in particular.

One in arena N.6 , where a second year student defeated all his opponents with just a few moves each time, reaching seven victories before claiming a spot in the next phase.

The other was in arena N.9, where someone, after brutally beating his first opponents, made sure no one else wanted to face him, thus securing a spot for himself as well.

Among the three, his method was the most brutal, but he still managed to keep it within the limits set by the academy for the tournament, barely getting away with it.

The referee of that arena could only shake his head, thinking about how in each of his matches he had nearly been forced to step in, as the boy always pushed his opponents right up to the limit, seriously injuring them, but never to the point that they were unable to take part in the following battles.

And so the tournament went on for almost seven whole hours, with many participants reaching the verge of elimination and others securing a good number of victories, with only a few rounds left.

Only a handful, apart from the first three, managed to claim a victory simply because no one wanted to fight them anymore, and among them was Li Daniu.

After defeating the strongest of his group, he had become the most powerful of his group still standing, finally securing the win.

Meanwhile, Zhu Rong, who had finished first, had already left long ago, renting a high level cultivation room in the pavilion and immediately immersing himself in cultivation.

He had already stabilized his new cultivation base, along with all the elemental cores within his dantian.

Now he had the chance to either keep progressing his cultivation or form his next elemental core.

Moving forward with the current number of cores would already give him a huge boost compared to cultivators at his level, but that wasn’t enough for him.

He wanted to get the most out of this cultivation technique and wasn’t about to hold back now.

Not to mention, the further one progressed in stages, the harder it became to cultivate new elemental cores.

He was in the perfect stage now to add more to his dantian.

Doing so after forming the golden core completely in his dantian and in his elemental cores would make it far more difficult to cultivate and connect any new ones.

He couldn’t just start creating connections between cores recklessly, it could damage the golden cores of all his elemental cores.

That would be problematic, difficult, and most importantly, painful.

In his past life, he had tried adding a third elemental core later on, and had attempted to pierce one of his golden cores in the elemental cores.

It had been a terrible decision that only weakened his elemental core, forcing him to cultivate for a long time just to stabilize it again.

He had no intention of repeating such a dangerous mistake. He had decided to take advantage of these early stages to add the elemental cores that were still missing.

He never thought he’d be able to create them all, but he was certain he could add some of the basic ones as well as a few rare ones that, while difficult, weren’t completely impossible to form.

Cultivating the Qi of a certain element directly from the surrounding environments spiritual energy would make things too slow and difficult, especially for some elements that are rarer than others.

He had done that for his first elemental core, his Fire Core, but for the others he had made use of beast cores of various elements, as well as natural resources containing a good concentration of elemental energy.

He had already obtained cores for air, water, fire, earth, and metal, and now he was about to obtain the one for wood.

Unlike the others he had so far, this was a rarer element, second only to a few others.

Just like metal, it was an element for which it was hard to develop strong affinity at birth or while growing, not only because it was rare in the surrounding spiritual energy, at least in this part of the human empire, but also because resources rich in such an element were equally rare.

Normally, it should have been much further down his list of cores to create, but fate had allowed him to get his hands on it.

More precisely, during the expedition to the mine.

Among the many beasts there, mostly of earth and metal elements, there had also been some high level wood element ones.

During the escape, he managed to secure some of them into his dimensional ring, though he couldn’t take too many given the gravity of the situation and had to be very selective.

He had obtained several corpses of beasts at the third stage of earth and metal, and, luckily, also a few of wood including one at the fourth stage, killed mostly by someone else but taken by him in the chaos of the moment.

He had nearly died in that little trip of his, but the gains from it were anything but small.