On the way home, in a driverless taxi.
"Brother Fang, you're not at the society any more?"
"Didn't you submit your application to be made permanent last month?" Xu Chenyang looked astonished. "Don't tell me Manager Huo called you up just now to fire you?"
Naturally Xu Chenyang knew the rule too: an assistant who was not made permanent within a year had to leave.
"That doesn't make sense!" Xu Chenyang shook his head, baffled. "With your results and your level of skill you'd be more than enough as a junior coach. How could it not go through?"
"Ha. Bighead, you're overthinking it." Fang Yu laughed. "I wasn't fired. Manager Huo called me up to tell me it had gone through — and I turned it down."
Better one trouble fewer than one more. Fang Yu had no intention of telling him the truth.
It would only give him something to fret about.
"You quit?" Xu Chenyang was more astonished still. "A martial junior college runs four years, but the fourth year is an internship, so you can apply to graduate early and sign with a company... Getting a permanent post at the Iron Mountain Martial Society — isn't that a good thing?"
The way Xu Chenyang saw it.
The Iron Mountain Group might not be one of the eight great warrior conglomerates, but its founder was a Starry Sky Warrior all the same... and the Iron Mountain Martial Society under it counted as a large company too.
A martial junior-college graduate stood a little higher than an ordinary academic university graduate.
To get into a company like that was doing very well.
People like him, in sales, did not even count as proper employees... A company that size would never come recruiting clerical staff at an academic junior college.
No qualification, and you were dead at the first step.
He would never in a thousand years have guessed Fang Yu would turn it down.
"I'm going to apply for the college-to-university transfer," Fang Yu said. That was not a lie to Xu Chenyang; it was the truth as well.
To apply for the transfer, he naturally could not sign formally with a company in advance.
In fact.
If he had not happened to overhear that conversation between Supervisor Gao and Manager Huo at the society, and then verified it himself using the blood-qi drugs the society handed out to its students, finally confirming that Supervisor Gao and Manager Huo were buying blood-qi drugs from a small factory and selling them as genuine product from the eight great groups.
He would have handed in his resignation half a month ago.
It was precisely because he knew their dirt that Fang Yu had deliberately probed Supervisor Gao, seemingly by accident, and drawn the man's suspicion onto himself... and in the end, exactly as Fang Yu had expected, they had used the permanent-status review as their opening and kicked him out of the society.
And he had made a small pile of money out of it along the way.
For Fang Yu, even failure would have cost him nothing. He had been planning to leave anyway.
The only risk was that they might silence him for good... but Fang Yu believed that with nothing more than a suspicion, and with the backing of Senior Brother Dong behind him, they would not take a desperate gamble.
"Murder over a trifle like this?"
"This is the Xia Nation, where the Blue Moon Alliance's warrior laws have run for fifty years and the Sky Eye watches every corner. This isn't the Primordial Star," Fang Yu thought. "All I did was collect the largest compensation the law allows."
As for exposing them?
Fang Yu knew his own limits — he did not have that kind of power... The blood-qi drugs Manager Huo and the rest were selling reached eighty or ninety percent of the genuine article's potency anyway. Never mind the students; even a High-Rank Warrior might not be able to tell.
Not everyone had Fang Yu's particular talent.
Xu Chenyang, of course, knew none of this, and took everything Fang Yu said at face value.
"The transfer?" Xu Chenyang blinked, then said, "Brother Fang, if I remember right, there are hardly any transfer places for martial junior colleges."
"Mm, it's hard. Our school only has twenty recommendation places," Fang Yu nodded. "If I miss those, all I can do is fight for the other thirty additional places."
Against an intake of five thousand students, Wuling Martial Arts Junior College's transfer rate came to one percent.
Far below the rate at academic junior colleges.
"Fifty in the whole school? That's brutal!" Xu Chenyang sighed. "Then again, it makes sense. Once a martial student transfers he goes on to two more years at university, and every one of those years the state puts in a guaranteed three hundred thousand Star Coins of resources — plus the chance to compete for all the university scholarships and special resources."
"Mm." Fang Yu nodded lightly.
Why were there so many academic students? Because the state — or rather the Blue Moon Alliance — had to invest very little in them. An academic junior-college student and an academic university student consumed, in most cases, much the same resources per year.
But martial training devoured resources...
Every coin bought exactly one coin's worth.
A martial junior-college student received a guaranteed hundred thousand Star Coins' worth of training resources a year directly, and that was before the various scholarships, the enormously expensive training facilities, the building of a teaching faculty and the rest of it; add all of that in and the figure would leave you speechless.
And the resources put into a martial university student were more staggering still.
Which was exactly why.
Even for martial junior colleges, a province could only take a hundred thousand students a year... and martial universities only ten thousand. More than that? The supply simply did not exist.
After all, the Blue Moon Alliance also had a vast number of warriors already graduated from its schools, and their training consumed colossal resources too.
You could say this: it was precisely because the whole Blue Moon Alliance, top to bottom, cultivated warriors and encouraged the martial path whatever the cost, that a century of brilliance on the martial road had been forged — and the evolution of the entire civilization pushed forward with it.
Sixty years ago a Mid-Rank Warrior was a rarity; now High-Rank Warriors were common enough.
"Ha, Brother Fang."
"It's hard for other people, but with your level of skill you'll manage it, Void Star Aspect or no," Xu Chenyang said cheerfully. "I'll be waiting for the drinks at your celebration."
Fang Yu could not help smiling.
His leaving the Iron Mountain Martial Society was in fact bad news for Xu Chenyang... A salesman's numbers depended heavily on coaches like him, after all.
Bear in mind that many society coaches contacted students and their parents themselves and gave the sales staff no chance at a cut at all.
And yet Xu Chenyang had not shown a flicker of displeasure.
"Bighead, don't worry, I'll have a word with Manager Dong. You can go straight to the Changsha South Road branch," Fang Yu said, smiling. "I'll ask him to look after you."
"It'll just mean a longer trip to work and back."
If Xu Chenyang stayed on at the Xinjiekou branch, Manager Huo and the others might well come down on him... and Xu Chenyang was not even a warrior. He could not take that.
"Brother Fang, then I won't stand on ceremony." Xu Chenyang's face lit up.
He knew perfectly well what kind of weight this Manager Dong of Fang Yu's carried... A connection like that was one he would not have dared to dream of.
"What's the ceremony between brothers? It's a small thing." Fang Yu smiled. Being brothers and friends with Bighead had never really been about being classmates; it was about the temper of the two of them.
Classmates, so-called, were only people forced to sit in one room together for a few years. It did not have to be harmonious.
But a good friend, a brother, was a rare thing.
Xu Chenyang would throw himself in for a brother. And by the same token, he never made a fuss about accepting.
Not long after.
Xu Chenyang got out first, leaving Fang Yu alone in the car to go on towards home. He rolled the window down and let the last of the evening sun fall across his face.
"The transfer?" Fang Yu's eyes were calm, and his thoughts turned inward.
"If I want the recommendation, I'd better awaken a Void Star Aspect... only, that blurred Aspect I visualize — when is it ever going to wake?"
At the thought.
Fang Yu closed his eyes gently.
Hummm.
In a kind of daze, Fang Yu felt his consciousness arrive at a mysterious place.
In every direction it was a vast, unfathomable blank, and only at the centre was there a figure, vast beyond all measure.
Gazing at it from afar: it lay there quietly, as if asleep, its outline blurred at the edges. He could make out only that its shape resembled a black goat without wool, and that a pair of enormous jaws took up more than half its body.
Its face was blurrier still.
"So this is my Aspect. It seems to have got a little clearer again since my skill came into Subtlety." Fang Yu's consciousness murmured, and at the same moment, through that vast, blurred Aspect, he faintly sensed several strands of information passing to him:
Aspect Observer
Life Tier: Level 15.9 (Low-Rank Warrior)
Martial Skill: Subtlety, High Stage (Blood-Qi)
Soul Level: Level 18.4
Void Star Aspect: Unknown (please strive to attain a higher Life Tier)
Innate Divine Ability One: Devour (after swallowing rare treasures of any kind, digestion is faster and its effect is greater)
Innate Divine Ability Two: Unknown (please strive to attain a higher order of life)