An hour before dawn, the team board had already been posted.
Yuan stood before it without needing to read it.
Because he had already tried.
At four in the morning, beneath darkness that nearly swallowed the lanterns, he had stood before the small drawing hall, where a young, shaven-headed monk was sealing a register with a black stamp.
Yuan had offered him what one usually offered in such circumstances.
A possible mistake in the registration.
A small observation.
A reasonable price for taking another look.
The monk looked at the silver pouch.
Then at Yuan.
Then smiled a smile that said nothing.
“The drawing does not make mistakes, brother,” he said calmly.
“We are the ones who make mistakes when we think we are smarter than it.”
Yuan had returned to the arena without saying anything to himself.
Now, standing before the board hanging on a wooden fence as people’s breaths condensed in the morning air, he read the worst outcome he had feared.
Team Four:
Ming Hao.
He Long.
And three other contestants from minor families.
One in thirty, the merchant said, some of his usual mockery gone.
And that doesn’t look like such a bad number when it doesn’t happen to you.
There was nothing left for Yuan to do but watch.
⸻
This year’s trial had been built as a temporary maze in the heart of the arena.
Walls of enchanted stone rose suddenly from the ground with grinding sounds.
Passages shifted whenever someone thought they had understood them.
Light spiritual traps released sparks when a step was made incorrectly.
Each team had to cross the maze before time ran out.
Every barrier required five people to open it simultaneously, with all five feet landing on five designated points at the same moment.
Cooperation or destruction.
That was how teamwork was tested.
And from the moment they took their first steps into the maze, the hatred between Ming Hao and He Long preceded them by a step.
It was not because either knew the other’s secret.
Neither did.
It was simpler and older than that.
The inherited hostility between their two families had passed from fathers to sons like facial features.
They needed no reason.
Blood provided one.
The temporary team leader, a calm young man from a neutral family, tried to organize a reasonable group crossing.
Ming Hao interrupted him and insisted on leading himself, rejecting every suggestion from He Long simply because it had come from him.
⸻
At the first real barrier, a magical wall that required five simultaneous steps, Ming Hao mistimed his movement by half a second.
Half a second was enough.
The wall did not open.
A side trap activated instead, sending a sharp spiritual spark into the arm of the young contestant from the neutral family.
He cried out and dropped to his knees, clutching the wound as blood ran between his fingers.
“If you had followed my plan exactly instead of making your sudden changes, this wouldn’t have happened!” Ming Hao shouted, pointing at He Long.
The accusation was obviously false to everyone.
But He Long had been carrying yesterday’s tightly suppressed anxiety in his chest, and his father was watching from the platform.
That accusation, made in front of everyone, was what finally ignited it.
“You’re the one who made the mistake in front of everyone,” he shot back, his voice sharper than usual.
“And now you’re trying to blame the person who was trying to correct your plan in the first place!”
Voices rose.
Between them, beside the injured boy’s groans, the tension became almost audible.
Ming Hao lost his temper.
He shoved He Long with force, releasing a small wave of his limited spiritual energy with the push.
A tiny strike by Soul Core standards.
But enough for any judge to count it as a direct assault.
He Long reacted before he could think.
Years of training moved his body a fraction of a second ahead of his mind.
A defensive motion became a counterattack in the same instant.
His strike hit Ming Hao in the chest and sent him crashing to the ground, a thin line of blood running from his mouth.
That was when the two men Yuan had seen that morning moved.
They had been concealed among the spectators near the southern barrier in cheap linen clothes, carrying something they had no right to carry.
Two real short swords.
When they saw blood on their master’s mouth, they did not wait for anyone’s permission.
They leaped over the spectators’ safety barrier and rushed into the maze, drawing their swords.
I saw them, Yuan told himself as his eyes cut through the crowd.
I told myself it was nothing remarkable.
⸻
The arena ignited.
Two He Family guards who had been watching from a distance moved with the speed of long training and intercepted the attacks before they could reach He Long.
Within seconds, four swords were clashing with lethal intent.
Blue and red sparks flew with every collision.
Sections of the magical walls exploded into splinters of wood and stone that scattered toward nearby spectators.
Screams rose.
The crowd recoiled like a retreating wave.
And it did not end with the younger fighters.
A huge man leaped from the Ming platform.
He had shoulders like stone and landed in the maze several meters away without making a sound, white dust swirling around his feet.
One of the family’s strongest guards.
A cultivator at the threshold of the advanced Soul Core realm, with the fury of a man who had just watched his family’s dignity trampled before everyone.
From the He platform, another man descended with similar speed and planted himself before him.
They collided.
The impact shook the ground.
A wave of spiritual pressure forced the nearby crowd several steps backward, and one of the wooden platforms cracked from the vibration.
Dust and debris filled the air.
The judges shouted for the fighting to stop.
None dared step between the two men.
Amid the panicked crowd, Yuan Chen stood without anything he could do.
This was the part he could not endure.
All this time, he had never faced a situation where he could not move his threads.
He negotiated.
Deceived.
Traded.
Calculated.
But now a battle was unfolding before his eyes between men who shook the ground itself, and there was no whispered word he could pass along, no intermediary he could use.
Then he noticed the wall.
One of the maze walls, cracked from the shock of the confrontation, had begun to tilt.
A group of terrified spectators was trapped beneath it, caught in the crush with nowhere to escape.
A woman clutching a child.
An old man.
A young man dragging his sister.
Yuan did not think twice.
For the first time, he abandoned calculation.
He charged.
“The wall!
Get away from the wall now!”
He opened both doors at once.
A movement he still had not mastered completely.
The Soldier and the Craftsman.
Force and precision.
A strike through the body like cold lightning.
The world around him broke into slow-moving fragments.
The crowd’s screams stretched out.
Dust from the stones hung motionless in the air.
Bodies became distances he could measure down to the centimeter.
He moved through the crowd, shoved the woman and her child away with controlled force, grabbed the old man by the collar, threw the brother and sister aside.
All in a single breath.
The wall collapsed.
A cloud of dust exploded over the place where those people had stood only moments before.
A heavy stone struck the ground where the child’s feet had been.
No one suffered a serious injury.
But when Yuan turned to retreat, before he had closed both doors again, he felt a gaze.
Amid all the chaos, one pair of eyes was not watching the battle.
It was watching the place he had just come from.
On the judges’ platform, above the dust, Lin Shui stood with her sharp eyes fixed on the spot where Yuan had disappeared only a moment before.
⸻
At the height of the confrontation between the two powerful men, the person everyone had been waiting for finally moved.
An old man in a loose gray robe descended from the northern platform.
A wooden staff rested in his hand.
His footsteps made no sound against the stone.
An old man who had reached Law Dominion decades ago.
He had no name announced in the arena and wore no insignia.
One of the elders from the neutral temples.
He neither shouted nor hurried.
He struck the ground once with his staff.
A calm wave of energy spread from the impact.
Colorless.
Soundless.
It swept across the entire arena.
Everything stopped.
The two swords froze in midair.
Dust stopped where it hung.
The breaths of the two powerful men halted.
Even the scattered stones remained suspended for a moment, as though the world itself had forgotten that they were supposed to fall.
No one below Law Dominion could resist that wave.
“Enough.”
His voice did not rise.
Yet it filled the arena with an authority that required no argument.
“This is a festival governed by neutral laws above every family.
Anyone who continues fighting now, regardless of which side they stand on, is attacking the neutrality of the temples themselves, not merely a rival family.”
The guards slowly withdrew.
Their breathing was heavy.
None dared raise their eyes toward the old man.
⸻
It took an hour of investigations before the senior judges managed to calm the situation.
Witness testimony and the maze’s magical record showed that Ming Hao had mistimed his step and triggered the trap, while his guards had been the ones to initiate the armed assault.
The Ming Family became the party held responsible, despite their young master’s blood being the first to spill.
Ming was given a symbolic fine, but the humiliation was severe.
Ming Hao was removed from the remaining events.
He Long, despite suffering only minor bruises, emerged with a much stronger position before his family’s elders.
They had witnessed his justified defense with their own eyes.
Yuan withdrew from the crowd before any eyes could turn toward him.
His heart did not settle for hours.
He sat on the edge of a low rooftop near his hut and replayed that sharp gaze again and again, like a man rereading an ominous letter.
She saw something, he thought.
Perhaps not enough to know who I am.
But enough to plant a question in her mind that will not die.
“You saved lives today,” the Soldier said inside him, his voice quieter than its usual urgency.
“At the cost of exposing part of yourself.”
A pause.
“A question worth considering, Yuan.
Was it worth it?”
Yuan did not answer.
Not even to himself.
He knew only one thing.
For the first time in seven years, he had acted before calculating.
And somewhere above the city’s walls, a woman was still staring at the dust that had swallowed that place, trying to remember something she was not certain she had seen.