Chapter 38 – Betting & Competing (III)

Chapter 38

Betting & Competing (III)

Kids streamed into various rows and columns, lining up according to their numbers.

There were honestly so many of them, at least a few hundred, a number distinctly larger than the totality of the last batch. It wasn’t all that unsurprising; if Elder Qin somehow managed to ‘sneak in’ Dai Xiu, there was no doubt other Elders were doing the exact same thing.

So long as the kid’s strength wasn’t something too outrageous, who would really care?

Anyway, the festivities started with a speech–as they all do–and as all speeches like this go… it made me want to jump off the viewing area, plunging headfirst at the ground below.

It was boring.

Oh my God, was it ever boring.

Half-a-freakin’ hour rattling on and on about ‘sect this’ and ‘sect that’ and ‘honor’ and ‘proper decorum’… I saw so many poor kids stifle a yawn that I want to openly weep for them.

By the end, Elder Qin had to cough lightly just to remind the other guy (Elder Zhang, I think was his name?) to quit it, finally bringing to an end a speech that would be the most effective lullaby known to man had it been recorded.

With the old guy finally being cut off, the actual competition could kick off; what little excitement I had toward it, however, was quickly evaporated as I realized by the end of the first few bouts that these wouldn’t be like those karate tournaments our school had when I was a kid.

You know?

A highly regulated bout between kids that was forcibly ended as soon as a singular drop of blood was spilled.

Here? Nope.

Rather, it was kind of the extension of what I saw those kids do to each other in the open Training Hall.

Take the arena closest to me, for example–two boys, neither aged over fourteen, jutting just barely past five feet, if that, walked up on the stage, bowed toward each other, and then proceeded to brutalize not just one another but also themselves.

The hunger, the desperation… it was as though there were howling demons siccing them on each other.

The first to strike was the black-haired boy; he slid just under the punch and delivered a mean uppercut to the jaw. I honestly don’t know how that wasn’t it–it would have done it for me, certainly–but the other boy endured and proceeded to knee the first straight into the spleen.

That was about where the ‘tactics’ of the fight ended–from then on, they just randomly splayed their arms about, headbutted, kicked, jumped, wrestled, grabbed, and pulled anything that they could… you know, how kids usually fight. No rhyme or reason, just primal instinct of violence.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

By the end, the black-haired boy was standing while the other wasn’t, though, to be honest… there were no winners in my eyes. The ‘winner’, after all, was bleeding from at least seventeen different wounds, his left eye swollen to the size of a mango, and one of his shoulders was clearly dislocated…

It wasn’t a one-off, far from it; rather, it was one of the milder ones, to be honest with you.

There were no separations, either: no girls-only competition or boys-only one. They truly were randomly drawn and pitted together, sometimes with two to three years of difference.

I watched an eleven-year-old girl be beaten an inch away from her death until a referee, or whatever the hell these skin-wearers called themselves, finally stepped in and ended it. I mean, I get it; they probably have ‘magic pills’ that will heal these kids up in a sec, and, in some sadistic, mean, but well-intentioned way, this was them preparing the kids for the world out there.

But… it was difficult. No, it was impossible for me to reconcile.