Chapter 16 – The obligatory Tournament arc after the training arc

“Finally, a fucking tournament arc!” - Garnet

After Lang published her research, there was some interest in it, but seeing how much she aged and knowing that getting to a certain zone with your Lifeforce meant your rate of advancement would slow down, people were hesitant to try.

It still caused some buzz, and Lang was happy that her families business and rating had gotten better for it. But she couldn't think about that, she needed to win this next fight to at least represent the school for the tournament.

On the day of the opening on Monday, Lang got to the school district very soon and saw that the other school had already come.

She made her way to the Soulcraft competition area, where there were 7 contestants. The way it worked was simple, they would get a task to complete and the first two to complete it, would fight each other to see who represented the school. This was quite similar to the second stage, where a task would be completed after which they would fight.

After looking through the competition, Lang didn’t recognize many of them. She recognized one of her classmates, but she believed she had him beat. She also recognized one of her highschool classmates Malcolm Lye who went into the chemistry class.

‘So Simone Tai is not here, this might actually be doable.’ Lang thought to herself.

The task they were given was a Vorulta box. The one in Lang’s tent was 3 by 3 by 3 meters and stood up on one of its corners.

A true classic. The box had a maze, of many walls, it was given a difficulty and a power level. One could find out with Information Soulcraft. And then, there were two ways of completing the maze, breaking it with Soulcraft, which you wanted to do if the power level of the box was low. This would cost tons of Soulforce but was rather fast. The other way was to snake your way through the maze and hit the end with your Soulcraft, unlocking it.

Lightning was not ideal, but also not terrible for the completion of the Vorulta box. Luckily, Fire and Earth were even worse, as Fire dissipated quite quickly and Earth blocked its own path.

Because of her large amount of Soulforce, at least hopefully in comparison with her competition, she started by using Analyze, sending out a small lightning from her arm and using Fair Eye to compare them and finally, she struck a small lightning into the first receptacle to test how far it would get without guidance.

The no-guidance lightning traveled only about 2 meters in the box, making seven distinct turns. ‘Almost no dissipation of Soulcraft on the inside, meaning you can go all out. While the outside shows that it is extremely hard to complete.’

“The opposite might be true but lets try it the less intensive way first.” Lang whispered under her breath.

She focused on the lightning to map out the labyrinth of the box. The tilt didn’t help at all, after a while Lang found herself tilting her body and head to better picture it in her mind.

A lightning trap!

It probably wasn’t the first element trap in the box, but if someone really wanted their family to win, he could get the box trapped in a way that only a specific magic type could realistically get through it.

What a lightning trap did, was take advantage of lightning’s attribute of using the path of least resistance to bait it towards a dead end that was the trap.

In Lang’s experience, people who made traps, made them just off of the main path, as getting trapped made people more wary of the path.

Lang therefore tried to get its lightning to the closest junction in the maze and going one of the other two ways. After two more turns, ‘Another lightning trap!’

She went the last way from that junction and ‘Yet another….’ Lang was almost getting angry.

“That means the previous junction!” She half whispered half shouted.

The previous junction forked twice before she went full circle and entered the three way junction that had the three traps.

She went backwards and from the junction chose a different path in the fork, hitting a button.

A button over a part of the box turned golden.

‘Finally progress.’

She changed up where she was going, and for 17 minutes she spent finding out all the empty spaces and dead ends.

“Those bastards unlocked one of the three traps.” Lang was actually angry now, someone had probably solved the box by now.

Sure enough, the middle of the junction was unlocked and led to a nine-way junction.

‘I’m not playing your game like this.’

Lang took out one of the Lifeforce canisters and imbued her Lightning with Qi from her forehead and started zapping the cube on different places. Hitting the golden button she found a clicking noise and the outer shell at the top of the cube fell off.

She stopped for a moment, Looked at the cube from there. If she could find any place that led to the end, it would be great, there were many tiny ways though.

Slightly uncharacteristic of herself, she used Water Soulcraft from her palm. She didn’t have much practice with Water, but it was useful even in small amounts with Lightning.

Many watery streams trickled down the different orifices in the skeleton of the box. She couldn't feel them too well, but there was a high likelihood that they would get somewhere, with the way gravity and Archimedes Shan’s law worked together.

Getting enough water at all the topmost parts should realistically mean that unless it was all covered with water traps, ‘Which I wouldn’t put past them.’ They would at the very least advance her forward.

After about one minute of flooding the top with water, a Golden button popped out, she continued though, then another Golden button popped out a couple seconds later.

After another minute of nothing happening, Lang decided to break those as well.

Doing the same thing she did before she tore through the Golden buttons and more places opened themselves to her. She filled both those panels with water again, completely blindly. And from both of them another Golden button popped out.

Along with a Red button at the top, in the middle of where the three-way panel that popped out would have been.

Lang first broke the two Golden buttons, landing more parts of the shell to the ground.

The only two parts that stayed were at the ‘Entrance’ and one directly adjacent to it.

Lang attacked the Red button and the Cube broke into eight 27 pieces.

Lang used the Lifeforce in her canister now to make a giant lightning surge with her legs and broke all of them within a very short time.

Finally a green light came up on top of her tent and she walked out, sweaty, exhausted and slowly loosing anger to her ‘Calm Mind’.

She saw that she had taken a full 35 minutes and 28 seconds.

The only other contestant who was out however had a time of 4 minutes and 11 seconds.

An announcer voice sounded “And we have our two winners, Aisha Huang and Lang Bao, each of which went about it a different way.

Aisha used Seeking Soulcraft to find the target, which was in fact very close to the Entrance.

Lang used a methodical enough approach of breaking in through the Entrance and then taking apart the areas around.

Both of them have shown great examples of Soulforce usage, now they will both get ready and in 15 minutes they will combat each other for the option of representing the school.

Lang never knew much about this Aisha Huang person, however from the description, she was a very calm and calculative person, who likely hadn’t used up much of her Soulforce.

And unlike Lang, she didn’t need to cheat by using Lifeforce reserves or Qi. Neither was technically against the rules as Lifeforce Soulcraft was usually advanced, but not when it was bottled up in alchemical bottles.

Qi was legal to use however it wasn’t that often used, as reliance on it, would ultimately slow your progress in Soulcraft.

‘She can’t have used too much of her Soulforce, so I’ll be at a massive disadvantage, unless I can end this quick.

She might use offensive wards and traps that collapse on me the moment I attack her with strong force though.

These are all conjectures that I can muster more powerful attacks than her in the first place.

If she is ahead of me in Soul Realm and Soulcraft, then I’ll just lose.’

‘Play to your strengths if you can’t get rid of your weaknesses.’

Lang prepared a Soulforce Protective ward, in the time as was afforded to her, with which she achieved rank 25 in Soulcraft. It did fill her with excitement a little bit, and help her calm her nerves.

She came out to the field, which was a circle about 15 meters in radius, with a smaller circle in the middle, about 2 meters in radius. The circle in the middle was banned, otherwise one could move anywhere they wanted, with the limitations they had to have the small circle approximately separating them.

They both had a powerful protective enchantment on talismans on their necks that would turn all damage to knock-back force. It was proficient enough to erase most pre-Emperor techniques, so they didn’t have to fear for their life or the life of their opponent.

The goal was of course, to get your opponent out of the circle.

Aisha stepped on the ring, she was a lithe girl with long legs, small breasts, ‘smaller than mine’ Lang though, dark brown hair with Feathers adorning them.

They both stood on opposite sides to each other about a meter from the small circle.

“START!” an announcers voice came out. Lang did a low kick filled with lightning and it harmlessly bounced off her ward. She did three more kicks each of which ended with the same outcome.

During the third kick, when Lang was out of balance, Aisha sent out a Sound Blast from her mouth, knocking Lang back.

‘ahh, so that’s the game you’re playing. Targetted warding.’ Aisha was prepared for Lang, by choosing the best safety measure against Lightning, while using an attack type that, while expensive, couldn't be disrupted by Lightning.

This duel allowed the usage of Body Realm abilities, however the tournament duel itself wouldn’t. Lang was questioning using them to keep herself up. Even though there were no points involved, it wouldn’t be a good look.

Ultimately she decided to wait a bit more, and also wait with the Qi based Lightning.

Aisha sent out two spinning air blades from her hands at Lang, who dodged to the ground, both of them sailing above her head.

This was the advantage of Lightning attacks, their homing nature didn’t allow opponents to dodge much.

Kick, dodge airblades, kick, kick, dodge airblades, kick, get hit by Sound-blast.

After trading a couple of long-range blows, Lang was getting knackered from the Sound blasts. Her lightning came out too slow to affect her opponents preparation period, but there was a way for Lang to bridge that gap. Instant forehead casting using her hair.

Making more distance from her opponent to look as if she was in need of rest, Lang dodged another set of airblades, without the usage of any Body Realm techniques, taking full advantage of the muscles and training she had gotten.

She pretended to kick again, which normally sent a spark of Lightning, but this time she didn’t. Forcing Aisha to defend, which gave Lang a second of rest before Aisha sent out her airblades again.

This time Lang felt the negative of aging upwards, her reaction time had deteriorated slightly. As a result, she failed in dodging and an airblade got blocked by her defense right around the shoulder. This caused Lang to stumble backwards mildly.

Trying to push her momentum Aisha sent out airblade after blade and while Lang was in the air, in a precarious position, she started preparing another Sound-Blast. ‘Gotcha.’ Lang thought as the Sound-Blast took about 0.6 seconds to complete, definitely a liability, somewhat similar to Lang’s forehead lightning efficacy in a long fight.

Except her forehead lightning forked its way from her hair and hit Aisha in the face, ending her preparation and causing backlash from that. ‘A good use for the lightning from my forehead, that came a bit unexpectedly.’

Lang started her kicking stance again, kicking as soon as a possible, from when Aisha was stunned by the forehead blast.

Aisha was put on the defensive but she somehow held until Lang unleashed a double knee twirl, bypassing her ward partially, putting her in a shock in the middle of Lang’s combo, which she promptly continued on, knocking her back one or two steps at a time, until she got off-balance and with another lightning blast she started falling backwards. At this point, she lost control and Lang sent out a much stronger lightning kick than before, which hit her square in the pelvis and rolled her out of the circle.

Lang won, with all the spectators, and she didn’t have to use her trump card. She was sure the Full Cultivation Academy would debrief their competitors on her style, but she still had her trump card left, hopefully that would be enough.

But for now, she needed rest.