Even as Sun Xiaoyan's victory stunned the whole arena, Lin Zhengli, only just come round from his coma, stood behind his elder brother and grumbled.
"Why did you concede for me? Had you woken me in time, I might well have fought on!"
"And then?" Lin Zhengren did not turn his head.
"If it weren't for my carelessness, that little savage would never have had a chance. And that fellow from Fenglin—he has not even Established his Foundation! To let him take the laurel, I refuse to accept it!"
"Even had you beaten him, by the tally he would still be first-year champion. It would have meant nothing. And besides..." Lin Zhengren's lips crooked faintly. "What if you had lost again?"
"Impossible!" Lin Zhengli glanced about, then lowered his voice. "You don't trust me? That I could lose to him?"
"Who can say?" Lin Zhengren smiled lightly.
Worse than the doubt was the memory—he had, after all, been pinned and beaten black and blue before so many eyes.
He was about to speak when Lin Zhengren turned and seized him by the front of his robe.
"Remember this! Your stupidity has made you an enemy."
He lowered his voice. "If you do not hold certain victory, do not hand your enemy the chance to complete himself. He has beaten not one of you—his championship is far from complete."
He let go, then turned back to the matches, no trace of gloom on his refined face.
"Do not let him complete himself."
...
When the round-robin began, Fenglin's luck was good, and it suffered no internal bout in the first round.
Li Jianqiu was given a bye, and the opening clash fell to Wang Changxiang against Sun Xiaoyan. Neither had any thought of changing his style: one charged blindly ahead as always, the other opened with his mist as always.
"What's this! Fog again!"
"Exactly! Nothing can be seen!"
With the bout invisible to them, the common folk would not spare the Wang family's face either.
But it was plain that the spectators' wishes had never entered Wang Changxiang's considerations.
Dashing through the fog, Sun Xiaoyan lunged at empty air time and again. Then, once his Dao seal was complete, the wind rose and the mist scattered.
That gentle breath pierced the gap between his fingers, turned violent in an instant, and became a tornado. Howling, it smashed through the thick mist and hurled itself straight at Sun Xiaoyan!
"Ahh!" The little fatty bellowed, sounding about as menacing as a squealing piglet. And yet his strength was not to be doubted. Even within the roaring tornado he struggled to lunge forward!
His robes tore to shreds, his face flushed red. His feet clung to the ground, but tile after tile cracked beneath him, and step by step he was driven back. A step past the line, and it would be defeat.
Sun Xiaoyan began to shape a seal. In the teeth of such a tornado it was agonizingly difficult, but he managed it.
A wall of stone rose before him—and was blown to pieces within a single breath.
The rubble slammed into Sun Xiaoyan, and now he lost all control. His whole body was caught up and flung out of the ring.
The Kun Skin Drum was indeed a Dao art of formidable defense—through it all, not a single wound could be seen on him, nor even a bruise. But he had still lost.
Sun Xiaoyan's defense was almost unassailable at this stage. Had this been a true battle, Wang Changxiang might well have had no means against him. But this was a competition—blow him out of the ring, and victory was his.
Jiang Wang sighed softly. Against either of these two, he realized, he had no good answer: the Four Spirit's defense was no match for the Kun Skin Drum, and the Purple Qi from the East Sword Art, though sharp, would likely fail to break through. Lacking a fine weapon, he could not defeat the little fatty.
There was no answer to Wang Changxiang either—once his Breath-Whirlwind Tornado came out, there was nothing for it but to flee. That was a Grade-A Dao art; in all the Fenglin City Dao Academy, counting even the instructors, how many hands could cast it? A monster!
"The wind sparrow." It was the humpbacked old man who spoke again. "His Dao-meridian true spirit should be the Wind Sparrow, born with an affinity for the wind element. That is how he can cast a Grade-A art above his grade."
Jiang Wang had never before heard of a true spirit called the Wind Sparrow. In the academy's lessons, the instructors had only ever described the Earthworm True Spirit—he had once gone so far as to believe all such spirits were Earthworms. Knowledge, he now saw, is often a measure of strength.
Jiang Wang and his companions exchanged glances, and their attitude toward this lecherous-looking old man turned markedly more respectful.
"Might we ask the old gentleman's surname?" Huang Azhan gave a little cough, deferential to a fault.
Still nursing his grudge over Huang Azhan's earlier loose tongue, the humpbacked old man treated him with great acrimony. With a cold snort, he made no reply.
"That's right, Grandpa, what's your surname?" Jiang An'an turned around, her big eyes full of curiosity. "I see you all the time, but I never know what to call you."
"Gui!" The little girl Qingzhi had just opened her mouth when the old man beamed and caught the word: "Grandpa's name is Gui. Just call me Grandpa Gui."
"What a surname—full of bearing." Huang Azhan swayed his head, and the flattery that followed would be unending.
Even Jiang An'an and Qingzhi hurriedly turned back to the field, where the second round had already begun.
Wang Changxiang against Li Jianqiu.
Whether by their long-standing ranks on the Dao Merit Roll or by the strength shown so far, Wang Changxiang held an overwhelming advantage. Yet for no reason he could name, Jiang Wang felt that Li Jianqiu was more than he appeared.
"Senior Brother Wang, can we not use so underhanded a Dao art as the Breath-Whirlwind Tornado?" Li Jianqiu tried to bargain before the fight even began.
By now Wang Changxiang had restored his Dao essence and was in full vigor. At the words he merely smiled: "The Junior Brother jests."
His old gentleness.
The seal in his hand was already complete, and the mist spread.
It was precisely then that Li Jianqiu flung both arms wide, and a fierce gale rose about him.
A mid-grade C-Class Dao art—Call the Wind!
This was not the ghostly mist of Little Grove Town; the wind blew it apart. In the two bouts before, the opponents had not lacked the means to dispel the mist—they had merely chosen to defend first, and neither had expected to be broken through in a single blow.
On the now mist-free ground, Wang Changxiang's hands never ceased their seals, and his voice came slowly, warmly: "Junior Brother Li used to take no interest in wind-element arts. The world of Dao arts is vast beyond measure—what is mixed is worth less than what is dedicated, what is shallow less than what is deep."
Li Jianqiu's seal was complete, and from his two hands he shook out a pair of flaming swords. With the lightest touch of his toes, he shot skyward like an eagle striking from on high.
"Learned them for my senior brother!"
In that moment, hanging in the air, his spirit blazed like a rainbow spanning the sky.
Wang Changxiang's expression did not change. He brought his hands together before his lips—index and middle fingers touching, thumb, ring and little fingers pressed each to its kin—and in the triangle between middle and ring fingers he opened his mouth and breathed.
The Breath-Whirlwind Tornado!
That wisp of breath became a tornado in the blink of an eye, and Li Jianqiu had already closed in—and, with no foothold whatsoever, abruptly flipped over several times in mid-air.
"Excellent!" Huang Azhan clapped hard in praise. Save for rare exceptions, before opening the Heaven-Earth Gate a human could hardly fly through the air; the levitation Li Jianqiu just showed was astonishing.
But those around him looked at Huang Azhan as though he were a fool, and Huang Azhan, after a few claps, slunk back with chagrin. For whatever the splendor of Li Jianqiu's mid-air flips, he had flipped out of the ring—the act of a man conceding.
Li Jianqiu landed, dispelling his flaming swords, a look of shock on his face: "Your Breath-Whirlwind Tornado can already be completed so quickly?"
He was not alone in the surprise. Any cultivator with a modicum of insight could see it. The only window to beat Li Jianqiu had lain before Wang Changxiang completed his tornado—but no one had known he commanded a Grade-A art so deftly, so swiftly, that he had even learned to shorten his seal-forming.
In all his earlier bouts he had never needed so long a preparation. The mist was nothing more than a trivial screen of illusion—a screen for the eyes of opponents like Li Jianqiu.
"If I went any slower, I felt something might go wrong." Wang Changxiang smiled gently.
Li Jianqiu was silent for a moment, then broke into a relieved smile.
"I lose."
And so the third-year champion of the Three-City Dao Debate was decided. Two victories in two bouts, and Wang Changxiang returned home laden with honor.
From that battle, he earned a new nickname—Wang of the One Blow: whatever opponent he met, one blow of his breath settled it. So too did it voice the notion that he possessed the strength of but a single blow. In Huang Azhan's words: brief, but savage.
The following bout between Li Jianqiu and Sun Xiaoyan could no longer affect the outcome, and the two fought with corresponding half-heartedness.
Though to the gaping common folk it still looked fierce—Li Jianqiu all but flawlessly displayed the violence of his fire arts—Sun Xiaoyan, for his part, once again bulled ahead on the strength of his Kun Skin Drum. And just before the two came to blows, Li Jianqiu drifted past the line and conceded once more.
But in Jiang Wang's eyes, Li Jianqiu had not gone all out. For from first to last, that ancient longsword at his waist had never left its sheath.
The company stepped down, making way for the fifth-year bouts.
As a fellow disciple who knew him well, Jiang Wang went up to offer Li Jianqiu a few words of comfort.
But Li Jianqiu spoke first: "I had prepared a surprise, and it turned out there was no chance to show it."
Jiang Wang knew he meant the speed of Wang Changxiang's completed tornado.
"Just now, when you faced Sanshan City, why did Senior Brother not try?"
For all the dazzle of that exchange, any clear-eyed person could tell that Li Jianqiu had never set his heart on winning.
Li Jianqiu smiled, a touch bitterly: "For one thing, his defensive art I might not have been able to break. For another, second and third place mean nothing."
He turned and walked away.
"The bouts are about to begin!" Jiang Wang reminded him.
Li Jianqiu had already pressed his hand to his sword as he receded into the distance: "I won't watch."