As he rested, Chang Heng watched the fighters that came right after him; he'd have to go against the winner, so it was better to spend some of the time he had left learning rather than recovering.

  Not that it ended up being much, anyway.

  One was Xie Mo, the grandson of Old Man Ling’s rival, the other a girl who came from a recently formed local Sect.

  As soon as the referee let them free to start, Xie Mo rushed at his opponent, his black robes flowing around him, almost leaving a trail behind. When only a few steps separated them, he didn't just keep going, but accelerated instead.

  He used a powerful technique- most likely, a Movement Technique, or maybe an offensive one adapted for this use- to close the distance sooner than he was supposed to, getting to his opponent in the blink of an eye.

  She didn't manage to block the first hit. Even from the stands, he could see it wasn't that powerful, but it left her dazed long enough for the bald boy to channel a technique into his first, enveloping it in a black aura.

  It was the move that gave his sect the name, both the strongest and most used by its members, the [Black Fist]. It was a wonder how complex it must have been, achieving such capabilities with nothing but the altered Stamina of Cultivators.

  She tried to defend herself with her own technique, one Chang Heng recognised being sold from his family, but it was pointless.

  The punch simply ran through, reaching her abdomen and tossing her in the air.

  Xie Mo looked ready to rush again, but she surrendered before he could reach her.

  After a moment of pause, he walked back to the seats where fighters waited in, a few rows under the black mass that were the spectators from his sect.

  The old woman who had come to them earlier, Xie San, nodded at him with a stern face. He had done good enough.

  The boy bowed and sat down, Chang Heng noticing how he seemed to clean something from his face.

  He shifted his gaze to the tournament brackets with worry. This fight happened right after his one, so there was a decent chance that…

  Ugh. He is my next opponent, this does not look good, at all. He is my complete opposite. How in the Heavens can I handle him? I can't just take hits or lose my calm like I just did- without [Three Layers Defence] he'll destroy me completely. I'm not even sure if using it will be enough…

  He thought of what the boy had just done- he was fast, when consuming either Qi or Stamina; his basic punch was weak; his enhanced one was very powerful, almost on the same level as his cousin's straight, all out punches. But those attacks were also costly.

  I will need to turtle up again, but this time properly. I can't lose my cool, I can't waste any more energy than necessary, and especially, I can't get surprised by his [Black Fist] even once. Make him use as many of those as I can, so that he'll be forced to surrender from exhaustion. The same strategy as before, but this time I'll have to carry it through.

  He couldn't think of anything else to plan beforehand, so he started gathering the motes of Qi that flowed in the air around him. In the Colosseo, closer to the centre of the city, there were clearly more than in his family’s terrains or his old house.

  The memory came with a sense of nostalgia, but he forced his focus back on the task: recover Stamina and heal back.

  Doing it still felt weird to do, as those were aspects that drastically changed when one became a Cultivator.

  As a mortal, both to heal and to, well, do things, one had to consume food, which somehow would be turned into energy reserves to achieve those results. The process was not really understood, unlike in Cultivators, with the hows and whys being unknown.

  As for healing, that made a bit more sense, the mass consumed would be turned into the missing or broken parts.

  Chang Heng had read a decent amount on the topic, and the contexts of this discovery in particular made him uncomfortable. There weren't many contexts in which a mortal would be wounded, unable to find any food, and have the sequence of events properly recorded by someone else.

  Any two of the requirements could be achieved at the same time, sure, but all three… those things happened in a controlled environment. One that had people be reduced to subjects.

  The image sent a shiver down his spine.

  For Cultivators the thing worked differently, even if eating could enhance the process.

  While resting their Cores would naturally generate the energies that they called Stamina and Vitality, and there was a reason they were called energies: just like Qi, they could be generated, accumulated, and consumed to achieve supernatural results.

  So, in some of the time he had left, he consumed the Vitality to heal all marks left by the fight, from simple redness, to bruises, to the flashing pain that came back randomly from the headbutts and the sucker punch at his groin.

  A warm flux flowed and spread through his body, easing the pain where it passed and settled. This kind of process was almost autonomously done by his Vitality, and the simplest application of it, as it only did what it was naturally supposed to.

  After that, he worked on filling his reserves of it again by cultivating.

  It was the main way to increase the rate at which one regained it- others, such as pills and special foods, he had no access to- but slowed down the gains in terms of Qi. In a way, he was lucky to be weak: if he wanted to both cultivate and heal, with all the times he had been beaten down in the last couple of weeks, he simply wouldn’t have had the time. Even something as desired as strength came with its drawbacks, as the long lifespans became essential for something as simple as healing back and refilling one’s reserves from a badly gone fight, stories told of men in the Dao Communion even taking years to truly be back to their full power and able to properly cultivate.

  That wasn’t even the full extent of it, as lands sparse of ambient Qi or tougher bodied would slow down the process. For Chang Heng, this was the main downside of having such a defence-focused Cultivation Technique, as a body like his took much more energy to heal; luckily, he had barely any Qi to recover, so the time he had left would be plenty enough to do both.

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  In the middle of this process, someone tapped his shoulder. Opening his eyes, he saw the girl from earlier.

  She was supposedly a year younger than him, but didn't look the part, with her curated makeup, long eyelashes, and extravagant, multilayered clothing. Her eyes were a vibrant blue which contrasted nicely with her cherry-red lips. Overall, she had a very cute face, and he could barely see the thin, elegant neck under it, barely hidden by her luscious pink hair.

  She was smiling at him, making his heart skip a beat.

  “You've stared enough, don't you think, cutie?”

  “Oh, uhm, yes, sorry!”

  He forced himself to look away, his hand suddenly very interesting. He could feel his face getting hotter as blood rushed to his cheeks.

  He called me cutie! Heavens help me, this is finally my chance! Keep calm, Heng!

  In the coming conversation, he was not keeping his calm at all.

  “So… uh, did you need something? How can I help you?”

  “Nothing in particular, but I've been here watching people beat each other up long enough that I'm getting bored. The referee said you were a Chang, right?”

  “Ehm, yeah, yes. I'm Chang Heng. And you? What's your name?”

  “Xin. It's ironic, in a sense.”

  “Xin, as in ‘rich’, right? I can't see it being ironic, to be honest, it just sounds good. What about your family nam-”

  “I don't have one.” She stopped him. “My family was poor and with no history, there was no great past to remember.”

  The boy felt his anxiety spike. She tried to hide it, look calm, but there was an edge in her tone.

  Oh come on! How did you screw this up already?! There was obviously a reason if she didn't say it on her own!

  “Oh, uhm…” Say something! “I… how was…”

  “Are you from the main clan or a side branch? You don't look much like the other Changs I've seen.”

  He thanked the Heavens for the change in topic.

  “Kind of… both, to be honest. My parents and I were on our own until I awakened, then I got pretty much… adopted, if it makes sense? By Patriarch Guang. Together with them. Before that, we didn't have much, we barely kept afloat.” He said, avoiding the fact that they struggled because all their money went into his medical needs.

  “He, so you too have humble origins, basically, right, cutie?”

  Chang Heng almost heard his heartbeat spike. He could feel a bridge forming between them, the beginning of a small connection formed from shared experience.

  “Well, yes, but…why did you think I'm so different from the rest of my clan?”

  Please tell me I didn't sound insecure! Because I am not, alright??

  “I mean… they're all so huge and tall, even the mortals, and then there’re Chang Guang, the recently un-secluded Chang Ling, and the impossible to forget Chang Jian…” She seemed thoughtful. “Did I say Chang too many times? I feel like I did.” She added with a giggle that hit him in his chest, his face getting a deeper shade of red than his hair. “But I mean, the first looks like a beast, the second a monster, and the third… he is one.”

  She said the last part with the kind of honesty that one could rarely hear, a shiver in her eyes and down her spine.

  The boy expected her to say how good his cousin looked, or how elegant, or strong… but a monster?

  Just what kind of voices go around about that guy? This seems rather extreme, doesn't it?

  “I trained with him, I know he can be scary, but calling him a monster is a bit much, no?”

  She looked like she wanted to say something, but changed her mind, opening and closing her mouth before she resumed speaking.

  “He trained you? You're so lucky, what kind of moves did he show you?”

  “Hmm… not much, really, he only ever used what I needed to see in order to get better at fighting, nothing more and nothing less. The only remarkable ones I saw were yesterday's… Whatever that cut was, and one of his Fighting Techniques, [Flint’s Ignition]. The name seems boring, but trust me, it's incredible.”

  “Yeah, I believe you, that one is really famous. I think it's his main technique, it's the one he uses most often. But like… Did you ever see him fight, you know, another person? A Cultivator?”

  “No, never, why?”

  Aren't we talking about him a bit too much? Why am I even asking her about my cousin now?

  “Well, let's just say he can be quite dangerous. He is strong.” She looked in the distance, shivering again. “Too strong, some would say. But! Since he was your teacher, you must be quite strong too, right?”

  Is she reading my mind?! Thanks, Heavens, for the change in topic! Now I just need to impress her!

  He raised his chin, trying to show a level of confidence he lacked.

  “I admit I may not be the best fighter, but as you'll see, I'm hard to put down for good.” Gah, what am I saying?! I sound like an idiot! “He may have beaten me down time and time again, but I've learned to stand back up again and again!”

  “Pff… from how your last fight ended, it seems that you are better at dragging people to the floor with you than getting up from it!” She barely hid a laugh.

  “Aw come on! It was a strategy, strategy I say! I'm telling you!”

  “I'll admit, those headbutts did look somewhat cool, even if you were the one taking more damage. The blood you lost was much more than your opponent did, it's easy to see from so close.”

  Most of it was not from the hits, I think, and I do not want to talk about my illness now! Worry crept inside him as he kept channelling his inner dumbass.

  “I may have lost more blood, but I could have kept going for a while! I'm very, very tough, I doubt there are many here at my same level, at least in terms of defence.”

  “Eh… are you more of a ‘your punch doesn't matter if I can heal it in a second’ or a ‘I didn't even feel it’ type of guy?”

  “The second, for sure, so much that my healing ended up being subpar. I bet I'm the one who can tank hit the most in the whole tournament, you know?”

  “Oh, really? I like your confidence, cutie. Do you have some special techniques from your clan or what?”

  “Yup, you guessed right! Apart from my Cultivation Technique, which is very powerful and made pretty much entirely by me, I also have one for fighting, [Three Layers Defence], it makes me incredibly hard and basically indestructible while I'm using it.”

  “I bet I can make something else really hard.”

  She said in a casual tone.

  “...What?”

  He was not casual at all.

  “Oops. I shouldn't make this kind of joke. Not in public, at least.” She winked at him.

  Ten thousand thoughts raced in his mind at that moment, until he felt some eyes burning on his back.

  When he turned, he saw Chang Jian waiting a few rows above the duo, with his usual smile turned into a huge grin. He was mouthing something.

  “You suck with girls.” His lips said.