Steel hissed against scabbards, and eighty killing intents locked onto adjacent throats in a single, greasy heartbeat. "No starting horn?" Zhan shouted into the gloom, planting his sandals against the flags. "False start! Call the play dead! Hey!" Nobody called anything dead. A brute with a jagged scythe lunged sideways, taking off another cultivator's ear. Blood sprayed the damp stonework, slick and dark under the flicker of the spirit lamps. Screams scraped the rafters. Three paces away, a young swordsman in silver brocade—embroidered with the crested serpent of the Cloud-Severing Clan—scanned the panic, spotted Zhan’s ragged peasant coat, and sneered. "A beggar in the pen," the youth scoffed. He swung a broad iron cleaver directly at Zhan’s neck. "Cull the vermin first!" *"Duck, you illiterate donkey!"* Old Man Gou’s voice screeched inside Zhan's skull, tasting like swallowed bile. *"He’s aiming for your windpipe, not handing you a prize turnip!"* Zhan did not duck. He sidestepped with precise, textbook footwork, tucking his elbow tight. The heavy iron blade cleaved the air where his collarbone had hovered an instant prior. "High-sticking," Zhan announced, thoroughly disgusted. "Clear contact area above the shoulder pads. Where is your training?" He brought down his willow branch with a crisp, downward snap. *Crack.* The supple wood whipped across the youth's knuckles. Bones popped like dry twigs. The greatsword tumbled from limp fingers, ringing against the stone. "My hand! My hand!" the silver-clad disciple shrieked, clutching his bruised fingers against his chest. "Take five paces back and think about proper stick etiquette," Zhan scolded, gesturing sharply toward an empty pillar. "Next infraction is a two-minute minor!" *"He tried to cut your head off, you rotting sack of turnip meal!"* Gou roared through the rusted hilt tucked into Zhan's sash. *"Why are you lecturing him on timber handling?! Crack his skull before his friends gut you!"* "League code, Gou," Zhan muttered, his gaze darting across the churning brawl. "We set the tone early, or the whole pitch degenerates into hooliganism." Two more cultivators saw their companion stumble and leaped across the flagstones, their faces twisted with predatory glee. The first, a lean girl brandishing poisoned deer-horn daggers, traced twin arcs of emerald mist toward Zhan’s groin. The second, a towering brute whose arms gleamed with bronze body-refining seals, lunged headfirst to crush Zhan’s ribs. "Blindside charge from behind the line of scrimmage," Zhan yelled. "And unregulated foreign substances on equipment!" He pivot-stepped. The girl’s emerald daggers hissed inches short of his belt, gouging green smoke into the limestone. Zhan flicked his wrist. The supple shoot struck her right cheek—not with lethal intent, but with the stinging precision of an academy tutor's cane. *Thwack!* A bright red welt bloomed across her cheekbone. She spun across the floor, crashing into a stone brazier, her daggers clattering loose. The bronze-skinned brute roared, driving his armored forehead straight at Zhan’s chest. Zhan met the charge flat-footed, planted his weight into his hips, and struck the man’s forehead with the flat edge of his branch. A shockwave rattled the green wood, but Zhan’s hidden core, fed by Gou's ancient hunger, surged. The brute’s momentum stopped dead. The man's neck jerked backward with a dull pop, his gaze rolling loose as he collapsed like a felled hemlock. "Illegal helmet-to-helmet contact!" Zhan bellowed over the screams. "Disqualified! Ejected from the premises! Look at him, he can't even maintain his stance!" Silence rippled outward through the immediate cluster of brawlers. A dozen sect novices backed away, clutching weapons with slick palms, staring at the ragged scavenger holding an ordinary shoot that had just felled three scions. High above the killing floor, behind a screen of smoky quartz in the imperial observation box, cold eyes fixed upon the commotion. Wei Tianhai stood motionless, his fingers digging into the balustrade until the gilded mahogany groaned. The bloodline he had torn from Zhan’s chest years ago stirred faintly within his own core—a lingering echo of stolen resonance. "That footwork," Tianhai murmured. His voice had the dry scratch of sand scraping slate. "The iron-crane posture. The balance of the Iron Cauldron lineage." A portly man dressed in the silk robes of a Vermilion Crane arbiter bowed low behind him. "Patriarch Wei? Do you require an adjustment to the contestant roster?" "The cripple survived the gutter," Tianhai whispered, his face darkening with venom. "He holds an active token. If he speaks before the pavilion elders, the tribunal will question where my cultivation surge originated. It cannot reach the arena platform. Refine him into grease." The arbiter offered an oily smile. "The mechanisms beneath Barracks 7 are notoriously... unstable, Patriarch. Consider the weed pulled." Back on the floor, Zhan was actively herding two panicked combatants apart with sweeps of his branch. "Create space! Respect the neutral zone!" A whistling sound cut through the screams. From the upper gallery shadows, a poisoned throwing star—forged from black meteor-iron and coated in soul-freezing bile—ripped through the gloom aimed at Zhan’s temple. *"Mine!"* Gou's voice turned into a rabid howl. The rusted hilt in Zhan’s sash twitched. An invisible suction tore through the air, dragging the throwing star off its fatal trajectory. Before the assassin in the rafters could blink, the weapon vanished straight into the pommel of Gluttonous Rust. A burp rattled through Zhan’s ribs, tasting sharply of sulfur and old scrap. *"Stale iron, but good venom!"* Gou cackled. *"Choke on this, boy!"* A stream of grey, crystalline energy surged up from the sword hilt, tearing down Zhan’s forearm and flooding the willow branch. The dried wood hissed. The bark hardened into shimmering, charcoal-black ironwood, grooved like a hardened baton and humming with a dull, resonant thrum. The leaves burned away in tiny puffs of blue fire, leaving behind a perfectly balanced, Qi-hardened club. "Official equipment upgrade?" Zhan blinked, testing the heft of the blackened baton with a couple of sharp practice swings. "A bit sudden, but standard regulation weight. Much obliged, table officials!" "Die, you lunatic!" A heavy brawler from the Iron Mountain Hall—wielding a seven-ring broadsword—lunged out of the smoke, bringing down a two-handed cleave meant to split Zhan from brow to groin. The blade hummed with golden mountain-cutting Qi, tearing a trench through the paving stones. Zhan didn't flinch. He raised the ironwood baton horizontally with both hands, catching the descent right at the sweet spot. *CLANG!* The seven-ring broadsword rebounded violently, rings shattering off the spine and clattering across the stone like copper coins. The attacker’s wrists exploded in purple bruises, his grip blown apart by the recoil. Before the man could scream, Zhan stepped inside his guard, cocked his arm, and drove the butt of the baton firmly into the center of the man's breastplate. "Unsportsmanlike conduct," Zhan barked. "Excessive roughness!" The breastplate caved in with the sound of a kicked drum. The Iron Mountain brawler flew thirty feet backward through the melee, plowing through four other combatants before crashing into the reinforced bronze doors, limp and senseless. "Is anyone else going to disrespect the rulebook?" Zhan demanded, his chest heaving as he pointed the blackened baton toward the remaining combatants. The surrounding novices took three collective steps back, lowering their blades. Then, a mechanical click echoed beneath the flagstones. The air dropped ten degrees. The smell of ozone vanished, replaced by the suffocating stench of rotten meat, ammonia, and ancient reptile musk. *"Down!"* Gou screamed, his voice cracking with genuine panic. *"The floor is pulling away! That fat bastard in the rafters pulled a lever!"* "A stoppage of play?" Zhan asked, looking down. The stone beneath his sandals cracked along clean, circular fault lines. With a deafening grinding of counterweights, the entire central floor of Barracks 7 fell open like a trapdoor, revealing a pitch-black abyss below from which wet, guttural breathing roared upward. Zhan lost his footing as the flags tilted, tipping him forward into the dark. "Delay of game penalty!" he shouted as the shadows swallowed him whole.

The First Whistle