Chapter 158: Life 68, Age 27, Martial Master 7
In their first martial competition, my students were pitted against Yan’s students.
Yan’s class was somewhat unique among those that I had seen. Usually, a Master would choose students with matching blessings and complementary affinities when possible. For example, Grandmaster Ning and Master Sun had chosen our class to all have comprehension blessings, and one of the classes we fought against only had students with elemental incarnation blessings.
In contrast, Yan had chosen students with wildly different blessings. One student could create an earth incarnation in the form of a large stone golem, another had a blessing that improved her stamina, and a third had one related to herbalism.
It took me a while to understand why he would choose such an odd mixture of students, but when I saw him writing in a notebook after class one day, I understood. He wasn’t focusing on having the best class possible. He was studying how these different blessings could be used. His plan wasn’t too dissimilar to things I had done in the past. He was giving up short-term gains for information that would be valuable in the long term.
Still, when I compared his class to mine, his had a clear advantage. Two members of his team had blessings that none of my students were able to match. Those two could easily defeat anyone my class had to offer. However, if the students paired off to fight in just the right combination, my class did have a small chance to eke out a victory.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t provide them with any advice. They had to decide their strategy by themselves.
In the end, it was close, but my class made two fatal mistakes.
The first was allowing Leng JunWei to fight first. He had been cultivating lightning qi and was working to develop his calligraphy talent in a way that would help him as a talisman artist. He was the second-best fighter in my class. Against him, Yan’s class sent their weakest fighter. Leng JunWei won, but it was a strategic defeat as my class had wasted a valuable asset.
The other mistake was saving Jin ZiHan for last. She was forced to fight against Yan’s most ferocious student, Cai XiaoYu, a girl blessed with seemingly endless stamina.