365 Chapter 365: It came from 20,000 Leagues (1/2)

When the stage began, all of us received a notification through our smartphones (good thing mine was waterproof, but even if it wasn't I had it enveloped in a protective field of my magical aura) right before the invisibility cloak wore off. I felt a tingle, and sensed that the cloaking spell had been lifted. Not that it made any difference for me.

There was no one else hiding in the sea with me. Smiling to myself, I began casting my summoning spells.

Above, battles erupted sporadically as teams or individuals encountered each other. Alliances were forged or broken, and pitted against one another. Unlike normal webnovels, they couldn't be bothered to single out a specific target and focus all of their energies into hunting him. I mean, they had better things to do with their time, and more imminent threats to deal with, rather than look for someone they couldn't find at the moment.

I mean, seriously, it wasn't as if they held a deep grudge against me. They recognized me as one of the bigger threats, true, but that didn't mean they would go out of their way to search for me and eliminate me, like all those caricature villains did in xianxia stories. In reality, most people had more important matters to deal with, and they couldn't invest too much time and resources into prioritizing the elimination of someone they regarded as ”trash” or insignificant, not when there were so many other strong participants competing against them.

So I didn't have to worry about that. Additionally, I did not know any of the other participants personally, so I could hardly think of why they would hold a grudge against him. Perhaps…perhaps if this was a typical Chinese webnovel, I would have offended some arrogant young master who was swaggering into the qualifying stage, either bullying other people or sexually harassing the female participants, by stepping in and stopping him (bonus points if I slapped him in the face for his behavior). Sometimes the arrogant young master has relations with an insider on the tournament staff, and requested for help to cheat, resorting to despicable means to eliminate the protagonist at all costs for no reason other than a stupid grudge, even if it meant risking being exposed for cheating and getting disqualified. But this was reality, and no such nonsense transpired.

The water around me gently churned as my mana accumulated inside me, tiny bubbles drifting away leisurely as they formed from the increase in magical energy within the vicinity. Since I was given such time and opportunity, I was going straight to one of my Celestial Guardians, but I thought I might as well stay underwater a bit longer and summon a few other Constellation spirits as well.

The docks were a great place to test out my new summoning spells and their improved abilities. And I intended to unleash them in full.

*

Above ground, Ding Ke Po was running around, trying to avoid blazing fireballs, sharp icicles and jagged lightning. The docks had erupted in a furious melee as students from the fifty or so different academies engaged each other in combat. Some were laying low, hiding out until the conflict was over and tried to reap the rewards while everyone was exhausted or wounded, but the majority didn't bother with such tactics. After all, it wasn't worth waiting until the end, and taking out opponents net them more points than surviving until the end.

The last ten surviving people would get forty points, for example, plus the ten bonus points for being the final participants remaining – so a total of fifty points. But everyone received ten points per ”kill.” In other words, a person who eliminated ten other students would get a hundred points. High risk, high rewards against low risk, relatively low rewards – of course, fifty points were nothing to scoff at, but you ran the risk of being taken out by surprise before there were ten left, and thus you gained very little points in the end. It was a very risky gamble.

By the way, the first person to get eliminated would receive one point, the second person to get eliminated would receive two points, and so on and so forth until the fortieth person, who would receive forty points. The last ten would therefore receive forty points each, plus the bonus points, for a total of fifty base, because that was when the stage ended.

”Huff…”

Ding Ke Po wasn't the team captain – he was just a show-off who was nominated for the fourth stage by his team in Divine Divination Academy because…well, they had no choice. At this rate, they wouldn't get enough points to qualify for the next round. Ding Ke Po was the least bad option in their current roster.

Not that Ding Ke Po himself had any faith in his own abilities. While the Divine Divination Academy was famous for their ability to predict the future and they specialized in Feng Shui, the sad truth was that they were fairly bad in combat. Ding Ke Po himself was not adept in fighting, which was why he was running instead of resisting.

Throwing himself into one of the ships to take cover from a volley of fireballs that arced across the air and smashed down on a wooden pier, incinerating the broken splinters into blackened ash. Rolling across the deck, he then dove into the bridge as a bunch of icicles thudded against the metal. The casters weren't paying too much attention to an insignificant threat like him, though. They were focusing their attention on other opponents.

A small slice of luck.

”Damn it,” Ding Ke Po grunted, frustrated. He hastily cast a small astrological screen – a spirit circle that possessed hovering esoteric runes that manifested in strange patterns. Those who could decipher the patterns would be those capable of predicting multiple trajectories of the future and could thus act accordingly.

Of course, the future was never set in stone, and diviners such as him often saw more than one possible routes ahead of the present. The difficulty lay in trying to identify which of these routes was the most likely to occur. Divination was never certain, often muddled in ambiguous temporal tides that obscured their inner sight. Time was not a singular, linear existence, but rather multiple strands of possibilities tightly woven together. Even a single minor action was enough to throw the entire path off into an entirely new branch.