Recordings of Yellow Pine's tournaments, like ours, were publicly available. A few betting agencies even streamed them live.

The schools themselves didn't handle the broadcasts, but they did get a cut from the bookmakers. And that was just our two academies.

The Spirit Temple considered working with bookmakers beneath their dignity, and the Army & Fleet Academy cared too much about secrecy, even though everyone else violated it at every turn.

Still, I doubted it saved them from demons in their own ranks. The horned would find out everything they needed to anyway.

The important thing was: I had access to fight footage, which meant I could greatly broaden my horizons.

First, I needed to familiarise myself with each individual qi type and get a sense of what it could do. So I started with early first-year matches, where most cadets only wielded one type of qi.

I began with a recording of a match between Lian Qiao and Rafi Bennet. Not that they were outstanding fighters, it was just the first video in the playlist from the first weekly tournament in the third month of studies.

Neither of them really knew what they were doing yet.

The first thing that caught my eye was the arena. At its edges, bowls burned with fire. Others were filled with water. Some held piles of stones.

Yellow Pine clearly cared about giving their cultivators relatively equal starting conditions. That alone broke one of my favourite techniques — tossing the opponent's weapon out of the ring.

Actually, maybe not. I didn't see a bowl full of blades. So blades were in a bad position here, which meant my curiosity ticked up.

Lian used Water. From what I already knew, Water was like short-range telekinesis, focused on flow and fluidity.

Lian's yellow-blue armour had a raised section on the upper back, looked like a reservoir, with tubes running down his arms and connecting to the palms.

Bennet wore yellow-green armour. Of course, yellow was dominant, it was Yellow Pine, after all.

His armour didn't have any obvious external mods. He was a Blade user and held a classic western cavalry sabre, late 18th-century design, with a bandolier slung across his chest.

Pretty standard for Point cultivators I was familiar with, except that the bandolier held slim discs instead of bulky spikes.

Lian didn't rush. He lifted some water from one of the bowls and condensed it into a long ribbon, coiling it around his arm. It resembled a Wood vine.

The referee gave the signal.

Bennet struck first. He leapt forward, slashing with his sabre parallel to the ground, then spun like a top, like a shuriken in flight, surging rapidly toward Lian.

His trajectory blatantly ignored the laws of physics, so I figured this had to be a dash-type technique for Blade.

Still, I wondered, didn't all that spinning disorient the user?

Lian struck with a water whip, shielding his left side with his arm. From his palm, via the tubes running to it, a surge of water burst out, coating his hand and instantly freezing into a thick layer of ice.

It really did resemble Wood. I'd seen a similar shield used by Wood cultivators before. But the whip shattered and splashed across Bennet's body and his protective formation the moment he struck the icy shield with his sabre.

The sabre bit deep, scattering shards of ice in all directions.

In an instant, the ice melted, and it became clear Bennet had landed a hit. The sabre had sliced several centimetres into the forearm plating. But the loss of solidity hadn't come from a loss of control. Lian had a plan.

The water reformed into a layer and froze again, anchoring the sabre to Bennet's hand. At the same time, the whip reformed into an icy noose around his neck.

That didn't stop him.

Bennet ripped a disc from his bandolier with his left hand and slashed through the leash. The loop around his neck melted instantly. Then he yanked his sabre hard, with force and precision.

Lian screamed and dropped to the ground. The ice chunk melted away, revealing a gash in his armour that reached halfway up his forearm, blood seeping from the split.

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The judje halted the match.

Seemed their referees were a bit more humane than ours.

This still didn't give me a complete picture of either Blade or Water, but it made it clearer why Point and Blade used to be lumped together under 'Sword Qi.' They weren't all that different, unless you dug into the specifics.

I hadn't seen any telekinesis yet, so I queued up Bennet's next match from the same tournament.

His opponent this time was Kadra Nyambe, a Fire cultivator in red-and-yellow armour. Her plating had distinctive protrusions along her shoulder blades and thighs. At first glance, they looked like regular reinforcement ribs, but on closer inspection, they resembled radiator fins with adjustable vents.

Signal to start, and both fighters launched into motion.

Nyambe didn't run. She launched herself like a rocket, literally: the 'radiators' on her back turned out to be nozzles, blasting jets of flame that propelled her through the air like a cultivator riding a turbocharged jetboard.

Bennet used his Blade dash, that same spinning lunge, but couldn't match her speed. Their collision happened closer to his starting point. Fire technique was winning on raw velocity.

A brilliant burst of flame engulfed them both, and the next second they went flying in opposite directions, skidding uncontrollably across the smooth arena floor.

Nyambe was the first to recover, and the first back on her feet. Her armour was still smoking, a deep gash running across her abdomen, but she was already pressing the attack.

A textbook straight punch, but instead of a projection, a flaming bolt shot from her fist: a compact ball of heat trailing a molten tail.

Bennet hadn't made it to his feet, he was still reeling from rotational inertia, but his formation caught the bolt.

I hadn't seen one like it before: a thick, blue-tinted rhombus that the fireball chewed into like a plasma cutter through ice. The orb fizzled out, but its burning tail still passed through and scorched a black mark onto the paint.

Of course, Nyambe didn't stop after her first attack, she unleashed a full barrage of firebolts at Bennet.

It was fast. Almost as fast as my Chain Punches. But the accuracy? About the same as mine when I first started learning it.

Bennet finally got to his feet and started dodging — just dodging, no techniques. He avoided most of the firebolts, and when he didn't, that strange defensive formation of his absorbed the brunt of the damage.

He had ways to fight back, though, and his discs were far more accurate, thanks to telekinesis.

Still, Nyambe had her own formations, so the fight hit a kind of stalemate. The firebolts didn't do much to Bennet, and his discs just bounced off Nyambe's defences.

She had a more classical, readable formation. Some version of my golden shields, appearing in stacked layers along the disc's path. The disc would slice through one or two, then deflect off the third.

Bennet tried to counter it the way most Point cultivators would, he lined up several discs and launched them in sequence at the same point. He aimed for her neck, but couldn't manage more than three at once.

They broke through the shields and scratched the armour, but that was it.

Both cadets realised this couldn't go on forever, and someone had to take a risk.

Bennet stepped forward.

Nyambe launched herself at him using her jets, but it wasn't a dash technique. There was no explosion, and she came to a halt two metres from Bennet. Close enough to fire without aiming, but just outside the reach of his sabre.

At that distance, Bennet's formation was losing ground fast. Some rhombuses were burning out, others couldn't form in time. Firebolts left glowing scorch marks on his armour.

Naturally, he wasn't going to stand there and take it, he kept trying to close the gap with sabre swings. Nyambe had to fire her jets again, but this time to dart sideways, weaving around him. Her firebolts grew slower, larger and more powerful.

They no longer left light burns, they left molten craters.

She was roasting him inside his own armour.

I was pretty sure Bennet was on enhancers, he moved with razor focus, almost like a machine.

Every step measured.

Every swing of his sabre could've been a finishing blow, if only she were a bit closer.

It came down to who made the first mistake.

Nyambe did.

She misjudged his range. He extended his shoulder just a little farther —

Contact!

The blade hit her pack of shields. First, second, third, fourth — shattered on impact. He sliced through the rest, and the sabre tip shrieked against her chest plate with a metallic screech.

Nyambe panicked.

She flinched, lost her balance for a moment. She jumped back, but not far enough. Bennet's sabre reached her again. He tore through the top layer of shields and sliced the rest, but this time, as the sabre struck her armour, he swung his left arm and hurled a disc.

The distance was nothing. Her formation was disrupted by the sabre's contact.

The disc flashed silver and with a burst of yellow sparks, it slammed straight into her throat.

It cut through the armour and buried halfway into the flesh.

Nyambe collapsed onto the floor, clutching her throat with both hands.

Bennet stepped onto her chest and raised his sabre for a final strike.

The referee reacted instantly, rushed in and grabbed Bennet's arm before the blade came down. He could've taken her hands off. Could've taken her head off.

That sabre looked even more dangerous than Point techniques.

The referee declared the winner and called in the med team and a technician for Nyambe.

Bennet didn't just stand there, he sprinted over to one of the water basins. He let go of his sabre and started splashing his torso with water.

The scorched spots on his armour had already faded, but steam still poured off him in thick clouds. Rapid cooling like that probably wasn't the best idea for the armour, but I doubted Bennet was thinking about his gear in that moment.

The video ended there, so I didn't know what injuries he'd sustained, I could only guess. But they must've been serious, because he didn't return for the rest of the tournament. I didn't see his name in any more video files. In fact, 'Match #1' was missing entirely from Round Three. The first listed was 'Match #2: M. Kovacevic vs A. A. Ndlovu'.

Still, that last match had been a spectacle. Bennet made an impression. But I hadn't learned everything I needed about Blade, or Fire, for that matter. If he'd stayed in the tournament, I would've kept watching his fights.

Now I had a decision to make: Should I track down more of Bennet's matches? Look for another Blade user? Or start exploring different qi types like Earth or Finger?

In the end, it didn't really matter which I picked first. Either way, I'd have to watch a lot more footage and read more training manuals before making any decisions.

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