Jiang could hear screaming from behind, the other butchers closing in on his flock, no doubt, but there wasn’t anything to be done about that. He walked forward at the black-haired butcher that had tried to throw a small star at him, smiling widely with open arms now lowered closer to the sides. His opponent took a few steps backward for every one Jiang took forward. His face wore an expression of pure terror, and he seemed to understand there was no point in speaking anymore.

  “And just where are you going?” Jiang asked. The man did not answer. Jiang knew he would likely be able to flee better than Jiang could, and the absorbed qi from his technique was dissipating quickly. Jiang shrugged and raised his right hand in a closed fist, save for his extended pointer finger. The man’s face darkened as his lips opened, likely for some last set of screaming or words or platitudes of why he should be saved.

  「Bang」

  A ray of fire shot out from the fingertip, a concentrated beam so powerful it blasted a straight line through some thousands of feet of earth in front of him and, naturally, through the man between Jiang and the earth that had so generously donated him the power needed for such a strong technique (at least relative to the strength the other so-called “elders” had displayed). The man’s lips remained open. No blood trailed out, but neither did any sound.

  The ray of fire went straight through his chest and Jiang let down his arms, the man falling face-first into the dirt, the ray having passed cleanly through and leaving a hole through the center of where his cooling heart should have been. Certainly, though, no cultivator capable of surviving such a death game had much of a heart to speak of and the ones that did were likely already many degrees beneath the deep freezer. Perhaps that ray was the first warmth inside the man had felt in eons.

  Jiang’s smile faded as the screams did from behind. He turned but did not look at the corpses. Instead he walked back to where he had started and bent down to speak to the purple-haired girl that had first relied on him for protection.

  It was surprising she wasn’t dead, but he supposed the other cultivators didn’t know Jiang couldn’t protect her. Luckily, it didn’t matter anymore. The blue-tinted monitors returned leaving smoke trailing between every corner of the battlefield.

  “Aaaaand stop!” the green-robbed figure in his gold crown announced.

  “That’s fifty left. Good job! You killed four-hundred-and-sixty-eight of each other in four minutes, ten seconds. That’s above average!”

  “Congratulations, survivors, you only had about a ten-percent chance of making it!”

  He paused between every statement as if reading from a script.

  Jiang bent down to the girl, doing his best to ignore the loud statements he already knew by heart.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her, teary eyes reflecting the clean-shaven visage of a butcher back at him. He hadn’t seen this face in a million years and now it had saved a child.

  “Violet,” she sniffled.

  “Follow me, Violet, and I’ll protect you as best I can.”

  The announcer wasn’t done.

  “But you haven’t made it yet! That was phase one of the legendary reawakening grounds. Rejoice! For now we move on to phase two! In phase one you were evaluated against each other, now you will be evaluated by objective truth.”

  If they meant scripture Jiang would win easily and could help everyone else make it through, but if they meant raw cultivation or some kind of qi capacity baseline he was fucked. His body was leaking qi like a sinking ship and the environmental qi was so minimal he was barely able to see it.

  Where did it all go? he wondered.

  A light flashed in between the three screens and a crystal ball formed behind them, floating down like a weightless feather to an echelon of soldiers that had gathered around the drop point without Jiang having noticed their arrival. This was a disturbing turn of events. There should have been none alive capable of outmaneuvering his eyes, but the fact these randoms were able to meant either everyone alive was a heavenly speed demon capable of outrunning light in a footrace or that his eyes had become mortal again. He supposed the second case was a better outcome.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The crystal ball shined and Jiang knew exactly what this was. They were going to measure everyone’s qi capacity and probably kill anyone below a certain threshold. What would happen if he survived the elimination?

  “You have about a fifty percent chance of surviving this round, but don’t get your hopes up! We’re going to be culling you down to ten before this is over, so make sure the guards can feel your despair!”

  What?

  The first cultivator began moving towards the guards.

  “About?” they said. There’s fifty of us. “About?”

  Jiang quickly began pulling the girl forcefully behind him as he ran towards the ball. The guards and those nearer the ball looked askance at him, questioning why he would possibly want to get closer.

  The torn-purple-robed cultivator that had begun approaching the crystal ball stepped back from the guards and allowed Jiang to pass, though it took him some ten or fifteen seconds to make it with the purple girl in tow.

  “Thank you, great masters, for allowing me to go first.” he said, out of breath. It would seem the others wanted to see what the ball would do without realizing its hidden mechanism.

  Jiang stepped up to the soldiers who looked amused, but allowed him to pass into their ranks and touch the crystal ball which did not react. It made no noise and emitted no light, but the guards didn’t move to kill him. Jiang let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

  “PASS.” The voice said flatly. Jiang walked back out of the exposed tip of the triangle of guards and pulled Violet up by an arm, pushing her inside after him. A faint purple light glowed from the ball.

  “PASS.”

  The purple-robed man stepped up confidently as Violet stepped out.

  “PASS.”

  The purple-robed man stepped out, smiling at Jiang. He took a few steps away from them and turned back to face the triangle, clearly waiting for the first casualty.

  Jiang could no longer predict the exact outcome, but he’d solved the puzzle immediately. There were exactly fifty cultivators remaining and only two ways to judge them: objectively and subjectively. If the judgement were objective then they may recruit no cultivators or they may pass everyone. While it would be good for the consistency of any given recruit, it would lead to inconsistent batch sizes which might lead to inefficiencies in the recruiting pipeline later. If groups were too large there might not be enough staff or the future stages might be overwhelmed. They could always perform an extra culling event if too many recruits survived, but if too few survived then they might be left with staff intended to train new recruits and no one to train.

  The number of staff was likely fixed. They were either utilized or unutilized, therefore the goal was to maximize the number of recruits they could train without going over. This meant they didn’t need an objective metric like absolute qi, but if they were going to use a subjective metric they would need some way to evaluate it. Would they take the exact midpoint of qi capacity in the recruits? No, assessing it would be difficult or impossible. Even if they had the technology to assess qi at any given moment, it would assess neither capacity nor efficiency, only how much someone had at the moment of assessment.

  This meant the best metric was one that was sensitive to both capacity and efficiency while also being taken within a close span of time for all recruits without being overly sensitive to their actual qi at that moment. Qi output was a good proxy measurement for this, a simple burst delivered to a device that measured all these parameters— the crystal ball.

  But if they didn’t have the middle cultivator’s qi in advance, how would they determine the cutoff? It could be done after all data was collected, that was a risk, but it could also be done on the fly by using the average or median or other middle-seeking metric of the already-collected cultivator’s values. This meant the measurement would start at zero, and that Jiang would pass if and only if he went first.

  “PASS.” Another recruit survived.

  He wasn’t sure, however, if they were going to do the executions in a single batch after the data was collected.

  “PASS.”

  The tension mounted.

  “PASS.”

  A blonde-haired girl in blue-green robes walked up.

  Why are they all human?

  “FAIL.”

  A white light and a flash of heat incinerated her where she stood. There was nothing left but a black stain on the dirt.

  Jiang breathed a sigh of relief and sat down cross-legged on the nearest patch of bricks, Violet’s wrist dragged in tow. She remained standing.

  “FAIL.” Another hot white light.

  “FAIL.” It seemed the middle-seeking measurement was around its target.

  “PASS.” Jiang wasn’t counting how many passed or failed. It didn’t really matter now, being out of his hands. Besides, they would surely tell him.

  It was very possible they’d kill him for trying to circumvent the test.