The competitor locker rooms underneath the Royal Capital's Grand Arena smelled exactly like unchecked testosterone, stale blood, and impending doom.
I sat on a wooden bench, nervously adjusting my cheap grey legal tunic. The goat was currently under the bench, aggressively chewing on a sweat-soaked shin guard it had stolen from a passing gladiator. At least, I hope it was a shin guard and not a Groin guard.
"Boss," I whispered, my voice trembling as I looked around at the absolute monsters stretching in the room. "Tell me again why I am wearing a numbered competitor tag? My job was to plant the EULA manual to catch the thief. Not to actually fight!"
Lo Yu, sitting across from me and casually puffing on his bamboo pipe, pulled a glowing jade slip from his robes.
"The wildcard bracket has a mandatory participation clause, Junior Associate," Lo Yu rasped smoothly, his missing-tooth smile gleaming in the dim light. "Besides, I secured one-hundred-to-one odds on you surviving the first round. A Litigation Master must always diversify his portfolio."
"You bet the firm's operating budget on my survival?!" I shrieked, clutching my head. "Look at these people! The guy in the corner is bench-pressing a horse! My Dantian is currently plugged with Senior Sister Ho's localized sweat! I don't have a weapon!"
"You have the heaviest weapon of all," Lo Yu countered, tapping the side of his head. "Liability. Now, place the bait."
I swallowed hard, pulling the freshly drafted, highly toxic Dao of the End-User manual from my robes. I carefully placed the scroll on the bench in plain sight. Whoever was using the high-tier Memory Jade to steal proprietary techniques before the matches would undoubtedly scan it. Once they executed the stance in the ring, their kneecaps would legally become our property.
"Competitor 404!" a heavily armored guard barked, kicking the locker room door open. "You're up! Get in the ring!"
I stood up, my knees knocking together. I grabbed my clipboard, my charcoal pencil, and a retractable steel measuring tape I had purchased from the Heavenly Peak hardware district.
"Fear not, Junior Associate," Lo Yu said, puffing his chest out and fixing his eyepatch. "Survive the match. The Dowager Empress is watching from the VIP box. Today is the day I secure my Imperial Sugar-Momma."
I didn't have the heart to tell him he smelled like three-day-old cabbage. I just nodded, clutching my clipboard like a shield, and marched toward the blinding light of the arena tunnel.
Hundreds of miles away, in the manure-scented pastures of the Velvet Hoof Beast-Taming Sect, Senior Brother Bai was facing the ultimate test of his martial Dao.
It was raining heavily. Thunder cracked across the grey sky.
Bai stood barefoot in the deep mud, his eyes narrowed, his breathing perfectly regulated.
Standing exactly five feet in front of him was the Sect's undisputed apex predator: The White Emperor.
It was a goose. A large, extremely angry, aggressively territorial farm goose.
"You have terrorized the Outer Disciples for too long," Bai whispered, the rain running down his chiseled face. His Shounen protagonist delusion was currently operating at maximum capacity. He didn't see a farm bird. He saw an ancient, mythical beast of unparalleled malice.
The goose let out a violent, deafening HONK, spreading its massive white wings and charging forward, its beak snapping like a steel trap.
Such speed! Bai's inner monologue screamed. It uses a low-center-of-gravity charge to bypass my upper guard! A flawless technique!
Instead of drawing his sword, Bai dropped into his newly created, heavily traumatized martial stance.
"Beast-Taming Secret Art!" Bai roared to the empty pasture. "The Ruminant's Defiance!"
Bai went entirely cross-eyed. He stuck his bottom jaw out and began to chew an invisible cud with a ferocious, unyielding overbite, perfectly mimicking the deeply unsettling aura of his one-eared goat.
The goose, mid-charge, suddenly skidded to a halt in the mud.
It tilted its head, looking at the handsome, former prodigy of the Raging River Sect who was currently standing in the rain, cross-eyed, violently chewing on nothing.
The goose's tiny avian brain short-circuited. It lacked the processing power to understand this level of sheer, unadulterated stupidity. Intimidated by Bai's completely unreadable aura, the goose slowly took a step backward, let out a confused, high-pitched honk, and waddled away toward the barn.
Bai slowly relaxed his jaw, gasping for air as if he had just survived a life-or-death tribulation.
"I did it," Bai whispered reverently, dropping to his knees in the mud. "I have conquered the avian domain. Just you wait, He Lu. When I return to the Capital, my Goat-Jaw technique will shatter your legal tricks!"
Back in the Capital Arena, the crowd of eighty-thousand spectators roared with bloodlust.
The arena floor was a massive circle of black obsidian, stained with the rust-colored marks of previous, highly violent encounters.
I stood nervously on the eastern edge of the ring. My opponent stood on the western edge.
His name was "Iron-Spine" Zhao. He was seven feet tall, completely shirtless, and covered in pulsing, heavily tattooed muscle. He was casually swinging a spiked iron mace the size of a beer keg.
"Begin!" the arena referee shouted from his floating cloud-disk.
Zhao let out a terrifying battle cry, his Foundation Establishment Qi flaring into a massive, fiery aura. He raised his mace and charged at me, each footstep shattering the obsidian floorboards.
"TIME OUT!" I screamed, blowing a silver whistle I had bought in the tourist district. "STOP! STOP RIGHT THERE!"
Zhao, completely thrown off by the whistle, stumbled mid-charge, his heavy boots skidding to a halt. He looked at me, utterly confused.
"What?" Zhao grunted, lowering his mace slightly. "There are no time-outs in the Wildcard Bracket!"
"There are when there is a blatant violation of the Occupational Safety and Heavens Administration codes!" I yelled, furiously scribbling on my clipboard. I marched right up to the massive gladiator, pulled out my retractable steel tape measure, and hooked it onto the edge of his spiked mace.
I pulled the tape back, measuring the distance from the spikes to my face.
"Six feet!" I declared loudly, looking up at the referee on his floating cloud. "Sir! According to Capital OSHA Regulation 402, Section B, any blunt-force trauma resulting in high-velocity arterial blood spatter requires the combatants to be surrounded by a Class-3 containment ward! Look at these wards! They are Class-1! If he smashes my skull, my brain matter will easily breach the spectator barrier and strike a civilian!"
The crowd went dead silent. Eighty thousand people leaned forward in their seats, utterly baffled.
The referee blinked, slowly lowering his cloud. "Uh... what?"
"Furthermore!" I continued, pointing a trembling finger at the massive craters Zhao had just left in the obsidian floor. "He is creating a hostile work environment! Look at those divots! Those are tripping hazards! Does this arena have adequate liability insurance for uneven flooring? Because if I roll my ankle on his crater, I am suing the Royal Capital for gross negligence!"
"I am going to crush you," Zhao growled, raising his mace again.
"Aggressive posturing!" I shrieked, backing away and pointing at him. "Referee, record this! He is intentionally inflicting emotional distress in the workplace! I demand a union representative!"
The referee, a mid-level bureaucrat who had never been threatened with a civil lawsuit in his entire life, began to sweat. He looked at the craters. He looked at the flimsy wards. He realized that if my brain matter actually did hit a spectator, the Capital Courts would hold him personally liable.
"Uh," the referee panicked, pulling out a rulebook. "He... he has a point about the containment wards. They haven't been inspected since the Ming Era."
"This is a martial arts tournament!" Zhao roared, his face turning purple with rage. "I am a gladiator! Let me hit him!"
"And face a class-action lawsuit for reckless endangerment?!" I yelled back. "You don't even have a wet floor sign out here!"
"That's it!" the referee shouted, raising his hand. "Match paused! Iron-Spine Zhao is disqualified for... uh... non-compliant infrastructure damage and workplace hostility! Competitor 404 wins by default!"
Zhao dropped his mace. He looked at his hands, then at me, then at the referee. A single tear of profound, existential confusion rolled down his tattooed cheek. He had trained his entire life for this moment, only to be defeated by a building code violation.
I threw my hands in the air. "Justice prevails!"
High above the arena, in the gold-trimmed Imperial VIP Box, the Dowager Empress of the Scarlet Lotus observed the match.
She was draped in crimson silk. Her face, as the bookie had promised, was a terrifying masterpiece of Alchemical Botox. Her skin was stretched so incredibly tight across her cheekbones that she looked perpetually, intensely surprised.
Down in the competitor's stands, Lo Yu had spotted her. The 300-year-old Litigation Master was currently striking a deeply suggestive pose against a pillar, biting his lower lip, and trying to waft his cabbage-stink toward the VIP box.
The Empress didn't even blink in his direction.
Her unblinking, artificially widened eyes were locked entirely on the center of the arena. She watched as I furiously gathered my tape measure, cowering slightly as Zhao walked past me, muttering to myself about filing an injunction against the arena's janitorial staff.
The Empress's breath hitched.
She had spent a thousand years surrounded by fearless, pristine heroes. Men who bled for honor. Men who fought gods. She was so incredibly bored of them.
But this man? This pathetic, unwashed, deeply paranoid coward who had just defeated a Foundation gladiator using a tape measure and a profound fear of brain trauma?
He was the most intensely vulnerable, gritty, disgusting creature she had ever laid eyes on.
The Dowager Empress slowly smiled. Because her face was surgically immobilized, the smile produced a highly unsettling, audible creaking sound, like old leather bending under pressure.
"Bring him to my chambers," the Empress whispered to her Head Eunuch, her voice trembling with thousand-year-old desire. "I want to inspect his briefs."