The Praesidium loomed, its emptiness casting the majestic stadium in eerie silence. A few people strode across the plaza, but that only highlighted the feeling of isolation. It almost felt as if they were trespassing. Or getting a peek backstage. It was an altogether strange and entirely uncomfortable setting.
“I’ve been wondering something,” Elijah stated, his eyes following a man carrying a dozen crates on his back. “Why does anyone in the Empire of Scale do mundane jobs?”
“Because they need doing,” Tura answered.
“Do they? It seems like most of it could be automated. You have incredibly powerful magic at your disposal.”
She snorted.
“What?” Elijah asked.
“Then what would people do with their time?”
“Uh…whatever they wanted?”
“Do you know the most fundamental truth of civilization, boy?” she asked, turning to face him. She had to look up to meet his eyes.
Elijah shrugged. “I don’t know. That people are people?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Closer than I expected. Wrong, but not an unexpected answer.”
“Then what’s the right response?”
“Purpose.”
“Huh?”
“People crave purpose. Above all else, they need a reason to keep going. A goal to pursue. Take that away from them, and they stagnate. They fall into a pit of apathy from which they will never return,” she explained. “Without jobs, society fails. Not because things no longer get done, but because people lack a reason to move forward.”
“Isn’t moving forward purpose enough?”
“For a few.”
Elijah frowned in thought.
“The Empire of Scale is old enough that automation has been attempted,” she went on. “Magical constructs to do every job. Our people were free to pursue their own goals. To follow their dreams. To be the people they wanted to be.”
“What happened?”
“The first time? Utter stagnation. Whole worlds were lost to apathy, and when those magical constructs fell to disrepair, no one was capable of replacing them,” she answered. “The second time, chaos. Young, purposeless dragons rebelled. They splintered away from the Empire of Scale, then swept across the multi-verse like a plague. The combined might of many rival empires rose to fight them off, but they didn’t stop there. They invaded our empire and nearly destroyed it.
“Every other instance ended with some combination of those two extremes.”
“I see.”
“You do not, but one day, you’ll understand it more fully. People need these jobs. They need a leash. Sometimes, a whip.”
“You act like they’re slaves.”
“They are. Not to the empire. To their own natures. Everyone is. An intelligent ruler will acknowledge this and use it to create appropriate policies. Only a fool would ignore reality in favor of a pretty fantasy where people are capable of self-motivation.”
“I know plenty of people like that.”
“Individuals. Not the group as a whole,” she argued. Then, she glanced away. “Bah. This day is not about politics or the philosophy of purpose.”
Elijah followed her glance toward the other side of the plaza, and he saw two approaching figures. Sara and Birk. The former was back to her old, energetic self. Almost as if she’d forgotten what Elijah never could. What Cyran had done to her remained in the back of his mind, needling him a little more forcefully with every passing day.
He’d killed people for less.
She’d heaped an armful of cheap souvenirs onto Birk, who didn’t look all that happy about it.
“Everything is so much cheaper when there isn’t a fight going on!” she exclaimed. “This was a great idea, Auntie Tura.”
“It was not my idea,” the drake grumbled.
Indeed, Sara had practically browbeat the older woman into allowing her to come. The town surrounding the Praesidium wasn’t nearly as deserted as the arena itself, but many of the shops were closed until the start of the tournament. Now that the qualifiers were complete, the participants had been finalized.
“Sure it was! You never do anything you don’t want to.”
“Bah,” Tura groused. Then, to Elijah, she said, “Come along. We have an appointment to keep.”
Elijah shrugged. “I think this whole thing is stupid, but whatever.”
No one responded to the dig. As far as he could tell, the whole thing was based on gambling. In order to establish odds, the bookmakers needed to know the baseline of his power. And that meant testing, which was why he’d come to the Praesidium.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on NovelPhoenix.
If anything, Elijah was more shocked by the fact that gambling was a thing amongst dragons. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been, but he was nonetheless. It was just further evidence that dragons weren’t so different from humans. More powerful, certainly, and with a few weird customs, but the similarities were strikingly surprising.
In any case, he followed Tura’s lead as they circled the massive arena. Eventually, they found the appropriate door. A little while later, they entered a lobby connected to a dozen isolated rooms.
A hundred or so other participants in the Tournament of the First Fang loitered inside, waiting their turn. At first, Elijah tried to study his potential opponents, but in the end, he accepted that there wasn’t much he could discern from such casual study. Instead, he passed the time by listening to Sara describe the past few weeks at the Academy.
“That’s a lot of math,” Elijah said.
“Well, I’m an Administrator by archetype,” she responded. Then, she raised a single finger and adopted a haughty voice. “Mathematics is the backbone of effective management. Without it, we would be lost. Or that’s what my instructors say. I’m dubious.”
“Smart. Don’t take anything anyone tells you for granted. That’s how you become a sheep.”
“What’s a sheep?”
“Something you don’t want to be,” Elijah answered. She nodded along as if it made all the sense in the world.
Before their conversation could go much further, someone called Elijah’s name. He looked up to see an ancient drake standing beside one of the doors. He was even older than Tura, which was saying something.
He rose and headed in that direction. After he introduced himself, the drake escorted him inside.
“Lie on the table.”
Elijah eyed it with suspicion. The table in question was a huge slab of marble covered in gold runes. Its construction wasn’t the issue. Rather, Elijah was more concerned with the straps clearly meant to hold him down. Or the array of spikes hovering above it.
“Do not be afraid, child. You will not be permanently harmed.”
Elijah immediately focused on the permanently part. He suspected that word would be doing quite a lot of heavy lifting. But it wasn’t like he was a stranger to torment. So, he went to follow the tester’s instructions.
“Please remove your clothing first.”
Elijah asked why, and the reply was simple enough. “To avoid bloodstains, of course.”
After that, Elijah stripped down and climbed atop the marble table. With a hiss, he muttered, “Cold.”
“Indeed.”
“Better than warm, I guess. Kind of like a toilet seat.”
“Hmm.”
The old drake wasn’t really listening. Instead, he was entirely focused on a gold tablet. It reminded Elijah of his many doctor’s visits, especially when the tester asked him a bunch of questions about his past, the circumstances of his birth, and the acquisition of his dragon core.
“Try to remain still,” he cautioned after the interrogation came to a close. “You may feel a pinch.”
Elijah didn’t respond. Instead, he closed his eyes, waiting for the inevitable. As they descended, the spikes hummed with power. He gasped as they made contact, piercing through his flesh with the ease of a needle. But the pain didn’t really start until he felt foreign energy circulating through his channels.
“Remain motionless,” the tester reminded him. Then, he let out a barely audible gasp. “Interesting soul structure.”
“Yeah. Interesting. Just what I was going for.”
“Quiet, or we will need to start over.”
Elijah gritted his teeth, unable to focus on anything but the pain.
It kept going for a few minutes until, at last, it faded away. Or rather, it shifted. Instead of his soul feeling like it was on fire, Elijah felt like his entire body had been left to marinate in acid.
Somewhere amidst the agony, he heard the tester mention a silver-tier body, confirming that the whole thing was meant to gauge his cultivation.
After that came his mind.
It held up better than the previous two aspects – at least until the tester increased the power and managed to bypass the spores surrounding each cluster of leaves. The foreign energy ripped through his mind with enough force that Elijah nearly blacked out. Still, he refused to give in, and he managed to maintain consciousness until the ethera receded.
Elijah didn’t need a guide to tell him what was coming next.
He braced, the muscles in his stomach tightening. The physical reaction was entirely unnecessary, but he couldn’t stop himself.
Suddenly, a spear of ethera plunged into his core, probing deeper than any of the other tests. It kept going for long seconds, sending arcs of agony throughout Elijah’s entire cultivation system.
He gripped the edges of the marble table.
He tried to focus on anything that might pull him away from the pain. The slightly antiseptic smell of the room. The elaborate designs on the wall. The old drake’s wide eyes. The feeling of his teeth grinding against one another.
None of it worked.
In his desperation to stop the pain, he attempted to expel the foreign ethera. But it was like banging his head against a brick wall, and just as effective.
Finally, he felt it slide out, leaving him gasping for air. Between pants, he muttered, “That was entirely unpleasant.”
“It is,” agreed the drake.
After that, the rest of his testing was far less invasive. The man somehow managed to pull up his status and list of abilities. He even accessed Elijah’s Legacy, which he perused for long minutes.
When Elijah asked to take a look, the drake muttered something about lacking access and an appropriate class to understand the data.
Disappointing, but not unexpected. Besides, Elijah knew his own feats of strength. He’d been there, after all.
By the end, the tester had begun to look a little pale. Quite an achievement when his scales were brown and never really changed colors. Still, Elijah stood by that impression.
“How’d I do?”
“Your results will be publicly posted before the tournament begins.”
“Uh…all of them?”
“No.”
“Care to explain?” Elijah asked, his legs hanging off the table. At least he’d been allowed to don his clothes.
Then, the tester went on to show him what potential bettors and fans would see. It was an abbreviated version of his status that wouldn’t give specifics about the actual numbers or his cultivation stages. Instead, it gave him a comparative ranking based on the results of his peers’ testing.
“So?”
“I am not permitted to disclose that information ahead of time,” he said. “But given what I’ve seen, you will almost assuredly be in the top thousand.”
“Oh. Cool. Top thousand isn’t bad.”
“Not bad? The most powerful young demi-gods in the entire empire will participate in this tournament. They are the future of dragons as a race. And among more than a million, you will rank in the top thousand.”
“Yeah. Like I said – not bad.”
Though Elijah suspected that he was playing from behind, largely because he was still a new demi-god. After all, there were probably plenty of other contestants who’d reached the pinnacle of the tier. What would the rankings look like if he gained a hundred levels? What about when he was knocking on the door of becoming a deity?
Mostly, he acknowledged that, while others might currently be stronger than him, he had a lot more room to grow.
Probably.
But that being said, he had no intention of underestimating his future opponents. All it would take was one mistake, and his ambitions would be cut short.
“Are we done, then?” Elijah asked.
The tester nodded.
“Wish I could say it was fun, but…well, it really, really wasn’t.”
“It never is,” the drake said. “Most prefer to endure it while unconscious.”
“That was an option?” Elijah asked.
“Of course. I am no torturer.”
He sighed, but he didn’t regret what had happened. After all, being probed like that had given him some ideas about how to progress in his own training. That was worth a little pain.
Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!
Use arrow keys (or A / D) to PREV/NEXT chapter