The first round of the tournament proper began at dawn, and it began with spectacle.

  Chen Xi had studied the bracket.

  Forty-seven competitors across four tiers, seeded by declared cultivation level, matched through a system that was ostensibly random but which Su Yiran's analysis revealed was weighted to produce entertaining first-round matchups.

  The organisers wanted blood and beauty. They wanted the crowd to gasp.

  They got it.

  The opening match was between a cultivator from the Jade Serpent Clan and a woman from the Crimson Lotus Sect — not Su Yiran's analytical division, but the combat wing, which was an entirely different species of cultivator.

  The Jade Serpent fighter used a technique called Coiling Python Strike: his Qi manifested as visible green energy that wrapped around his arms and extended outward in serpentine tendrils, each one semi-autonomous, seeking the opponent's weak points with what Chen Xi recognised as a crude but effective targeting algorithm. It was flashy. The crowd loved it.

  The Crimson Lotus woman used Hundred Petal Cascade.

  Chen Xi watched, and for the first time since arriving in this world, he saw a technique that was genuinely beautiful.

  The woman's Qi manifested as petals. Not metaphorical petals, not vaguely petal-shaped energy constructs — actual, fully formed lotus petals made of crystallised spiritual energy, each one razor-edged, each one spinning at a rotational speed his vortex calculated at roughly 3,400 RPM.

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  She produced them in waves: dozens, then hundreds, filling the arena with a blizzard of pink-white destruction that shredded the Jade Serpent's tendrils like tissue paper and left the man defending desperately behind a barrier that was visibly degrading under the barrage.

  It was, from a physics standpoint, catastrophically inefficient.

  "She's burning through Qi at roughly nine hundred units per second," Chen Xi murmured, more to himself than to anyone, though Little Abacus was crouching beside him recording every word.

  "Her retention rate on the petal constructs can't be more than two percent. Ninety-eight percent of that energy is waste — heat, light, spectacle.

  The actual combat-effective portion is the edge geometry of each petal, which requires perhaps four percent of the total energy to maintain."

  "She's using forty-five times more power than she needs to," Little Abacus said, his brush scratching.

  "Forty-seven times, accounting for the rotational stabilisation overhead."

  "So if someone could do the same damage at two percent of the energy cost—"

  "They'd have forty-seven attacks for every one of hers. But nobody here thinks in those terms. They think in terms of how impressive it looks."

  "It does look impressive," Little Abacus said.

  "It does," Chen Xi admitted.

  The Hundred Petal Cascade overwhelmed the Jade Serpent's barrier in eleven seconds.

  The man hit the arena floor with the bewildered expression of someone who had been buried in an avalanche of flowers.

  The crowd roared. Spirit stones changed hands in the betting sections.

  The Crimson Lotus woman walked off without looking back, leaving behind a carpet of fading energy petals that dissolved into the air like snow on warm stone.

  Chen Xi calculated her remaining Qi reserves.

  She had used roughly sixty percent of her total capacity in an eleven-second fight.

  If she faced a competent opponent in the second round — one who survived the initial barrage — she would have serious problems.

  He made a note.