250 Chapter 250: The Whole Poin

"Stand down!" Teacher Fielding roared as he descended from the podium upstairs and proceeded toward the arena. The uniformed students bowed sharply, and then withdrew reluctantly. As they did so, a couple of teachers threw ten sacks of rice at me. As Teacher Fielding approached, he kicked one of the sacks of rice at me, and it landed at my feet. He regarded me sternly. "Make sure you come again."

I glanced at the sack of rice at my feet, and then looked up to stare at Teacher Fielding determinedly.

"I didn't fight because I wanted the rice."

Then I scowled and gestured toward all the sacks of rice.

"What the hell is the point of all these rice?" I demanded, annoyed. "Why the hell are you giving rice out to students who scored victories in the qualifiers? Aren't the qualifiers supposed to help us score points for the purpose of trying to participate in the Spiritual Road training camp? What's with all the rice?"

Teacher Fielding shrugged silently, looking just as perplexed as I felt.

The translator hesitated, but he quickly recovered and bowed submissively to Teacher Fielding. He most likely interpreted Teacher Fielding's loss of words as a sign that he didn't understand what I just said. "He said he will be happy to come again."

"I never said that!" I snapped.

"Why are you acting as if I need a translator?" Teacher Fielding added, annoyed. "I can understand perfectly what Richard is saying. What are you trying to do? And why bother translating if you're going to completely change the meaning of his words?"

The translator student paled and backed off. With nothing else to do, I turned away and began to depart the stage.

"Oi!" Teacher Fielding called out to me, and I stopped to glance back at him. "Who exactly are you, Richard?"

I smiled grimly. "I'm just a normal citizen of the Global Federation."

With that, I descended from the stage, grabbed my packet of Calbee pizza-flavored potato chips and Dong Fang Yue Chu's bloodied sack of rice, intending to bring it to him. Without sparing the teachers or the student spectators a second look, I departed from the coliseum without a single word.

*

"Oh, thanks. But you really shouldn't have…"

Dong Fang Yue Chu was lying on bed in the infirmary, a few rows down the ten poor dudes that I had beaten up as revenge for his thrashing. He grimaced as he tried to sit up, and adjusted the pillow behind his back.

"You should just have taken the rice."

"For what?" I growled, irritated. "What's with the rice? Why are they giving out rice for the qualifiers? And what are we supposed to do with the rice?"

"Uh…cook it and eat it?" Dong Fang Yue Chu sounded as if he was stating the obvious. I sighed and rubbed my forehead.

"Ten sacks of rice? I mean, sure, they are fairly small, but it's just me and Dad at home, we don't need that much rice. Besides, this isn't World War II, it's not as if there's a shortage of food and we are starving."

Thanks to magic and technological advancement in agricultural industries, the world no longer had to worry about starvation and food shortages. Even the less…technologically inclined empires were able to sustain their populations with magically grown and replicated crops without requiring vast swathes of agricultural fields.

However, the ultra-capitalist nature of the Global Federation still made food fairly expensive. That was how the Federation worked. Any reason they could use to generate profits, they would. While the government decreed that all citizens be allocated a bare minimum amount of food for survival, any more than that was charged exorbitant prices. Chefs made a lot of money, as did the suppliers of surplus food. There was no reason to sell them so expensively, but people did so because it would bring them money. As much as people protested and complained, they couldn't exactly do much because they all received the bare minimum of food to survive, and anything else was a luxury.

Nobody was obligated to cook for free or to settle for the prices you wanted them to accept, especially if you're not going to starve from death just because they refused to sell you food and you had your own bare minimum amount that ensured survival.

So people mostly sucked it up and paid them. Besides, even though I whined about how expensive, it wasn't as if people were charging a hundred dollars for 15 pounds of rice. Just $30 for 15 pounds of rice, for example. Not ideal, but not that bad. The better quality rice could go up to $50 or $60. I was talking the equivalent of the present day's USD, for reference.

In the end, as long as there was supply and demand, the merchants got to keep their prices artificially inflated, and the consumers just paid them while grumbling on the side. It was the same with non-essential medical services – something as cosmetic as eyesight correction, plastic surgery, slimming or pigmentation was going to cost the payer a bomb. Since essential and life-and-death medical services were covered by national healthcare insurance, the medical sector needed some way to make money, and that came from non-essential medical services. If there were people willing to pay for it – and there was quite a few – they would make lots of money from it. Otherwise, well, we weren't going to die if we were denied such things, so there really wasn't anything to protest against. They would just tell us, "don't purchase the surgery/product/service then."

And that was within their rights to do so. They had to make a living.

"Still, I appreciate it."

Dong Fang Yue Chu was smiling gratefully.

"I didn't expect you to help me take revenge and beat them up for me. Really…thank you."

"I didn't do anything."

"Ha ha!" Dong Fang Yue Chu burst out laughing. "You always say that, but in truth you've done a lot more than you know."

"Uh, right."

Dong Fang Yue Chu slumped against his pillow and the aluminum head of his bed. I watched him sympathetically. Even though Teacher Cure had cast her famous healing spells on her, given the magnitude of the injuries he had suffered, he still needed an hour or two before he fully healed.

At least he was better off than the ten dudes I had just beaten up. I wouldn't say I thrashed them. The battle was so much closer than I hoped it would be. If I had made even the slightest mistake, I would be the one lying on the bed instead of all ten of them. The earth mage with the colossal golem armor spell in particular was extremely powerful.

Furthermore, they were too self-centered and obsessed with attaining individual glory to work together, which was why their attacks were so haphazard and unsynchronized. If they had learned to fight in a team like me and my friends, they would have overwhelmed me long ago. Well, maybe not – I didn't just recklessly challenged ten guys because I assumed they wouldn't be working together. I still had my ways of dealing with them, but it would be a lot more difficult, and I was certain I wouldn't have gotten off with anything worse than light injuries.

"You should get a healing spell cast on that," Dong Fang Yue Chu advised when he caught sight of my bruised and bleeding knuckles. I tilted my head to the side and scoffed.

"They'll heal within the hour, even without a healing spell." That was a benefit of being a mage. The mana that flowed through our bodies accelerated our innate healing ability. It wasn't as efficient and nowhere as fast as a healing spell, but it was a lot better than non-mages, who would otherwise take a few days to a week to heal from a bruise or a cut.

Glancing at Dong Fang Yue Chu and remembering how that bastard teacher Zuo Teng had flamed him with a spell, I scowled. Then I also recalled something that had led to that event in the first place.

"Rather than me, what about you? Why were you so reckless? Challenging three people at once like that…you think you're Master Liu, is it? You're lucky you're not dead!"

"No, that was…" Dong Fang Yue Chu looked embarrassed. I snorted.

"Don't tell me you were really that desperate for rice. If you need rice, I can give you some. I have quite a lot stocked up at home. You don't need to risk your life stupidly like this just for food. Don't hesitate to ask me for help."

"It's not that either." Dong Fang Yue Chu looked even more embarrassed. He probably regretted ever picking up the sack of rice that I had passed to him. "I was short on points."

"Points?" I raised an eyebrow. Dong Fang Yue Chu nodded before he sighed and glanced at the ten dudes on the beds a few rows away from his.

"Yeah. Have you forgotten? The whole point of this qualifier is to accumulate enough points to get into the Spiritual Road training camp, remember?"

"Oh, right." I scratched my head sheepishly, remembering that. "You were lacking in points to make the top five?"

"Yeah. Most of us are, actually. I only managed to get five or so matches these days, and I didn't win all of them. Just four out of five. If I didn't stake everything on winning another three, I wouldn't be able to get enough points to qualify." He rested his head against the wall. "As it is, I've failed anyway, so it doesn't matter."

"Hey, at least you tried." I patted his shoulder in an effort to console him. "You're a far better person than those who didn't have the courage to make that attempt. If you didn't challenge the three of them, you would have spent the rest of your days wondering what could have been and regretting not taking the plunge. Right now, all you did was fail, but everyone fails. You'll just bounce back and recover from the failure, just like everyone else."

"Ha ha, yeah." Dong Fang Yue Chu shook his head. Then he stared at me. "What about you?"

"What about me?" I asked as I adjusted my glasses tiredly and slumped against the chair I was currently sitting in. even though I appeared outwardly fine, trying to take on ten mages at once was still quite the draining affair. I had used up quite a lot of mana.

"You ready for the Spiritual Road?"

"Hah!" I scoffed. "Of course not. Why would I be? I never intended to go to the Spiritual Road and participate in it in the first place. I'm going off on a mission to another city next week once I receive confirmation from Instructor Feng Hai."

"I don't think you have a choice," Dong Fang Yue Chu pointed out. "You probably have among the highest number of points now, enough to make it to the top five."

"Huh? How?!"

"Dude…" My good friend glared at me as if I was an idiot. Which, to be fair, I was an idiot. There was no denying my lack of intelligence. Just look at the number of comments at the side, and you will count at least a hundred different readers insulting me as stupid and bemoaning how much of an idiot I was. "You defeated ten opponents today. Add to the match you had against Tie Quan, you've probably gotten a massive haul of points. The average person only won five or six matches in this week. The top students like Craig or Theodore only won ten, one less than you. I think only Harrison Reed has probably won more matches than you."

I wasn't surprised. The Holy Saints president was a monster. At least he didn't get expelled and leave the school unlike some Saint Judgement president in a web novel that I was supposed to be copying. Honestly, I was glad that he was on our side, rather than against. Hopefully he had improved and was much stronger than he was last year, when his performance in the previous national tournament was less than stellar.

However, I was taken aback by the information that Dong Fang Yue Chu had just provided. The hell?! How was it possible that I was one of the very few who had defeated eleven opponents in a week? Surely there were other students besides Harrison who were much stronger than me, and more passionate.

"What? How…?"

"You really have no self-awareness, huh?" Dong Fang Yue Chu shook his head, almost scornfully, and reached out to pat me. "Good luck in the Spiritual Road, my friend. I'm counting on you to do my part for me too."

"Hell, no! There's still quite some time. I'm sure Craig, Theodore and the rest will surely be able to surpass me."

Dong Fang Yue Chu gave me a pitiful smile. "With only one day left? Oh, and before I forget…my friend, because you fought ten guys all at once instead of fighting ten separate matches, you get multiplier rewards…I mean, points bonuses for defeating ten opponents at once. Simply put, you probably gained ten times the points you would get if you fought and won ten separate matches." He shook his head. "You probably overtook even Harrison in terms of points alone, and there really is no way anyone can catch up to you now, never mind surpass you, unless they go crazy and challenge ten guys at once like you did today."

"I'm sure they will try."

"Yeah, but there's no guarantee they will succeed." Dong Fang Yue Chu laid a hand on my shoulder. "Face it, Richard. You're going to the Spiritual Road, whether you like it or not."