True, those counter-moves had been a last-minute cram as well, and the whole crowd had needed only three days to more or less master them. But now the Trial Tournament was already underway. Even if there were a full two days of slack between one round and the next, that was barely enough to recover one's stamina and true qi—where would anyone find the time for private tutoring?

"There's time. Of course there's time—because this isn't anything new. It's just a review of the counter-moves I already taught you." Wei Zhao gestured for Ying Ziyu to board, then took up the oars and rowed the wooden boat back toward the isle reserved for the Cangwu Sect of North Island.

"A review? Will that even help?" Ying Ziyu had no confidence in it. By nature she was the sort who feared neither heaven nor earth, yet examinations and the like were the one thing she had no answer for, and to her this Trial Tournament was nothing less than an exam. The moment she stepped into the testing hall her mind went blank; no matter how clearly she memorized the counter-moves now, when the time came it would still be useless.

"Relax. This time it isn't a plain review—it's tailor-made for you." Wei Zhao smiled mysteriously. By now he had already located the root of Ying Ziyu's trouble; devising a remedy was not difficult.

"Really?" Only at this point did Ying Ziyu finally recover herself. It was not confidence in herself but confidence in Wei Zhao—since Wei Zhao dared to say so, there had to be a way to see her through.

Elsewhere, the others watched the two of them row away. Qiu Lingshan could not help worrying. "Will Ziyu be all right?"

"Relax. With the leader himself stepping in, she's bound to be fine. All we have to do is wait and see." Wu Chengtian had not a doubt.

The rest exchanged smiles as well. Since Wei Zhao had said he would take them all to the Primeval Trial, he would never leave Ying Ziyu behind alone. He had never let them down—not before, and not ever.

By the fourth round of the Trial Tournament, Xue Jianming and Wei Zhao and the others with three wins apiece had already secured their trial qualifications ahead of time. Some others, with three straight losses, had long since been eliminated, and together with the losers who had been knocked out in earlier bouts with grave injuries, the number of disciples competing this round had shrunk markedly. Take the Foundation Establishment Grand Completion bracket: eight had remained in the previous round, but only five were left in this one.

Without Xue Jianming and Wei Zhao, this round's matchups had lost much of their draw. Leng Leng and Duanmu Yu were about the only focal figures left—the former a prodigy who had come within a hair of upsetting a peak Golden Core expert with Drawn Circle as Prison; the latter a lead senior sister who was gradually revealing the formidable side of the Ye Ling Sect. And both were beauties besides, which made for a rare spectacle in itself.

Unfortunately the two women did not meet this time. Yet to everyone's astonishment, Leng Leng and Duanmu Yu—either of whom should have ranked among the very best of the remaining Foundation Establishment Grand Completion experts—both contrived to lose their bouts in the same round!

The two Grand Completion disciples who had drawn them had already resigned themselves to their fate when the lots came out. After all, the strength the two women had displayed was truly extraordinary; an ordinary expert of the same tier would have had no chance of victory against them. So both had merely resolved to go down fighting, certain of defeat.

But who would have thought they would actually fight their way to a win?

The result left the onlookers gaping. Even the winners themselves could scarcely believe it, feeling as though the victory had been picked up for free. It was a good while before they came to their senses, whereupon they were beside themselves with joy.

"What in the world is going on?" Qiu Lingshan and the others looked at one another. It was a pity Wei Zhao was not at their side just then; otherwise he could have explained it to them.

"I'm afraid their true qi was too depleted over the first three rounds, and their stamina gave out," Xin Yi'an said thoughtfully, glancing at them—all save the silent, wordless Bing Wushuang. Apart from the two parties themselves, Leng Leng and Duanmu Yu, he was surely the one best placed to see what was really going on.

And he was not wrong in the least. Because of her successive breakthroughs in the previous two rounds, Leng Leng's cultivation realm was far from consolidated; what was more, in the last round against Xue Jianming she had for the first time unleashed the extreme version of Drawn Circle as Prison. That was a trump card that drained true qi and stamina to an extreme; at the time, keyed up as she was, she had not felt it, and only now did the drawbacks show themselves in full.

Had she been able to bring out Drawn Circle as Prison, there would have been almost no reason for her to lose that bout. But precisely because her true qi was insufficient, an unmistakable flaw had appeared the moment she executed the move—and that was how her opponent had turned defeat into victory.

Duanmu Yu was the same. Whether Ye Luo Zhi Qiu or One Leaf Like a Mountain, both were powerful moves that consumed enormous true qi and stamina, and used again and again in quick succession, each use drained more than the last. Add to that that her opponent was by no means weak, and in the end her loss was not hard to understand.

The two women reacted to their defeats in exactly the same way: without a word, each walked straight to an empty patch of ground and sat down in meditation to recover her true qi. Both now stood at two wins and two losses, and the fifth round to come would decide directly where they went from here. So they had to seize the time to husband their strength and prepare for that final matchup.

By coincidence, once Leng Leng and Duanmu Yu had fallen one after the other, this fourth round seemed to have been cursed: upsets of every kind came thick and fast. Competitors who plainly held the absolute upper hand time and again capsized in the ditch—it was downright uncanny.

Xin Yi'an was not much surprised. As a seasoned elder of the Cangwu Sect of North Island, he had presided over no fewer than eighty if not a hundred contests great and small, and he knew well that in the middle and later stages of a tournament, with stamina and true qi heavily drained, the mind would slacken unawares from fatigue. That was the time most prone to accidents, and a spate of upsets like this was nothing strange.

A day later, the fourth round finally came to the early Foundation Establishment bracket. With the competing disciples sharply reduced for various reasons, the pace of the tournament had clearly quickened; the first round had taken two full days to complete, whereas now, by the fourth round, all the matches thus far had taken barely more than a single day.

Had Xin Yi'an not deliberately left a little extra time between each group's matches for everyone to rest and recover, it would have been even shorter. After all, not only were there far fewer bouts than before, but because everyone deliberately cut back on probing, the length of each bout had shrunk markedly as well—a matter of course.

"They still haven't come back. Should we send someone to fetch them?" Qiu Lingshan and the others exchanged glances. "They," naturally, meant Wei Zhao and Ying Ziyu. (To be continued.)