Chapter XIX: Gathering of Wealthy Scions I

Onin

Sengoku Empire

The Great Plateau

Month of the Pangolin 8, 172 ,328 DE

At the gates to the airfield, a guard looks us over, and as he frowns, his brow creases. An odor of mile confusion seeps into his scent. "What's your business in Onin?"

"We're here for the college entrance exams."

Hearing Vorn's words, the guard turns his attention to Hoshi. "Young sir, where are you from?"

With a hint o confusion, Hoshi glances at Vorn before responding. "Shizukana Gake. Heian Kingdom."

Hearing Hoshi's response, the guard glances at Vorn and I, and the odor of confusion in the guard's scent increases. "The Heian Kingdom examinees are quartered in Quad Twenty. It's north of the Grand Arena. With the exceptionally high number of gaijin in the city, the watch is on edge. I suggest you keep your bodyguards on a tight leash."

Looking at Vorn and I, Hoshi bursts into laughter. Even with the confused guard glaring at him, it takes Hoshi the better part of a minute to get himself under control.

While wiping tears from his eyes, Hoshi points at the guard. "Beast, this guy thinks you and Prince Vorn are too old to be taking the entrance exams. You do look like a pair of middle-aged uncles."

Shifting his gaze to Vorn, the guard's eyes narrow. "Prince Vorn?"

Vorn smiles, but his expression shows nothing resembling friendliness. He looks like a cat sizing up a mouse. "Vorn Bjornsonner, Crown Prince of Amber."

The guard's face turns pale. "Amber? Crown Prince?"

"Is there a problem?"

The guard rapidly shakes his head back and forth. "No. No problem."

"Then we'll be going." As he finishes speaking, Vorn twists the throttle and acclimates past the guard.

After watching Vorn ride away, the guard runs to the guardhouse next to the gate. "Captain Shigeno! Captain Shigeno! There's a Prince of Amber in the city!"

Hoshi chuckles. "Maybe the rumors are true."

"What rumors?"

Hoshi gives me a wide-eyed stare. "You never heard the story about a warband from Amber dragging the last Emperor out of his palace and horsewhipping him?"

I shake my head. "No."

"They probably kept it quiet, but most of the noble clans should know about it. I'll tell you about it someplace where we can't be overheard. We don't want to piss off the locals. We should get going." With another chuckle, Hoshi accelerates away from the gate.

Shaking my head, I follow Hoshi into the city. Since his is on one of the main avenues, the city's layout makes Vorn easy to find. In just a few minutes, we catch up to up to him.

From north to south, the western city has been divided into columns of ten, square quads. Each quad has an exact size of one square kilometer, and one hundred meter wide roads divide the quads from one another. The extend for thirty kilometers from east to west, and while some of the quads are surrounded by walls, the western city itself has no curtain wall.

Despite the early hour, hundreds of steamer cars, trucks, and bikes fill the hundred-meter-wide avenues between the quads, and crowds of humans wait in queues to cross the avenues from one quad to another. With the quads running a kilometer along each side, buildings and many smaller roads fill their interiors. While some of the quads appear to be dedicated to manufacturing, others contain a mixture of residences and businesses. The only order to the quads seems to be that the manufacturing and commoner quads are furthest from the mountain. Based on their clothing, many of the commoner waiting to cross the avenues are on their way to work in the manufacturing quads.

As we get closer to the mountain, the building in the quads become larger. Some of the more extravagant quads look to be the walled domains of the wealthy, with guarded gates preventing entry by the common citizens.

While the buildings near the airfield mostly have the multi-story, boxy, flat-roofed design that has sprung up in the past couple centuries as the Sengoku Empire's technology has grown, the closer we get to the mountain the more the older styles of architecture dominate. The sweeping pagoda-style roofs, fusuma and shoji become common, and by the time we near the Grand Arena, the boxy buildings have completely disappeared, and pagodas can be seen rising from inside the walled compounds of the wealthy. Onin is a city caught between the old, traditional style of the nations east of the Kami Kaze Mountains and a newer, more efficient, much more ugly style that has grown with the rise of Yuan Qi driven Engineering and technology.

Stele on the corners of each quad have the quad's number etched into them, with the numbers increasing from low to high as you go from south to north along a column. The Grand arena fills a gap between the first and second columns of quads. Smaller arenas lie to the north and south of the five kilometer long and three kilometer wide Grand Arena. Parks and restaurants surround the smaller arenas. Quad Twenty is the farthest north quad, lying right next to the parks. It appears to contain mostly inns, with some taverns and restaurants mixed in. All the establishments are of course meant to cater to the wealthy.

Entering the quad on our military-class steamer bikes, we draw a fair amount of notice, but many people just look away after a quick appraisal. Of those who continue to pay attention to us, most are young and have the air of tourists. I do not recognize and faces, and the jumble of scents makes it nearly impossible to pick out the scent of any individual. They should be the students from places other than Shizukana Gake. or wealthy Cultivators twenty and younger with hopes of getting into the Twelve Great Cultivation Colleges.

Whether it is the residents or the tourists, the people on the streets wear a wide range of clothing styles. The majority wear either pants shirts and jackets in the style of the Dunkle Sonne Empire or the traditional kimonos of the nations east of the Kami Kaze Mountains. However, many of the people wear clothing similar to those living in the Four Middle Empires or the Jewel Kingdoms. A scattering of others wear clothes in styles I do not recognize. The Great Plateau is vast, and I am not familiar with the clothing of all the nations scattered across it.

Many of the gazes focused on us drip with disdain and derision. Whether they see us a gaijin or a fat Cultivator, the wealthy scions of the noble and mercantile clans clearly see themselves as superior to us. When we stop our bikes to look around, a group of five less than twenty-year-old idiots move toward us. Stopping in a line, with the most expensively dressed one in the middle, they appear to think they are blocking our path.

"Hey, Fatty, what do you think you're doing bringing a pair of Gaijin dogs into a human city?" The most expensively dressed one, who is apparently the leader, speaks with a snide and whiny tone of voice.

Vorn sighs and looks at me. "Never fails. Collect a bunch of limp dick, hothouse bitches in one place, and some needle dick bitch has to start a dick measuring contest. You want to deal with them or should I?"

The five should be from a weaker power, be it nation, city, or clan. The scions of the real powerhouse clans would not do the talking themselves. They would have one of their lackeys to the talking for them. This expensively dressed idiot is trying too hard to show off.

"Gaijin bastards!" One of the other four

I shrug and get off my steamer bike. "I'll do it. It's been a few weeks since I had a good excuse to kick someone's balls up into their body cavity."

Hoshi laughs. "Since when did you need an excuse? You do it just because you don't like someone."

Putting down his bike's support stand, Vorn leans back against the padding on the armored housing for the steam engine. "Not liking someone is called an excuse, Hoshi. He's just following the pattern of the hypocritical, self-righteous, young masters in the serial novels."

I give Vorn a flat, hard stare. "Someone being a smart-ass, smug cat and insulting me is also an excuse to kick his balls into his body cavity."

"Who do you trash think you are!? How dare you ignore me!?" The leader of the five explodes with indignant rage.

Drawing his jian, a sword in the style of the Four Middle Empires, the leader steps forward aggressively. As he lunges at me, the flow Trinity accelerates my Mind. Twisting my body just enough to avoid the sword that looks like it is moving in slow motion, I step inside the human's reach. Grabbing him by the wrist and throat, I hammer a kick into his balls.

Pop. Pop.

With the clearly audible sound of his balls rupturing, the leader of the trash turns pale. His stomach heaves, but my hand clamped around his throat prevents him from puking on me. As I hurl him into his four sycophants, his vomit explodes from his mouth, spraying all of them with filth.

"Barely into the middle of Qi Condensation and acting like tough guys. If you think you're strong, I'll abuse you like I do the strong." My words are spoken in a soft voice, but the but the web of Trinity surrounding me make them resonate loudly in the ears of everyone watching the show.

The few peak of Core Formation and Martial Warrior realm Cultivators in the crowd, who are not here to take part in the entrance exams, look at me with narrowed eyes. As Cultivators, they have no way to gauge the strength of my Power. Trinity can easily monitor and examine Yuan Qi, but the reverse is not so easily achieved. In terms of my Power, I most likely appear as a blank or void to their senses and rudimentary awarenesses. With my physical appearance, those Cultivators would have great difficulty in even determining my age.

Not lacking in stupidity,. the remaining four Cultivators draw their own weapons, more jians, and move to stand between their fallen leaders and me. Two of the four appear to know Martial of Cultivation techniques that can obfuscate the actual strength of their Yuan Qi. They are really at the peak of Qi Condensation, but they have made themselves to be in the middle of the Realm like their leader and the other two.

"Fools. They are only in the Qi Condensation realm."

"They should know better than to provoke a gaijin animal that can move that quickly."

"Animal? It seems more like a Beast than an animal."

"It looks more like a Beast than a human, even a gaijin."

"Are gaijin human?"

Schadenfreude fills the banter of the crowd watching the show. Feeling faintly amused, I do not bother to hide my predatory smile, but before I act, a male Cultivator saunters out from the crowd of onlookers.

"Don't you think you should show some restraint, gaijin." Though phrased as a question, the man's words are anything but a question.
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