Chapter 105: Higher Rings
Another week passed over Blackridge City like a storm cloud that refused to break, heavy with the promise of a violence that never quite arrived.
Seven days earlier, the Azura Gang had halted every expansion project. Work on the coffee station at the gambling den, the new strip club locations, the clothing brand, and the hotel conversions had all stopped, and whatever money remained had been redirected into the operating budget to keep the lights on, the patrols running, and the fighters training.
Everyone knew it was not enough, but it was better than nothing when the alternative was bankruptcy and the slow collapse of everything Elijah had built.
Before dawn, a van with darkened windows left the 9th District and wound its way north through the quiet streets of the 8th and the 7th. It carried Elijah, Kai, Daniel, Jack, and Tristan toward the upper districts, where the Alpha Gangs had ruled for generations with an iron grip that no one had ever been strong enough to challenge.
All five wore black jackets embroidered with the golden sun of the Azura Gang, and their auras flickered in shades of red, purple, silver, and gold as they prepared for what lay ahead.
Jack rode in the front passenger seat with his red eyes fixed on the road, while his gold aura pulsed in the steady rhythm that Elijah had come to associate with the Draconic Breathing technique. Daniel sat beside Kai on one bench, and Tristan sat next to Elijah on the other, his purple eyes calm and his expression unreadable as always.
Elijah rested with his eyes closed and his breathing slow. Although he was not truly meditating, he let his Ki core replenish the energy he had spent during the morning's training while he prepared himself for the higher underground rings of the Crowned Sun's territory.
When he opened his eyes, he found Kai staring into the middle distance with his dark purple aura moving in slow, steady waves.
Three days earlier, Kai had compressed his Ki into a solid core and broken through to the Advanced Knight Stage, and the change in him was obvious to anyone who looked. Curious to see how far his friend had come, Elijah focused on him, and a screen appeared in the corner of his vision.
[Status Scan: Kai]
[Cultivation: Advanced Knight Stage (Initial)]
[Physical Limit: 150]
[Base Stats:]
[Strength: 55]
[Agility: 54]
[Endurance: 55]
[Defense: 54]
[Ki Enhancement: 70% (Inner Breathing Technique - Tier 6)]
[Effective Stats (with Enhancement):]
[Strength: 94]
[Agility: 92]
[Endurance: 94]
[Defense: 92]
[Ki Core Formed: Inner Breathing variant]
[Ki Production: Passive regeneration established]
Elijah closed the screen with a long breath that carried both satisfaction and concern. Thanks to the seventy percent enhancement from the Inner Breathing technique, Kai's effective stats sat in the low nineties across the board, which was respectable for someone who had only just broken through.
The concern came from what the screen did not show. None of them had unlocked their elements yet, including Kai, Jack, Daniel, Tristan, and Elijah himself.
According to the document, the potential existed within every Advanced Knight, but reaching the stage was clearly not enough to awaken it, and Elijah still did not understand what else was required.
A knight who had unlocked an element was not necessarily stronger in raw terms, but a fighter who could hurl lightning, raise walls of fire, or move with the speed of the wind had options that someone limited to punching, kicking, and blocking simply lacked.
In a close match, those options could decide everything. The Azura fighters would be at a disadvantage against any opponent who had awakened an element, although Elijah believed they could overcome it if they stayed careful and strategic.
As the van crossed into the 6th District, Elijah let his Ki sense spread outward, and the change was immediate. It showed not in the buildings or the streets but in the people, whose auras were brighter, denser, and far more controlled than anything in the lower districts.
Advanced Knights were scattered throughout the area like stars across a night sky, and each one he brushed against reminded him how far from home they had travelled.
The fights waiting for them would be just as different. In the 9th District, Elijah had fought in the lower underground, where anyone with enough courage could step into the cage.
Those fighters came from the gangs, the streets, and the desperate corners of the city, fighting for money, respect, or simply to prove they were still alive, and the crowds were as loud and chaotic as the informal betting that fuelled them. Beyond the rules the fighters set for themselves, there were none at all.
The higher underground was run exclusively by the Alpha Gangs who controlled the top three districts, organizations such as the First Hand, the Crowned Sun, and the Silent King, who had held their territories for generations and tolerated no interference from outsiders or upstarts.
Their fighters came from their own ranks or from independent cultivators who had earned a place in the higher circuits, and nearly all of them stood at the Advanced Knight Stage or above. The crowds were smaller but far wealthier, the gangs regulated the betting themselves, and referees enforced strict rules with the authority to disqualify anyone who broke them.
The most significant difference, however, was the presence of mages.
Becoming a mage was never a matter of choosing a different path from the knights, because no choice was involved at all. A mage was born with a Mana core, an organ that did not exist in ordinary people or in knights, and that core made it impossible for them to cultivate Ki or walk the knight's path.
The document had laid out the mage rankings in its opening pages, from Adept Mage at the bottom to Arch Mage at the top, but it had never explained where mages came from or why they were so rare in the lower tiers.
Elijah had since learned the answer, which was that a person was either born with a Mana core or was not, and no training, technique, or amount of willpower could create one where none existed.
Where those births happened depended on the land itself. Tier 1 through Tier 3 cities had been built in places naturally rich in mana, where the energy of the world flowed close to the surface, and children there were born with Mana cores far more often than anywhere else.
Whether those mana-rich zones were the remnants of some ancient cataclysm or simply part of the world's natural formation, the cities built on them had flourished in ways lower-tier cities never could.
Mana attracted mages, mages attracted wealth and power, and that wealth and power drew more families capable of bearing mage children, creating a cycle that lifted those cities far above the rest.
Blackridge was a Tier 4 city, built where mana was present but never abundant, so a child might be born with a Mana core once in a generation, if at all.
Mages were so rare here that they seemed almost legendary, and the few who did exist were fiercely guarded by whichever organization had found them first. In Tier 5 and Tier 6 cities, the mana was so thin that mages were almost never born, and those who appeared were barely distinguishable from ordinary people.
Most residents of those cities lived and died without ever feeling the touch of mana on their skin.
That rarity was a large part of why the Alpha Gangs ruled Blackridge. Their knights were formidable, but their mages gave them capabilities that no amount of physical enhancement could match.
A mage could incinerate a knight with a fireball before he closed the distance, weave illusions that left even veteran fighters disoriented, heal wounds that would otherwise take weeks to mend, and detect lies with unsettling ease.
The Crowned Sun, which controlled the 2nd District and ran the very fights Elijah's group was travelling to enter, was known to keep at least three mages in its employ.
Elijah turned that number over in his mind as the city grew brighter and cleaner beyond the darkened windows. An elemental knight was a problem he could plan for, because such a fighter still had to close the distance, land a blow, and survive the exchange that followed.
A mage existed entirely outside that framework, since a mage did not need to get close to hurt someone, did not always need to see a target to strike it, and did not need to be stronger, faster, or more skilled to win.
All a mage needed was more mana than an opponent had Ki, better control over that mana than the opponent had over his own body, and the willingness to use it in ways that no knight could predict or prevent.