After that little talk, Sam got closer with the kids.
He sent them away to relax, as he is sure that they wouldn"t be able to relax after the compet.i.tion ended.
And his guess was right.
The compet.i.tion went on for over a week inside the forest patch as everyone tried their best to survive and to be the last one to leave.
Even though the students managed to stay until the last day, not all of them managed to become top ten.
Seven of them lost while the three of them only managed to luck out. They cannot use the beasts of their full power at the moment, so they are already troubled from all the pressure they are facing and they are only middle stage acolytes. The late-stage acolyte particularly the peak stage ones are extremely problematic to deal with.
They lost.
Sam met with them the very night after he rewarded the top ten and sent the schools away.
He looked at his students who are feeling down. Even the three who managed to score a position are feeling a bit down.
"So, how are you feeling?"
They didn"t reply. They wanted to, but they couldn"t find any words.
"I know you are probably feeling that you would have won if you managed to use the energy without restrictions. If your bracelets are off, you would have managed to gain a win over them. Right?"
They nodded heavily when they heard Sam"s words.
Sam just smiled and said.
"That is the mentality you have to let go of. That is the thought process I wanted to eliminate in your mind from the start. In fact, I made this whole compet.i.tion up for this.
The biggest mistake all the cultivators do is training to be the best among their peers. It is a mistake because it is not enough. If we look at the compet.i.tors, everyone who managed to win is a peak stage cultivator of the Acolyte stage which const.i.tutes seven of the top ten.
Only the three from your group are middle stage cultivators. You managed to subvert two sub-stages and won three places.
That is the only thing the rest of the school administrators are doing and you did that with direct combats.
Every one of you focused on fighting your opponents head-on, you used your environment to your advantage but not the best of it.
You are so fixated on winning head-on and the glory of the winning, you forgot the most basic lessons I always taught you.
Only Rangit and Madhu utilized traps. Why did only two of them do that? What happened to the rest of you? You could have lured the others, worked together with each other, made others clash with each other by setting them up. Why didn"t you do any of it? There is barely any cunning in that battle you have done.
Everyone thinks that there needs to be fairness in fighting. But it is not true. It is good enough that there is fairness in duels and some compet.i.tions. There is no need to ask for fairness in every battle.
Because the world is made of unfair things. It has only one job and that is to bring you down to your knees and slam your head to the ground while placing a foot on your neck until you die.
If you look for things like honor and glory in every single battle you face, you will die a meaningless death.
All of you worked alone even when you met each other. You could have had a better chance if you worked together. Only Ratri and Arvi managed to work together. But they were soon overwhelmed by the alliance of your compet.i.tors.
All of you wanted to win this alone, defeat more enemies and get the first place all by yourselves.
Go back and rest for the whole day and think what you did wrong and how you could and should have gone about it."
After that, he sent them away.
This is a big blow for the students, but Sam wanted them to experience it. They are Sam"s students, after all, if they didn"t win in a compet.i.tion solely created for them, it is not a disgrace to them, but to Sam.
They already heard several skeptical voices focused on them. They are even questioning Sam"s decision of choosing them as their students. There are even sentences speculating that Sam might not be as good of a teacher as he was a fighter and inventor.
This made them feel ashamed.
After the break is over, Sam once again started their training and he could see the change. They are a lot more determined and they didn"t just only focus on the breakthroughs. In fact, they didn"t even focus on them at all. They started focusing on the combat abilities, how to work together and how to increase their chances of winning.
Everyone is also focusing on the traps in their free time.
They are not wasting any time.
Days pa.s.sed, Sam saw their rapid progress and felt extremely satisfied. He couldn"t help but get drunk in this feeling. Helping the students grow is a lot more satisfying than creating a large organization. He could feel it.
And along with his training and stabilizing the organizational expansion, everything is going way too fast.
While progressing in the cultivation, Sam also started moving towards his next project. This is also mainly focused on helping his students and would become revolutionary things in the future.
He could imagine thousands of years later after the inevitable fall of all the organizations and powers he built, people would still be talking about his legends and the technology he is creating would be the symbol of that.
Even though Sam is not exactly so drunk of being glorified, it is still a great feeling when he thought of what kind of impact his technology would bring to others.
Sam started making plans for the future. And one of the plans is regarding the Place of worship. Since he understood that faith energy is something essential for anyone who wants to become a G.o.d, and from what he observed the G.o.ds when summoned to the places of worship using the ritual, they would be able to help their followers.
All the G.o.ds had a hint of contempt towards their followers as they merely looked at them as livestock for their faith energy. Maybe not all G.o.ds, at least the ones that Sam came across.
But Sam"s case would be different. His places of worship would be at most constructed in the branches of his organization which is already big enough. At least these would be fixed and permanent places.
Some places might be added in the future. He cannot act and behave like the other G.o.ds and from what he could guess after he became a G.o.dly being, there is little chance for him to come back and as soon as he became one, the other G.o.ds particularly, Indra, Hou Yi, and Hel would let all their organizations go after his own.
So, Sam has to make his places of worship more accessible and more useful for the followers and the next generations of his place.
Even though it seemed a bit narcissistic, he cannot avoid it, if he wants to protect all his hard work and pa.s.s it on to his students and descendants.
As he planned all these things, while his team is collecting new followers and students progressing rapidly, two years pa.s.sed.
In these two years, the team managed to gather eight hundred members along with seven hundred and twenty beasts.
Out of which eight hundred and thirty are of the Pre-transcendent stage and the rest are of the transcendent stage, ranging from the initial to the peak stage in both cultivation realms.
This is a considerable force. Particularly when considering the fact that they were dealing with forces led by Peak stage Transcendent cultivators and now they have over a hundred Peak stage, transcendent cultivators, under him.
Sam threw them all into the chessboard in batches as he released the previous batches who were brainwashed and made soul contracts with him. He sent them to look over the schools and new branches of the organizations.
As for the gains regarding the cultivation techniques and the battle techniques, he managed to get around thirteen hundred cultivation techniques on top of the cultivation techniques handed over by the people he forcefully subdued.
As for battle techniques, there are more than two thousand.
Sam used the printing machine to copy them again and again and sent them to all the Realm academies.
Now Sam"s academies became the biggest schools across the realms and the Dusk organization also acquired the name of the superpower.
Along with that the Raiju tribe inside the tempest valley was reduced by a bit as they were all sent to different realms to either train themselves or to a.s.sist Sam"s organization.
Sam got ready to depart to the location to continue the next phase of the journey, but there are some talks he needs to do, with the students, with the administrators, and with the Old Beast.