"Hey! What the hell was that?"
Fatty Zhang's furious roar echoed across the now-silent quad. He stormed forward, his face red with protective rage, planting himself between Lin Hao and the prodigy. He wasn't yelling at Chen Long, he was yelling at the organizer.
"That's not fair! That's a cheap shot! He's supposed to be your guest!"
Recruiter Han, his face pale and slick with sweat, stepped forward, his hands raised placatingly. "Mr. Zhang, please! It was a demonstration! A standard... a standard spiritual pressure test. No harm was done."
"No harm?" Fatty was almost vibrating. "He attacked him!"
Chen Long let out a short, sharp, arrogant scoff. The sound cut through Fatty's yelling like a whip.
He didn't even deign to look at Fatty. He looked past him, at Lin Hao, who was still "recovering," his head down, "panting," and "hiding" his (perfectly calm) face under the bill of his cap.
"Pathetic," Chen Long said. The word was cold, clear, and laced with a profound, aristocratic disappointment.
He let the insult hang in the air for all the cameras to capture.
"All that brute strength," he continued, gesturing to Lin Hao's "trembling" form, "and you can't even withstand a simple pressure test. You're a hollow shell. Your foundation is empty."
He looked at Recruiter Han. "This is your 'hero'? This is the best your city has to offer? A brute who got lucky. I've wasted my time."
He was about to turn and leave, but then, a new, "generous" idea seemed to strike him. He stopped, a cruel, magnanimous smile touching his lips. It was the smile of a king about to toss a single copper coin to a starving peasant.
"Still," he said, his voice loud enough for the crowd to hear, "a beast of burden can still be trained to pull a plow."
He nodded. Not to Lin Hao, but to one of his Level 3 retainers.
The retainer, his face a mask of bored, aristocratic duty, stepped forward. He reached into his tunic and pulled out a small, thin, cheap-looking booklet. It wasn't bound in leather. It was 20, maybe 30 pages of thin, rough paper, stapled together with a single, rusting staple. It was, in every way, "trash."
The retainer didn't offer it. He didn't hand it to Lin Hao.
He tossed it.
The booklet tumbled through the air and landed on the concrete steps with a pathetic, soft thwack. It landed directly at Lin Hao's feet, the cover fluttering open in the breeze.
The entire campus gasped. Su Yun's hand flew to her mouth, her eyes wide with shock at the sheer, blatant disrespect. Fatty Zhang was so angry he was literally speechless, his mouth opening and closing with no sound coming out.
This was not a gift. This was an insult.
Lin Hao, playing his part, just stared at the booklet on the ground, "frozen" in humiliation.
"That," Chen Long announced, "is my Chen Family's 'Iron Muscle Mantra'."
He let the crowd absorb the name, as if it were a great treasure.
"It is a basic, mortal-grade Gongfa," he said, his voice dripping with condescension. "We give it to our new servants... the ones with no talent. It teaches them to haul luggage and stand at attention."
He looked down his perfect, aristocratic nose at the top of Lin Hao's baseball cap.
"If you can even learn to circulate Qi with it, if your... foundation... can even handle that," he said, "you might be useful as a guard for my family one day. A gatekeeper, perhaps."
The humiliation was total. It was absolute.
Chen Long's "generous" act was complete. He had, in one move, established his own superiority and confirmed Lin Hao's as nothing more than a lucky, untrained brute.
He "swept" past, his white tunic not even stirring in the wind.
"Recruiter Han," he snapped. "The tour. Now."
Han, pale and sweating, could only nod. "Yes... Yes, Mr. Chen. This way. This way to the new Academy wing."
The motorcade doors opened. The retainers followed their master. The BSA agents scrambled to keep the press back.
Lin Hao was left alone on the steps. The roar of the crowd was gone, replaced by a dead, awkward, pitying silence.
Every student, every phone, every camera, was now zoomed in, not on the departing prodigy, but on the "humbled" hero.
Lin Hao, the "brute," took a "shaky" breath.
He slowly, humbly, bent down, his knees "trembling."
His fingers closed around the cheap, stapled, "trash" manual.
He picked it up. He tucked it into his hoodie pocket as if it were a lifeline, his head still bowed, his face hidden from the world.
The cameras clicked, capturing the perfect, symbolic, humiliating image.
And in the silent, hidden, Level 6 core of his being, Lin Hao, the upgrader, smiled.
"Mortal-grade," he thought, his mind cold and sharp as glass. "Perfect. Another 100 UP."