Chapter 322: Start of the tournament
When we arrived at the arena, we were immediately brought into a waiting room that had been prepared for us.
This was a private waiting room as it had our names on it.
When we walked through the hall, we could see that all of the large guilds and even some of the bigger guilds had received private waiting rooms.
It seemed that they had gone all out for this tournament.
As we sat there in the waiting room, we were able to see everything that was happening on stage.
It was a very fabulous show, worthy of a tournament jointly hosted by all the large guilds.
There were world class entertainers that came onto the stage one after another.
At the end, there were even several S Rankers that came out to say a few words. These were the guild masters of the various large guilds.
Of course, not all the guild masters came.
S Rankers were busy people in the first place and they weren't able to get out of their work that easily. There were many things that needed S Rankers to personally handle, so they didn't have that much free time.
The ones that came were more than happy to come since it was a chance to slack off.
That meant that Bing Lan wasn't here even though Elementia was one of the sponsors.
After this entire ceremony, they started introducing the contestants.
The first contestants that were brought out were the ones that had made it through the general preliminaries.
It wasn't just only those from the large guilds that were at this tournament, but also the general public was allowed to enter. As long as they passed the preliminary tests and passed the open qualifiers, they would be allowed to join this main tournament.
But that meant that the ones that were allowed to join the main tournament were all the cream of the crop.
They were unaffiliated Awakeners who for some reason hadn't been discovered by the large guilds yet.
After they established their fame at this tournament, there was no doubt that they would be invited to join the large guilds.
So this was not only an opportunity for them, but also an opportunity for the large guilds to find some more talents.
After they were introduced, it was finally time to bring out the seeded contestants from the large guilds and large organizations.
We were called out in the middle of the pack.
When we arrived on stage, we were immediately met with cheers just because of the fact that we were from Elementia.
But in a certain corner of the crowd…
"It really is him…How could it be him?" Yue Ling said in a shocked voice.
The girl who was beside her noticed this, but she could see the way that the other members of their group were looking at Yue Ling. So she quickly patted Yue Ling on the arm to get her to calm down.
Yue Ling didn't react at first, but then she slowly calmed down and revealed an indifferent look.
But the damage had already been done.
"Check that kid. See what happened in the past few months."
On the stage, we walked to our designated location and then stood there waiting for the tournament to start.
Standing beside us was Alex and the group from Eden on one side and Julius and the group from the Rothschild Family on the other.
I knew about Alex since he had come out before us, but I was surprised about Julius since he came out right after us.
Even Alex seemed surprised by this.
It seemed that he had used his influence to change his spot so that he would be called up after us.
As we stood there, Julius just looked at me with a wide smile and said, "What a coincidence."
Both Alex and I revealed bitter smiles, but we didn't say anything as we waited for the host to finish all of their introductions.
From time to time, I could feel that there were some unkind gazes that came in our direction.
They weren't exactly filled with hostility, but it was clear that they weren't filled with kindness towards us either.
After a long time, the host finally finished introducing everyone.
Just this alone was enough to take an hour with how many different people had to be introduced. Though if they didn't spend a few minutes for each person just introducing them, then it might not have been as long.
But this was something that had to be done to build prestige I guess.
After it was all done, I was surprised to hear that we were jumping right into it.
"Now that everyone has been introduced, let me introduce the first round." The host gestured and there was a screen that came down.
Once the screen fully came down, there was a set of rules that appeared on it.
At the same time, there was what seemed to be a scoreboard that appeared on the side.
To my surprise, I found that I was one of the few that was put on the scoreboard.
The others were…the ones that were favoured to win this whole tournament.
Was I one of the favoured ones as well?
Why did I never hear about this?
The host continued by saying, "Since our contestants are all Awakeners, naturally we will test them in the one environment that Awakeners are known for. Our first round will be a dungeon dive."
As soon as his voice fell, there was a portal that suddenly appeared on stage with him.
None of us were really surprised by the fact that it was a dungeon for the first round, but we were surprised to see this portal appear out of nowhere.
None of us seemed to expect this portal to suddenly appear like this. At the same time, it was clear that we could all sense the strange sensation that was coming from this portal.
It seemed that whatever this was, it definitely wasn't normal.