After a night of rest, the Nine Schools Competition officially began early the next morning.
Naturally, the boring speeches by officials were skipped over, along with the formal procession of each school marching in formation. Even at the end of the twenty-first century, aside from the grander scale, Fang Zheng felt it was no different from the sports days he had attended back in school.
The Nine Schools Competition schedule consisted of five days of regular events and five days of rookie events, for a total of ten days.
The first three days were the official competition.
The first day featured the men's and women's preliminaries and finals for Speed Shooting.
The second day featured the men's and women's preliminaries and finals for Crowd Ball Scramble, as well as the preliminaries for Pillar Break.
The third day featured the men's and women's preliminaries and finals for Surfing Competition, as well as the preliminaries and finals for Pillar Break.
The fourth through eighth days were reserved for rookie events. The schedule was largely no different from the regular competition, except that the women's preliminaries and finals for Illusion Star Picking, as well as the men's preliminaries for Secret Stele Decryption, would be held on the seventh day.
The eighth day would hold the finals of the rookie men's Secret Stele Decryption event.
The ninth and tenth days would host the regular events for Illusion Star Picking and Secret Stele Decryption respectively.
Put simply, the rookie events were basically there to warm up the crowd for the regular competition.
Fang Zheng's first event, naturally, was the men's Speed Shooting preliminaries.
The rules of Speed Shooting were simple. Two people faced off, and one hundred red and one hundred white disc-shaped targets would be launched across the field. Whoever destroyed one hundred targets