The common folk soon discovered that the "tastes of the big shots" they couldn't understand went beyond makeup and aesthetics.
For example—
The competition events.
They'd already seen wrestling and the like, and quite a few were die-hard fans of certain contestants, dreaming of getting their hands on them. So when the wrestling qualifiers officially began, the fans' cheers thundered through the sky.
They tried to overwhelm the opposing contestants with sheer volume.
But they couldn't make heads or tails of some of the events that followed.
They genuinely didn't understand them.
The event was called "riding."
But the riders weren't on horses. They were riding adult, fat pigs.
Twenty contestants gathered at the starting point.
They waited for the signal to set off, then had to tackle seven or eight different sections of obstacles along the way. The course wound and twisted, with "surprises" hidden at every turn: hurdles to leap, water to ford, slopes to climb, patches of ice to cross, muddy ground to slog through...
The first three contestants to reach the finish would split the twenty pigs according to a five-to-three-to-two ratio. They said Lord Shen had castrated and raised every one of them himself! Their meat was tender and flavorful, with no trace of that rank smell.
The stranger something was, the more it drew people in. The common folk, still buzzing from the fierce battles in the first wrestling qualifier, were captivated by this event too. They flocked to the viewing area set up beside the course to catch a glimpse of the brave pig-riders.
The twenty contestants: "..."
They said they'd been forced into the competition, not that they had some strange passion for riding pigs. Would anyone believe them? At first, they'd planned to slack off, but once they heard what was