There were simply too many contestants. Holding all the matches at once would have been far too cumbersome.
After all, the All-around Competition featured a great many events. If each event were conducted one contestant at a time, it would probably take a hundred or eighty years to finish the whole competition.
So the first strength event, brick lifting, was divided into three stages.
The first stage was the qualifying round: contestants had to lift a brick weighing one hundred thousand jin.
It seemed simple enough, but with all their strength sealed and suppressed, leaving only the power of their flesh, there were truly very few who could lift a hundred-thousand-jin brick.
Just a moment ago, there had been tens of millions of contestants. After the first stage, which required lifting one hundred thousand jin, fewer than ten thousand remained.
A one-in-a-thousand advancement rate!
In truth, anyone who could enter the All-around Competition and take part in any event could be called a genius.
The fact that only fewer than ten thousand remained out of tens of millions didn't mean the others weren't geniuses.
It was simply that, among geniuses, there were those who were even more gifted.
The purpose of the All-around Competition was to find such geniuses.
Of course, this only applied to the strength event. Many contestants had been eliminated from the brick-lifting competition, but that only showed that they weren't strong enough. They might well have extraordinary abilities in other areas!
That was only natural. People gifted with outstanding abilities in every field were few and far between.
The first stage of the first strength event was over.
The second stage began soon afterward.
This stage was also simple: the brick's weight was raised to three hundred thousand jin!
That was only three times the previous