Still, since Shu Le and Ai Xing had already come all this way, they had to finish what they had come to do.
After extensive negotiations, both sides finally reached a reasonably satisfactory agreement.
The Kendo Championship could exclude Socially Unaffiliated Personnel, but it had to allow the academies to participate. That was the authorities' final bottom line.
The Kendo Championship had always been an opportunity to allocate resources among the various sects. Since the sects led by Wu Yong wanted more resources, the authorities gave them a chance: bring the Academy School into the Kendo Championship and compete for those resources fairly.
As for excluding Unaffiliated Civilians, that decision had also been carefully considered. It was not that the authorities looked down on them. Rather, after such a long period of reform, the Academy School and the sects had become hugely influential within the country. Roughly eighty percent of Trainers were trained by one or the other. For a relatively small competition like the Kendo Championship, there was no telling whether anyone from the remaining twenty percent of Unaffiliated Civilians would even participate, so Xin excluded them outright.
It had to be said that although the Academy School and the sects fought with each other, both had made enormous contributions to the country.
In the turbulent early days after the Founding of the Nation, some Unaffiliated Civilians might have trained on their own and become professional Pokémon Trainers.
But after a long period of stability, the Academy School and the sects had developed their own training methods, which produced far better results than training alone. Their admission requirements were also relatively easy to meet.
Take the Monster Handler assessment Chu Xin had participated in, for example. Although placing in the top fifty was difficult, securing admission to an academy