The Law of Ueki, Volume 10

The Law of Ueki is a shonen supernatural battle manga by Tsubasa Fukuchi, serialized in Shogakukan's Weekly Shonen Sunday from 2001, running 16 volumes and 154 chapters. The protagonist, Kosuke Ueki, is a first-year student at Hinokuni Junior High who is granted by his homeroom teacher, Mr. Kobayashi—a candidate for the throne of the celestial world—the power to turn anything he considers trash into trees (limited to trash that fits in the palm of his hand). The god of the celestial world is about to abdicate, and 100 candidate gods each choose a junior-high student as their proxy, granting them unique powers to fight one another; the candidate god represented by the winner succeeds as the next god, and the winning student receives the "blank talent," allowing them to gain any one talent they desire. The rules state that a power user who harms an innocent loses one "talent," while each opponent defeated adds one "talent." To keep this power out of the hands of the wicked, Ueki fights on in defense of his own justice. This is Volume 10 of the series (Chinese edition published by Ching Win Publishing, translated by Chen Yingting). According to the Chinese edition's synopsis, this volume corresponds to the stage after the end of the first day's preliminary tournament: three weeks later a five-person team battle is to begin, and to win the contest and rescue Mr. Kobayashi and Inumaru, who have been cast into hell, Ueki and Kosuke set out to find new allies, only to be caught up in a struggle over something, and the story moves into a new phase from there.