In the Celestial Origin Sect, the sixth bell was used as a clarion call to signal the true beginning of each working day. Its peals, unleashed by a heavy gong set in some high point whose location Qing Liao would not learn for many days, sounded out loud and clear. None of the preceding five bells, marking out each hour of the pre-dawn darkness, had been even one-hundredth of the volume. Nor would any of those subsequent to it, save for the twelfth bell signaling midday, approach it. The final bell of the day that he'd heard last night had done nothing more than roll him over in his sleep.

  Clearly this vibrant signal was one only a fool would ignore.

  Liao did not consider himself a fool, and regardless he'd been trained and forced to rise early all his life like most children. By the time the sixth peel finished he was upright and folding his blankets away on the wall end of the couch. He did this blindly, for it was only the second day of the year and the sun would barely have risen by the time he was set to report. Such glimmers of light that worked their way over mountain and wall alike were too weak to penetrate the screen over his window. Only after making his bed did he seek out the striker, left upon his lap desk the night before, and stumble through lighting the candle.

  At home he would not have bothered with a light on such a morning, being fully capable of dressing and washing face and hair in the dark. However, the unfamiliar folds and ties of sect robes, with their exterior hanfu, demanded visual capacity. In doing so he discovered that, at some point during the night his village-sourced version of the outfit had been replaced by a new copy of the same. This one was largely identical, and fitted little better, but it was clean and the bleaching of the whites was superior.

  This mysterious visitor, whose arrival Liao felt somewhat discomforted at having slept through, had also left a food tray. It contained a heavy bowl of mixed cooking similar to the night before, though using buckwheat and mushrooms rather than rice and nuts, complemented by dried dates and sliced oranges. He devoured it all readily, surprised by the presence of such fresh fruit during the season. The sauce chosen this morning was different, lighter and barely noticeable. He found it somewhat less pleasant, but not anywhere close to putting him off the meal.

  By the time he'd washed, dressed, and finished the platter, he discovered the sky was rapidly brightening and he had to rush to the privy before making his way to the First Training Hall; a task made significantly more complicated by his complete lack of knowledge as to its location.

  He also initially forgot his copper badge on the desk and had to run back to grab it.

  Thankfully, the attendant who welcomed the new recruits returned to his prior position in the morning and guided them towards a building only a short distance southeast. Though Liao began a little ways behind the main cluster of white-clad and white-belted cultivators, it took no more than a few moments of jogging to catch up. Running down the path in this way did not bother him, nor did any of the other youths seem to care.

  He guessed, based on a quick examination of the other recruits and the words of the grand elder the night before, which had lodged in his skull like gravel, that these were mostly the sons and daughters of farmers. After all, most of those who lived in Mother's Gift were, perhaps nine in ten families. The formation of the dantian being triggered by dice rolled by the Heavens that not even immortals could influence or predict, such general matching was inevitable.

  This randomized distribution became especially clear as the full group of new students assembled before the training hall.

  The facility was, outwardly, extremely ordinary. A double courtyard with an open-sided hall in the center, it could have been any village estate save that the walls were stone and timber not pounded earth and mud brick. The northern square was completely open, containing nothing but a bare floor of soil, raked flat. The southern square featured a garden of mostly shrubs built around a small artificial pool with a tiny fountain, currently idle. Black roofing tiles, universal throughout the sect, gave it a somber cast compared to the thatch Liao knew well.

  Though the materials were very fine by the standard of a mountain village, that was all. He had seen larger homes, both in the mountains and during the journey of the day before. It was also very plain, completely lacking in adornment, wall art, or other embellishment. Even the plants in the garden and the braziers in the central hall were common. The series of cushions laid out of the floor there, each perfectly circular, were naught but woven woolen pads.

  He was struck, instead, by the immaculate nature of the facility. Never in his life had he occupied a space purged so completely of dust, grit, and waste. Even when the whole village worked to clean the temple on feast days they could not manage such pristine results. It made him wonder just how many of the residents of the city below worked under the sect as servants, and what special tools they might possess.

  Eighteen cushions lay on the floor of the hall, each with a lap desk beside it. These faced east, towards a wide standing wooden frame covered in a panel formed from a single piece of perfectly split slate. Liao marveled at that slightly, for while he had seen slate pieces before, never one of anything approaching such size or smoothness. Seated, he realized that they were not much beyond a long bowshot from the Starwall itself, something revealed as the first lengthy shadows of dawn made their way across the open courtyard. There were buildings, nearly the entirety of the sect, in between, but even so, it was close. The terrible Killing Fields, where the sect spent its lifeblood to protect Orday's creation, were no more than a brief walk away.

  Liao shivered for a moment, recognizing that he was now doomed to live in proximity to that eternal struggle, and that his duty demanded he participate in it.

  One cushion for each student, the last of whom arrived with the first strike of the gong for the seventh bell. She was a short-statured girl, notable for puffy cheeks and a heavy body retaining more than a little baby fat. Childhood hunger had never touched her. It marked her out, the child of some rich artisan, perhaps, or one of the bureaucrats who maintained the sect's laws in the city and countryside from within Starwall City. No kin to the gathered farmers' children.

  Neither was he, but it was a far more friendly sort of variance.

  The total count was ten girls and eight boys, as close to even as one might expect from chance.

  The cushions had been placed down very deliberately, and were, everyone soon discovered, heavily weighted on the bottom to prevent idle shifts. They were far enough apart that casual conversation was functionally impossible, any attempt to speak to a neighbor would inevitably disturb someone on another side. This mechanism sufficed, on that morning, to impose a measure of silence on the gathered fourteen-year-olds. With none among them knowing any of the others, for that would have been a rare coincidence indeed, none dared speak in front of them all.

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  A series of tight, nervous, looks passed among the group instead. Not one of them, Liao realized, understood what was to happen next. Legendary tales of battles with demons might reveal some idea of the capabilities of cultivators and their actions in the field, but the day to day operations of the sect remained completely opaque. Even regarding those they were sworn to protect, the Celestial Origin Sect was not inclined to present its business to the eyes of outsiders.

  The final ring of the gong cut off all speculation, for it brought with it the arrival of their instructor.

  He appeared with uncanny speed. The eye registered nothing more than a white streak from the north before a man slammed to a stop at the edge of the eaves and walked with deliberate casualness to the front of the hall.

  Stellar Flash Steps, it had to be. Liao could detect the faintest of echoes, a rapidly dissipating afterimage of the same technique Su Yi had utilized; the compression and explosive release of qi to empower motion.

  This new arrival wore the same white hanfu-topped outfit as the assembled recruits, and for that matter all of the servants, but his robe was woven out of impossibly fine lotus silk. The fabric rippled across his body as he moved, shining with every ray of light that caressed its folds. His belt was blue, and he wore jewelry sufficient to supply a village's worth of rings, all attached to thick chains draped around his neck. While the physical refinement attached to cultivation turned Su Yi into a perfectly porcelain doll, on this man it evoked a middle aged martial empowerment with the solidity of graven stone. Truly, his square-jawed, steel-eyed, and broad-shouldered form possessed not one flake of flab or sag. He appeared as if he ought to be holding up the corner of a temple roof or standing eternal sentry beside the sect gates behind a stone lion. Not overly bulky, his physique possessed the lithe coils and tight muscles of a true warrior inside of a heavy laborer.

  He wore his black hair cut extremely short, little more than a dark fuzz atop his skull. A narrow mustache, separated in the middle, girded his upper lip like twin sword blades. This only amplified the militant nature of his visage, engraving him with the legacy of countless legendary officers of the long lost old world.

  “Good morning new recruits,” the cultivator possessed a booming voice filled with vibrant, confident energy, an ideal match for his qi-refined image. “I am Elder Yu Yong, Master of Recruits for the Celestial Origin Sect.” He strode through the hall, legs powering immense, high-step strides, until he stood before the black slate. “All of you are my charges now, and will remain so until you manage to reach the first layer of the body refining realm and become proper initiates of the sect. That takes, in case you are wondering,” the fire in his dark eyes revealed he knew that all of them had immediately wished to ask this. “As long as it takes. It might take a week, a month, a year, ten years, or even the rest of your lives.” A formidable brow narrowed and weighed upon the group. “Do try to avoid trying my patience.”

  Eighteen youths shivered on their cushions, and not because the morning was cold.

  “Now,” Yu Yong stood stiff as a board before the blank black panel. “Eighteen this year, not bad. Welcome to the Celestial Origin Sect and welcome to your new lives. Whatever you were before, dancer, farmer, miner, judge, that is over. Forget it! You are now cultivators. You belong to the sect, to the teaching of the Celestial Mother. You will learn to channel qi, to run, to fight, and to craft. You will stand atop the Starwall and face down the demon hordes that seek to end us all. If you think that by igniting your dantians you have won some kind of prize to a life of leisure and delight, well, you are wrong.”

  He did not, as many expected, thunder this last. Instead, a deep, palpable sadness wrapped itself around his expression. Loss radiated outward from the military man. Somehow, that was far more intimidating.

  “Of all the paths to be walked through life here in Mother's Gift,” he continued in the same tragic vein. “Cultivation might be the most dangerous of all. The demons are numberless, merciless, and furious. Even should you rise to such heights as to overawe those wretched creatures, this path defies the natural order of reality as devised by the Heavens. The road to immortality is marked by terrible tribulations, and failure is far more likely than success. Our sect, and the Starwall, have stood for two-thousand five hundred and thirty-one years. In all that time, only three have risen from the place you now sit to occupy the Celestial Ascendancy Realm as Grand Elders.”

  He paused. “I shall repeat that, since young people are prone to ignoring such bold truths. Three, twenty-five hundred years, and every year fifteen new initiates enter this hall. Have any among you skill at arithmetic?” Dark eyes scanned the group. “Can you calculate those chances?”

  The silence that followed stretched out interminably. Liao waited, not trying to perform the calculation. He could perform simply sums well, and quickly, but the massive numbers were simply too large for him to grapple with, at least not without scratching in the dirt. Many of the others, it appeared, were similarly hesitant to make the attempt.

  Eventually it was a slip of the girl in the rear, so thin as to be called waifish, who raised her head and spoke. “One in twelve thousand five hundred.” Her voice trembled, the grand number vibrating with hopelessness.

  “Good,” Yu Yung affirmed. “That is close enough that you should remember it. One in twelve thousand and five hundred. Worse, far worse, than the odds of becoming a cultivator at all. Twelve times worse. But,” his whole demeanor shifted with jolting speed. Military vibrancy rushed back to banish all sorrows. “Do not despair. Even the least cultivator shall live far longer than ordinary mortals.”

  A broad grin spread across the wide face. “Each new layer of every realm adds to your time spent in this turn of the cycle. Reaching even the seventh layer of the first realm, body refining, will nearly double the span, to one hundred and fifty years in all. Each of you is capable of at least that much, and most among you, should you survive the battles to come, of many centuries. Further, while the sect asks much, it grants much in return. The finest food and drink, the richest clothes and jewels, beautiful art and courtesans, wondrous displays, and all the other luxuries Mother's Gift has to offer shall be at your fingertips. Serve the sect, earn your stipend and rewards, and all this is open to you.”

  He took one step forward, then retreated back and slammed his knuckles against the black slate. The loud crack this released nearly jolted Liao from his perch.

  “However,” Yu Yong folded his hands together across his chest. “None of that begins until you master my lessons. Otherwise, you will spend you life as a cultivator repairing the Starwall. Everyone has a use, even those who cannot progress. Do not strive to make that one your own.”

  Trembling on his cushion, barely holding to his seat, Liao stared at the broad elder. Despite this terrifying introduction, so many this remained unclear to him. Demons, fighting, he had no desire to take part in this strange war poorly grasped from old stories. Rewards, the prospect of feasting every day, that was tantalizing, but hardly necessary. Life in the mountains taught one to restrain greed. To spend the rest of his life clinging to a wall and setting stones, however, that drove a spike of terror deep within. He hated confinement, hated unchanging repetition. It trapped him. Shackled to a vast wall that displayed no variation for its nearly one hundred kilometer length, that would destroy him, he knew it.

  “The sect, and I,” Yu Yong continued, flush with enthusiasm once more. “Do not wish for that. Every cultivator is valuable. We will push you to excel, to progress.” He raised up a meaty hand and held four fingers forward, pulling them in one by one. “Cultivation progresses along four principle components, and you must master them all: breathing, motion, conflict, and artistry. All will be explained in time, but we begin with breathing and the first step on the path to command of the soul itself, through the Celestial Infusion Method.”