- Ava -

It had been a few days since arriving at the Jade Peak Sect. Ava marveled at how easy it had been to infiltrate. All she had to do was show up at that hick town and pretend to be a farmer's daughter. Since arriving nobody had so much as questioned her. This couldn't have been any easier. Now all that was left was to observe, report, and await further instructions.

Ava wasn't entirely sure what she was meant to report on. After all, she had only barely begun learning Yin Demon Breathing Technique. She had the instruction manual hidden in a storage ring, so could continue to cultivate her path in secret, but what good did that do right now? She thought that perhaps her Elders were simply being patient, waiting for her to learn to cultivate before finding weaknesses in the Jade Peak Sect's defenses. What else could it be, since she couldn't even properly sense chi yet, and knew very little about formations?

The thing that had most worried her on infiltrating the sect had been the cultivation manual, but nobody had commented on her storage ring, let alone asked to inspect it. Perhaps that was the first thing she should report. Ava's Elders at the Demonic Desert Cult had promised to reward her for anything useful she found. The promise was vague, so she wasn't sure what sort of rewards she would receive, but she hoped it would be pills or treasures to aid her cultivation. Becoming stronger was the only thing that mattered to a demonic cultivator, since might made right, and the strong ruled over the weak. Kraterocracies were a common sense form of government for cultivators. After all, what use were elections when a political opponenent could simply be killed? If the killer was strong enough, then anybody who saught to punish them would be killed as well. What use, therefore, was there in arguing over ideology, philosophy, or principle? The only thing that mattered was to be unbeatable, and if you were weak, you should do as you were told, or you might just be killed like an annoying fly.

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Elder Graham had gone on at length about these things when she had been in the Demonic Desert Cult. She understood the gist of what he meant, and so she aspired to be strong. There was strenght in stoicism, and weakness in kindness. The girls' hall monitor, Linda, had been pretending to be nice since she arrived. She wondered what game the woman was playing. No one in their right mind would be kind to another cultivator. Only the truly stupid would do such a thing, and they deserved to be exploited, but Linda didn't seem unintelligent. In the Demonic Desert Cult, pretending to be kind was a strategy for influencing idiots. She would keep an eye on Linda. If Linda thought she was an idiot, she would regret it.

Ava wondered about that Elder Babbot as well. She had been surprised when he had taught her and the other children a focus technique on the ride over. Ava knew that, while focus techniques could be useful, they were incredibly dangerous without supervision. She wondered what the Elder's intentions were in teaching it. At first she thought maybe he had noticed she was a spy, and intended to trick her into killing herself, along with the other children. A few sacrifices wouldn't matter, if it meant rooting out the enemy. However, when Senior Hall had stopped the other two children from using the technique, she was surprised that nobody had said anything to her about not being dead. Later, she learned that Elder Babbot had been teaching that technique to all of the new recruits. She then wondered if it had been an initiation ritual, to weed out the idiots before they could contaminate the sect. Such things were common in her cult.

When she realized that none of the new recruits had been weeded out, though, she was stunned. At least some of the children should have been left to die, but they had all been stopped from using the technique before they could die. "How strange," she thought, "Is that Elder insane then?" That wouldn't be a surprise to her, since she was used to insane Elders. Demonic chi tended to corrupt the mind, and many Elders in her cult were quite unstable. She would report on this as well. Insanity in an enemy camp could be exploited. She thought that he could also simply be stupid, but that would be a dangerous assumption to make, and she wouldn't be caught off guard because she underestimated her opponents. She was no fool.