In a single smooth motion, Zhao Gang pushed himself onto his feet, quickly shaking off the days of physical inactivity. He wasn’t entirely sure how long he’d spent studying but he’d barely done more than scratch the surface of the formation. Regardless, he was certain that he had made all the progress he could in a short time. Anything more would require him to invest months at a minimum. His purpose, given his time constraints, was to take meticulous notes and document what he could see to give his disciples a chance to start familiarizing themselves with the formation as well.
While ideas from ‘programming’ had allowed them to alter the implementation of some formations, the two disciplines were fundamentally opposed. Programming, from what he could tell, had no intent built into it, just a series of commands that were run explicitly as written, like ordering around a slave.
Natural energy was no one’s slave. It did not follow commands. Oh, from a surface perspective, it may look that way, but that was only the misunderstanding of those who could not see beyond the superficial. No, one had to coax the natural energy into following along by giving it something ‘interesting’ to follow. To do that, one had to build an intent.
The physical form of the formation barely mattered. It was why this particular formation could be built to cover a room or hide a planet. No matter what one hid, the intent of the formation did not change. But imprinting one’s intent into the ambient energy in a stable and self-sustaining manner was hard. One had to be able to visualize their purpose, their goal, and then weave that into their Qi before anchoring it with things that would not corrupt that intent.
So why was studying formations so hard? Because one wasn’t studying a physical pattern but rather someone else’s intent. And because intent was very difficult to keep pure, Formation Masters used tricks to make it easier, tricks that tended to allow their intent to set successfully but also muddied their actual purpose. For example, one of the most common and useful tricks was metaphor. Why reinvent the wheel? There was a lizard that could use Qi to hide, so instead of trying to use pure intent to convince the ambient energy to take on the ‘hiding’ intent, why not just say ‘see here? Be like this lizard’.
With a real-world example to anchor the concept to it was much easier to convey intent. One might even use the remnants of such a beast as a sort of reminder, a starting point to give the ambient energy the right flavor. Of course, nobody wanted the ambient energy to attempt eating flies with a tongue. No, they only wanted to hide. So they start with the metaphor and then twist and prune it until it does only what they want.
This is all to say that while Zhao Gang had observed the formation, felt the energy and its flavors, and taken extensive notes documenting as much as he could, the formation more or less remained a mystery. While he could guess at the intent that was used, though it was incredibly complex, he could not yet guess how that intent was formed. To recreate the formation he would either need to be able to figure out how the intent was originally formed - whether through metaphor or some other process - so that he could reproduce it, or he would have to figure out the exact details of the intent that was used and build his own method for creating it. Either way, it promised to be a project of years rather than days.
Considering where the formation was located, he hardly thought that surprising. The formation, just like everything else in the palace, was as much a work of art as it was a functional construct.
Now that he had begun the process, and created enough material for his disciples to begin the process as well, it was time to move on.
Hoping that the Great Ancestor had followed through on allowing him to come and go from this room directly, he reached out and felt at the fabric of the Highest Heaven. Rather than being a solid adamant wall, which it would have been if he did not have permission, the space felt spongy and malleable. With a huff of relief, he used his will and Qi to open a path through the void. The next instant he was gone.
*****
Over the next several days the school was once again thrown into chaos. The research teams that had shown up to investigate the island were the least of their problems. Rather than barging in and taking over, they were doing their best to be discreet, something for which Rejya Xinasa was grateful. It had only taken a $1.2 million donation to the appropriate charity to make it happen.
Getting a call directly from the Governor telling them to play nice made people polite.
The real chaos came from the reshuffling of the staff. Out of the thirty full-time teachers, leading to a student-to-teacher ratio of 10:1, Dianna had been promoted to Vice Principal and a full eleven had to be let go. This meant that instead of a teacher for every ten students, they now had a teacher for every 16 students. It wasn’t a huge shift, and it was manageable, but melding classes together on short notice wasn’t as easy as it appeared on paper. Each teacher had their own style and taught at a different pace. Worse, teachers taught different subjects, leading to deficiencies in certain classes and little change in others. In short, it was a mess.
They brought in substitutes for the first two days, but that was a short-term solution, lest they run into the same problem they were trying to avoid. Diana and John worked nearly nonstop and by the third day all the students had been arranged in their new classes. The only positive, as far as Dianna could tell, was that the teachers all buckled down without complaining. Normally increasing class sizes was a hot-button issue for any teacher, but her faculty understood the necessity.
The students, however, were upset. Children have this strange need for stability and routine. When those things get jostled children tend to get cranky. Some handle it better than others and these children handled it better than most, but there were still a few tantrums, some tears, and lots of confusion. The teachers soldiered on and did the best they could to make things work.
What they didn’t do, though it had been suggested, was allow those disciples with credentials to take over classes. It wasn’t that they weren’t qualified, theoretically at least, but rather that everyone felt it was a good idea to keep a clear divide between the disciples and the teachers. Disciples were members of the sect. Teachers were members of the school. Nobody was interested in mixing the two overmuch, no matter how convenient it seemed at the moment.
The attitude the staff held towards the disciples had also noticeably changed. There was some fear, but mostly the teachers went out of their way to show a lot more respect. The administration talked amongst themselves and decided that all things considered, this was a good thing. The teachers were there not just to pass on information but to provide examples. It wouldn’t hurt for the students to see the teachers actively showing respect to the disciples. In return, the disciples were given clear instructions that they were to be respectful as well. This caused some friction as the disciples had mostly gone out of their way to simply avoid the teachers.
In cultivator culture this was normal - mortals weren’t worth their attention. The instructions they were given, however, changed that. Cultivator culture equated giving respect to a person with treating them as an equal. Since they were equals, you couldn’t simply ignore them. The change was mostly subtle, but it changed the atmosphere noticeably. The disciples, whom all the mortals had believed were a stoic and uninterested lot, suddenly acknowledged the faculty in the little ways that courtesy dictated. Instead of simply stepping out of the way when two people crossed, now the disciples might add a word or a nod. It wasn’t deference, never that, but these simple acts of greeting and other small courtesies noticeably defrosted the relationship between the two camps and eased some of the tension that, until that point, nobody had truly acknowledged.
Hiring new candidates was the next big task. Normally they would have several months, the summer quarter, to interview new candidates and select appropriate staff. Unfortunately, all the top-tier candidates were currently teaching and not one would consider changing positions in the middle of the school year. Since the school year had more or less just started it became quite the issue. The idea was floated of cycling through substitute teachers for ‘working interviews’, but was rejected. Simply put, subs were either retired teachers who didn’t want permanent positions or new teachers who hadn’t gained enough experience yet to take on a classroom full-time. The few teachers with experience in the subs pool that didn’t fit one of those two categories were either problem children or had other reasons why working full time wasn’t possible. All in all, it was a poor option.
Resigned to the situation, they decided not to rush the hiring process and simply work through this first year with limited faculty. The other staff members - janitors, maintenance, housekeepers - were all much easier. They were ‘interviewed’ and, if found unable or unwilling, replaced. While finding replacements for them was much, much easier, it still took substantial time and effort as they couldn’t narrow the pool down to a single person for each position, initially at least. Instead, they gathered 2-3 candidates for each potential position, then gave them ‘the talk’. After one notable incident where a particularly ‘sensitive’ girl managed to induce mass hysteria, they decided firmly that the talk was always given one on one, never in groups. This severely slowed things down but they managed to avoid losing huge numbers of candidates because of groupthink.
Rejya Xinasa was quite certain that she would have developed an ulcer had she been mortal. The sheer number of potential problems were multiplying exponentially. She had tasked a group of disciples, five in all, with following up on each rejected candidate and making sure that they didn’t remember anything they shouldn’t. While they didn’t run into any problems, the sheer scope of the problem was daunting. Complicating matters was the fact that nearly every person carried some form of device that could record, whether it be video or audio. The disciples had to not only check the person’s memory but also double-check their devices to make sure that no trace was left behind. While they were checked before they left, experience and intuition told them that simply assuming the on-site check did the job was a recipe for failure.
They managed. Somehow. The days passed and things settled. Another week had gone by since the school was closed and every student was up and on their feet again. Xinasa was exasperated and relieved that they could finally begin turning these students into real cultivators. Unfortunately, not every student had been able to produce the spirit pulse under the formation, meaning they were unable to forge an innate constitution. While there were only seven of them, they still presented an issue for her. She had to decide whether they should be rejected and sent home, or whether they should be allowed to cultivate with their original capabilities. After all, they hadn’t been damaged, they simply weren’t going to be as gifted as the other students.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
How they answered the question touched on the philosophy of the school and so Xinasa decided to take advantage of her new resources; she asked the teachers. The question caused some rather heated discussions and got to the root of their issue - were they a school, and thus a sect, for the ‘gifted’, or was their goal to be more inclusive than that? Would they remove students who failed at any opportunity to excel?
The group quickly divided into two camps. Principal Cartwright led the first, which quickly became known as ‘Earth Philosophy’, while Xinasa quickly took up the lead of the second camp, known as ‘Traditional Philosophy’. The debate started with Cartwright proposing that they kept the students. His justification was that their original talent remained and that they were already students of the school. Since they were already there and they had ‘passed the test’ to join the sect, they shouldn’t be penalized. Essentially his philosophy was inclusive; those who didn’t reach the peak could still fill out other roles within the sect and work towards its betterment.
Xinasa immediately responded that it would be a waste of resources to commit to raising students who were substandard from the beginning. This led to a nearly two-hour discussion of what resources she was referring to and why, exactly, they needed to guard them so closely. It boiled down to the fact that advancing in cultivation required the sect to provide each student with certain resources to reach their full potential. These resources were valuable and quite rare. Examples included everything from spirits for bonding to cultivation aides to ‘accessory artifacts’, including everything from one-time use life-saving talismans to artifacts that allowed a cultivator to travel faster or even fly.
The problem was that while they could easily provide the appropriate resources for any individual student, providing the resources for not just this class but future classes would quickly turn into a large-scale logistics problem. One of the teachers finally boiled the problem down to its core.
“We lack infrastructure,” he said simply. This comment turned the entire conversation on its head. The camps quickly broke down as they began to discuss exactly what infrastructure was required and how to make it scalable so it could meet future needs. Unfortunately, there was no way to meet all the needs of the sect indefinitely, but they made nebulous plans for how to approach future needs. The discussion highlighted the source of conflict between cultivators at every level - resources were relatively scarce and cultivators were common. Low-level cultivators were especially common, making up about 90% of all cultivators. This didn’t mean that higher-level resources were less fought over. Quite the opposite. While most cultivators were in the lowest category, so were most resources. At the highest tier resources were so scarce that one might look for thousands of years before finding a particularly necessary item. Such bottlenecks were extremely common and many cultivators died of old age, even with lifespans covering centuries or millennia, before finding the items their specific path of cultivation required.
The explanation was necessary but it cost the teachers quite a lot of morale to realize just how difficult the path of cultivation was. It required not only talent and hard work but also an abundance of good fortune. Still, they dug in gamely and started making plans for how the sect would generate and distribute resources.
“We need a logistics expert,” John said finally. “Our plans are good but hardly good enough to act as a foundation for an enterprise as large as we’re hoping this will be. We need someone, or a group of people, whose whole job is dealing with this mess. Preferably non-cultivators so they have no stake in the resources they’re allocating.”
“If you had suggested that anywhere else,” said Xinasa seriously, “Your comment would be viewed as naive to the point of outright stupidity. If a normal sect put a mortal in charge of distributing resources, every single disciple would threaten and bully them to get what they wanted. They wouldn’t be able to say no to anyone, meaning the sect would never actually have any control.”
“Yet if we can’t do this,” said Principal Cartwright seriously, “Then nothing else really matters. If the students engage in such things then we’ve already failed. Sure, we might have a student or two who tries it, but our punishments should be both public and severe enough that we discourage others from attempting it.”
“You can be sure someone will try,” said one of the teachers. “What it comes down to is that we have to commit to enforcing the rule of law. If we can do that, fairly, evenly, and consistently, then we have a shot. If we don’t, or can’t, then we’ve got no chance of actually making any of this work.”
At this point Zhao Gang, who had returned in time to hear a good portion of the discussion, made his presence known.
“Cultivators have a saying,” said Zhao Gang, “There’s always a higher sky. It means that no matter how high you reach, there will always be someone who stands above you. It will be a very long time before one of the students reaches such heights that they can challenge me, but the day will come. Even if they don’t challenge me directly, they could still challenge whoever is acting as guard over the resources. The day will come when the students will be strong enough that we can’t simply tell them no and expect our sheer strength to deter them. This has been the issue from the beginning - at some point, we have to build up not just respect for the rule of law, but loyalty to it. For that to happen, following the rules has to be advantageous. Ultimately, expecting loyalty to restrain someone in the face of profit is folly. How do we proceed?”
There was silence as everyone considered his question for a long moment. Finally, John spoke up. “There’s a couple of things we can do. First, we weed out anyone who shows signs of being a problem. I assume you have a way to deal with those we reject?” The question was directed at Zhao Gang, who nodded solemnly. “Good. Beyond that, we teach them. You said they’ll be smart, right? Well, we use that. There are thousands of things we can have them read to teach them not just what the law is but why it’s important. We work on both sides, the emotional and the logical. We teach enlightened self-interest - what's good for the sect and good for Earth is ultimately good for them. Small sacrifices build the foundation that supports you. That type of thing.”
Zhao Gang nodded before continuing. “We’ve gotten off topic. For now, I need a decision - do we keep the students or not?” He looked around the gathering meeting each person’s eyes. There were seventeen of them in total including Principal Cartwright, Vice Principal Ochoa, and Rejya Xinasa, along with a mix of teachers and disciples.
“Since no clear cut answer exists,” said John, “We should vote on it. Zhao, I know the decision is ultimately yours, but I think we need to decide if you’re going to be bound by this vote before we take it.”
There was a long moment of silence while Zhao Gang considered. “Since I can see both paths being viable, I will abide by this vote.” He paused again, looking around the room. “I think I shall need to study the way your governments work more closely. I dislike the way much of your politics work, but if we are going to keep the spirit of this world alive then we must govern here the way that you are governed out there. For now, however, I will simply say that I will constrain any vote to choices that will not harm the sect. As for the finer details, I think we must have a more open form of control.”
The debate started up again briefly after his statement, but in less than an hour the vote was taken. The children without an innate constitution were staying.
Once that was settled, Zhao Gang had Rejya Xinasa come to his office.
“While I had been planning to wait to give you direct control, it seems events are moving against us,” said Zhao Gang. “I will be leaving soon, possibly for some time. I will have to trust that you will handle things in my absence.”
“Yes, Master.” Rejya Xinasa bowed with the words, her demeanor calm, but inside her heart was racing. Master Zhao was leaving? In the end, she couldn’t keep her curiosity to herself. “May I ask after your errand?”
It was all she dared but even that much earned her a raised eyebrow from Zhao Gang. After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded. “I cannot give you control and then deny you the information necessary to chart the course. Very well. I have been told by the Eternal Emperor that I must find Ren Hulina. Given that Hulina was tracking down missing or wayward disciples, I fear that it may take some time. If my disciples have been plotted against it may be that I will be delayed unraveling whatever machinations have captured them. Or it may be otherwise. The Eternal Emperor did not bless me with his wisdom, only his direction.”
“Thank you, Master,” replied Xinasa. “I wish you luck on your journey.”
“Be aware that the curious and the mischievous among the Eternal Court have begun to seek us out. While I feel that we have some time, given where we are, their powers are sufficient to find us regardless of how unlikely our hiding place is. We must be as prepared as possible. If we have a visitor while I am gone I entrust you to handle the situation using your best judgment.”
The thought of a member of the Eternal Court showing up here while her master was away set a block of ice in Xinasa’s stomach, but what could she do? “I will do my best, Master.”
“One final thing,” said Zhao Gang, his face hardening, “While I agree with allowing the school some input, and even agree that it is beneficial to allow the students to see us involved in democratic processes, you will not allow things to reach the point where we do not have the control necessary to make decisions without resorting to forceful means. I trust that achieving balance in this issue will not be too hard a task.”
“I will see it done,” said Xinasa, her face hardening.
The next topic caught Xinasa off guard. “What do you say to granting them their Guardian Spirit early? Maybe as soon as they have completed the opening phase?”
“So soon?”
“Maybe not for those who have failed to forge themselves a constitution. But for everyone else, yes. We are certain of their affinities now, I assume, which means allocating spirits appropriately will be a trivial task.” Zhao Gang seemed perfectly confident of the decision meaning Rejya Xinasa could do nothing but go along.
“It will be as you say, Master. What of the Denglong girl? I am unaware of their affinities.” She avoided mentioning that, sooner rather than later, they would need a cultivation method that would suit the girl.
“Study these,” said Zhao Gang, waving his hand and producing a set of memory jades. “I have not had time as of yet, though I shall do so when I return. I presume they contain the answer.” He looked at her seriously before he continued. “Do not share them or the knowledge they contain. They were given to me directly by the Great Ancestor. He implied that he had a rather hard time producing them since a natural-born Denglong does not require such aids.”
“These are cultivation manuals?” asked Xinasa, a little stunned. Even the least cultivation manuals were considered a treasure. The manuals that her master had so casually passed to her, produced as they were by the Great Ancestor, were certain to be extraordinary. The worth of such things was enough to ensure fighting among the Eternal Court.
“I presume so. That is what the Great Ancestor implied. I have not looked.” Zhao Gang’s dismissive attitude was obvious, as if the priceless treasures were lumps of coal. Xinasa simply didn’t understand how he could disregard them so utterly.
Seeing her reaction, Zhao Gang chuckled. “You look as if I have thrown away a fortune. To be sure, many would wage war for a peek at their contents, but the Great Ancestor has hinted that what those jades contain will be useless to any but the girl. You know the danger they represent. We will be returning them to the Denglong when her need for them has passed, but I am confident that even if their contents were to get out they would provide no benefit to the random passerby. Their danger is in their secrecy and the possibility of its breach, not in the jades themselves.”
“You are certain?” asked Xinasa, still not daring to place the jades in her storage ring. “Is it even appropriate for me to be their custodian?”
“I am certain,” replied Zhao Gang. “As for your custody of them, who will know? Do not tell anyone and whether it is appropriate shall not be an issue.”
Xinasa wasn’t exactly satisfied with the answer, but she had no choice but to dutifully store them in her ring. With any luck, Master Zhao would be back before the girl required them.
Having concluded their business, Zhao Gang dismissed her, leaving her to fret once more over her burdens and the excessive rate at which they seemed to be piling upon her shoulders.