Zhao Gang waited patiently, his face a mask of stoic calm. He did not smile. That was not his place. No, the teachers would smile and befriend, comfort and guide. His place was to rule them, to discipline them, to lead them. As such it would be improper to show how excited he was to see the students shuffling in, each engrossed in something or other but all giving him at least one awkward glance. Some stared.
It had taken eight long years to get to this point, not to mention calling in countless favors and exerting himself to rebuild his fortunes in record time. After all, a sect without wealth was no sect at all. Sure, they needed cultivation manuals and techniques and a million other things, but wealth was fundamental to it all. Many things could be bought if you knew where to look. In the highest planes he could buy cultivation manuals in the common market that would last these children decades if not centuries. No, his entire purpose had been to accumulate as much wealth as quickly as possible.
His reappearance had startled many. His breakthrough had scared more. Despite his earnest desire to stamp out all the bugs that had been harassing him before his breakthrough, his focus was elsewhere. None had been so foolish as to put themselves directly in his path, so he had to content himself with being left in peace as he conducted his business.
Gathering his many disciples had been first on his very long list of things to accomplish. That hadn’t gone anywhere near as well as he’d hoped. A few renounced him. Quite a few were obviously missing. More had simply disappeared. It seemed that his enemies had taken his absence as an opportunity to carve off chunks of his following. Ren Hulina, one of his most advanced and able disciples, had been tasked with investigating. Given their worryingly common nature, he expected that to take some time.
His other disciples, and especially his personal disciples, he gathered together and set to work. They were more than a little startled by his hurry, especially since he refused to explain anything about his purpose, but they set to their tasks with admirable diligence. Two years was all it had taken to rebuild his fortunes enough to begin the real work.
Zhao Gang had not been idle during this time. Occasionally, when it was too dangerous for any other, he would take on a resource gathering mission himself. More often he was overseeing the movements of his disciples and setting the foundation for what was to come. As every cultivator knew, the foundation was important, so he spent considerable time on it despite his irritation with the seemingly mundane tasks. There was thankfully little bureaucracy, but what he had to deal with was worse to his mind. He sat through endless cups of tea with countless sect heads, clan leaders, exalted elders, and government functionaries.
Dealing with the straight forward, business-like issues of Earth’s sprawling bureaucracies had become a kind of soothing exercise in comparison. After all, to deal with that horrendous mess all you truly needed was patience. Now that he was a True Immortal, who had nothing but ties of convenience to their physical form, patience was easy. It was almost refreshing.
Compared to rebuilding his fortune on the higher planes, building a massive fortune on Earth was child’s play. He’d handed the task off to some bored disciples and six months later they’d returned with a net worth in the tens of billions. All it had taken was combining the powers of expert cultivators with the ideas of the people of Earth – his disciples had decided to mine out a couple of asteroids. They’d had to borrow a couple of extra-large storage rings to get the job done. It had been simple in the end.
Once that was complete he hired a team of lawyers and started the paperwork to buy Hat Island, a depopulated island in the Puget Sound just north of Seattle. At just over 400 acres it had been perfect for his school. The natural barrier of being an island, combined with being placed essentially right in the middle of everything in the Pacific Northwest, had made it an ideal candidate. He’d be able to control access to the island without raising undue attention while simultaneously providing his students the chance to access the larger culture of the world. They would be connected without being immersed. Perfect.
Seeing that hiring flunkies, aka lawyers, to do the majority of the boring, everyday work had been very efficient so far, Zhao Gang had repeated the procedure. This time, however, he’d hired an Architectural and Construction firm. He’d given them his specifications and let them do as they wished with a virtually unlimited budget. It had taken them forever – five years – but the results spoke for themselves. Zhao Gang could have achieved similar results through his own power, probably, but the wait hadn’t hurt overmuch and having everything on the up and up with the local government would avoid many headaches in the future he was sure.
While the construction was happening, Zhao Gang turned to his next and, in all likelihood, most important, task – securing the planet. He and his twenty most gifted disciples spent nearly three years creating the formations that would protect the planet from outside influence. Three years might not sound like a lot, after all, he spent forty years laying the essence creating a formation, but the amount of effort expended between the two couldn’t be compared. Twenty-one cultivators over three years amounted to 63 years of actual work, but more impressive was how the collaboration between them took what was initially a fairly standard and well-understood formation and re-imagined it, creating something that was qualitatively different from anything that had been done before.
The basis for this advancement was, to his surprise, one of his younger disciples. Tor Wessi was less than ten millennia-old, barely a child in terms of his fellow disciples, yet he had taken to studying Earth with a passion. The result was the application of a field known on Earth as ‘programming’ to the art of formations. Even better, the math of this confounding world, while a terrible confusion of symbols, had somehow managed to clarify certain key aspects of what they were trying to attempt, allowing the efficiency of their final formation to improve many times over. The end result was an effective and remarkably elegant formation that did what he wanted and was almost mind-bogglingly efficient.
Once that was done he’d turned the group to laying the formations for the island itself. He’d sworn them all to a cultivator’s oath and then shown them the formation he’d made deep in the Earth. With their help, he’d been able to channel the majority of the free energy so that it came up under the school before spreading out, allowing the area to become quite energy dense. Then they’d layered on everything from defensive formations to specialized energy gathering arrays, formations meant to act as tests for disciples and hidden treasures of all sorts. They had expended profligately with Zhao Gang’s only instruction being that nothing was to be easy. Great treasures could be found on the island, but no disciple would be handed anything. They would have to work for them.
Unlike what sects would set up in other places, however, he had expressly forbidden the tests from being mortally dangerous. They could wound, they could terrorize, they could try to crush body, mind, and spirit, but they could not kill. His reason was simple – at some point, the authorities would notice if his sect turned into the typical meat grinder. Instead, they had to go with a more brutal approach, something that anywhere else would have been insane. It would probably be considered cruel here too in another hundred years. They decided that those who would have experienced death in the trial would have their cultivation crippled and their memories altered.
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Crippling the cultivation of beginning cultivators was surprisingly simple. The memory alteration, however, was a much trickier proposition. They studied the problem as a group for over a year. Once again, the answer came from the practices of Earth. Simply removing memories wasn’t a problem. The problem was that replacing them without creating serious gaps was previously impossible. The solution was a fairly simple and ingenious one, one that cultivators who hadn’t experienced the pervasive technology of Earth couldn’t have imagined being possible. They were going to record everything about every student. The specifics were complex and resource-intensive but doable. Then, when a student was expelled they would erase the entirety of their time within the academy, then alter the recording and play it back into the mind, replacing the memories that no longer existed. The result would be memories that closely matched the originals, save that they wouldn’t remember anything about cultivation. Thus the academy protected itself without creating issues with the mortals. Implementing the system had been a trial, but they’d managed.
Now all the groundwork had been laid, all finishing touches accomplished, all the hoops jumped through. Students, for the first time, were filing into the academy. Had he still been mortal, he would have said his heartbeat increased. Fortunately, he had full control of such ‘involuntary’ reactions now. Thus his demeanor was perfectly calm and placid as he swept the room with his soul’s senses, feeling out each student as they took a seat in the auditorium. He had to actively suppress another smile. The amount of talent in this room, combed from orphanages all over the world, was impressive. The people here seemed to have one of two reactions to the lack of natural energy – they either had their Qi channels shrivel up to uselessness or had them expand and harden to draw in every tiny little wisp of energy.
Those with withered channels were obviously useless, but those who had the opposite were almost universally blessed with above-average potential, with a fair few whose potential could only be called monstrous. Paired with the insights this world had to offer, one or two of these children could potentially be his peers in the distant future. The thought kindled something deep within his soul. He’d long since abandoned any hope of having a true family. Instead, he poured his whole self into raising his spiritual children – his disciples. But no matter what they said or how they tried to hide it, every cultivator secretly dreamed of finding a Dao Companion. The only problem was that such partnerships only ever worked between equals, or at least near equals. Zhao Gang had long since outstripped all of his friends and colleagues, to the point where most wouldn’t do more than bow in his presence and offer platitudes. This world though… maybe it would offer the opportunity to find such a person.
He immediately discarded the thought as an idle fancy, knowing better than to hope for such an outcome. Even if it was possible, the likelihood of it happening in the next twenty millennia was infinitesimal. That was far enough in the future that it wasn’t worth dwelling on, even to him.
The children were nearly all seated and waiting, so he ended his musing and brought his full attention back to the room. Soon they were all facing him, fidgeting and whispering to each other as they waited. Zhao Gang decided not to make them wait long. They were children, after all, each one short of seven years old. Expecting maturity of children that age, especially those who hadn’t started cultivating, was foolishness.
“Welcome, children, to the Immortal Mysteries School for the Enrichment of Child Talents, or simply the Immortal Mysteries Sect. If you were to count, you would find that there were exactly 300 of you, each an orphan that was selected by one of our teachers to receive a scholarship to the school. To receive the opportunity, the teacher in question must have found something extraordinary about you. In time, we hope to bring that to light.”
“As you have all noticed, I’m sure, myself and some of the teachers aren’t exactly what you would call ‘normal’. We come from somewhere very different than where you’re from. My hope, and the hope of these teachers, is that all of you can learn to act as a bridge. To do so, you will need to learn how to act while in our native lands, but we are to teach you what is necessary without distancing you from your own culture.”
“At the same time, you will be expected to begin your schooling and take it seriously. On top of that, you will be doing something that other schools simply neglect or avoid – you will be training your bodies to the utmost. There is a reason for this, a very good one, but that will come later. For now, listen to your teachers, try and make friends with your classmates, and be diligent in learning everything you can.”
“Know that just because you are here doesn’t mean you will be allowed to stay. We have great expectations of you all. Those who fail to meet those expectations will be returned to their previous homes. Success, however, will be rewarded far more richly than you can imagine. We hope to make you all into something truly special.”
There was a moment of silence while all the children realized he’d finished speaking, then one little girl raised her hand. The silence continued while they all looked at the girl with her hand raised. She flushed and slowly lowered her hand, looking around her to try and find an escape. Zhao Gang felt vaguely bad for the girl, but he didn’t understand the gesture or what she was trying to accomplish with it. Finally one of his disciples, Rejya Xinasa, floated a whisper to him on a thread of Qi. “I believe they teach their children to raise their hand when they have a question.”
Zhao Gang nearly snorted. It was such a simple thing, why hadn’t other cultures ever adopted it? Mostly when students had a question they had to remember it until after the lecture was finished, to be asked later. Oftentimes whole sections of a lecture were rendered virtually useless because a question was not sufficiently addressed. This hand raising it seemed… respectful, somehow. It didn’t interrupt the teacher but it signaled an issue, allowing the teacher to handle it as they saw fit. How foolish cultivators could be, so bent on not offending that they would sacrifice potential gains for the lack of ability to politely ask a question.
“Please stand,” said Zhao Gang, addressing the girl. She rose hesitantly, not quite sure if she was in trouble. “This as a mild example of what I meant - where I am from does not use raising one’s hand to ask a question. Because of that, I did not immediately understand what you were doing. Please forgive me if I have embarrassed you. What is your question, young one?”
The young girl looked at him hesitantly, barely willing to raise her eyes from the floor. Her voice was soft and equally hesitant. “You didn’t tell us your name. I was just going to ask what it was.”
This time Zhao Gang did smile. “Another difference, young lady. In my culture, it is up to the elder to introduce themselves or not as they choose. I accept that you ask in ignorance and I do not take offense. Next time, however, I suggest you avoid this particular question. As for an answer, you may call me Headmaster. In the future, you may earn my name, but I wouldn’t worry about such things now. If you ever do it will be far, far in the future.”
The girl flushed again and sat, obviously ashamed. “Relax,” Zhou Gang told her kindly. “I thank you for having the courage to raise your hand and encourage you, all of you, to do so when you have a question.”
There was a shuffling among his gathered disciple at the words but he ignored it. He knew they were mentally preparing themselves for such interruptions. Most, if not all, would do at least some research on how such things were dealt with.
“Now I will be turning you over to Principal Cartwright. He will make sure all of you know what to do and where to go.” Without further words Zhao Gang turned and left the room, leaving Principal Cartwright to arrange the student’s lodgings and classes.