The lady smiled at their flabbergasted faces. “You see, F-Rank is the lowest level of cultivation talent. Only with modern advances in spirit-detecting artifacts can we actually learn it exists—and, as you probably can figure out by now, it manifests very weakly as slightly increased physical attributes and mental clarity, as well as slightly increased appetite...there probably have been millions of unknown F-Ranks. Still, a cultivator is a cultivator, so...” She took the their documents, wrote “F-Rank” on the front, and then lit the pot. The coals lit up in blue flames which incinerated the papers totally—not even ash remained. “I’ve sent your documents to the EDCC. You’ll be contacted by a cultivator school soon! I hope you two get in the same school.”
Since they had no social Arts, they had no way of knowing that she thought The only school desperate enough to take two F-Ranks is that school…
The two of them had absolutely no reaction as the enormity dawned on them. Eventually Jiayun managed to clear her head and talk. “W-wait! If F-Rank was found only recently, then why wasn’t D-Rank called F-Rank? Why leave F free! That makes zero sense!”
“Well, you see, miss...no one wants to be called an F-Rank. To make it nicer to D-Ranks, we called them that instead of, you know, ‘Failure’-Ranks!”
“So it’s okay for US to be called Failure-Ranks!”
Nashara finally got a hold of himself. “I’m a cultivator...”
“No you aren’t.” The Lady quickly reminded him. “You have the talent.”
“I’m...a cultivator...I’m...” Nashara raised his fist to the sky…
...and cried.
“I’m a trash-tier Cultivator…hah...” Tears streamed down his face. “Hah...fuck.”
Jiayun got in on the action, though she refrained from silly crying. “We went from pretty top-tier mortals to just shitty cultivators.”
“Can you, uh, leave? My shift doesn’t end until all the applicants are dealt with. Leave. You don’t need to be here!”
The two of them only looked at each other with misty eyes—misty eyes of elation mixed with disappointment.
The lady stand up and sighed. Her hand slightly glowed with energy. “OUT!” Thrusting out her palm, the two immediately got slammed with an extremely powerful gust of wind, their eyes popping right open as they rocketed back and flew out the still-open cathedral doors, their impacts on the snowy ground outside throwing up giant plumes of dusty snow.
They stayed there for a bit.
////////
Nashara and Jiayun alike shoved bowls of crappy buffet food down their gullets and kept going to the food counters of this awful buffet they only chose out of indecision. The staff was starting to eye them with annoyed grimaces.
“Finally, some goddamn FOOD!” Nashara managed to say between throwing another spoonful of teriyaki chicken into his mouth.
“This ‘food’ is absolute trash.” Jiayun said, though the seven empty plates on her side of the table certainly said otherwise.
“Trash you’re shoving in your mouth like it’s nothing!”
“Well I’m still hungry!” She sighed and took a gulp of tea. “Besides, trash-tier food for a trash-tier cultivator.”
“Oh come on, we’re not...okay we are trash-tier cultivators, so bad I didn’t even know our rank existed...” Nashara was a big fan of following cultivators, but their world only intersected with the moral world in very specific ways, so new developments like that could take months or even years to filter down to normal mortals like him. Well...he wasn’t technically a mortal. “But...damn, I can’t believe this. We might be able to become cultivators. Wait, we definitely can! We’ll be accepted by a school! You know, their schools don’t cost anything. They’ll contact Halma itself and have the government pay for our tuition! I might be able to save all 5,000 karas I saved up to pay for tuition...” Nashara pulled a wallet out and showed off 50 silver paper bills.
“You dork. First of all after graduation they’ll want their investment back and secondly, the school probably won’t take our money. You do realize that all the cultivator schools are on a giant island with its own laws and money, right?”
“Of course I do. Don’t make me info-dump it.”
“Do it for me.”
“Why the hell would I ever do anything for your benefit?”
“Just do it!!”
“Okay, fine. Yes, they’re on all an island in the middle of our continent, a 200,000 square mile island, owned by the Eight Directions Cultivator Collective. Apparently an ancient cultivator carved the whole thing out and surrounded it by a giant sea of sorts. Well, given it’s hemmed in by the continent, it’s more an absurdly huge lake...apparently the island has its own magically-forced weather system, so the southern part is an inexplicable desert and the northern part is a frozen hellhole even though it should be a temperate forest all around.”
“Thank you for the info-dump. I’m sure someone appreciates it.”
“I just feel like I was taken advantage of.”
“I’ll make it clear: you were.” Jiayun capped that off with taking a sip of tea.
“...moving on, I wonder what school will take us.”
“I’ll be amazed if any school takes our utterly incompetent asses at this point, really.
“Oh, be positive...”
...she did have a point.
//////////
Thankfully, they got their answer quick. Surprisingly quick. That night, they grabbed a cheap two-bedroom hotel to rent until they got their answer. The lodging wasn’t the best, but they grabbed one on the outside of the mountain, so they saw the valleys and plains stretching for miles out their window, which was pretty nice.
Said view was obscured slightly, though, by the intra-city railways circling the city like giant rings. The design of Lavonia meant that you couldn’t travel straight inward for far. Instead, Lavonia more resembled a set of rings stacked on top of each other and getting smaller and smaller as they reached the peak. Thus, the trains didn’t bring people in and out of the city as much as they did up and down it, forming a bigger set of rings on elevated bridges outside of the city’s actual rings. Since sharp drops and climbs would be vomit-inducing, the rings slowly inclined up, trains running up and down it. It was truly a spectacular sight.
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The chance of the above two paragraphs’ information being relevant later was next to none, for the record.
The two admired the view a bit. For the first time in a long while, they actually managed to not snark at each other. Eventually they retreated to their bedrooms. Nashara went to sleep thinking of all the food he could try—Jiayun was doing the same, to be completely blunt. Both of them had huge appetites.
The next day, they got dressed and walked the city for a bit. Just for the fun of it, they bought train passes for the intra-city rail and rode it all the way to the peak and back down again, just to admire the sights of the mountain range Lavonia was built on and the trains themselves. Down at the bottom, they tried their hand at fishing in the mountain’s various caves, and at the top, they toured the capitol building, a massive palatial manse of marble. Finally, they came back to their hotel at around 6PM. The sky was already a deep orange, the light of the falling sun casting gorgeous crepuscular rays through the steel frame of the intra-city railway.
They were admiring the view yet again. “Pretty city, huh. Kinda wished I lived here. Only problem is the lack of roads...I wanna be a biker one day, ya know.”
“Huh?” Jiayun looked over at him. “Really? Didn’t strike you as the type. But I’d be you’d be surprised to know I want a motorcycle one day too.”
“Huh, really—wait, what is that?” Nashara pointed at a black dot in the sky slowly getting bigger.
Jiayun narrowed her icy eyes and looked closer. “It’s coming for us.” She said rather blankly.
“Wait, is that a flying sword? The ones eastern cultivators use?”
“You automatically thought that from a black dot in the sky?!”
“Duh. Maybe it’s from our school. It’s obviously coming right at us.”
“Well, it is...”
They watched it intently. The dot got bigger and bigger. Soon, its features became barely visible in the twilight.
“It’s coming really fast, huh.”
“Yeah. It’s gonna stop soon, right? Like, in the comics and novels they always slow in front of their recipient if they’re sending a message.
“I guess so...it’s...uh, not stopping.”
“I guess it’s a really cool one that can stop quickly.”
“No it’s just not stopping.”
“...huh, you’re right. Wait, it’s gonna stab us--”
The sword just kept flying towards them. Now they could blatantly tell it was a sword. It made zero attempt to slow down. At all. It just flew straight at them.
Nashara and Jiayun got the idea and immediately lept out of the way as the sword smashed straight through the window and shot straight into the ground at an angle, glass shards flying everywhere. The two shielded their faces with their arms, the shards glinting in the twilight as they both lept backwards into various furniture, knocking a bunch of crap on the ground and leaving the floor a mess. The sword just sat half-impaled in the floor—clearly enough to poke through the roof of the room below as a “what the hell is THAT!?” sounded from below.
Nashara got up and dusted himself off, looking at the broken window with dread. “By the gods...we don’t...have to pay for that, do we?”
“What do you think? I’m sure the hotel will accept ‘this sword tried to kill us and flew straight through the window’ when they see this disaster!” Jiayun got up as well and stumbled over to the sword. It was a simple shortsword, and looked incredibly low-quality from something coming from a cultivator. It had no signature forged into it, the metal was rusting, the leather grip was horribly frayed, and the small strip of...something attached to it was worn. “This thing looks like a counterfeit replica of a cultivator sword. What on earth?” She grabbed the strip, at which point it immediately glowed. She made a surprisingly cute “kyaa!” and dropped it, but the strip immediately produced a piece of paper from seemingly nowhere. Jiayun immediately grabbed it, blushing a bit. Nashara walked over and looked at it too.
Dear Nashara Zaras and Jiayun Xue,
Congratulations on your realization of your cultivating potential. We at Flowing River Cultivation Academy are proud to say we have selected you to be students at our school. An instructor will be here to provide you more details soon. Enjoy your life of cultivation!
-Headmistress Adelaina Xufeng
...that was it?
“This is the shortest and least flowery acceptance letter I’ve ever seen.” Jiayun said with furrowed eyebrows.
Nashara on the other hand, was more focused on the name. While, as said before, information on the cultivator world was difficult for a mortal to come by, he was roughly familiar with the various cultivator schools—and he had never ever heard of any school named Flowing River Cultivation Academy. The name wasn’t even impressive. The others were called things like Jade Mountain Lotus Academy of Cultivation or Seturnius Candidatus Lyceum. “Flowing River”? Rivers naturally flowed! Why not “Jade River” at least! “I’ve never heard of this place before.”
“I think we just got set up. This has to be a scam. That lady was in on it.”
“I'm starting to think that too--
WHAM~!
The door to their room flew straight into the wall between them. They pushed their naturally high dexterity to the limit to avoid it, the wood grazing each of their noses. Both of them were as still as a rock, though their positions meant they were rather comically staring straight at each other.
“Whoops, sorry! I may be a pretty low stage, but I should watch myself...” A man in his early 30’s or so walked into the room and apologized to the two of them. “I’ll put the door back on.” His hand glowed with wisps of spiritual energy, and with a wave the door’s pieces suddenly recombined and solidified as it flew back to the doorframe, seemingly as new. “How’s that for some nice Enlightened Arts! Ah, come on, you two! Don’t look at me like that?”
Like usual Jiayun was the first to speak. “...you have about five seconds to explain who you are.”
“Didn’t you get the memo on the jade slip?” The man laughed without any care at all and looked around, nodding when he saw the sword and message. “Ah, you did.” He grabbed both and stashed them away—as in, he put them behind his back and they suddenly disappeared without a trace. “It said I was coming.”
“I assumed a school official would at least KNOCK!”
“Sorry, the door was locked and I was kind of in a rush. I fixed it anyway! Ah, let’s just move on. Now the two of them could get a good look at him—he was rather tall, with rather muscular arms and messy red hair a deep hue, like blood .“My name is Clavius Corona. I’m a teacher at Flowing River Cultivation Academy. I just had to say hi to our newest F-Rank students.”
Nashara finally responded, tears streaming down his face. “Jab the knife in deeper, won’t you.”
“Ah, don’t worry. Talent only matters for the first few stages. Once you get up to speed and form a core, it doesn’t matter anymore. Everyone’s the same from then on!”
A knock resounded from the door. “Hello! Hello?! Open up right now! Half the damn hotel’s complaining about this noise and I am NOT losing customers!”
“Ah, shit. We better bounce.” Clavius grinned wildly and grabbed the two’s luggage. He then just straight up threw it out the window, Jiayun’s making sure the window was wrecked even worse.
That snapped Jiayun into action. “What the hell?! MY CLOTHES!” She rushed to the shattered remains of the window and looked down at the falling bags five stories below that crashed into the ground with a loud bang. Any nearby bystanders yelped in surprise and retreated away.
“Don’t worry, I’ll fix them when we get down.”
“What do you mean, ‘we’--HEY!” Jiayun yelped as Clavius grabbed the duo and lept effortlessly out the window, just as the hotel manager unlocked the door.
The three fell quickly, the F-Rank duo thrashing wildly out of instinct as the chilling air whipped past them. Clavius merely grinned. They impacted the ground with a loud thud that kicked up a corona of powdery snow, but his legs were totally fine. “There, see?” Putting them down he waved his glowing hand again and the busted luggage was as good as new. “Now get going and follow me!”
The two of them were too busy hyperventilating to follow him until he was nearly out of sight, though to be fair, the hotel manager screaming his head off at them from the window was a pretty good motivator.