Destiny is heralded by, like, nothing really. One day, you wake up, and before you know it, you're fighting beings with one foot in the realm of godhead.

And you're one of them!

Likewise, when Esorem found himself in the capital, everything was recapitulated. Esorem's life was more or less the same life he led in River Mantis - sell furs, get drunk, ask about metal men - with the minor exception that it took awhile to get to a place that had enough furs.

This place was the royal family's private hunting grounds.

Poaching? Hahahahahaha! Esorem didn't give two shites. Or one. All of his furs were poached. Miraculously, in three years, this caused trouble only once, and that was settled with a timely bribe executed so clumsily that I'm not even going to describe it. When the affair was over, I almost wanted to hug the guards who accepted the money for being so kind-heartedly corrupt.

The only thing that was odd in all of this is that Esorem never did bed anyone, woman or man. It wasn't that he was ugly - by human standards, he was acceptable. It wasn't for a lack of money - by the third year, Esorem had enough gold coins hidden away to do whatever a man could want to do. (This, mostly due to the fact that he wanted almost nothing.)

It just... wasn't something he did. And honestly, it was odd, in the same way that the spiritual sense was odd.

I was inside Esorem. I was living in his body. I could see the totality of his soul. And it was not cultivated. It was completely mundane, ordinary, unrefined.

Worthless.

And yet he acted like a Heaven Severing ascetic at times.

It made no sense - I was aware of his body. The proper chemicals and hormones were there, but the signals that they engendered seemed to be adressed to nowhere. Could growing up and living in total isolation have been the cause?

I puzzled over this, as Esorem turned forty, and group of philosophers came into the city.

The Many-Worlds Sect.

As Sects went their delegation was... manifestly unimpressive. I sensed perhaps two disciples who had even reached the Great Circle of Awareness - which was at best the first step in Transcendence - if even that.

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The rest - all twenty seven of them - were just mortals. Oh, a good few were cultivators, too, but the sort of parochial garbage counted for very, very little. I thought at the time that perhaps they were just a minor detachment, but still... A detachment of dregs?

Still; if there was ever a stimulus tailor-made to elicit a response from Esorem, the Many-Worlds Sect was it.

Allow me to explain.

In this World, three types of Transcendents exist. Alchemists, Rogues, and Philosophers. Alchemists who cultivate transcendence - there are also alchemists who remain mortal - want truth at any cost. Any. Rogues lack a coherent ideology, are almost all insignificant, and constantly suppressed. Philosophers focus on developing knowledge from certain perspectives; holistic truth is generally not wished for except at the very highest level - and even then, they have limits.

To facilitate the condensation of individual perspectives into greater truths, Philosophers who share similar theses form sects. And so in extremely ancient times, you had things like the Formal Realm Sect and True Equanimity Sect develop equivalent concepts of heavenly motion, each from their own perspective - a martial language in the case of Formal Realm, and a (now long dead) system of notation in the case of True Equanimity.

Dry, no?

The point is, each sect has a central concept, and the Many-Worlds Sect had this one: That there were other worlds. And they didn't mean the type Immortals and Transcendents could create - oh no. Though we would only find out later, their leader knew the Scheme of Totality, and comprehended it, and had walked upon it, peer to the ancient masters of old. And these were not the worlds that any had the strength to create. They were the Worlds; and the Many-Worlds Sect knew them.

This was actually so unspeakably profound that I wondered which Tenma was currently using us as the punchline in its cosmic joke, because that wasn't something a trash sect like Many-Worlds had any business knowing without the Knights annihilating them.

And certainly, one day, they would be annihilated.

Actually, that last bit was the only important one. By joining them, Esorem got to take a suicidal risk.

How could he not?