In spite of how close so many people can become in the Academies, it’s usually a rather lonely affair. It’s different for those from the third ring- most who come to the Academies are supposed to be true geniuses, representing their sects to show that the third ring still has vitality, are still forces to be contended with, even as they send their prodigies off to learn at the Empire’s hands. Thus, most arrive here at Core Formation at the earliest, at great expense. For those from the second ring, sometimes whole groups come together, like with Xin Xi and his fellow; entourages of cultivators, friends, allies, proper classes, sometimes starting at Qi Gathering realm.
It makes a lot of those from the third ring at least somewhat outcasts. It’s subtle, especially as their strength progresses and the upper floors allow more and more independent study, but it still feels strange to be in a place full of so many people, yet feel so alone.
Though technically Shin Ren is never alone nowadays.
The upper floors of the Core Formation part of the building are interesting. The Qi density is, in theory, intense enough that one could cultivate and achieve results anywhere in the building, and runic array set up in different chambers can even generate environmental or conceptual types of Qi, for a limited time. The hallways are austere, not as ornate as one might expect, with enchanted glow-stones that dot the ceiling in even patterns and illuminating walls of rich wood paneling that make up the walls and floor, leaving the ceiling a pale white stone to add a little extra illumination.
Aside from the pillars that allow the staircases to move up and down between the floors, each room is different. The top floor of Core Formation holds six libraries, each spatially overlapping with the libraries on the lower floors to allow ease of research, with two to each side of the pyramid. In between them are most of the living quarters, with individual bedrooms, bathrooms, and meditation suites for hundreds of cultivators, usually almost always full, and, as one comes in closer to the center where the pillars lie, they give way to lecture halls, areas that emulate open-air terrain, and spaces to mingle and socialize. Towards the very center lie the training halls, each one altered to hold miles of terrain within their already expansive chambers, and surrounding each of the hundred halls are armory rooms and teleportation arrays to medical pavilions nearby.
Overall, it’s the perfect space for cultivation, for training, for learning, and even for making alliances and testing oneself.
It’s just… not very friendly. Partially by intent.
Shin Ren spends his first day back overwhelmingly in the libraries, poring through a dozen different scrolls detailing some of the history of the Blades.
The first scroll he finds, Histories of the Empire’s Great Myths, reinforces some of the tales he already knew about them, all the way back from the founding of the Empire. Three thousand years ago, the Emperor began his first great work of raising from the ground the first ring of the holy Empire. While this isn’t the great expansion, wherein the Empire spread its borders throughout all the civilized lands, it’s considered by many to be the moment when the Emperor Above Emperors solidified itself as the true power of the region, beyond compare.
And it’s when the Blades first gained the name.
There were only two to begin with, the First and Second Blades of the Emperor. The First Blade, which has never been harmed, never been wounded, never lost any sort of battle throughout all the millennia of her power. She has no other names and no other titles, and there are many who claim that she Cut them away from herself until all that remained was the Blade supreme. The Second Blade, on the other hand, was the warmonger of the two, a great and violent beast of a man who went by the name of Un. He betrayed the Emperor after the formation of the great pillar of the first ring, attempting to slay his master when it was weakened from its great work, but was defeated and vanquished by his apprentice Rin Zhi, the current Second Blade, now known as the Cleaver, whose Cuts cleave reality as if it were flesh.
Between the two of them, it’s said that they held off all the armies of all the nations in the world. Everywhere they stood, none could pass, and the great working of the Emperor came to be beneath their swords. In the myth, they fought dragons and Daemons, against sects whose names are still honored and remembered like the Blessed Sky sect and the Divine Swords sect, against alliances and monstrous beasts alike, and came out victorious.
Then, during the great conquest, came the next two Blades.
The Third Blade has the name of Z-127, and is said to be the sole survivor of one of the great atrocities of the war of expansion. What was soon to be called the second ring was, at the time, a series of disconnected nation states, most of whom sought to slaughter each other perpetually. When the Empire brought forth its holy pedestal of the first ring, they claimed insult, that it had divided a balance and destroyed a false peace between them. Supposedly, one of these would-be kingdoms enlisted children as slaves and experiments, that they might be trained in Dao and augmented by ritual and surgery from a young age. Z-127 is the last of their last group, having slain all their fellows after achieving enlightenment and accepting the Emperor’s reign as truth. It is said that their blade unmakes all life that it Cuts, such that all that lives cannot survive is proven not to be upon encountering them. Supposedly the Third Blade earned their rank by killing the entirety of the nation that demanded their fealty, and gracing the Emperor with the heads of every one of its leaders. Despite this, they rejected gaining any other name, going only by what they were called as a weapon and slave.
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The Fourth Blade, on the other hand, is considered the most eccentric of them all. He was born in the war, a conflict that was unjustly dragged out by the former kingdoms and pretend empires of the earlier era, and it’s said that he spent much of his time in the depths of that conflict. He was part of a raider clan, one of the groups which fed on suffering and death, but after experiencing crippling defeat and the loss of his sister, he redeemed his soul and came to the light of the Emperor’s vision, mastering an aspect of the Cut. Now Kai, the Fourth Blade, is a hunter of masters, capable of Cutting through Qi itself and specializing in the destruction of any technique, artifact, or impenetrable defense.
It does not take more than a glimpse of the face, photo-realistically drawn on the scroll, to recognize the Blade that came for his master.
The Fifth Blade is the one with the least information, and the one with the closest ties to the Academies. While it’s said that Kai visited and learned from them, the Fifth was a student who came millenia after the great wars, during another time of upheaval. Her name is Yula, her family name erased by something that is described in the scroll as “an all-consuming mass of all that could not be”. She earned her title by confronting this very… thing, somehow achieving a Cut so supreme that it erased her opponent from existence itself. Like it had never even been. She has been spoken of as the second coming of a Sword Saint, a possible equal to the First Blade someday.
The myth ends with all that was unmade by the beast being returned unto reality, creating a positive final note for the story, but that part feels… a bit too clean compared to the rest.
Five Blades, five tools with which the ruler of the greatest Empire in the history of the world can excise away any threat. Each one strong enough to vanquish armies, each one undefeated in battle since achieving their titles, and each one single handedly responsible for securing the Empire against the greatest possible threats.
Now, it’s important not to judge people by their history. Shin Ren is well aware that people can change.
But the Fourth Blade attacked his master without any reason, smiling with a jackal’s grin the whole while.
And he, along with four of the five Blades, are warmongers, soldiers who, even in the most benevolent of myths, have watered the earth deeply with the deaths of whole armies and whole nations.
Most of the scrolls and books he finds afterwards expand on a lot of those myths, or bring up tales that never quite made it into the annals of history in quite the same way. Theories on Enemies of the Empire speaks to some details and hints of what Yula the Sword Saint may have fought, and has a rather extensive list of organizations and names listed as vanquished by a few of the other Blades. Mysteries of the First Blade goes into some of the unconfirmed rumors about her and her exploits, detailing a few of the more famous duels she was a part of and confirming (to the best of the the writer’s knowledge) the fact that she’s never been wounded in combat.
Then come the more interesting ones, the ones that take a bit longer to find.
The True History Of The Cleaver details some of the controversies surrounding the Second Blade and his exploits, going into detail about what it claims really happened during his master’s betrayal in the foundation of the first ring. It goes into detail about how there are differing stories about the supposed cruelty of Un, the original Second Blade, and that while it’s unclear exactly who Rin Zhi was among his followers, none of them had such conflicts in their histories. Supposedly his second in command was a known cannibal, his third known for leading his men into the slaughter not just of soldiers but whole towns and cities. Rin Zhi is named only as “Un’s apprentice”, but what that means, and why there are so few records of his name otherwise, paint a strangely obscured picture.
As for Z-127… well, frankly, there’s barely any mention of what their old kingdom was. It was supposedly erased from history on the Emperor’s command to honor the slaughter that its Third Blade committed, but that leaves only the fact that at some point, some empire existed, and supposedly one of their child soldiers slaughtered either their army and leaders… or the entire country. The closest he gets to finding some kind of truth about its history comes in a book called Forgotten Kingdoms: The Lost History Of The Expansion, which took him a good few days to find and really only had superficial details about its subject matter. The majority of the work was taken up by philosophical discussions on the righteousness of erasing one’s opponents and dishonoring history, with only occasional references to what those enemies were, and only holding a single mention of a place called the “Xenuous Alliance”, which is one of the only ones he can’t find referenced anywhere else, and that’s not exactly concrete.
Overall, Shin Ren comes to a rather disappointing but expected conclusion- he’s not going to find the answers he needs in the official libraries. The context is helpful, it opens up new questions that are useful indeed, but if he’s going to find out more, he needs to find the right people to actually ask.
Two distinct possibilities, then. He can either find one of the Imperial masters, those who give lectures and assign the tests to mark progress at different points in the academic year… or he can wander out of the Soldier’s Academy and into the Scholars. If the libraries here hold works that have gotten him started so well, then whatever books the sister building to this Academy holds must be on an entirely different level.
Either way, his paths take him deeper into the Academies, which requires work.
Either he’ll need to test well enough to be allowed entry to the Scholar’s Academy, or he’ll need a pass from someone with authority. Considering how he’s pretty sure he doesn’t have years and years of studying to figure out how to test into the Scholar’s Academy directly, he’ll need to impress someone enough to secure a pass, something not given out quite as freely as the other, more universal resources inside the pyramids.
He needs to go to the training halls and find someone to spar with. He needs to prove, beyond a shadow of doubt, that his “fall” in cultivation has given him greater strength, that he might impress the benevolent, Emperor-chosen masters of the inverted pyramids of the Academies.