Year 658 of the Stable Era,

Fourteenth day of the fourth month

The garden of the Teal Mountain Sect was rather nice, even if it was being taken in in such a fleeting fashion. Smooth stone pavers wound wide paths around trees and ponds, separating the plethora of species brought to the sect by its many members over the centuries. They were a tapestry of tales, each having been added for a reason that mattered to their respective tender.

Some, like the grove of ironwoods being hit by a group of enthusiastic disciples, were cultivation aids. The tree’s strong bark, already akin to its namesake metal, would only grow tougher over the years in the face of such constant tempering, resulting in a training companion that could keep up with the immense lifespan of a cultivator. The largest of the trees loomed over the rest of the grove, its thirty foot diameter mere inches away from pushing the path aside, its scarred bark a testament to millennia of endurance.

Others were more exotic, with far more unclear purposes.

Metal trees of winding copper and ruby berries, that slowly moved their burnished leaves to better catch the sun. Immense lotuses wider than a man, with a rainbow of winding veins emerging from their ivory blooms. A pair of floating birds’ nests, held up by a tree that was only visible in the reflection of a nearby pond. There was even a patch of black sand, where a set of paired pear trees made of living flame bore fruits of perfectly clear water, golden seeds glistening within.

As Ren watched a disciple in heavily padded clothes used a glowing spear to prune one of the trees, the fruit and branch somehow holding their form even after they were separated. He couldn’t even imagine what it would be used for. Was it a pill ingredient? Or was it some sort of condensed source of water qi? Or, after watching the disciple take a hearty bite out of it, what would it even taste like?

And then there were those that, like Founder’s Willow, that were purely aesthetic. Many cultivators maintained hobbies on the long road of immortality and gardening, with its long growth periods, was almost perfectly made for beings who could blink months away. Some of the maintained gardens were immaculately maintained things; perfectly identical flowers spaced at exacting intervals, each the precise shade needed to best complement its companions. Trees, slowly shaped over the decades to form aesthetically pleasing patterns, their shadows casting pleasing images over empty groves of perfectly identical grass.

Ren also spotted a few sections that looked quite overgrown, with grass almost as tall as he was, and smatterings of plants in various stages of fighting for survival. He wondered what led them to being in this state. Were they flights of fancy perhaps? The whim of a cultivator who decided to try his hand at something for a few years before just giving up? Or were their owners simply preoccupied with closed door cultivation, and would one day return to set things right again.

Then again, maybe some were just the way their owners liked them, he thought as he saw one of the rougher looking sections being enthusiastically watered by a burly disciple. The man’s green robe was marked with the white cuffed sleeves of an inner disciple, which explained why the disciples carefully pruning solar oranges in the neighboring section were limiting themselves to just shooting him glares rather than rushing over to forcibly trim back the ramshackle roughage.

Even with their quick pace, which picked up midways through, it still took the applicants a good half an hour to exit the garden. As they wove their way through the sect, Ren swore to himself that he was going to be more diligent in cultivating his body. And his movement techniques. And his qi. Oh ancestors, why were there so many stairs in this sect.

* * *

At the head of the group, Yeung Lin kept walking at his usual pace. Behind him, the applicants struggled along with him, in various stages of exhaustion. He didn’t need to look back to know this, as with his level of cultivation such a simple observance was well within his abilities.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

As cultivator in the Golden Core stage of qi cultivation, it would be the simplest thing for him to simply reach out and feel them with his qi sense. Inexperienced as they were, the applicants would be unable to feel the ephemeral touch of his qi against theirs. Such an overt probing would typically be seen as bad manners among peers, but with such a vast difference in skill it was unlikely to ever be discovered.

As a cultivator in the Body Moulding stage of body cultivation, he could also use his enhanced senses to keep track of their position. He simply needed to increase the potency of his senses. Hearing, smell, instincts; focusing even the slightest bit would allow him to sense every labored step and obvious breath of his charges. The sect’s sprawling design did much to encourage its members to achieve a certain level of physicality, and he found that showing new members that reality as early as possible was best.

And lastly, as a cultivator of the Mind Coalescing stage of mental cultivation, he could always just keep track of them by feeling the presence of their consciousnesses around him. With his mind’s eye he could see the wisps of the soul, those exudences that life produced from its myriad feelings. All but two of the youth were open books, their inner emotions on full display, even if he could see most of them just as plainly with his normal eyes.

Yeung Lin’s prowess in cultivating the three pillars of cultivation was a source of pride for him, as it was rare for a cultivator to reach the third stage of each, much less before their first millennia. While most focused on cultivating their strengths, he remained a pure generalist. After all, a strong foundation was built on even ground.

Thanks to this mentality he had been able to overcome several of the stumbling blocks that had plagued his peers, a direct result of the wider understanding of cultivation his chosen path granted him. Said understanding was also what had allowed him to develop the technique he was using to observe the applicants: his ‘Eyes on the Back of His Head’ technique.

While a Body Reshaping cultivator could simply grow a second set of eyes on the back of their skull, Lin had been able to produce a similar effect a stage early after experimenting with combinations of mental and qi sensing techniques for a few decades. He’d originally developed it to get back at some friends that had enjoyed sneaking up on him a little too much, but he’d quickly realized that there were far more practical applications to being able to expand his field of vision in any direction. While it would take at least another few decades to refine it into the quality where it could be considered a true teachable technique, it served as an affirmation that his cultivation as on the right path.

So, it was good to see that some of the applicants had already begun to expand their horizons in similar ways. The Bailong boy he had expected; the family had always set high expectations for their members, even ones that were applying to sects far below their status. The other he hadn’t. He’d have to go through the applicant list again to confirm their identity, as he’s just skimmed the pages marked important, but if they made it through the tests they would definitely be someone worth watching.

Stopping in front of the nephrite pedestal of the statue of Lee Taijin carving his first floating mountain, Yeung Lin stopped to check his timepiece as he waited for the applicants to catch up to him. They were such handy little things, these new clockwork devices. It had only been a century or four since their invention, and they’d already gone from being the size of a large man to the size of said large man’s hand.

All the alchemists swore by them, and he could see the appeal. They kept far more accurate time than the old water clocks and, most importantly, they synchronized with each other incredibly easily. Which is how he knew that even if it took the husky young heir of the Min family another 3 minutes to reach them, they would still be able to enter the hall 5 minutes ahead of schedule. He was proud of the boy. They usually had one or two applicants get lost and drop out each year, but he'd managed to keep up.

“Well then,” he announced, projecting his voice so that the straggler could clearly hear him, “we have arrived at our destination. Behind me is a statue of our illustrious founder, Lee Taijin, the Strongest Brain. It is a common practice for disciples to rub his feet for good luck before exams and missions. To your right is storage pagoda number five and the general assembly hall, where we will be holding the opening ceremony. And to your left is the skydock. Should you fail the application exam, the boat to take you back to Red River City is docked in berth four.”

Yeung Lin paused to put his timepiece back in his storage ring, before remembering he had one last thing he was supposed to say. “There is also a skiff to take you to the sect’s entrance every other hour if you were accompanied to the sect. And now that you are all here, let us proceed.”

Without another word, he turned and began walking towards their destination, this time at a pace slow enough that the applicants were easily able to keep up. As they passed the statue he watched out of the back of his head as many of them reached out to rub the statues, some far more vigorously than others. He chuckled to himself. No matter the age, kids never changed.

Not that luck would help them much with this year’s test.