The day before I was to begin teaching my class of Disciples, I went to Instructor Yuan’s office to get a list of the students who would be in my class. Typically, I would’ve had such a list several days earlier to assist me in making preparations, but because I was not the one in charge of selecting my students, it was delayed.
The instructor’s room was laid out exactly how Grandmaster Ning’s had been, and Instructor Yuan sat behind a wooden desk with two chairs in front of it. After I sat down in one of them, she took out a piece of paper and slid it to me.
“These will be your students. I’ve specially chosen them for you, and I’ll be interested to see what you’re able to do with them.”
Looking at the list, I saw that all of them had well-rounded affinities, but they were all low. No one had any affinity above mid six-star. The only saving grace was that none of their basic affinities were below peak seven-star. In a way, this wasn’t too different from the affinities I had come in with. The biggest difference was their lack of secondary affinities. Only one boy had meaningful secondary affinities, low six-star for wind and lightning. Overall, this was a bit below what I expected from students in the elite classes.
Typically, elite Disciples would have at least one affinity at mid five-star or above. This meant that my students would be at a severe disadvantage in both qi control and cultivation speed. This could be addressed during their first term as Martial Masters, but they would have to make it that far first.
When I looked at their blessings, the students seemed equally mediocre. All their blessings were designed for scholars. One boy had a blessing that improved his calligraphy while one of the girls had one to help her with mathematics. None of them had a blessing that would directly help them with cultivation or any of the cultivation-related professions.
I looked at Instructor Yuan. I was confused by her selection. She might have done this just to spite me, but if I performed poorly, it would reflect poorly on her as well.
“These are the Disciples you chose for me? Can you tell me why?”
I could sense annoyance and a bit of exasperation coming from her.
“I made this selection in coordination with Lord Ning. He believes this is the best group of Disciples to give you. While they all qualified for the elite courses, no Master would normally choose them, so they would be forced into the regular courses.”
She sighed as she looked at me.
“Neither Lord Ning nor I believe that you will follow the normal routine while teaching. This could be good or bad. We don’t know. However, Lord Ning wishes to see what you can accomplish if given free rein, and you will have far more freedom than normal while teaching this group of students. If you fail, the Academy won’t be happy, but you won’t have ruined anyone important. However, if you succeed with these students, it will be seen as a major victory. Either way, if you want unfettered freedom to teach as you wish, these are the perfect students for you.”
Understanding her reasons, I gave the instructor a deep bow. “Thank you for your consideration.”
After accepting my bow, she placed a white jade token on the desk.
“This will allow you access to all the Rank 1 library rooms. You may use it to select techniques to use in class or to study the techniques your students are using, but you will only be allowed copies of the texts you plan to use in class.”
She looked at me seriously.
“Be careful with how you use this. The primary reason the Academy limits a student’s access to techniques is so that they choose the ones they practice carefully and are not overwhelmed by trying to master too many skills at once. I recommend against directly providing them with a core fighting technique or a permanent cultivation technique. They should earn these as your class did. However, as I said before, you are free to do as you wish with this class.”
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Before heading to the library, I needed to make a plan for how I would teach my students. Freedom to access and copy any Rank 1 technique I wanted was a massive boon, and I would definitely abuse it, but how could I use this access to best help my students?
The beginnings of a plan came to mind, and I spent several hours fleshing it out.
When I arrived at the library, it was already late in the day. I went to every room possible and copied all the manuals into my mental library, including the Academy’s Rank 1 techniques for things such as talismans and illusions. These profession-related techniques wouldn’t have too much value without the appropriate training or qi, but I wouldn’t hesitate to take them when they were offered to me like this.
In each of the cultivation technique rooms, I picked out a dozen different techniques to be copied. When I finally left, I had a storage bag bulging with techniques, half a dozen Rank 1 library tokens, and a librarian cursing at me.
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When I entered the classroom for the first time, my students were already waiting for me. There were two boys and three girls. Each of them was only 16 years old.
As I made my way to the front of the classroom, I examined each student with energy vision and saw that none of them had begun trying to cultivate. Before I could begin my lesson plan, I needed to get some qi into them.
I gave them the most authentic smile that I could. “My name is Su Fang. I will be your teacher for this term.”
I reached into my storage bag, took out Low-Yellow cultivation techniques for each of the nine elements, and placed them in front of the class.
“Before you can begin cultivating, you need a technique. Decide which element you want to use and take the appropriate technique.” I gestured to the manuals available. “Do not worry about this being a permanent choice. You will be able to change your decision in the future.”
No one rushed to be the first to choose a technique. They all looked at each other awkwardly, trying to figure out how to respond. While I had expected at least one person to quickly come up and choose a technique, I had considered this possibility as well.
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After half a minute of no one moving, I stacked the techniques together, picked them up, and presented them directly to one of the students at random.
“Choose a technique.”
The girl before me hesitated but eventually took one of the books I was holding out to her. After that, I approached each of the students and forced them to choose one of the remaining technique manuals.
“These are basic Low–Yellow techniques. Cultivate them to the best of your ability and try to break through to Martial Disciple 2 as quickly as possible.”
With techniques in hand, they each took a position on a cultivation mat and began studying their manuals. While three of the students appeared slightly apathetic and sullen, one of the boys gave me the feeling of an interested scholar and one of the girls had an air of fatalistic determination about her.
I had designed this task based on Instructor Yuan having told us that all our students would be knowledgeable about the basics of cultivation and somewhat arrogant. I wanted to see what they could accomplish without guidance.
While Instructor Yuan had said that my only job in the first lesson was to prove to the students that they needed my help, after thinking through a few ideas, I felt that I could also use this lesson as an opportunity to better understand them, how much they already knew, and how much they would be able to accomplish by themselves.
Only the determined girl was able to successfully cultivate the Low-Yellow technique well enough that she would be able to advance within a reasonable amount of time. To help speed up the process, I activated a Qi Gathering Formation. With the addition of this extra energy, everyone started making visible progress.
An hour into the lesson, I called a halt to their cultivation. There was no point in having them spend any more time than necessary poorly cultivating this technique.
“Stop. Out of all of you, only Jin ZiHan has even a chance of reaching Martial Disciple 2 anytime soon. Fortunately, you have all gathered enough energy that we can proceed to the next task.”
I walked closer to them so that they could all easily see what I was doing. I held up my right hand and created a false qi filter using my spirit fire. None of them would have developed qi vision yet, but they could see the spirit fire and sense their own energy.
“This is what I want you all to do. Use your qi and create a facsimile of the filter in your technique manual. Instead of creating it in your body, make it hover above your palm. This is slightly harder than creating a regular filter for cultivation, but everyone’s affinities are more than high enough to do this.”
It took them a significant amount of time, but one by one they were able to form the basic shapes needed.
Once they all had a rough copy of their filters floating above their palm, I used my spirit fire to create examples of the proper filters and overlaid them onto the students’ creations. I wanted to give clear indications of where their filters were correct and where they had problems. I couldn’t easily change the color of my fire, so I had the areas where the student’s filters were correct glow brighter. Once the entire filter was correct, my spirit fire overlay would glow brightly in recognition.
Where Instructor Yuan would have shown dominance by placing the students in a position to fail, I would do so by demonstrating my own depth of knowledge and understanding.
It took them several more minutes to slowly adjust their filters to perfectly align them with the fiery example I provided. They were all inexperienced and had very poor control of their qi, but their affinities were all at least peak seven-star. Even without any prior practice, it was only a matter of an hour before everyone had a correct filter floating in front of them.
As they worked, I didn’t notice any of the brashness that Instructor Yuan had warned us about. Likely, this was because they had already been humbled by their relatively poor affinities and mediocre blessings. For many, including my past self, a peak seven-star affinity would have seemed like an unattainable dream, but these kids were judging themselves against peers with five-star affinities. Their ‘lacking abilities’ meant they nearly weren’t allowed to enroll in this course, and that humbled them more than I ever could.
I took five stacks of techniques out of my storage bag and put them where everyone could see them.
“You have all perfected the filter in the Low-Yellow technique. Now, we will see how far you can push yourselves.”
I pointed to the top techniques on each of the stacks.
“These techniques are Mid-Yellow.” I pointed to the second book on each stack. “These are High-Yellow. As you go down each stack, they continue getting progressively more difficult. At the very bottom is a Peak-Earth technique. Find the stack for the affinity you have been cultivating. Go down it one book at a time and create a perfect copy of the qi filter for each technique. The first person to successfully form the Peak-Earth filter will be granted a token to select a Rank 1 technique from the library.”
This exercise was less about them being about to form a proper qi filter and more about them learning better qi control. Moving their energy into the right place and keeping it there while working on the rest of the filter was a difficult skill to master. Profound and Earth techniques didn’t necessarily have more complicated filters than Yellow techniques did, but I had specifically chosen these techniques in order to create a noticeable, steady difficulty curve. The filters for the Peak-Earth techniques all looked like nothing more than a bundle of knotted and tangled yarn.
As the students practiced and made their ways ever further down their stacks of books, the time they spent on each technique increased.
Whenever one of them picked up a new book, I would provide them with a fiery example of what they were supposed to accomplish. All they had to do was match their qi to the sample filter I provided. Still, none of them got very far on that first day. It wasn’t until the end of the first week that Jin ZiHan was able to create the first Peak-Earth filter and claim the library token for herself.
With this initial goal accomplished, I instructed her to choose a new element to begin working on. For this second element, I did not provide a fiery guide for her. I only gave her a signal after the entire filter was correct to indicate that she was allowed to continue on to the next technique. In the first exercise, she had demonstrated sufficient qi control to create an Earth-Rank filter, this one would teach her to translate a drawing from a book into a correct three-dimensional filter.
These exercises were far from how Instructor Yuan had taught us to approach teaching our students to create perfect qi filters. However, to me, this felt right, and it seemed like it was effective. Her method was more about breaking the students down before building them back up. These students didn’t need to be broken down.
Instead, by using this process, I let them see what they could do and how I could help them. It also allowed me to better understand their current capabilities and where each of them would need my help.
Once each student was comfortable with making all of the filters for their first element, I switched them to a different one as I had with Jin ZiHan. I wanted everyone to have a broad understanding of forming different qi filters. If they were destined to be scholars in the future, this knowledge would be beneficial.
While Jin ZiHan was the quickest, the slowest to progress through the lessons was Leng JunWei. His approach was slow and methodical. He started with the lightning techniques, and when he moved on to the wind techniques, he carefully recorded differences between them and the previous lightning techniques into a notebook.
Close to a month into the class, I repeated the same lesson that Instructor Sun had given my class for managing acupoints and cultivation madness. Using a Rank 3 Qi Gathering Formation, I had them cultivate to Peak Disciple under conditions that guaranteed that they would absorb a significant number of impurities.
From there, we continued with various lessons on cultivation, professions, and martial combat. None of my students had any real gifts to help them succeed in any of these fields, but they all responded well to my lessons and were willing to give it their all.
At the end of the first year, they had their first martial competition, and I could only hope that the dedication they had shown would be enough.