Elder Yu Yong spent a week running his recruits through cultivation exercises. It was, for most, the longest ten days of their lives. By the end of it Liao had spent so much time seated on the weighted cushions that he could not rise or descend without pain, though such agonies were not easily differentiated from the general soreness that consumed every part of his body. The exercises had been increased each day, until it felt like stepping into the field meant insertion into a human-sized vise while the elder squeezed. There was nothing that did not hurt in some way.

  The group was worn hard, taken to the very edge of what fourteen-year-old bodies could sustain. They stuffed heaping quantities of meatless meals into their mouths, but even this could not keep them ahead of exhaustion. Rice, noodles, mushrooms, beans, and more types of fruit and vegetables than Liao had ever known existed were crammed into their bellies. It all somehow tasted fantastic and left him feeling strong at the same time. He'd never eaten so much, or so well, in his life, but even after only ten days the absence of meat certainly made itself known. Creativity with sauces could only do so much to hide the deficiency of that distinctive flavor.

  Such a lack was not new to him, life in the mountains meant one ate whatever foods the forest provided, even if that meant the same thing every day for a week, but he not expected to face such constraints in the sect.

  A single week had seen the obliteration of more than a few illusions.

  Such lost dreams had not come without commensurate progress. Liao had reached the point were he could reliably, if feebly, cultivate. The moments of effective meditation, where the stellar qi flowed into his dantian rather than drifting about and slipping from his grasp, grew longer every day. Consistently lagged, and he struggled to gather in the essence efficiently, but he could feel the difference.

  Elder Yu Yong had begun to offer personalized instruction, starting midway through the week. The veteran cultivator told him that his intuitive grasp was the best in the class, but he needed to properly refine the theory and convert it to practical action. Until then, he would continue to lose the overwhelming share of his potential gains. It sounded simple, but improvements remained stubbornly difficult to achieve.

  In the rough ranking of progress that inevitably resulted when gathering a group of teenagers together in anything even remotely resembling a competition, something keeping the students isolated on their cushions completely failed to prevent from forming, Liao found himself in fourth. He found that he was perfectly content with that position. Absent any desire to rank first, or to demonstrate some kind of intellectual or physical superiority, superlatives others were quite willing to contest, he simply continued to work on the method for itself, for the echo of that feeling of oneness with the stars.

  Nothing more was necessary.

  No one, least of all the elder, complained about this lack of cutthroat motivation. A cultivator's efforts to discard distractions were always an accepted and encouraged part of doctrine.

  Slowly, Liao condensed drops of qi in his dantian. It was far from filled, especially as it grew its bounds with each cultivator session, however minutely. Steady progress occurred nonetheless, and by heading the directive to refine his approach over and over, more drops were added each day than the day before. He found that very satisfying. Plenty of food, a room with blankets where he was never, ever cold, and advanced upon his assigned tasks, these states combined to leave him happy. Not glamorous, but he took joy in the mundane.

  Certainly he was sufficiently satisfied to avoid borrowing the misery of those who squabbled with the elder or tried to prove themselves superior to the other recruits.

  This left him largely alone and ignored, but though he missed his family, that did not bother him much.

  In the second week, Elder Yu Yong upended the developing dynamic and hierarchy of the recruits effortlessly when, following the midday meal, he informed them exercise was canceled and ordered them back to their seats instead. “Today,” he introduced the new topic brightly. “I will begin teaching you the Stellar Flash Steps.”

  These words drew gasps from many.

  Yu Yong ignored such outbursts entirely. “This movement technique will form the foundation of your practice as cultivators. It will be, for the rest of your lives, the primary means by which you unleash qi from your reserves. Some come here thinking weapon work or artistry predominate, but even the most dedicated warrior cannot fight all day long, and the most committed craftsman must likewise take breaks. Motion, by contrast, is fundamental to life. You will learn to use the Stellar Flash Steps always, with every stride you take, until it is an extension of your natural motion. It will become a seamless extension of your body's activity, your every step fluid and swift as light.”

  As he said this, Elder Yu Yong, without giving any indication of variation, simply pacing about as he always did, appeared to vanish from one side of the hall and appear at the opposite. He gave not the least sign that anything unexpected had occurred. His stride remained completely regular. Nor did it change when he stepped back to his original position, covering dozens of meters in two strides.

  The only way the eyes could be trusted to accept this seemingly impossible motion was through the strange echo it imparted to the elder's words.

  “Much as the Celestial Infusion Method was devised by study of emanations of the stars,” the elder ignored the gasps that followed his darting about without warning. Bug-eyed stares would not suffice to halt his lectures. “The Stellar Flash Steps draws upon a different property of light uncovered by Orday. Light,” he said simply. “Is not still. Light moves.” He turned, face toward the students once more as he said this. Eyes flashing with inner fire. “Observation of the sunset should suffice to make this clear. It merely appears still because it is faster than limited minds, even the minds of cultivators, can easily grasp. Even the mightiest of celestial ascendancy realm Grand Elders struggle to enhance their perception sufficiently to focus qi and grasp a fleeting glimpse of light in motion. Orday, as you may imagine, achieved this.”

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  Everyone nodded. None of the students, and certainly not Liao, would doubt any feat credited to the Celestial Mother. She had ascended. Anything could have been granted her memory and it would not be counted impossible.

  “Light is faster than anything,” the explanation continued. “Faster than the swiftest diving bird, than the crack of a whip, or even the stone-shattering pulse of an earthquake. To be, to move, as light is to go beyond perception.” There was a pause as the elder wisely pulled back. “But such feats are far away in your futures. For now, each of you will learn the motions, patterns, and stances used to push your qi through the necessary channels of enhancement. Do not worry. This technique, like light itself, contains multitudes. Even within the limitations of the least recruits it can be of great use, and it will grow alongside you as you rise in cultivation, remaining an essential tool to even the greatest elders. Just as important, it is a suitable means to practice channeling and releasing qi, though none of you have quite arrived at that point.”

  At this point gray-robed servants began to pass out explanatory booklets. These, Liao noticed immediately, were considerably thicker than the ones that explained the Celestial Infusion Method. He did not look forward to struggling his way through so many words.

  “Each of you will be given time to familiarize yourselves with the first step of the movement technique. After that we will conduct exercises. For that purpose I will break the class apart into groups according to your readiness to utilize qi actively.” These words carried with them audible resignation,a deliberate weariness the elder intended the recruits to recognize. It seemed Yu Yong had little patience for the sort of petty infighting this form of division would inevitably unleash.

  Nevertheless, by the time the next bell rang he moved through the hall and partitioned the eighteen without a shred of hesitation or mercy.

  Four groups were created this way, and their size was not even. The weakest group was comprised of the three students whose bodies were not yet ready to begin even after ten days of vigorous exercise and strengthening. The most advanced group was also the smallest, a single fisherman's daughter who could swim and dive with great skill and had demonstrated such superior spatial awareness that teaching her alongside the others would apparently hold everyone back instead. The remaining two groups each had seven members, separated not based on any physical capability, but on their cumulative accumulation of qi up to this point.

  It seemed that failure to progress in lesson one incurred a debt against lesson two. Liao suspected, and from the looks that passed among the youths he was far from alone in doing so, that this gap would only widen when it came to future added topics. Little wonder then that they'd been told not to make friends.

  He was placed in the more advanced of the two groups, and from the instant of division felt stirred by a great determination to maintain that status.

  “Light moves both fluidly, as water does, and in pulses, as a spark cast from a fire or a jumping grasshopper might,” Yu Yong walked around the all in the courtyard. “The art of the Stellar Flash Steps is in adopting these two states in tandem, projecting them onto the essence of pure motion, and the terrain before you, and then shifting back and forth between them. For now we will begin by practicing the stances.”

  The books they'd been given specified fourteen different positions, seven each for waves and particles respectively. One by one they contorted their bodies to hold each one. The elder shouted out postural corrections, allowed them to reposition, and then repeated the sequence.

  Liao had never thought simply standing in place and holding a fixed pose would be difficult, but the Stellar Flash Steps demanded strange bends to the torso, odd directions of the feet, and twists and turns that resembled no natural human motion. Strains blossomed along muscles and tendons unused to such stresses. By the time dinner was called everything hurt, unfamiliar alien pains that arrested natural motion.

  No one else suffered any less. The class collectively crept and dragged their bodies back to their cushions, a march of the invalid.

  “Difficult, is it not?” Yu Yong concluded for everyone. “But the foundation is key. Once you have mastered posture you can begin to add motion to the sequence. Only then will you find it possible to move about unassisted. When that has been achieved you can add qi to the process, enhancing your bodies in support of your actions. All of you should have some idea of what this can achieve when synthesized.” His words called up memories of the journey to the sect. “With this technique you can cross the land in hours, become untouchable in combat, and stride across the sky itself as a streak of light. The possibilities are boundless. Immortals can even surmount the sky itself.”

  He spun around them, a living blur of motion. “Be patient and work hard. Continue your meditation, you will need to make progress in gathering and controlling qi before you can empower the steps properly.”

  Heading this advice, and also because it hurt to even stand, Liao spent his evening meditating. This kept his mind away from the endless aches of his muscles. This time he sat outside, despite the cold, for the vista of the stars above helped him focus and enhanced his progress.

  Over the next several days, as continuing exercise and instruction left them all an exhausted mess, he noticed that while it occasionally rained and even once briefly covered the courtyard in a light snow, the skies over the sect were always clear. When night came the stars were endlessly visible, obscured by nothing. Even the moon seemed to dance aside from the circle of sky above the red-timber structures.

  “It's a formation effect,” Yu Yong told him when he asked. “And a fairly simple one. There are far more formidable defenses laid atop the walls and throughout the Killing Fields. We will cover such topics soon enough.” It was a simple but effective answer, one that fully satisfied Liao's curiosity. He did not need to know how it worked, it was nice enough that the stars were always visible.

  By the time the second week came to an end he was conducting his nightly meditations seated atop the roof of the little barracks, balanced on the ceiling tiles. The view there, free of obscuring buildings, measurably improved his qi condensation. This more than compensated for the way his aching muscles protested the ascent up the slick walls.

  One of the servants caught a glimpse of him as he shimmied up the corners. The middle-aged man scowled at this, but said nothing. Apparently something as minor as climbing a wall did not suffice to allow a mortal to counter a cultivator. Liao marveled at this, the way the servants, many of them of respected aged status, were endlessly deferential. They were also remarkably silent, saying almost nothing at all when within the sect walls, not even to each other. Yet such curiosities swiftly faded into the background.

  He quickly grew used to having others prepare his meals, clean his clothes, and tidy up his little room. He could have done all these things himself, though the barracks had neither kitchen nor laundry, and the servants answered no questions as to their location. All such mundane chores were eliminated from their schedules, allowing maximum focus on cultivation.

  The elder never bothered to explain this. He would simply praise those who made the best use of their time to expend maximum effort whether they made any progress or not. Though this method was somewhat difficult to understand as it seemed to disregard results, none of the recruits could find the will to question the elder's approach.