After ten days of practice the fisherman's daughter was the only one of the eighteen to master the Stellar Flash Steps sufficiently that Elder Yu Yong might have allowed her to practice using it. However, she had not yet accumulated sufficient qi to perform the maneuver safely and was firmly forbidden any attempted demonstrations.

  Instead, Liao found the third week dawned with considerable progress of his own in filling his dantian to the point that he was now second in the class. Only the waifish girl, who seemed to possess an education far in advance of everyone else, surpassed him, and she had been in the lead from the start. This progress astounded him, though it also provided a sense of just how far he had to go. Even if his pace continued to grow as it had been doing, weeks of meditation remained before he could even contemplate reaching out to connect the first meridian.

  Learning the movement technique had been less efficient. He was progressing with the stances, but shifting between them proved to be something of a block. He would try to switch from one position to the next, from particle to wave, only to end up horribly off-balance. Face-first falls into the hard dirt were frequent, and though that was a status he shared with most of the others, this time there had been no pulse of enlightenment to ease his progression. The elder's diagnosis was, thankfully, succinct and to the point. “You are over-committing. You are trying to shove your body from one move to the next. Stop. Imagine the sequence, find the rhythm of your steps.”

  Sound advice. Easy to understand. Far more difficult to implement.

  As the third week began, Elder Yu Yong changed the daily schedule once again. “As we have covered most of the basic aspects of life in the sect, and as you all better prepared to devote the majority of your day to exertion by this point, lecture time will be reduced. Meditation will continue to occupy the mornings, but the afternoon will be divided between continued movement technique practice and weapons practice.” He reached back and drew a diagram on the slate.

  “As I explained earlier,” Liao's quick check of the expressions on his fellow recruits' faces suggested he was not alone in having forgotten this particular lecture. “All weapon arts used by the Celestial Origin Sect are combined into one overarching composite: the Nine Spheres Arsenal Method. This unified approach to combat training combines barehanded techniques, conflict footwork, and the use of nine different weapons. Today we will begin with the fundamentals, and throughout the rest of the week you will be introduced to each of the nine weapons the sect utilizes.”

  Nine little images in chalk, each easily recognizable to teenagers raised on stories of cultivators, were linked in a circle. They drew in every eye present.

  “Pay attention!” Yu Yong suddenly thundered. “While you will learn to wield and maintain all nine of the arsenal's weapons, every cultivator inevitably specializes, finding one approach best linked to their dao. This week will include the first step upon that path, the beginning of a specialization that will follow you the rest of your life. Test yourself against each weapon, seek out the one that suits you, that resonates with everything you've discovered while meditating.” He leaned forward, face pulled tight, emphasis embedded in every syllable. “It is critical that you make this choice correctly. Travel any distance down the wrong path and struggle to return to the correct one is terribly difficult, often impossible. If an obvious choice does not emerge, wait. Further guidance will not harm your progress. I will be watching carefully. If I pull you back, understand that this is my reason.”

  The elder had never justified himself to the students in any decision before.

  “Why do we even need to learn a weapon technique at all?” this question came from the thin girl who led them in cultivation. Her name, Liao had eventually learned, was Zhou Hua, something he had learned third hand, for though she asked more questions of the elder than the rest of the class combined, she spoke to her classmates even less than Liao did.

  “Does the dao demand we learn to fight? How could the true dao be so limited?” A sharp tinge of pride, the first sign that this girl was a teenager like the rest of them, emerged as she dared the elder to challenge this seemingly ironclad philosophical statement.

  Everyone in the class turned their heads towards the girl, eager to watch the imminent clash unfold. Elder Yu Yong, however, disappointed them all by simply bypassing the issue. “The dao does not demand you learn to fight. The dao does not demand anything. The sect, however, gives much and demands much in return, and combat is one of those demands. We are in a war of survival!” His words boomed as he turned his head eastward toward the looming shadow of the Starwall. It easily dominated the horizon beyond their little hall. “Beyond those walls lie the Killing Fields, where demons infiltrate every year. Past that, the Ruined Wastes have consumed the whole of the world, and demons haunt them in numbers uncounted. Demons that seek to consume the qi of every living soul in this land, from the greatest of elders to the youngest infant. The sect defends those walls, for only the sect can. Mortals cannot stand before demons and live. Every one of you will, in time, undertake that duty. You will fight the demons, and some of you will perish doing so, in order to preserve the lives of all who shelter behind you. This must be done, and if you cannot find the courage within to stand and face this threat to the existence of all, then you will never find the dao.”

  Zhou Hua, whatever else she might be, was very intelligent, and her reasoning encompassed recognition that this was a point upon which the elder was not to be challenged again, ever. Several others in the group took more joy in witnessing her comeuppance than the declaration that had been made, only to be silenced in their snickering by Yu Yong's furious glare. Liao found he was possessed by a deep determination to stare directly ahead at the black slate, eyes frozen.

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  “You do not understand, not yet,” Yu Yong no longer looked at the class. The walls consumed the whole of his sight. “But you will. Once you have filled your dantians and become immune to the influence of the demon plague. Then, you will walk the walls and see the true face of our enemy. For now it is my task to prepare you, to make you ready for the day that moment comes. Now, up, out to the yard. We will begin.”

  Anger did not dissipate swiftly in an elder cultivator. Though Yu Yong revealed nothing to external observation, his actions were not so easily smothered. Once he had taught them the simplest of the barehanded martial arts forms the class was subjected to endless cries of 'again!' The onslaught of repetition seemed truly endless, and left all eighteen recruits destroyed upon the earth. By the time the evening meal was served Liao could barely hold his chopsticks. Unable to keep his arm steady, he was forced to hold his bowl against his chin several times during the evening meal lest he drop it to the floor.

  He did not meditate that night. Even the effort required to crawl onto his couch and pull the blankets over his body left him utterly exhausted.

  Each of the nine days to follow, though less intense, was much the same. In the morning they discovered the training yard had been filled by figures made of straw in loose imitation of the human form. These training dummies numbered eighteen, one for each recruit. A barrel full of training weapons, made of weighted wood or bundled bamboo, had been similarly placed at the corner of the space. The students were admonished to use these only as instructed. Yu Yong arrived each day with an expression suggesting that anyone who attempted to treat them as toys would be subject to the harshest discipline.

  Two boys tried anyway. They were made to run laps until they collapsed and were dragged back to their rooms by gray-robed servants. That humiliation was one capable of lingering for decades.

  As its name implied, the Nine Spheres Arsenal utilized forms for nine different weapons. The elder brought forth combat ready examples at the beginning of each day.

  The axe was first. It made a considerable impression.

  Unlike certain weapons of war, witnessed only in stories and tales, every one of the recruits was familiar with axes. All of the boys and most of the girls had spent many hours using them, chopping and splitting wood. They carried expectations of a heavy, thick, and powerful implement of devastating swings.

  That was not what was brought before them.

  Yu Yong's axe, which he placed against the black slate to highlight every feature in contrast, was a sleek, finely ground thing with a narrow, sharply pointed head clearly intended to slice through flesh, not tree trunks. Not a tool but a weapon, these implements radiated a sense of deadliness even when passed around in blunted training form. When handled and directed through swift cuts and rapid sweeps, this impression only redoubled.

  A hatchet, smaller than a woodcutter's axe or even these weapons of warfare, was a common tool for a trapper to carry. Liao knew it well, and had taken the lives of any number of small creatures, especially fish, with a single downward chop. Despite that familiarity, the weapon felt uncomfortable in his hands, and the moves he was directed to practice seemed to fight against his intentions. His qi did not flow through those patterns naturally, and forcing it accomplished little.

  He was not alone in such difficulties. Only one of the eighteen, a tall and slender boy from one of the southern farming villages, took to the axe. His natural aptitude and affiliation for the weapon was obvious, it danced like a living creature in his hands, hungry to embed itself in the flesh of his foes. Yu Yong made everyone watch, that they might understand and recognize such compatibility.

  Few found disappointment in moving on from axes. Axes might be useful, but they lacked for glamour and pride of place in the legends. The most prestigious of the nine weapons was the straight sword, or jian, for the Celestial Mother herself carried such a blade in battle. It was destined to be the last weapon they tested.

  Axe. Blade. Bow. Chakram. Dagger. Halberd. Mace. Spear. Sword. Each of the nine weapons of the arsenal passed through every hand. No one asked why this nine and not some other assembly of implements of death. Orday had chosen these weapons for her followers. All others were unnecessary. Invariably every new cultivator displayed a connection with at least one of the weapons.

  The spear was the most common choice. Fully eight of the eighteen adopted this unimposing but mighty option. Two each chose the sword and halberd, and one fourteen-year-old apiece adopted the final six. Part of this latter group, Liao found himself alone holding a bow at the end of the week. To stand by himself before the elder was somewhat intimidating, but he was absolutely certain he'd made the correct choice.

  Even after an unexpected complication was added to the mix.

  “The bow is used at a distance,” Yu Yong noted the obvious. “You will need to choose a secondary weapon for close in use.”

  “Daggers,” the word spilled out of Liao's mouth without hesitation or any realization that he was even making a decision. It simply was the path.

  “Excellent,” the elder sounded satisfied by both this choice and the speed with which it was made.

  Everyone's weapon choice was recorded, but the training blades were returned to their barrels each evening. There would be no taking them home for night practice, not yet. Only supervised practice was allowed. Safety was one reason stated for this decision, but the other was incentive. “Once you progress beyond this class you will enroll in the Weapon Hall of your chosen component of the arsenal. There you will truly start your journey down the path of martial pursuits. While we are here the battle techniques of each sphere,” there were seven for each weapon. “Will remain no more than words on a page.”

  The number of students meditating at night increased considerably thereafter.

  In this way their first month as cultivators came to an end. Qing Liao found it all blurred together utterly in his memory. He recalled little of the long lectures, and realized that somehow he'd spent the entirety of the month broadly confined to two small buildings. He had not traveled such little distance in a month in any time he could recall, perhaps not since he'd first learned to walk.

  He ought to have missed the forests and itched to stride down the trails. Meditating that night, he realized that he did, in fact, yearn for that. He did not want to stay in this compound, adjacent to the city, forever. He wanted to go back home. He had no wish to spend his days sitting and studying.

  Despite this, he also knew that none of that mattered, for now. It would come. He needed to draw the stars close first.