Chapter 137: The Admittance Exam (Patreon)

Liu Wei floated high above the forest beneath him and gazed into the distance where another track of candidates was just approaching the sect. These had to be the ones from the town of Joywater, one of the three gathering points the sect had announced.

The exact location the track was approaching was a large encampment just outside the sect perimeters, where the candidates would be staying. Traditionally, they’d have been housed in the Training Hall, but over the last five years, there had been too many of them to do so. Having lost over six-hundred members in the battle at the Roaring Thunder sect, the sect was looking to replenish its numbers as quickly as possible, so they had been taking in more than the usual one hundred disciples per year.

In order for this to not entail a drop in the average quality of the disciples, they’d had to greatly increase the number of candidates by easing the requirements and hoping to find some of the less visible talent the population had to offer.

Having confirmed the arrival of the last group of candidates, Liu Wei began making his way back to the Training Hall. He’d have to organize the instructors and send out word to the other elders that the exam could start tomorrow.

…

Ye looked down at his breakfast. Bread, cheese and smoked ham, with a couple of fruit to go along with it. Not quite to his liking, but the best there was on offer and honestly a lot better than he had expected to be getting after the sleeping arrangement he’d been made to endure.

It really had been a downgrade, both compared to his usual living standard and even to his time in Joywater. The family elders had warned him about the ascetic lifestyle that was practiced in cultivator sects, but he hadn’t expected being made to sleep in a damned tent. Not just that, he didn’t even get to have it to himself.

Ye glared across the table. Nuo was busy happily gobbling down his third serving of rice of the day while Xinming was doing her best to ignore Meilin as he excitedly chewed off her ear about the properties of a rock he’d found on the way here.

He sighed. He was a generational talent. If the saying about talent attracting talent had any truth to it, he was supposed to be surrounded by the Lunar Peaks Sect’s future elite by now. What disrespect had he shown to his ancestors to be fated to be stuck with those weirdos instead?

“I heard that, you know?”, Xinming stated.

“What?”

“Your exasperated and highly melodramatic sigh, what else?”

Ye groaned. He’d already learned that trying to enter a battle of words with the girl was a decidedly bad idea, so he held back a retort and focused on finishing his breakfast instead.

That turned out to be a good idea pretty soon, because it wasn’t long until a man whose robes identified him as an instructor stepped into their midst.

“Everyone finish up here and start gathering where I and my fellow instructors will point you to. The sect elders will arrive shortly!”

That was enough to send a wave of excitement through all the disciple candidates gathered here, including Ye himself. The elders of the Lunar Peaks Sect were legendary figures, renowned and revered across the sect’s territory.

Breakfast was suddenly very much unimportant as people jumped from their seats and began racing to be the first to arrive.

…

Liu Wei watched from a distance as the stream of children spilled out of the encampment and began gathering into a crowd. More than two thousand of them were present here today, just about as many as the total number of disciples the sect had.

Just as the crowd had finished forming, Liu Wei felt the presence of the other sect elders approaching. Besides Ma Rong, everyone was present, led by Patriarch Zhao. He took to the air to join them, and they jointly made their way towards the crowd.

As they came into view, the crowd fell into a commotion. When they were right above them and the noise didn’t show and sign of dying down, the Patriarch gave a sign to Sun Liang.

“Silence!”, Sun Liang’s shout, empowered by his Qi to the highest degree, boomed across the crowd.

“The Patriarch wishes to speak.”

The crowd quieted down in an instant. A command issued this way by someone of the Dao Contemplation Realm was quite compelling even to hardened cultivators and these were, after all, just children. It was quite the forceful way of shutting them up; Liu Wei could see some of them drop to their knees from the pressure they had just felt.

“Thank you, Elder Liang.”, Patriarch Zhao said. Then he empowered his own voice using his Qi, though his voice was measured and pleasant as he did so.

“Greetings, everyone. I am Sect Patriarch Long Zhao. I welcome all of you to the great Lunar Peaks Sect. Today marks the beginning of the yearly disciple admittance exam, held to determine the next generation of our sect’s disciples. All of you possess talent at cultivation, otherwise you wouldn’t be here today. I hope that, over the following three days, you will be able to show us that talent to its fullest extent. I wish all of you the best of luck in the exam!”

The crowd cheered, though somewhat tentatively, fearful of another reprimand. Instead, Liu Wei waited until the cheers had died down on their own.

“Hello, everyone. I am Liu Wei, head of the Training Hall and as such the chief organizer and overseer of this exam. Like Patriarch Zhao, I would like to welcome all of you here. I will explain the structure of this year’s exam to you, so please pay close attention. One thing before I start with that though:

“The sect is looking to take in around two hundred disciples this year. I’m warning you now, however: You will be judged on the merits you possess, not on how you compare to your fellow disciples. If more of you than expected turn out to meet the standards we have, we will take in more than what we planned. Conversely, if not a single one of you turns out to possess the qualities we expect, we have no problem not taking in any of you. In other words: you will gain no advantage by trying to bring down your fellow competitors.”

That wasn’t entirely truthful, the sect did need to take in disciples after all, but it was an important message to get across. Over the years, they’d witnessed all manner of manipulation attempts, from bribery over poisonings to candidates pushing others off a mountain. From the candidate’s perspective, this made sense in order to reduce competition. From the sect’s perspective it was a massive headache; they were gathering all of these children in order to pick out the most talented among them, not the ones most inclined to backstab others for their own profit.

“I want to make this absolutely clear: The other candidates are your potential future sect-brothers and -sisters, so we want you to treat each other with respect and kindness. If we do notice any sabotage attempts, the perpetrator will not only be disqualified, but they will also be punished according to their actions.”

Liu Wei paused for a couple of seconds, so the meaning of his words had time to sink in. Then he continued.

“With that out of the way, let us speak of the exam. As the Patriarch alluded to, it will take place over the following three days with the results being announced on the fourth or fifth one. For this time, you will be split into groups of ten candidates each.

“To be clear: the performance of the other candidates in your group will have no bearings on your evaluation. However, each group will be assigned a joint exam aide. Your aides will not grade you, but instead help guide you through the different stages of the exam. Meanwhile, the instructors will record your performance and supervise your adherence to the rules.”

The purpose of the aides, who were volunteering disciples, was to fill in for roles that were usually performed by instructors but didn’t strictly need to be, since they were short on personnel to handle this number of candidates.

“The exam is split into several distinct tests that will put different aspects of your ability under scrutiny. You should of course aim to perform well in all of them, but I want to stress that you are not judged on some aggregated total score. We aim to find exceptional talent and such talent is often found in isolation, so an exceptional showing in any of these tests can be enough to let you pass.

“The first test you will face is the physical examination, where you will be tested on your strength, endurance, speed and agility. It will be held in the form of a race, right after we have finished assigning you to your groups.

“Next is the written examination, held tomorrow from morning to afternoon. This one will test your general knowledge, your intelligence and problem-solving-ability as well as your ability to maintain concentration over a long period of time.

“After that we will hold the willpower examination, which, as the name suggests, will be a test of the strength of your will and determination. This may sound like a trifle compared to the other examinations, but once you step into the world of cultivation you will quickly realize how central this quality is to some people’s path. As this will be the shortest of the examinations, we will hold it tomorrow evening after a small break from the written examination.”

While the other examinations had, in one shape or form, always existed, Liu Wei had come up with this one himself. He’d had a vague feeling that there was something that the admittance exam was missing and after looking at the sect’s elders, he’d figured out that it was the core quality of Lan Shi that the sect wasn’t checking for.

“The third day will come with a test that will let you put the abilities we have tested so far to practice: The combat examination. Each of you will be holding three duels against your fellow candidates. You will not be judged purely on whether you win or lose, but on your entire performance during the duels. Just to inform you right now: the duels will be held open to the public and are likely to garner significant viewership from our sect members.

“Finally, we will test your aptitude at Qi manipulation in the Qi affinity examination. All of you have performed a simpler version of this examination when you were tested for the ability to cultivate, but our artifacts are more precise than anything you could find outside of a sect. Of all the tests, this one is given the most weight, as a person’s Qi affinity is generally accepted to be the best indicator for their talent at cultivation.”

While this was true, it was also not nearly as reliable as the confidence in Liu Wei’s voice would make it seem. In reality, figuring out the talent of children largely came down to guesswork. He himself had performed utterly averagely at this test and was only barely accepted into the sect on account of his performance during the written exam and one of the examiners having taken a fancy to him, only to later become known as a generational genius.

Still, it was the best they had to go with. They could, after all, hardly give let anyone who wanted cultivate until they stepped into the Dao Attunement realm to see how well they took to dealing with the Dao. Liu Wei would, of course, have loved nothing more than that, but even if the pillar families’ favoritism and extortion were to cease being a factor, resources were still far, far too limited for something like that. Even in the future he envisioned, they’d need to be distributed by talent and effort, rather than handed out freely.

“Once the results of the examinations have been reviewed and we have selected those of you who will be taken in as disciples, a process that is expected to take between one and two days, the results will be announced publicly. If one of the eight other halls wishes to take you in as an inner disciple, you will be personally approached with the matter. If multiple halls extend an invitation, you may choose freely which one you would like to join. Technically, you may also choose to remain an outer disciple instead, though the benefits of being an inner disciple are many.

“If you are not chosen to become a disciple, you will be escorted back to the gathering points, and your families will be contacted to take you back home. If you have performed well despite not meeting our standards just yet, we will extend an official recommendation to you, which will all but guarantee your acceptance into most of our subordinate sects.”

“That is all for now. Please head to one of the aides now to form groups of ten, they are clothed in red robes to make them easy to identify. I’m sure that all of you are eager to start the first examination, but I ask that you maintain order as you do so. I wish all of you the best of luck.”