Entering The Arcane Tower Sect

“I’m Maria Del’Gado, primary cultivation instructor for the lower grades,” the beautiful woman said, introducing herself. Her platinum hair blew in the fiery breeze, azure blue robes whipping around her full figure. “Cultivation is the core of martial arts, and the only path to immortality.”

“I am Nushi El’Mar, primary weapon art instructor for the lower grades,” the man with the chiseled face, tan skin, and brown pony tail said. His voice was masculine, but also charming. “While cultivation will empower your blade, without mastery of the sword, you will surely fall in battle long before you attain immortality.”

“While the others are correct in their assessments,” the feminine looking man in the middle said, “Without the arts of crafting, inscription, and array formation, they would have no sword to lift, no art to wield, and no roof above their head! Therefore, the crafting arts are the superior path to the cultivator! Keep that in mind! I am David Ling, crafting instructor for the primary grades of the Arcane Tower Sect. Over the next four years, you five will study under us as you fight to ascend through the trials of the Arcane Tower. Are you ready to begin?”

David asked kindly, a smile in his face.

Then, all at once, Wei and his team stepped forward and shouted, “We are!”

”Hehehehe,” Maria giggled girlishly, even though she was a full grown woman. “In that case, let’s go!”

The next moment, the transmission array magic whirled around them, bright white lights clouding their vision. Wei Wang felt the familiar sensation of his body twisting and turning through space, and then next moment he landed on a soft floor in a small, quaintly decorated room.

It appeared they were in some kind of classroom. The three instructors stood at the front of the room. Behind them was a blackboard, and to the side was a podium for lecturing.

There were several long wooden tables arranged throughout the room, but it didnt seem like this classroom was big enough to hold more than ten or fifteen students, max. In fact, the five of them were already plenty. Along with the three instructors, it felt quite cozy here.

Not only that, but along the walls were plush leather couches that looked like you could sink into a disappear. In other places, the walls were lined with bookshelves, and seemed to be full of books on combat arts and cultivation. These weren’t jade tablets, however, but simply conventional instruction manuals.

“We are now on the third floor of the Arcane Tower. Your dormitory will actually be on the sixth floor. Every year, as long as you continue to promote through the ranks, you will ascend at least one floor. It should be said that if you can quickly overcome your seniors, it is possible to be promoted to higher floors more quickly,” Maria began explaining to them the rules of the Arcane Tower Sect at once.

“On the sixth floor, you will have only a sparse dormitory with bunk beds. You will all live together, breathe together, eat together, and share the same living quarters. However, as you ascend, your living conditions will gradually improve. The higher in the Tower, the more lavish your living quarters will be. You will each have your own room, at first, and then eventually you will be allowed to have an entire apartment to yourself.”

“The Arcane Tower Sect functions through constant trials. From now on, you five will fight as a group against other teams of five who have come before you, and soon teams that follow you as well. Here on the third floor, in the main atrium of the Arcane Tower Sect, there is a ranking board that lists the current rank of all the teams within the Arcane Tower. Your division extends until you reach 22 years of age. We admit five new teams per year, so there should always be roughly 50 teams on the ranking board.”

“Naturally, you are currently ranked in last place. Not only that, but your bouts will be primarily with those teams in your own year. If you can defeat them, you will slowly be able to challenge older students, but it is very likely that they are far stronger than you. Not only have they been training longer, but their bodies have matured. You are still very young, and have only just begun to bud.”

“On the third floor, besides the central ranking board and a few classrooms and libraries, would will find several gateways. Some of these gateways can be used night or day, all year long, to transmit to open training grounds. There are desert training grounds, forest training grounds, volcanic training grounds, coastal training grounds, and mountain peak training grounds. Please understand, the transmission portal will truly transmit you across time and space to a location in the chaotic realm. You may meet with vicious beasts, and it is also possible to find treasures there, just as you did while you were in the selection trials. However, what you need to understand the most is that if you die in those training grounds, you will really die! It’s not like the selection trial where you will instantly teleport back here, alive. So, if you leave and never return, we can only assume you are gone forever, and replace you on your team after a period of time.”

“There is also an attribute measuring room on the third floor. You can test various attributes such as strength, speed, agility, Chi gathering speed, and magic potential. Once measured, your attribute scores will be inscribed in an overall student compendium, so you can compare yourself individually against all 250 students of the lower grades. After this meeting, I suggest you all measure your attributes, so you can better understand your team composition.”

“The third floor also has two array inscription platforms. These are for the versus matches. You will regularly compete with other teams for position on the ranking board, as I said earlier. In contrast to the open training grounds, when you die in the matches, you will be able to return here, alive. However, if your team is eliminated, it will count as a loss.”

“From this point, you have exactly one year to enter the top 45. If you fail to do so, that indicates you have been overtaken by your juniors entirely, and you will be dismissed from the Arcane Tower Sect. At that time, you will return to the mortal world, though you will continue to benefit from that which you learned.

For the first 4 years of your training, you are expected to increase your rank by at least 5 each year. However, once you turn 16, the rules become lighter. At that point, as long as you stay in the top 30, you will not be dismissed from the sect. However, your performance for the last 6 years will count heavily towards your final evaluation and assignment after graduating from the lower grades. It is generally expected that a team be at least in the top 20 by the time they reach 20 years of age. If not, one could only be counted as the lowest quality of disciple.”

“As for your schedule, aside from your matches, which will happen at predetermined times, you will mostly be able to cultivate according to your own determination. On the weekends, you are permitted to travel home to stay with your family, although we expect you to cultivate constantly no matter where you are. If you slack off even an inch, you will be overcome by more talented, determined brothers and sisters, and you may even find yourself dismissed from the sect!”

“On the fourth floor, you will find the Arcane Tower Sect’s lower grade Bazaar. On this floor, students in the lower grades can trade with one another at their leisure for weapons, armor, and cultivation resources. There is a blacksmith chamber, an armor crafting chamber, medicine crafting chamber, jade tablet library, and inscription chamber. There is even a restaurant that lower grade sect disciples can eat at, provided you have the money. If not, you can always eat in your dorm privately. Some rations are provided for free, in case you are truly poor, you will at least not starve.”

“Hehe, what Madame Maria means is, as lower grade dicisples, you will actually have plenty of opportunities to make a little bit of extra money. Martial Artists become wealthy over time, so even if you start out poor today, your fortunes have already begun to change just with your admittance to the sect! Afterall, out of over 300,000 youth we test each year, only 25 are admitted! How could you possibly remain poor, with such outstanding talent! Each and every one of you are destined for greatness. The only question is, how great? And will you outshine your peers, or will your light be overshadowed by those far greater than yourselves?” David Ling said.

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“You should know that from now on, your opponents will be far more capable than those you defeated so far. Those other youths that were not selected, the truth is they cannot even be considered lower grade dicisples of this Tower! The weakest of those who entered before you is already far senior to you in power! Indeed, in the first three months you are here, your progress ought to be swift. However, your matches will also be ferocious, and you will likely be defeated. Alas, this is the price you pay for rapid development. Since you are out of your league at the moment, you will progress quickly to catch up, but you will also suffer loses and defeat,” Nushi spoke, his masculine voice wise and calming. “Furthermore, until you are at least rank 45 on the leaderboard, I advise you not to enter any of the training grounds! Even the weakest vicious beast you will meet out in the wild will tear you apart. Just do what you can to cultivate and advance here. Practice your combat techniques by cultivating sparks constantly.”

“Hmm,” Maria made a sound, “Your greatest challenge will always be increasing your cultivation rank. That is because accessing the next layer of a cultivation technique, invariably requires more sparks than the previous layer’s spark cultivation capacity! When you progress, your capacity to hold origin Chi sparks in your body will grow, but it will never be enough! Depending on your cultivation manual’s grade, your capacity may even be the equivalent of two layers behind the actual cultivation requirement!”

At this point, Wei finally spoke up. “Masters, if that is so, how does anyone ever make progress?”

“Of course, that is a natural question, junior Wei. There are two primary paths. One is to have a lucky chance within the chaos realm, and happen to find enough sparks gathered together to instantly unlock the next layer. In fact, I believe you may have already had this kind of thing happen to you, Wei. It appears your cultivation is already at the second layer?” Maria replied to Wei’s question, as she was the cultivation instructor.

“Hmm,” Wei replied. He didn’t know how much the instructors knew, but he guessed that since the ancestor spirit had been so secretive, his status as candidate for reincarnation of the ancestor god was not known. Therefore, he didn’t want to give too much away. “I had a lucky chance, and I found a spark in the fourth stage that allowed me to progress to the second layer of my cultivation.”

“I see,” Maria replied. “Well, that’s the first way of progressing, but the higher you cultivate, the lower the chance of that happening. That’s because the spark requirement becomes more and more burdensome, but in general, the number of sparks you will find gathered in the chaotic realm doesn’t increase unless you go somewhere truly dangerous.”

“The second method,” David Ling now interjected, “Is with medicine pills. Medicine pill crafters are able to refine pills that allow a cultivator to temporarily increase their spark capacity. However, it should be said that ingesting these pills is usually an excruciatingly painful process. Furthermore, the effects do not last long, and they don’t actually grant the sparks themselves! What this means is that while your body is being wracked with pain, you must quickly cultivate the required number of sparks and unseal the next layer in the cultivation technique! Only then will you progress! Because of this, many actually fail, even when taking medicinal pills! Furthermore, if you take too many of the same kind of pill, that pills efficacy will decrease, and it may no longer be possible to access the next layer! In that case, your cultivation will stall, and you will find it very difficult to progress. This is the main way that cultivators reach bottlenecks in their cultivation that they cannot overcome, and become stuck, sometimes for decades or even the rest of their life!”

“Instructor, as far as I can tell, my cultivation manual has five layers, but I am already on the second layer. It can’t be that short, can it?” Wei continued to ask questions. He was learning a lot from this exchange already.

”That’s correct, Wei,” Maria replied. “Cultivation manuals in our sect correlate to stages of cultivation. They can have three, four, or five layers. The higher the quality of the manual, the more layers they have. An inferior grade manual will only have three, a medium grade manual will have four, and a superior grade manual will have five. If one cultivates a superior grade cultivation technique to its fifth layer, the bottleneck between the top of that cultivation stage and the bottom of the next will be much smaller! For this reason, finding a superior grade cultivation manual is often the difference between stalling in ones cultivation, or progressing smoothly. You can consider yourself very fortunate to have come across a superior grade manual during only the selection exam. This alone is very rare. In fact, most students only find lower grade manuals during the selection exam, and must search diligently for better cultivation manuals later on when they are ready to breakthrough.”

“Switching isn’t as easy as it sounds,” Nushi sighed from the side. “starting a new cultivation manual requires starting from the bottom of that stage. You will need to erase your cultivation and go backwards, and then progress from the first layer of the new manual again, taking pills or finding spark bundles to catch up to your peers. If you can, its always better to try to jump stages without doing this, but if you put too much time and effort into a lower grade manual, its already a very difficult situation to be in.

“Not only that, but you will be at a disadvantage on the battlefield. Once your peers reach the fourth or fifth layer of the current stage, they will have greater spark capacity than those stuck at the third layer, and will inevitably ascend the ranking board more rapidly.”

Wei’s mind was already working hard. That meant that in order for their team to win in the future, he would have to ensure that his teammates all had superior grade manuals as well! It wasnt enough for only him to have a superior grade manual. If he was correct, as they ascended the ranking board, by the time they reached the top 40, they would probably start to encounter older students who were already on the second grade of cultivation, let alone at the top layers of the first grade. They would never be able to compete, unless they could catch up quickly!

“Instructors, how many cultivation grades are there?” Wei Wang asked naively.

“Heh, don’t worry about that for now. Just know, there is always someone stronger than you!” Nushi exclaimed. “As for what you need to worry about right now, it will generally take at least one year for you to reach the top of the first grade and break through to the second grade. That will also correspond to your promotion in the Tower, and when that time comes, you will ascend from the sixth floor to the seventh floor.”

“What’s on the fifth floor?” Thomas Portsworth couldn’t keep his curiosity any longer, and spoke up.

“That floor is for sect elders only. You do not currently have permission to visit. Here on the third floor there is a transmission array that can send you to your barracks. As long as you are a student of the sect, you can use your emerald sect badge and the array will automatically deliver you to the correct floor.”

“Emerald sect badge?” Thomas responded.

At that, the instructors looked at one another, and then Maria spoke. “That’s right, we haven’t given those to you. Nushi, if you will.”

Nushi moved towards the podium and then withdraw a small yet ornately designed wooden box from beneath the lecture. Moving gracefully, he brought the box over to the table and had the five youths gather round. With a click, the ornate top opened to reveal five emerald badges. The badges were each pinned to an armband.

“Welcome, young Apprentices, to the Arcane Tower Sect. With these badges, you show yourself to be an official apprentice of the Tower. Please,” Nushi spoke, waving his hand out with a flourish.

One by one, they retrieved their badges from the wooden box and slipped them on their arm, over their bicep. The badge had a symbol of a crystal at the top of a small, delicately drawn tower. Around the edges of the crystal, something like lightning arc’ed towards the edge of the badge. This was no doubt the crest of the Arcane Tower Sect.

“Mm, Masters,” Leah Levi spoke up timidly, “how much time do we have before our first match?”

That’s right, Wei thought. He hadn’t even asked how long until they fought their first opponent!

“As of now, you have three weeks to prepare for the beginning of the next season. When the season starts, you will have one match every three weeks for three months. During that time, you will square off against the four other first grade teams. After the season ends, you will have a three month break in which you should focus on cultivating and enhancing your martial arts. Each year, the sects of the Western Continent hold a tournament. Three months after our season ends here, you will participate in that intersect tournament. The prizes there are substantial. After that, you will have another six month cultivation period, and then the next season will begin.

“You should understand that even though you cannot die or be physically wounded in a match, injuries you suffer can harm your cultivation and meridians. It is possible to have your capacity temporarily decrease due to wounds. In serious cases, you may even be permanently set back a cultivation layer, and have to unlock that layer again through normal means after recovering from your wounds. It’s very rare, but in a worst case scenario it’s possible to have your cultivation completely wiped out, and be forced to start again at the beginning of the current cultivation stage.”

Wei Wang wondered what possible kind of wound inflicted in the match could possibly have such a vicious, permanent effect. Since it was expected to die when you lose anyway, but that would be considered a light wound, Wei really did not want to find out what could be considered a severe wound.

“If there are only 4 matches each season, then that means the highest we can rank on the board in a single season is 45th?”

“If you are undefeated, it is indeed possible. But, by the time the next season begins, a new cohort of first grade juniors will have been selected. So at that time, if you managed to make it to the 45th position in your first season, you will naturally start the second second in 40th place. Not only that, but if you are undefeated in your first season, in your second season you will face off against students one year older than you. By then, you will be a second grade student, but in that case, you will be facing off against students in the third grade!”

Even though it was a challenge, Wei Wang couldn’t afford to let his heart be shaken. If he failed a single match, it was different for him. If the ancestor spirit considered that to be unworthy of his reincarnation, and decided Wei was a failure just for losing a match in the Tower, then he would be slain immediately and have his soul sent to hell by the ancestor from the realm of the gods! He absolutely could not let this happen, so he was determined to win above his grade at all cost.

“Well,” David Ling said, “if there are no further questions, you five are dismissed. Feel free to explore the third and fourth floor of the Tower as you like, and when you are ready, retrieve your emerald Sect badge from the elder on the fourth floor, then use the transmission array back on the third floor to go to your barracks. From this point forth, how you choose to spend your time is up to you!”