Rapid Progress

For the mundane world outside the Dao Academy, a month might mean no more than a few sunrises and moonsets, a few bouts of household gossip.

But for the new students who had just entered the Prefectural Dao Academy, this month and more marked the beginning of a transformation that would remake them to the bone.

Dressed in a blue-gray student's robe, with his Gray Ordination identity token hanging at his waist, Chu Bai walked calmly out of his room.

The dormitory was still quiet. A few early-rising spirit cranes occasionally preened among the trees, letting out clear cries.

Over the past month and more, his life had run as regularly as a precision mechanism.

From seven in the morning until one in the afternoon, general studies classes were fixed as firmly as thunder could not shake them.

In the spacious, bright classroom, Chu Bai gained his first systematic understanding of the cultivation world's vastness.

He learned that beyond Great Zhou's seventy-two prefectures lay the boundless Savage Demon Domain; that besides orthodox Dao cultivators, there were body cultivators who entered the Dao through martial arts, heterodox paths that commanded ghosts and spirits, and the Demonic Path, whose very name made people pale.

"Spirit herbs are distinguished by their medicinal properties and age. Look at this crimson blood ginseng. If its rootlets turn purple, it has entered a recognized grade. Ordinary fire can scarcely damage it, and it must be refined with spirit fire..."

"In the art of talismans, begin your stroke like drifting clouds and finish it like sudden thunder. If this stroke of the Baleful Suppression Pattern strays by even a little, at best the talisman is ruined; at worst, it explodes..."

Chu Bai sat at his desk, his wolf-hair brush flying across the paper as he took notes.