On the twenty-fourth day of the twelfth lunar month, the Shanmen Annual Assembly opened.
The Shanmen Annual Assembly was held once every ten years, after the first snowfall of the twelfth lunar month.
This tradition primarily followed the pattern of Extraterrestrial Spirit Green descending once every sixty years, combining selection with a gathering.
In theory, following the pattern of Extraterrestrial Spirit Green's descent, there would be six Annual Assemblies in a sixty-year cycle. The first two were relatively simple, merely ordinary gatherings within the sect to discuss affairs and strengthen ties; serious business began with the third. Their current assembly should have been the fourth of the cycle, and this assembly would essentially settle the selection of True Disciples once and for all, with no further changes.
The fifth Annual Assembly would prepare for the descent of Extraterrestrial Spirit Green and no longer involve questions of selection; as for the sixth, it went without saying that cultivators from across the continent would gather to admire the spectacle from the Outer Cosmos together. It was called the Brocade Continent Sexagenary Assembly.
This was true not only of Shanmen Quanzhen. The continent's other traditions mostly did the same, differing only in whether they followed a ten-year, eight-year, or twelve-year interval. Ultimately, all would converge at the continent's Sexagenary Assembly, the endpoint of a cycle.
But this descent of Extraterrestrial Spirit Green was exceptionally important and might bear on who would unlock the Heaven and Earth Shackles in the future. Thus, every tradition's struggle for True Disciple positions was fierce, even bloody. Shanmen Quanzhen was by no means alone in this.
Appointments, pulling strings, connections, exploiting public office for private gain, factional infighting, struggles between power blocs... these things existed in every tradition. Shanmen Quanzhen was far from excessive among them. Even those