Book 3: Chapter 20: Recruitment Drives |
Yin Hu sat on a chair that creaked every time he breathed. A basic thing with four legs, a back, a plank to sit on, and the structural integrity of a promise made by a politician. The table before him held three orbs that caught the afternoon light filtering through the gaps between leaning buildings and reflected it back in colours that had no business existing in a place this miserable.
The slums smelled like ambition had died there and nobody bothered to bury it.
The Orb of Telling sat on the left. Smooth, pale blue, about the size of a large apple. The same one he had used with Jun and Shui back when they had still been within the Silver Mountain Gang territory. It read spiritual root elements and purity with the clinical detachment of a physician who'd seen too many patients and stopped caring about bedside manner three centuries ago.
The Orb of Reading sat in the middle. A deep amber that pulsed with a slow, rhythmic heartbeat of Qi. This one measured potential, cultivation ceiling, and body cultivation ceiling. The hard numbers that determined whether a person would spend their life scraping the bottom of the barrel or punching through the heavens. It did not take into account miraculous potions and elixirs… None of them did.
Lastly was the Orb of Grand Secrets.
That one was special. It searched for potential bloodlines, hidden abilities, inherited powers locked behind generations of dormancy, skills that would slip past every other test like water through a sieve. It found the unfindable and the buried treasures in a field of debris and mountains of compost and garbage. That had been the main thing Yin Hu had been searching for.
Cultivation and body cultivation potential was all good and dandy, but he already had quite a few of the baby animals that Da Ruis had been finding in the forest.
What he needed now were adults, loyal to him and willing to fight in case they needed it. Protection, guard duty, cleaning, servant duty, farming spiritual herbs, mining rare resources, and a hundred other tasks they could have in addition to the focus of cultivating to keep their Hu Clan working and functioning properly without having every single person rely on his rice.
Only the inner circle was going to get that luxury.
Not once had it flashed, much less suggested than anyone had even the lowliest bloodline possible. Nothing came up the whole time.
Yin Hu shook his head and looked around himself.
Zhong Da stood to his left, back straight, jaw set, his single arm resting on the pommel of a blade he had taken to carrying with him everywhere.
I need to give him a blade. The prosthetic is all good and dandy, but that doesn’t serve as a weapon.
The one armed man had closed the shop early and Yin Hu could still see the residual irritation in the way his fingers drummed against the hilt. Apparently the tides of customers had been growing. People lining up around the block to buy weapons that Yin Hu wouldn't have used to prop open a door. Not even that. He wouldn’t have dared to use them even as doorstops lest they shatter into a hundred pieces and become a safety hazard. Yet, there were entire crowds that were willing to pay grand sums for the worst ones between them.
He genuinely could not figure that one out.
Those weapons were the absolute dregs. The bottom of a barrel that itself sat at the bottom of a larger barrel. He'd pulled them from the rice bag specifically because they were the worst things in there. One of them had rust, actual rust, on a supposedly Qi-forged blade. He'd tested it against the tree within the isolated island and the tree had won handedly every time.
Yet people fought over them like they were divine artifacts.
Cultivators on this planet need help.
Da Ruis sat to his right and covered head to toe. Mask, gloves, cloak, hood, and enough fabric to outfit a small funeral procession. All of it necessary because the ghostly administrator had the unfortunate quality of being partially transparent in direct sunlight. A quill moved in his covered hand as he recorded every name, age, gender, and results of the three orbs with the meticulous obsession of someone who had spent centuries cataloguing things that no longer existed.
The Hidden Lotus Hall's last contribution to the world: impeccable penmanship.
Before them stretched a line.
A very, very long line.
It snaked through the alleyway, curved around a collapsed building, disappeared behind what might have been a tannery based on the smell alone, and continued somewhere beyond Yin Hu's willingness to look. Hundreds of people. Men, women, children, elderly. Ages six through forty. All of them fidgeting, whispering, stretching their tired legs for the older ones, and craning their necks to see what was happening at the front.
Yin Hu sighed. They'd been at this for thirty minutes and the line hadn't gotten shorter.
It had gotten longer.
"Patriarch," Da Ruis leaned toward him, voice muffled behind the mask. His quill paused mid-stroke. "A question that has been gnawing at me since we set up."
"Go ahead."
"The age range." Da Ruis tapped the registry ledger. "You've set it at six to forty. Standard recruitment across every sect, clan, and institution I've ever encountered caps at thirteen. Even that is generous. Most serious organizations won't look twice at anyone above ten. The younger the candidate, the more malleable the foundation, the more time to develop proper meridian pathways before corruption sets in. Those early years are—"
"Vital. I know."
"Then why forty?" Zhong Da cut in from the other side, his drumming fingers going still. "I've been wondering the same. Even the most desperate outer court recruitment drives I witnessed in the Zhong Clan never went above twenty and those were wartime measures."
Yin Hu looked at both of them.
Da Ruis had stopped writing entirely. Zhong Da's hand had left his pommel. Two men from opposite ends of the cultivation spectrum and they wore the same expression. Brows pinched, heads tilted at nearly identical angles, mouths pressed into thin lines that said I respect you enormously but this seems strange. Yin Hu considered them for a moment as he thought what to say.
In the end, there was only one thing he could do.
Yin Hu let the Ancient Being Persona settle over him like a second skin.
It came easier now. The posture, the weight in his gaze, the deliberate slowness of his movements, and the raised chin all fell into place without hesitation. He didn't even have to think about it anymore. His chin tilted up half an inch. His shoulders squared and hands folded on the table with the patience of someone who had watched civilizations rise and crumble and rise again and found the whole cycle mildly tedious.
"If it had been about age," Yin Hu said, "I would have not accepted either one of you."
Da Ruis's quill slipped from his fingers and clattered against the table.
Zhong Da's hand shot back to his pommel and gripped it hard enough that the leather wrapping creaked.
Neither one dared to speak after such a statement.
"To me…" Yin Hu paused.
The words sat in his chest like stones. They were heavy, not because they were special, but rather they were the truth, unadulterated by the persona he cultivated. He could feel the familiar pull to dress them up, wrap them in mysticism and vague implications, and let his persona do the heavy lifting while the truth hid behind layers of cultivator-speak and dramatic pauses.
That was the safe play.
The one that kept the mask intact and the questions at bay.
He let out a sigh instead.
"To me… I can't sense either one of your cores."
Da Ruis went rigid beneath his layers of fabric. Every fold of cloth went taut like someone had pulled strings attached to his spine.
"Not even in the midst of battle or when you flare your Qi. Not when you push your cultivation to its limits." Yin Hu looked at Zhong Da first, then turned his head toward Da Ruis. "As though you are mortal."
The silence that followed was thick enough to chew.
Zhong Da's grip on his pommel had turned his knuckles white. His jaw worked side to side, teeth grinding against each other in a slow rhythm. His eyes were wide and fixed on a point somewhere past Yin Hu's shoulder, staring at a wall that had done nothing to deserve such intensity.
Da Ruis hadn't moved or breathed, which was admittedly less remarkable for a ghost, but the stillness was different from his usual careful composure.
That's the first time I've said that out loud to anyone. Feels… lighter, actually. Like putting down a bag I forgot I was carrying.
A shuffling sound broke the moment.
The next person in line had gotten tired of waiting.
A forty-three-year-old man with wispy hair clinging to a scalp that had clearly surrendered the war decades ago and left him half bald. A skeletal frame wrapped in robes so ragged they qualified as a philosophical statement about the nature of impermanence. His eyes darted between the three of them with the manic energy of someone who had been standing in line for the better part of an hour and had convinced himself during that time that this was either going to change his life or kill him and he'd made peace with both outcomes.
He stepped up to the table, hands already reaching for the first orb.
Da Ruis snapped back to the present. His hand shot up, palm out, and the old man froze mid-reach. "W-Wait. Hold for a moment."
The skeletal man's fingers hovered an inch from the Orb of Telling. His eyes bounced between Da Ruis's masked face and the orb like a dog being told to leave a treat on its nose.
Da Ruis turned to Yin Hu. The mask hid his expression, but the angle of his head, the slight forward lean, the way his covered fingers pressed flat against the table, all of it screamed urgency. "What about Hei Gu?"
Yin Hu blinked. "Who?"
"Hei Gu. The Black Flame Dragon cultivator. The one you—" Da Ruis made a vague slapping gesture with his hand. "—dealt with. In the forest. Before we arrived here."
"That arrogant young master?" Yin Hu picked up his tea cup and took a sip.
The tea was lukewarm. Ta Rae wasn't here to keep the pot fresh and the absence was felt in ways he refused to admit publicly. Ta Rae was back at the house, sulking about being left behind. The tree had tried to uproot itself and follow, much to his disbelief. He hadn’t even known that was possible. The bastard Demonic Spirit Tree had been hitchhiking in his bag when it could have just walked with them… not that he wanted to be followed by a greedy tree like that.
It was… terrifying to think about.
Yin Hu had to threaten it with the axe once more to get it to settle back down. The tree had re-rooted with theatrical reluctance and shaken every single one of its leaves at him in what he could only describe as arboreal profanity.
Spoiled rotten. Every last branch.
Da Ruis nodded, entire focus locked onto Yin Hu. Zhong Da matched his intensity.
"Something about black flame dragon lineage, yes. What about him?" Yin Hu asked as he took another sip.
"He was… His cultivation base alone should have registered on your—"
Yin Hu shook his head. "He was pathetic."
Da Ruis's head rocked back half an inch.
"A child who thought they were something special because the world told him he was." Yin Hu set the cup down. "Had he been a threat, I would not have slapped him. The consequences for attacking a Hu Clan member are severe. I showed him mercy precisely because he posed none."