"Appearance reflects self-image in elder cultivators, is the short answer. The long answer is - I don't know either. Those are all good theories as to why it's part of his presentation. I guess we had better hope he introduces himself?" 

(A good grade in subtext!)

She smiles. "I wonder how that works with multiple selves."

Jasmine mentally flinches. She hadn't considered that. The idea of compromising on her ideal form is not terribly appealing.  

"I'm sure we'll figure things out."

"Probably some of the prior art on body-sharing cultivators will talk about it, so we don't have to go into it blind. Even if it's not in the books, there's people we could ask."

"Yeah." She does not sound terribly enthusiastic.  

Possibly Jasmine needs some more screaming-into-a-pillow time, or at least staring-contemplatively-out-the-window time. Now really isn't the time for those, unfortunately.

(Kedri is regretting a little that she didn't offer Jasmine the front for this class--Jasmine really hasn't had much time with control over her body today, and it can't be helping--but doing it right this moment seems like it would probably make things worse rather than better.)

It is a matter of seconds between the final student arriving and taking their seat and the old man opening his eyes and rising to stand at his lectern.

"Greetings, students. I am the Saint of Nine Stones, and I have the honour of being perhaps the oldest mortal in the duchy. I will be, for the next six months, your teacher on the subjects of ethics and history. I assume you are all intelligent enough to understand why those subjects are taught together.

More likely is the possibility that you wonder why you need to be taught these subjects. Perhaps you are among the unthinking many who never question the honour that is asked of them. Perhaps, more likely even, you are among the few who have examined the works of the ancient philosophers and examined your life, and noticed situations where you could, without apparent consequence, deviate from morality and thereby profit. It's not hard to find situations of this sort, if you look for them. And many, having found them, succumb to temptation and take these opportunities. Many come to regret it for reasons you would find unpersuasive - a thief being killed by the one he stole from has, you might say, simply committed an execution error, just as a hunter slain by her prey has made an error in her own arts. A hypothetical planner looking for chances to behave dishonourably to their gain would respond to that by saying - simply be better, more capable. Don't get caught. Such refrains are recurring parts of all of our teachings, are they not? Many things cultivators regularly do are foolish only for the incompetent, the arrogant, and the unlucky, and many cultivators plan on not being among those numbers - I will cover later in this class why that is a mistake, as well, but it is a different mistake, and to my judgement a lesser one.

To answer this question, let us consider a single question - a question of practical morality so simple that most of you might not have ever formally been taught it, though without a doubt that the bone-deep truth of it resounds through everything you ever plan and do.

Why don't I just kill you?

Well, firstly, lets suppose I have a motive. It's not hard to imagine one - I am an old monster, certainly, and many of you are descended from similarly old monsters who have had many chances to do me offence, defeat, and injustice, and I might wish to take out my revenge on their legacy and loved ones. Or perhaps we could range further afield, and suppose that you are a class of an enemy sect - the Scions of the Market perhaps, or the Emerald Guard, or perhaps an entire caste-line of our dawn-lander foes gathered to be executed in one fell swoop - and if you do not know those names, understand learning them to be an essential purpose of this class even if you despise this old man's rambling on ethics. I hardly have to defend the position that you would be wholly unable to stop me - you are, for now, mortals, and I am high in the Sixth Realm, the Crucible of Justification. It would, quite frankly, be in some ways easier for me to kill you than for me to let you live, such is the intensity of my true power. Perhaps the sect guard would be able to defend against me - in this fortress, perhaps, but the Emerald Guard have a much inferior fortress and few aside from their sect master who would be my equal even in pitched battle, if you would allow my cynicism. It would be very very difficult to prevent elders like me, dao reserves, and so forth, from setting forth to kill the young blood of their enemies and so kill them at the root. And yet, this does not happen. The thoughtlessly ethical among you are unsurprised, of course - it simply is not done, for the elder generation to meddle unduly with the affairs of the younger generation. Guidance and teaching, certainly, bribery and reward, without a doubt, minimal intervention in direst circumstances, or at great loss of face for all involved, it's hardly unheard of. But for the elder to simply say - these young ones squabbling are unappealing to me, my grandchildren are not winning what I see as their fair share of the spoils, so I shall step down to their level and slaughter their foes, we do not see this at all. Why?

Answering this question, and others like it, is, I think, the principle purpose of this class. To provide a sketch of the answer, that we will fill in with detail through the next six months, with examples of societies that have thought of morality in different ways, and the consequences grand and small for violations of honour and morality that seem at first to be without cause - it comes down to mitigating losses. The loss of a beloved heir or apprentice or legacy is a greater harm to one elder than it is a pragmatic victory for his foe, so if both engage in this tactic, then both will be greatly harmed in ways which do not, actually, impair their ability to retaliate and inflict similar harms in the short term. So such conflicts, if not conclusively put to a halt by the seniors and peers of those involved, rapidly escalate to an explosive extent, forcing even weak sects to strike out - since without their new talent, they will never be stronger than in this moment, and because they have taken a terrible loss of face besides, and one should never doubt, as a matter of brutal pragmatics, the amount of damage a truly desperate cultivator or sect can do, nor the number of vultures waiting in the wings to feast on the weak, nor the number of so-called heroes waiting to gain face and plunder in righteous battle. So people who violate this rule, despite their correct adjudication that they can win the war, often do not profit from doing so a sixteenth of the extent that they think they might, even ignoring the fact that you are, even in your darkest moments, continually being watched and judged for your actions, and what friends and enemies they might make of you - if no-one else, by Fate and Luck. This is, perhaps, a simple example, and a simple cause, but I think, in the end, you can find that all matters of honour, courtesy, ethics, and face, can be discussed in these terms - though for some matters, the damage is slower and more subtle, losses to intangible matters like trust and comfort and room to grow rather than tangible matters like supply of living grandchildren.

Another question I'm sure some of you will be asking, then, is why you have not been taught this before. Well, I'm sure some of you have been, those clans and tribes close to the Bank understand what makes for a good student, but for the rest of you, who learned from the classical texts of the ancient masters of ethics and morality, might wonder why those masters did not justify themselves in those terms? In some cases, this was because they did not know - the principles of ethics needed, like any other art or science, to be discovered, and the founders of a field are not, despite what your technique scrolls might say, always the equal of every innovator who comes after. But, perhaps more tellingly, we still teach them - and we do not still teach the texts of revered physicists whose ideas have been superseded, no matter how rightfully honoured they are for their genius. The difference is that these texts are, in their ancient legacy and timeworn correctness, still good introductory texts, essentially correct in all matters of practical deed, and this is all most people need - certainly all that most peasants need. Ethics, like most fields, is largely for specialists to debate and for the rest to simply act on, trusting in their teachers to teach them well. But you are to be cultivators, and we find that cultivators are much more given to sins of desperation and greed alike than most people, so it is important to teach them, before all others, the deep truths behind when one should choose to die with honour rather than spite, and when one should choose to stay one's hand and go hungry rather than steal. Moreover, and this will seem strange to you, you are the students of immortals, and you will have long lives. You can afford to spend a few years mastering many useful skills that will benefit you, be that ethics or cartography. Finally, and this is very important - the Bank is not like other institutions. We seek to survive a deep future beyond the lifetime even of the true immortals, let alone such mayfly lives as our own, and thus we have a deeper need of honour, reliability, and righteousness, than those organisations which seek solely to propel their members to the highest heights that can been achieved.

And, on that matter, we can circle back to the other reason for this class - to educate you on the history of the empire, on the other great sects, the other sects of note in the city and the duchy, on the great powers within and without the empire, and so forth, so that you do not embarrass the sect by giving succour to our enemies and insult to our allies - or, I say, remembering my own youth, so you do not do so without thought to the consequences, and so you understand who we are merely traditional rivals with, and with whom we have deep-ingrained bad blood that cannot be put aside in times of difficulty. Such nuances are important, even for those of you who wish to spend the remainder of your lives doing little but hunting monsters and whom have no inclination to scholarship. In that regard, I will remind you that there will be tests of comprehension at the end of each month, along with various other assessments and a final exam, and insufficient performance in this respect is grounds for further compulsory tuition or in extreme cases, expulsion from the sect. This should be trivial to avoid for those capable of entering the sect in the first place, but lesser threats have proven insufficient to cause young masters and street rats alike to actually pay attention in this class."

Indeed, it seems like a lot of people who had tuned out the class thus far are suddenly tuning back in at the threat of expulsion trickles through their heads. The Saint of Nine Stones continues his class without comment on this, moving away from high-minded ideals to covering more practical matters of curriculum, scheduling, and reading recommendations, as well as a basic outline of the ten imperial sects, the five great sects of the Silver Sea, the ducal nobility, and the current geopolitical situation in general. He assigns no homework, noting that it would be cruel to do so when the class is so eager to begin cultivating right away.

No, she very much needs to be taught how people here think about ethics, and certainly what their history is.

And indeed, his description is fascinating. It's...almost familiar, and she's not sure how much of the difference is merely surface-level and how much runs deep.

...or possibly it would be more accurate to say that it's fundamentally different, and she's not sure how much it has converged onto what she's used to.

However far the branches may stretch, the original root from which morality grows is precisely the lack of truly overwhelming power differentials among humans. If you are in fights to the death on anything remotely like a routine basis, even if you are much stronger and more skilled than all of your opponents, sooner or later your luck will run out and you will die. (Especially, though by no means exclusively, if twelve of your mortal enemies form a coalition and dogpile you. Or if somebody manages to sneak into your food stores and poison them.) They say that's why the violence drive exists in the first place: to ensure that everyone is a potential threat to everyone else, and no-one's wellbeing can be safely ignored.

But the people here can't build on that foundation. It's been true since time immemorial--more than ten thousand years, maybe a lot more--that there are people so powerful that no number of much-weaker mortal enemies is sufficient to even probabilistically kill them.

And yet, after all that, from their own root they've grown something similar enough that it might actually be the same thing in different words.

She very much looks forward to filling in the details.

(...the cohort can afford to spend a few years mastering useful skills that will benefit them, except the several of them that will statistically be dead within a year. On the other hand, ethical reasoning is also a useful skill in the case of getting dumped on some host somewhere, so there's that.)

Two hours of lecture is a lot to process (...for now, she thinks with a smile), but she does her very best and takes many notes.

Notes on the ten imperial sects and five great ducal sects might describe them as follows:

Of the great imperial sects, the great powers of the empire second only to the three freeborn kings and the imperial family, there are the following, and while every great sect is a society complete in itself, teaching every art worth teaching, they each have their own specialities and secret techniques.

The Shining Knight Sect, who train the nobility of the empire in the arts of virtue, war, and stewardship, famous for esoteric moral tests (and ironclad if strange codes of ethics in general), glorious last stands, and for populating the many chivalric orders of the empire, perhaps the first in the breadth and quality of the armies they deploy and the lands they rule of all the sects.

The Peerless Blade Sect, who train all comers in the art of murder at any cost, famous for brutal simplicity, savage enlightenment, and the killing of gods and men alike, filling out the empire's ranks of warrior-saints, monster-hunters, and wandering adventurers, perhaps the first in the quality of the fighters they produce and the in the quality and the quality of those they kill. 

The Dawnbreaker Sect, who train captain and shipwright alike to set to sea the great navy and trade fleet of the empire, famous for craft that sail the seas and sunbeams with equal facility and for their ancient bloody war against the Empire Of The Dawn in the eastern sea. Theirs are the great sailors and explorers, the greatest ships and the greatest admirals their progeny.

The Crown of Perfection Sect, which is the finishing school of the ideal imperial beauty, school of the arts and the sciences, of beauty and correctness and poise and perfection. The sect which courtiers and courtesans wish they could claim to have been taught at; peerless when it comes to every respectable, noble, art-form, from calligraphy to singing to painting to dance.

The Bloody Heart of Suffering in the Void Before Justice Sect, the Crown's eternal rival, which has changed it's name and ideals a dozen times in the last millennium, the home of counter-culture and transformation, of self-discovery and hidden potential, of rebellion great and small and of art writ raw and messy. Shabby and disreputable, but beloved nonetheless - of the arts deemed common, strange, forbidden, or useless, there is no greater school.

The Bank, which of course needs no introduction, the oldest sect, vault-builders and guardians, strange and ancient and alien in their carefulness, source of bodyguards and warders, first of the sects to be founded and, all agree, the last of them to die.

The Scions of the Market Sect, the Bank's traditional rival - the agile, the quick-thinkers, the horse-traders and herb-dealers, the founders of ten thousand companies, all forming the network of dealers, brokers, and auction-houses which together manage to provide some semblance of liquidity to the impossible unique wonders of the cultivation world. None would argue that their sect is the richest - but the Saint of Nine Stones will note wryly here - none would argue that they're the fastest to get themselves killed or bankrupted by abject foolishness.

The Great Academy Sect is the foremost institution of learning in the entire empire, the place which every bureaucrat and scholar looks to with longing and knowledge-greed, the ones to whose standards the exams throughout the empire are set. Everything worth knowing can be learned there, and is taught with the ferocity expected of a faculty who love their subjects more than their own children.

The Philosophers Guild is, perhaps, the strangest sect, being as much a never-ending maelstrom of discourse on the nature of good and virtue as it is a teaching institution. All virtue is considered there, and thus all evil as well, and all the world, and all matters esoteric. On matters of fact, they are second to the Academy, but the Guild is unequalled on matters of virtue, and on matters of esoteric insight. If one must learn of the nameless and speak of the formless, communicate the incommunicable and comprehend the incomprehensible, there is no better place to go, and it continues to emit saints, monsters, and mad sages in equal proportion to this day.

The final, and youngest, sect is the Iron City Sect, located in the city of the name, itself located partially in the body of the immortal of the same name. They are the engineers, the industrialists, the wonder-workers, programmers and cyberneticists, mad and cutting edge, doing things which nobody has every done before and on scales that seem nigh-heretical to the ancient handcrafted sages. Some call their work unreliable, shoddy even, but if you need all three of fast, innovative, and cheap, there's nobody else you can turn to - and if you're a cripple with no name, no money, and no talent, there's no other sect which can refine that dross into gold with the infusion of capital and steel.

Of the five ducal sects, a tier below those in power but more dominant in the local region:

The Bank, again, has one of it's five great vault-fortresses, right here on this very spot, and keeps only to it's own wisdom, and that of its close allies in the hillfolk Warden-Clans.

The Emerald Guard are brave soldiers and stoic sorcerers, loyal to a fault to the ducal family and based out of the duchy capital to the east.

The Silver Seas Shipwright Company make ships and trade missions, and know the Silver Sea better than any others, and cleave to the old ways of the shore-folk who were here before the empire, and who still stand out by their accent and traditions.

The Violet Blade Sect are monster-hunters and deed-seekers, glory-hounds and heroes of the people, the perfect representatives of what the imperial orthodoxy says a cultivator should be, at least in public.

The Princes of Tin and Copper are a beggar-sect, only an inch better than organised criminals, consisting of outsiders, madmen, fallen nobles, tinkers, lucky fools, and others too disreputable or untrustworthy for a better sect, forming a coalition of the hungry, the desperate, and the greedy who serve only themselves in the end (and also in the middle and the beginning).

Kedri is very glad to have some more grounding in how imperial society works, even if she does wonder how much Bank propaganda is mixed in and how each sect's own descriptions would sound (how--part of her thinks--they would be sounding to her now, if her dice had rolled a little differently).

...not that she would want to get up close and personal with a Prince of Tin and Copper or for that matter a Peerless Blade to ask.

(The importance of impulse control in potential candidates for violence-training is conspicuously absent from the description of the Peerless Blade. Maybe they care about it to a non-zero extent, but they cared about it as much as it deserves it'd be more obvious...

...no, hang on, she's still caught up in lower-competition ways of thinking, isn't she. This is not a society where it's feasible to restrict combat training to those who can be trusted not to misuse it. They're planning to give her some combat training even though she's not at all sure that's a good idea.

Which still makes Peerless Blades more dangerous than a random cultivator. Differences of degree do matter: maybe the math on how concerned one should be by the prospect of meeting them still checks out. But she's going to have to recalibrate.)

...so Crane's ancestors were conquered by the empire, and her people (those of them who remain after evaporative-cooling, anyway) retain a partially independent culture? That sounds concerningly like there might be lingering tensions there, patches of quicksand that Kedri should be careful not to step in.

""At least in public.""

It seems to be for the best that Kedri is in charge of notetaking right now: Jasmine, having more general background knowledge already, would likely have made too few notes to suit Kedri's needs. Kedri's feelings on the matter are still tinged with a little guilt, though.