"Ah, I took the standard post-tertiary exams for entry into the imperial bureaucracy as a citizen cultivator, and apparently I did very well? Or, well enough to get an offer from the Bank instead, I'm not sure what their criteria look like. I certainly didn't get a perfect score or anything like that, I'm not even sure it's possible. And the Bank is a better place to learn than in the common ranks - if nothing else, after a few years, I can transfer in and start at a higher rank with better techniques." 

"Congratulations!"

how well would she have done on those exams there are clearly many paths to becoming a cultivator

She almost remarks on how fortunate she is to have landed in this particular part of the world, then decides against it. Likewise with asking about what the exams are like.

"Thank you!" Lark is going to fail to change the subject and instead fall silent. 

"Do you know how much time until the orientation begins?"

Maybe she can just sit here contemplatively for a bit, or maybe that would be too wasteful-of-networking-opportunities or something.

(She wonders in passing if seven-foot-tall marble guy has a friendship bounty on him, but honestly he's pretty intimidating.)

"Not exactly, but it shouldn't be long. We're scheduled to start on the hour - there will be a gong." 

(Seven foot tall marble guy seems to be cheerily and loudly discussing tournament results with a girl on his opposite side with a floral-print robe in gold and red and no less than six sheathed swords on her person.) 

She'll see if she can overhear any useful or interesting information, then.

(If that girl has six blades they're allowed to know about, how many more does she have??)

(Concealing two to five foot long blades is a logistical concern they do not yet have the supernatural power to solve.)

It seems that marble guy's cousin was in the tournament, reaching second place and winning a weapon from the host's vaults, facing in the process several up and coming cultivators from noteworthy families - sword girl hasn't heard of them, so he describes each of them and their speciality, and she speculates how she might go about countering them - a straightforward swordsman, she would counter with a nasty trick and a geokinetic with fast attacks from several directions. She admits her family style doesn't have a good counter for the third place winner, who was creating semi-guided birds out of unparryable fire, and marble guy admits his cousin relied in that fight on brute toughness to withstand the limited number of slow and expensive attacks. She speculates that such techniques would probably be quite vulnerable to even primitive countermagic, and wonders if she'd be able to learn a useful technique for the purposes from the sect, or if her effort would be better spent elsewhere. Before he can respond, a gong sounds, and a hush falls over the disciples. 

(Yes, but there may be smaller knives.)

Now would be a good time for a spiritual notebook.

The tournament had no specific restrictions on style (or at least no obvious ones), but clearly was...not necessarily not dangerous, but safe enough for second place to be a cheerful victory. She wonders what safety measures they take, and what the resulting injury rates are like.

What aspect would countermagic be? Arcane, presumably. That would make it her job. Something to bear in mind for later.

She turns her attention to the stage.

One moment, the stage is empty, and the next, a man stands there. 

He is indefinably middle-aged, with hair and moustache still thoroughly black but his face weathered, just a touch, by the passage of years. He wears lamellar armour made from pale green jade, each plate inlaid with text in gold, too fine to read at this distance. His shield is clearly of matching make, with the finer text on it assembled into a larger character - the character for 'Bank'. He has a spear that appears to have been carved from a single piece of bone or ivory, flowing coils and curves down its length forming a strange and organic beauty. He speaks: 

"Hello, disciples. I am Fortress-Commander Grainhearted Black. I currently have command of the fortress-vault in which you will reside and study over the coming years, and I am proud to welcome you all to be a part of our great work here.

Do not doubt that in coming here and studying with us, that you are becoming part of something greater than yourself. The Bank is the oldest, proudest, and greatest sect in the empire. The Scions of The Infinite Market might be richer, and the Peerless Blade might be deadlier, and each of the Imperial Sects possessed of their own virtues, but the Bank survives. We will not teach you to kill, but to win conflicts. We will not teach you to grasp for wealth, but to create lasting institutions. We will not teach you only the lessons you need to survive today, but the lessons you need to transcend tomorrow.

The Bank prizes, above all things, looking to the future. This is why we chose to align ourselves with His Divine Majesty, who sought to create an empire that would last through the ages as a crucible of legends and the center of the world. That is the legacy which I hope you will be living up to, and I don't doubt that each and every one of you will.

Today will be the first day of your journey as cultivators, on the long road towards finding your own Way and reaching immortality. To do so, you must defy the heavens and overthrow nature - but you must also master yourself and understand your values completely. To ascend to immortality with an imperfect or broken Way does you and the world you would create harm that is unimaginable to you as you are today. So I implore you to think not just of strength and power, but also of wisdom and insight, lest you choose to walk down a path that will lead to the destruction of all you care for, and that you allow us to guide you to achieve a truer enlightenment. 

That said, I'm sure most of you have been yearning for today for quite some time. We will try not to take up too much of your time today - you will hear a little from one of my colleagues on matters of logistics after this. Then, we will have an exhibition match between two of our fine 5th realm: Crucible of Endeavour warriors in order to enlighten you to the true power cultivators can wield, and then you will depart to our archives and dispensaries so as to receive your starting allocations, techniques, and class catalogues, whose printing we unfortunately must leave to the last second to accommodate last minute additions of both teachers and students. I suspect that most of you will want to take the remainder of the day to study those and make the important decisions related to them, so we will not impose on your time until this evening, when you are invited to a feast prepared by the 4th realm immortal chef Songstill Trout, who has kindly agreed to be a teacher here this year. Your true education shall begin tomorrow. 

On that note, I must remind you that beginning to cultivate before your first qi theory class tomorrow is strictly forbidden. Please don't consider this a terrible burden, so much as a chance to start off on the right foot under the watchful eyes of a true master. Thank you." 

He pauses to allow for applause, and then walks off the stage in a manner that's almost gratuitously mundane, compared to his arrival. 

Was that teleportation, or was he already standing there invisible? (There's no way these people don't have invisibility magic, with an entire Hidden aspect.)

She wonders if the writing is purely decorative, or if it's part of the enchantment. Presumably this gear is enchanted.

A little part of her wonders how many sects are also claiming to their new disciples to be the greatest, and an adjacent part of her wonders if historical records are good enough that only the Bank has a plausible claim to be the oldest.

Still, what she has heard and seen of the Bank thus far is very promising. (And maybe she only thinks that because of how she was shaped, but...even if she didn't come into existence like this, she came into personhood like this.)

"Think not just of strength and power, but also of wisdom and insight" has a bit of the same vibe as the "no internal violence" rule being in large font. She strongly suspects that her default inclination is not weighted enough towards strength-and-power to survive in this society.

Her first reaction is to cringe a little at "most of you have been yearning for today for quite some time" and "last minute additions of students", but then again they're also talking about Lark, and very possibly some of the stranger students. She is not the only outside-context person here, and the Bank is clearly accustomed to expecting the unexpected.

Did Trout pick their own name?

The semantic bleedover informs her that the term "immortal chef" refers to a food-magic specialist: it doesn't seem to have any more specific implications, like a particular certification or power level or something. Presumably "immortal" is being used here in the same sense where "mortal" means a non-cultivator even though most cultivators eventually die.

She looks forward to learning more about what the results of food-magic are like.

That bit about 'we're giving you your first technique today, but practising it before tomorrow is strictly forbidden' is clearly a marshmallow-test: anyone who fails it has proven themselves unfit to be part of an institution that prizes farsightedness above all things. Even apart from that, she very much does want to start off under experienced supervision when it comes to tinkering with her soul.

(She hopes nobody else fails the test and inflicts secondhand-embarrassment on the rest of the cohort.)

Ah, apparently this is an applauding occasion: that seems reasonable. She takes note of the form of applause the people around her are doing and mimics it.

(She resists the urge to turn around and check how one applauds when one is a cyborg spider.)

"Were there any notable bits of subtext in there that I might not have caught, coming from a foreign culture? ...I guess it might be hard to tell which bits would be non-obvious from the outside.

I did notice how they're giving each of us a technique *today* but not permitting us to do anything with it until *tomorrow*, as a test of our ability to look to the future.

...also it occurs to me to be concerned about how they learned what damage a flawed ascension would do."

"I think that only mentioning two other sects was some kind of subtle snub - lots of people consider the Market to be our rival, so they're likely always in the speech, but presumably there's some specific reason that the Blade was mentioned and not, say, the Heart or the Philosophers, that we'd know if we had more insight into high level politics." 

"They're absolutely testing us, but also they are hoping we will have actually read our books by then. Don't know how realistic that's going to be, some techniques fit on a single page and some are thousand page tomes." 

"Unfortunately, flawed ascensions happen? The Bank is not the only sect, and not all cultivators are aligned with the empire. If we're lucky, the tribulation kills them and produces a new regional scale stain. If we're unlucky, then someone successfully ascends as an awful god, and that's how we get new hells." 

"...how often does that happen? How many of them *are* there?

...even-- even the less-bad outcome must be pretty bad, if it's staining a whole region with awfulness."

(not to mention whatever poor bastard ends up hosting them)

"Also, uh, as for 'hell', the language-borrowing gets a bit slippery with things I don't already have words for. 'Realm where demons come from'?"

"The huge stains aren't always awfulness, sometimes people just - contained contradictions that they couldn't resolve, or couldn't commit wholeheartedly to their Way, or they just weren't competent or strong enough to get it right, and they tore themselves apart.

Hells are - well, they're idiomatically realms which are awful. Specific recorded hells are full of demons of some sort, extremely unpleasant to be in, and are often hard to escape or actively working to trap more people. I've read of about half a dozen hells but I don't have a reason to think I've heard of all of them. Probably some of them are just full of demons suffering together rather than that and also occasionally emitting demons into the empire. ... also I should at this point be clear that people use the term demon ambiguously in several cases - it can also refer to, for example, monsters possessed or empowered by forbidden gods, malevolent spirits of any sort, the inhabitants of any worldsoul realm even the nice ones, or specifically the subagents that essence realm cultivators can shard off from their main soul to intervene in the world."

"Eesh."

She wonders if her homeworld learning about cultivation would be a net positive. She supposes there's no point dwelling on that: it'll happen or it won't, and she'll almost certainly never even find out either way.

...actually, no, it's not true that there's no point in dwelling on it. After all, if she does conclude that the existence of cultivation is net-negative, then she should keep it a secret from future worlds that don't already know.

Now isn't the right moment for contemplating that, though. She still has very little information on which to make such a decision, and it doesn't affect her current actions since once the secret's out learning cultivation yourself does seem overall positive (if perhaps slightly questionable on the acausal-bargain front).

There really is a lot to take in with this world.

This time she can nod thoughtfully.

"Yeah, 'demon' was...close enough that it was clear what Tashayan word I would translate it as, but the boundaries didn't feel like they matched up quite right. To us, 'demons' sometimes refers to malevolent spirits in general but mostly refers to ones that possess people. There aren't any back home, but we know they exist elsewhere because we hear sometimes about people getting mistaken for them."

"That makes sense. It must be very strange, to hear whispers of power but never any firm conclusions." 

(At this point they might notice that the next speaker, an elderly woman in plain robes of dark red, has arrived on the stage and introduced herself while they were talking.) 

Time to focus on her immediate surroundings again: internal conversation and demon population ethics and who the Heart and the Philosophers are can wait.

She readies herself to take notes. In Imperial, partly for practice but mostly so that Jasmine can later refer to the notes as well.

This speech will cover practical manners of logistics both for the next few days and for the coming year, including things like thier right to use the teleportation network (trips to and from the sect proving ground are free, and they may make occasional trips elsewhere in the duchy), their compulsary classes (qi theory, history, and ethics taking up one day a week, martial training and physical conditioning most mornings.), and various other details of the sect deal. Much of it is a recapitulation of what they've already been given notes on, or things Jasmine already knew, but it's still helpful to note down. 

She looks forward to it! Qi theory and history especially sound like they'll be very helpful for getting a better grounding.

Presumably she should have at least the basic combat training they give to people not pursuing the Martial aspect, just in case. The thought of having that affordance is a little unnerving, but she can handle it. She thinks.

(As for Jasmine's physical training, that will be a very strange experience to go through given that Kedri can still feel the body when she's not fronting.)

Also, teleportation network.

She actually gets to cheat a little bit on the physical training, having arrived into a body which has ten years of practice at meeting and exceeding the expected standards for physical conditioning - and honestly, that is half the point, keeping the scholars and the jade beauties from dying of heart attacks and romantic wasting respectively. But self defence training is indeed useful. On the other hand, Jasmine will be taking the advanced classes. 

Eventually, the lecture will be over, and it will be time for everyone to file out to the viewing platform from which they will watch the exhibition match take place in a large clear field below.