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.
