Enlightenment

As it turned out, one of the rewards for competence was getting stuck in quarantine for a month.

Okay, that wasn't entirely fair. Yes, Yon lost out on a fair amount of time he had hoped to use for other projects and for networking with others, but he had gained the gratitude and a personal relationship with the two inner circle members he had been assigned to provide medical care for.

Ryu Hashin was a third son of his clan's heir-line scion, which put him fifth in line theoretically and never in line outside of disaster practically. He had the political connections to be a core disciple, but at only sixteen he had still been young enough that being an inner disciple had been more useful for his growth. With the Ego Death of their ancestor, he had volunteered as an inner disciple to help regain his clan's standing. Ryu was part of the Hunting Division, but he was more of an academic in that he enjoyed dissecting and cataloguing beasts, and generally had a scholar's air about him. He had been in the tactics class because he saw combat as something of an intellectual puzzle and wanted to know more about moving soldiers around to achieve his ends.

Tvar Oli was another inner disciple, but where the Ruy were a notable clan with a lineage that included old monsters and even the Ascended, the Tvar were more recent and their most notable members were elders in branch sects. That meant that he was actually a few years older than Yon, and had been essentially voluntold to join as part of the sect's tithe to the Celestials. He was in the Artisan Annex and had done significant work with spirit bronze casting, which meant that he had little carryover expertise, so he was trying desperately to be the best possible officer he could by piling on extra classes.

Both had been talking with Amep since they had been in adjacent cliques at the Sect. Amep's failure to secure a dessicator quickly had actually impaired a project a mutual sponsor had been working on, although fortunately Amep hadn't actually let anyone know who had got in his way and Yon wasn't breathing a word of that. Somewhat fortunately, both inner disciples had seen Amep as being a bit too desperate to pump up his personal rather than clan value and thus were not particularly broken up by his violent end despite past associations. As for Yon personally, they mostly just took the fact that he was their medic while in quarantine as a given, but close proximity and the application of emergency care certainly gave a generally better all around improvement in their attitude.

They also weren't doing nothing while in quarantine. The Celestials would send them study materials, and they all had enchanted slates that used correspondence magic to pass messages back and forth. This meant that they did a lot of tactical and leadership study in between sessions of meditation and physical conditioning. Ryu also took every opportunity to practice wargames with Yon and Tvar, using a wide variety of tools and knickknacks in their out of the way hall to simulate various battles according to the Celestials.

While there were legitimate training purposes, Yon did have to admit that Ryu saw the whole affair as being something of a pure game, and he was a bit of a childish bitch about the whole thing. Tvar had the social standing to push back if Ryu got too annoying, but Yon just kind of had to go along with things. Yon of course couldn't obviously throw a game, and there were a few times where Ryu was clearly experimenting with something and thus decided that a loss was an acceptable outcome. Most of the time though Yon had to try not to be too clever lest the younger noble get upset at him for rising above his station.

There were two times where this didn't work that Ryu at least had the good graces to not throw an absolute fit over, although that was mostly because the cause of the results were somewhat absurd. The first was one time when the random numbers used to simulate the unpredictability and fickleness of fate on the battlefield spat out a sequence of truly ridiculously good numbers for Yon and garbage for Ryu. Had then been actual dice fists probably would have been thrown, but they had all assumed that they could all manipulate dice throws and had asked for something more secure. While the numbers stabilized shortly after, that initial spate put Ryu in a bad spot where recovery would have required Yon to blatantly throw the game.

The second incident was subtler but no less absurd in totality. In that scenario Yon had just thrown the most simple and basic tactics at Ryu, intending to lose to Ryu's forces like typical, but the game had simply not cooperated with either of them. Neither had particularly good or bad luck with the rolls, it was just that Ryu's advances kept bouncing off Yon's units and Yon kept being in a situation where the most obvious move was clearly also the best one and he would have insulted Ryu if he did anything else.

Ryu had been fuming by the end of the whole thing, but no one in the quarantine room could point to anything Yon had done that had been particularly clever, or anyway the scenario as devised should have given him some sort of starting advantage. He'd just kind of won in the most boring way possible, which hadn't made any sense to any of the three men in the room. It had just sort of happened.

Although after a few more weeks of going over lessons in tactics and leadership, as well as losing the vast majority of the wargames he played, Yon was starting to get a feeling for the way the Celestials did things. They did things by using vast numbers of mortals to haul large amounts of equipment in such a way that they could concentrate extraordinary levels of violence on points and then pounded them like a miner driving stakes in order to split a stone. It wasn't clever or elegant, but it worked.

Then again there had been this one match where suddenly everything had clicked for Ryu and his units began to practically dance across the battlefield, and Yon had pulled out all of his own stops just to try to keep up with the sublime ballet of simulated violence and to extend the experience. He had actually enjoyed rather than accepted his loss in that game, and the next few matches had seen both players frustrated that they couldn't replicate that magic before they returned to their typical routine.

Near the end of their isolation they received not educational or historical material, but actual updates as to their overall objective. As was obvious, the Celestials were preparing for a great conflict, but the depth of the preparation was more extensive than anything Yon had imagined.

It seemed that they were on a giant ship capable of sailing a spiritual sea, able to move between realms of existence. Their ultimate objective was still out of the scope of the material, but spiritual realms apparently had tides and currents and shoals that made the ease of their navigation differ with place and time. The realm their sect had been from was part of a particular current known as the King's Processional, so named for its relative ease and stability while also taking a particularly long route through the local branches of the World, passing through or close to most major features.

Their first stop would have them remind a local lord of their allegiances through a show of force, which would give the conscripts a chance to experience deployment and a taste of combat in the manner of the Celestials. They would be met up by the second wave of conscripts from the sects set to leave at the six month mark, and then the blooded veterans would be merged with the green conscripts to teach them on the way to the next stop. This overall process of either picking up recruits and supplies from loyal worlds or experience in battle from reminding lazy and wayward rulers seemed intended to repeat at least a half dozen times along the Processional before they actually were ready for the actual campaign.

The majority of the information provided was on their first stop.

The First Stop
[ ] Seka, the Phoenix Realm; another realm of sects and cultivators
[ ] Oublie, the Eternal Deeps; a strange place dominated by thousands of pocket spirit realms
[ ] Eclipse, the Twilight March; where the sun never sets nor rises

AN: This one fought me, so have a simple bridging chapter