Primalshadow said:
*It is actually quite tough to estimate how many people our year has; I don't think it is mentioned outright anywhere. However, after passing Zhou's second test there are a touch under 50 disciplines remaining. Our own trials required us to go up against two groups in test 1 and a lone discipline in group 2, which would suggest a roughly 1-in-6 passing rate, but others may have had different trial; still, I think it is safe to say that there were 100+ test takers. Considering that not everyone was taking the class, I think it is safe to say that the number of people in our year should be in the low- to mid-hundreds. Then again, there were only 30 people in Elder Su's first class, so that is a point in favor of low-hundreds over mid-hundreds.
Responding to this first, because we do have a bit of numbers there:
Her 'class' soon joined the disciples from the other three lecture halls, and moved on to the two mountain paths that lay behind the main hall. Each path was flanked by a pair of large stone pillars carven with many symbols, centered around a single large character. The right hand set the character for man, the left hand set the character for woman. The meaning was rather obvious, and it seemed that no one had a desire to test the elders words today.
Walking between the pillars gave Ling Qi an odd tingling sensation, making the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. It was unpleasantly like being watched, but thankfully faded as they moved further from the pillars. For now she walked silently somewhere in the middle of the crowd of quietly chattering girls, clutching the strap of her satchel tightly and feeling terribly out of place. There were more than fifty, but less than a hundred people in the group with her. She hadn't gotten an exact count, but that meant that she had quite a few people to compete with if the implications of Elder Jiao's statements were true.
So we know there is around 50-100 girls. Assuming rough parity (unlikely), this means there should be around 150~~~ disciples in our year alone.
We should take this stumble with Su Ling as a lesson - being a named character doesn't make you special. Elder Jiao made it pretty clear when we entered the sect - the majority isn't going to go particularly far, at least as far as progressing through the sect is concerned. There are hundreds of people in our year at the sect alone*, and only sixteen people are accepted into the inner sect a year. Certainly, it is possible to try again on subsequent years, but you will also be competing with older students. The underlying calculus in unchanged - hundreds of students are accepted to the outer sect each year but only 16 inner-sect slots open up, which means that we can at best expect a single slot to be available for 10 people.
There it is, by the numbers. If we pick out a face from among our peers at random, their odds of getting promoted to inner sect, ever, are 10%. Admittedly, this is only an a-priori estimate; once we learn more about the face we've picked out, we can and should update this estimate. Take Bai Meizhen, for example. To start, her bearing and the way people responded to her marked her as special; people who stand out from the crowd like that are unlikely to be riffraff. And of course, once we learned that she was at Mid-Yellow cultivation, there wasn't even a question; her chance of making it to the sect is a near certainty, at least barring unfortunate accidents (which nevertheless need to be taken into account, reducing her chances from 99% to something more modest like 80%).
But look over our other acquaintances, and take a moment to think about how they measure up; are their advantages really enough to boost them from the baseline 10% to something truly respectable? I can see Han Jian slipping by on Backing and reasonable cultivation speed; I think his odds are over a third, though perhaps less than half. Then there is Gu Xiulan, who may not have quite as much backing but does have a highly-placed sister to give her advice; her chances too would probably be in the 1/3-1/2 range.
And then there are Li Suyin and Su Ling. Make no mistake, I'm happy to have them as friends, and I do acknowledge that they have advantages of their own. But do I think that makes it more probable than not that they will get into the inner sect? I think not; and on the off-chance that they do, I expect it to take more than a year.
I'm not going to go into depth about Su Ling, since we don't really know here well in the first place - but consider Li Suyin. What do we know her advantages to be? Well, she was one of the top five or so cultivators in Elder Su's Spiritual Cultivation class. Promising, but not especially significant - there were only something like 30 students in that class in the first place, after all. We also know that Li Suyin didn't go to the Physical class, and that in general her talent for physical cultivation trains behind her abilities at spiritual cultivation; a point against her. We know that she has little backing, other than the presence of a single good "clan" art; I would say she is somewhat neutral in that respect. And she is good at taking notes and is sensitive to Qi, so that is a point in her favor. Overall? I'd give her maybe a 1/4-1/3 chance of getting into the inner sect, at some point. Not a chance that it will be this year, though; at least unless the production competition disadvantages older cultivators to make things fairer to our year.
There are a lot of important info there, but it seems to be completely missing the point of the sect, of the tournament and of the screening process. While it can be tempting to go with statistics and 'Well, there should be around 30 people in second stage right now, and there is 16 places through the tournament, so if it was just this year's disciples alone they should each have 40% chance to get there' generalisation (which utterly ignore people coming from behind), I think it's much more important to determine what is needed to
'have a shot', as well as the failure points.
I think all of those are
extremely important, in no particular order, if you are going for the tournament route:
* Being healthy, your gear/tools unbroken and able to go and participate during the tournament week.
* Always trying. If/when you doubt yourself, don't stop improving while you work through your doubts and grow stronger from it. Never stop.
* Reach for opportunities constantly. Be it exploration or mission sects or taking over the outer sect, constantly find ways to challenge yourself.
* Obtain powerful methods. If your luck is bad, you are shit out of luck.
* Acceptable Talent.
'Acceptable Talent' is noted because even if you do everything well, you will have huge issues to get in the sect through the tournament in your first year if you have shite talent. Having Talent 4 basically means going 40% slower at everything than Ling Qi, even discounting breakthroughs, and opportunity costs piles up fast.
In this I haven't mentioned any advantages from backings and from being stronger at the start, because they only matter when it comes to making those checkpoints above
easier. It's easier for Han Jian not to give up because he is coming with a team and has the knowledge of his dad being Indigo/Violet and that means a great help 'mentally' and materially to pick up the slack when he becomes tempted to give up.
When we talk about Shoe-ins, Bai Meizhen isn't in the same order of magnitude as Sun Liling or Cai Renxiang. While all three of them have the last 4 checkbox, and all three of them began with two laps in advances, making it easier to grab those opportunities, there is very few thing one can do to sop Sun Liling or Cai Renxiang from participating in the tournament with health and gear optimal. Bai Meizhen though? thinking back to what we know now, and going from the beginning of the year (so ignoring everything we did), I would give her maybe 40% chance to grab a spot, simply because she will have a peer with a powerful group behind her that wants to cripple her, but she herself is not allowed to hit back. Her having a cascade failure from the thunderdom on wasn't unlikely if she failed to draw with Sun Liling, and even doing that would not assure the future lack of targeting.
Every character we have seen so far, that we know to some acceptable measure, have had mental conflicts from time to time. Han Jian and his inability to be decisive, Gu Xiulan and trying to find her place in the Golden Field group when it comes to Fan Yu and Han Jian, Bai Meizhen and 'finding her roots', Li Suyin and her choices when it comes to fighting and killing, Su Ling and her lack of confidence compared to Ling Qi (oh Hey Fan Yu), and so on. The mental conflicts are, I think, key to the Sect's screening processes. It's about creating conflict and forcing the disciple to evolve or fail. If Lu Suyin had given up she would have 'failed', and so on and so forth. Having backing? It helps so that someone can pick you up and help you keep going until you solve your issues. This is what Gu Yanmei is doing to Gu Xiulan (and Ling Qi was doing to some measure), Ling Qi to Li Suyin, Elder Ying to Bai Meizhen, and so on.
I'd hazard that the main reason most outer sect disciples never get to inner sect is not some kind of 'they are not talented enough' or 'they never got good arts' or 'they had enemies', but simply 'they gave up'. The screening is harsh, and after some time almost everyone will choose to stop being constantly forced to evolve as
that hurts. And so their strength improves much, much slower, and they 'settle' for other plans.
The third checkbox is a bit different from the second one, in the sense that it's not about just never giving up. It's about finding new ways to do so, to constantly reach out to opportunities you had previously not thought about.
For Li Suyin, you can see it by her asking us for help for training, by her inviting Su Ling for the argent vent mission without us being aware of it, by her getting a movement art on the sly 'to deal with people bullying her' (so not just keeping to her family arts), by her asking to train physical cultivation with us after she had given up on it previously, by her choosing to get a completely different secondary art suite for combat even though her family arts arguably do it better, and,
again, getting new formation-type combat abilities on the sly when she told us she 'hadn't had much time for formation lately'. (Remember that argument about how Li Suyin always does stuff by herself on the sly
@FixerUpper?). This is, in part, why I am confident on her 'Yeah, I am already in the inner sect since week 35, I just didn't want to make you doubt yourself' speech to us before the tournament.
For Bai Meizhen, it's the exploration she is doing when we are not looking, her breakthrough and so on. Gu Xiulan, she is the one asking us to go along with her fighting older out disciples. Basically, if you don't reach for new things and give yourself new challenges, you might keep up with your current pace, but you won't outstrip your own expectations... and that is what the screening process wants you to do. This is arguably the place where Su Ling is currently failing. While she is improving at her production ability, she doesn't seem to be setting challenges for herself, and is instead 'settling down in a rhythm'.
Obtaining powerful methods should be obvious. It is needed. The sect provides decent stuff, but you need good stuff to get the good stuff, and so on. There are opportunities being seeded, and there are obviously sect points if you are being unlucky, but you need those methods... and this is where backing shines. Someone like Han Jian need very, very little when it comes to finding new methods. He wants to try new things that aren't family style, certainly. But even if he doesn't what he already has is vastly better than what someone like Su Ling can get with dedicated effort unless she gets really, really lucky.
TL;DR: Backing, etc, don't matter so much they are deal breakers. Talent barely matters (for getting in the inner sect) as the sect won't accept people with extremely poor talent. What matters is the attitude of the disciple and the achievement they manage
within the sect. There are advantages you can bring from outside, but they aren't so strong that they outweigh a dedicated, midly talented disciple. The points of failures are not 'How much advantage does that person have', but 'How does that person deal with the cut throat environment of the sect'.
EDIT: obviously, all of this is to 'have a shot', not 'be assured'.
