[X] Volunteer to go now
Yon has experienced being sold once before in his life, and this time he's going to get the most out of it personally as he can.
He isn't the first, or even really among the first, but he is solidly in the first half of outer disciples who move forward to take a red ball. For a time he is worried that he might not make it, before he realizes that it does in fact seem that the Envoy is taking a third of all outer disciples immediately.
He wonders at what benefit there might be, but as he reaches the front of the line he is immediately shuffled into another line where a core disciple from the Artisan Annex is rapidly weaving together signifier tokens. Rather interestingly, Yon got a premade and significantly more ornate token in Medical Pavilion blue compared to the disciples from the Hunting and Internal Security Divisions ahead of him. It looks like specialty matters, and most of the volunteers have been from the more combat focused divisions.
Immediately after getting his token an inner disciple from security shoves him further along into a side building where a number of other dazed looking outer disciples with similar tokens to him, only varying in which division they were a part of. There were very few from Medical and Artisan, and no one he could see from Scriptorium, which made sense given how relatively unadventurous those groups were.
Eventually a core disciple from Huntingang rang a gong to get everyone's attention. The seemingly middle aged man had a pained look on his face that seemed only slightly relieved to see everyone eager to get this over with. "Attention everyone! Attention! You are here because you were within the first one hundred to volunteer from your division. The sect will be providing you with a small supply of cultivation resources, while the Celestials will be providing additional training and you will start out with a higher rank than those less eager." The disciple looked at a scroll and said, "I believe the translation is 'Common Twenty Man Leader', and if any of you are from noble families and don't like that name, shut up about it, you're serving under Celestials."
Yon had a strangely prophetic feeling that a lot of young masters were going to die in short order because they had no idea how to shut up and keep their heads down. They might understand differences in power, but any noble scion caught up in all of this would have simply been a recent addition to the sect and would see the situation as being a temporary inconvenience. Yon was certain that the first wave of outer disciples were fresh and young and presumed that by volunteering they would be swept up to whatever equivalent of Core Disciple the Celestials had in short order. He could already tell the Envoy and his vassals did not think that way.
He also really hoped that Va was okay.
Soon enough the approximately two hundred and fifty of them were being shuffled further into the sect compound. Already there were whispers that those who had volunteered later from their divisions were going to be 'Common Five Man Leaders', and that there were discussions about the possibilities of fights breaking out over slower but more noble disciples taking offence.
The group entered into a major antechamber, one of the study halls and arming rooms that lead towards the Deep Archives. The regular furniture had been cleared out of the way, with the primary point of interest being the dozen or so mortal servants whose bodies were stacked in a bloody heap on one side of the room. They had been flayed and their skulls broken open, with their skins twisted around an arched doorway and their brains being used to write upon the macabre parchment. The author of the atrocity was a man of stooped mortal stature so buried within his robes that his face could not be seen, his limbs atrophied but his spiritual presence so great he was moving the viscera that was his ink with his mind alone.
Yon didn't know where to look, since everything was unpleasant. The script was simultaneously fascinating but also made his head spin to gaze upon it. The bodies taunted him with their ghastly anonymity: had he known any of those servants, had he interacted with any of them? He knew from personal experience how little the lives of mortals could mean to those spiritually greater than them, but this was different.
It was the looks in the eyes of the other disciples that finally clued Yon into what was different. If an elder wanted to run an experiment on mortals, it was generally seen as a courtesy to other disciples to not make a public mess. This display showed that fundamentally the Celestials saw the disciples as little better than the mortals, meaning that perhaps for the first time in their lives these disciples were feeling empathy for the flayed and shattered bodies on the floor, and they did not like it.
The Celestial sorcerer finished scribing, at which point there was a flare of light and the archway was limned in flickering violet flames, the passage beyond replaced with a strange image that swam and flickered like it was beneath a layer of turbulent water. The outer disciples who had volunteered were promptly herded through the portal, a thoroughly unpleasant experience that left many nauseous on the other side. Yon was one of the few with a tough enough constitution to power through the disorientation, which let him get a better appreciation of the place.
He had absolutely no idea where they could be, other than far from home. They were in a massive chamber that had to be multiple li long and made of stone, the vaulted ceiling at least as high as a dozen men were tall. There were no windows anywhere, although there were many doorways leading into the chamber, and glowstones provided illumination. There were all sorts of structures and scaffolds made of all manner of materials, and Yon immediately clocked the place as being a physical training chamber of some sort.
Hard faced men clad in strangely chitinous plate watched the disciples spilling in through the sorcerous portal and clearly thought nothing of it. Most were up on gantries observing from a distance, but several were at the same level as them, and were notably armed with unpleasant looking clubs. Several of them were grabbing incapacitated disciples and hauling them over to strange mechanisms that seemed to be like metal spider legs surrounding a face mask mounted on a pedestal. They roughly shoved disciples face-first into the artefacts, the mechanical legs closing around heads, at which point the victims started to scream.
One disciple tried to protest, and got a jab from a club. The young man easily blocked the strike, but to everyone's surprise there was a loud crack and the wayward disciple was knocked to the ground, his muscles seizing up as he screamed in surprise and pain. He was immediately seized and shoved into one of the devices.
One of the first disciples shoved in was released from whatever it was he was experiencing, collapsing to the ground in the midst of a seizure. At this Yon's Medical Pavilion training kicked in, and he gestured towards the young man on the ground. Somewhat surprisingly the Celestials just shrugged in indifference and made an allowing gesture, and Yon was able to attend to him.
The majority of the first batch of disciples failed to wake up, and several died, but Yon got the feeling that the fact that the transit had incapacitated them meant that they had the weakest constitutions. However, when one man about his age managed to get his eyes to flicker open, one of the guards barked something in their weird language. The disciple had a funny look on his face before he nodded and said to everyone else, "I… I understand them."
Ah. Obviously the Celestials would need to communicate with their conscripts, so implanting the knowledge into the intended leaders made sense. The indelicate manner of doing it was not exactly comforting, but senior disciples could just be like that, so it wasn't exactly a new experience, especially not for Yon. As such, Yon made sure to get into line for the devices, because he had a feeling the Celestials were not going to be particularly tolerant of the last few disciples finding their feet afterward.
The experience of having his head wrapped up in unyielding metal and his face pressed into the mechanism was distinctly unpleasant all on its own, but once the lights began to play before his eyes the experience went from uncomfortable to excruciating. It was like his skull was being drilled into through his eyes and out the back so that molten metal could be injected. He could distinctly feel memories being called up and then foreign ones being hammered in on top, crudely welding them together.
Diamond Body and Iron Kettle let him endure, but just barely. While Iron Kettle was mostly about physical digestion, it inherently also included spiritual digestion to incorporate the metaphysical elements of consumed items into the body and soul. Yon barely managed to hold on, and even then when the mechanism released him he tottered away and had to throw up thin bile out of sheer, undeniable biological reflex. The guards laughed at him, but one of them commented, "Ha! Got the first one of these savages that might be able to hold onto being a sarge!"
The first thought that flashed through Yon's head was 'There are going to be so many dead young masters if the Celestials call us that!', followed shortly after by the somewhat more immediately pertinent 'Oh, I could understand that'.
It took about an hour for the disciples to all be processed through, the men-at-arms watching them with dispassionate amusement the entire time. On occasion they would pass pieces of metal or script back and forth among each other, apparently some sort of gambling. Ten of the disciples died outright, but they had all been from the first batches who were scooped up after being disoriented from the portal to this new realm.
The leader of the Celestial armsmen seemed to eventually decide that the process was well enough in hand that his words would be properly conveyed to the survivors in one way or another.
"All right you primitives! I am Sergeant Major Gosrick of the Forsaken 178th! You will address me as 'Sergeant Major' or 'Sir', is that clear?" The burly man barked out at them all. Yon and the majority of the disciples all immediately chanted out some sort of confirmation, but there were a few who were young and confused or just too proud. The armsmen laid into those lacking with their clubs.
"Ha! Not bad, not bad! Not bad for a bunch of ignorant savages who don't even know how to wipe their own asses that is! I think the majority of you might survive this!" Sergeant Gosrick said while giving a harsh chuckle. "Now that your freebie is over, let's get this right. The first and last thing out of your mouth when you address me is to be 'Sir!', is that clear?"
Several more examples were made when the chant was not "Sir, yes, sir!" This went on for a few minutes before eventually Sergeant Gosrick said, "Well, we might make something of your lot yet! I hear you savages think that the Gods have blessed you, and that makes you strong, but let's see if that is actually the case, shall we? We have a series of challenges for you lot, so let's see what you're really made of."
How does Yon perform?
[ ] Push to do as best as he possibly can
[ ] Don't stand out one way or the other, just do a good job
[ ] Sandbag a bit, be underestimated
[ ] Hang back to help those struggling