Mount Hua had not seen this many people in forty years.
They came from the outer villages first, summoned by formation-message two days prior, the paper cranes arriving at farmhouse doors and market stalls and the small, practical homes of the mountain's lower settlements with the sect's official seal pressed in pink wax and a message that said, simply: 'The ancestor has requested your presence at the Selection. Bring your family.'
Nobody refused.
Nobody who received a message from the Plum Blossom sect with 'ancestor' written in its first line and the formation signature of the sect master's personal seal refused to come.
They arrived the morning of the tenth day in steady streams — farmers with their cultivator children, merchants with their sons and daughters who had tested into the sect's outer divisions, village matrons with the proud, anxious faces of women whose children had been in cultivation training for years and who had never been invited to watch.
