He then opened the academy’s sect registration portal on his datapad.
The registration form was straightforward. Sect na. Founding mber ID. Initial mbership list, minimum two additional mbers. Mission statent, optional field that most sects left blank but that he looked at for a mont before deciding it was worth filling in.
He typed the na.
He entered his mber ID.
He left the mbership fields for the other two mbers blank for now, marking the sect as pending formation pending mbership confirmation, which was a valid registration state that held the na and reserved the founding credit for forty-eight hours while the founding mber finalized the roster.
In the mission statent field, he typed four words.
****From nothing to first.*****
He looked at it for a mont. It was accurate. It communicated the direction without overexplaining it. He submitted the registration.
The academy system processed it and returned a confirmation.
Sect Registration Confird — Pending Status
Sect Na: Celestial Legion
Founding mber: Lin Yi (1st Year, Level A)
Current mbership: 1/3 minimum — Pending
Current Rank: Unranked
Combined Score: 0
Status: Registration hold — 48 hours to complete minimum mbership
He looked at the confirmation for a mont. Unranked. Combined score zero. The bottom of the academy’s sect registry, tied with every other newly ford or incomplete sect in the system.
That was fine.
He closed the registration portal and opened his formation theory notes. The fundantals module had three remaining sections, and he wanted to finish them before the dungeon chanics practical session that Instructor Fang had scheduled for the following week.
Formation theory was not the most imdiately applicable knowledge for soone whose combat output operated at his current level, but he had decided early in the sester that operating below his potential in any area was a habit he did not want to develop. The academic components of this institution existed for reasons that would beco apparent at scales he hadn’t reached yet, and arriving there without the theoretical foundation would be a problem that past-Lin-Yi had failed to prevent.
He worked through the first section. Then the second. By the ti he reached the third, the dormitory corridor outside had gone quiet, which placed the ti sowhere past the point where most of his classmates stopped working for the evening.
He thought, while he read, about what Celestial Legion needed to beco over the course of this session and the ones that followed it.
The imdiate priority was mbership. He needed two more mbers to complete the registration. That decision required careful thought, because the sect’s composition at founding would shape its direction more than any subsequent additions. Early mbers established the culture of a collective. They defined what the group expected of itself and what it accepted as normal. The wrong founding mbers would require managent energy that he would rather spend on forward movent.
He had not yet made a decision about who he wanted. He was not going to make it quickly. The forty-eight-hour registration hold gave him ti, and he would use it.
He thought about the academy’s full student population across all years. He thought about the first-year cohort, both Level A and Level B, and about the specific qualities that would make soone useful in a sect built around the goal of reaching the top. He thought about the older students, the second and third-year hunters whose levels and experience were substantial but whose sect affiliations were already established in most cases.
He thought about what it ant to build a sect from zero score to first rank in a single session. Whether it was possible was a question with a straightforward answer. His expedition output in six hours had generated enough score to shift his individual ranking from eighth in the first year to first in the entire academy. A sect that could replicate and compound that kind of output across a full session’s worth of expeditions, dungeon clearances, and combat assessnts would accumulate score at a rate that the existing top sects had never experienced.
The question was not whether it was possible. The question was whether the right people existed to make it real.
He thought about that for a while longer.
The formation theory module’s third section covered anchor configuration in multi-elent environnts, and he read it with deliberate care from beginning to end. He took his ti with each subsection, slowing down whenever the explanations beca dense or layered. He annotated the points that contradicted what he had assud going into the reading, marking them clearly so he could revisit them later, and confird the ones that aligned, noting where his understanding had been accurate. Every correction felt precise, every confirmation quietly reinforcing.
By the ti he finished, the annotation count on the section was higher than any previous module he had worked through so far, the margins filled far more densely than usual. That ant one of two things. Either this section was genuinely more complicated than the earlier ones, demanding more attention and revision, or his assumptions about multi-elent formation chanics had been less accurate than he initially thought, requiring more adjustnts than he had expected.
Probably both.
He saved his notes and closed the datapad.
He then looked at the registration confirmation notification that was still on his phone screen.
Celestial Legion. Unranked. Score zero.
He had built things from zero before. He had started from a class rank that a room full of people considered laughable and ended as the top candidate in an eight-city regional examination. He had entered a dungeon event alone that was rated hazardous tier and erged with a mythical-grade weapon. He had stood at the edge of the thirty-ninth floor of the Dragon God Tower with a torn arm and pushed further instead of stopping.
Zero was just the beginning.
He set his phone down and went to sleep. Tomorrow he would identify the mbership. The day after that, Celestial Legion would be complete.
And then the real work would start.
*****
A/N: Thanks for everyone who is reading, I have listened to every complaint and anded any inconsistency. I’m planning a mass Chapter release, if you want to support the effort, gifts and golden tickets will be appreciated.
For gifts:
1 Dragon = 5 Chapters
1 Magic Castle = 10 Chapters
Above Castle = 15 Chapters
Also reviews will be appreciated, and I don’t delete reviews, I read them and improve
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