Meng Hao was about to fail the Imperial Examinations for the third consecutive year, and he was not taking it well.

The examination hall in Yunjie County was sweltering in the midsummer heat. Two hundred scholars sat at wooden desks arranged in perfect rows, their brushes scratching against examination paper as they composed essays on the virtues of filial piety and the proper governance of the empire. Meng Hao had been staring at his blank paper for over an hour, his brush hovering motionless above the inkstone.

He was not stupid. He was, by any reasonable measure, a very intelligent young man with a good memory and a decent hand. But he was also incredibly lazy, deeply uninterested in bureaucratic philosophy, and cursed with the misfortune of having parents who considered failing the Examinations a fate worse than death.

'The Confucian ideal of the gentleman scholar,' he muttered under his breath, 'is to abandon worldly pursuits and cultivate the self.'

This was, technically, a valid interpretation of Confucian thought. It was also a convenient justification for not knowing any of the answers.

An hour later, he handed in an essay that consisted of a single beautifully calligraphed sentence: 'A gentleman does not worry about examinations, for the Dao is beyond examination.'

He failed, of course. Spectacularly. And when he returned home, he found two old men in long robes waiting at his family's modest estate — men who definitely did not belong in Yunjie County.

'Your parents owe us money,' one of them said. 'Quite a lot of money. Since you've proven incapable of becoming a scholar-official and repaying the debt, you will come with us.'

'To where?' Meng Hao asked.

'The Reliance Sect,' the old man said, and for the first time, Meng Hao felt something stir in the air — a pressure, invisible and vast, that made the hairs on his arms stand up. 'You will become a cultivator. Or you will die trying.'