Event · Wiki
Aperture Opening Ceremony
开窍典礼
Gu Yue Clan · Ceremony
The night every youth of the Gu Yue clan walks into a flower field to learn whether they will be allowed to cultivate, a ritual where a child's whole future is decided in a minute.
In the textevery mark is a paragraph; click one to read the line
Written into 14 of 346 published paragraphs (4%) — first at chapter 1, ¶30, most recently at chapter 4, ¶53.
What it is
The Aperture Opening Ceremony is the ritual that opens the Primeval Sea of every youth in the Gu Yue Clan, and the first major event of the novel. The clan's hope for the year is spoken before anything happens.
Ancestors bless us! Hope that in this Aperture Opening Ceremony, many youths with excellent aptitude can emerge to bring fresh blood and hope to our clan!
Chapter 1, paragraph 31
How it works
The youths descend into the dark, and the depth they reach is itself the answer.
Their families or seniors had already explained before they came that the farther they walked, the better their aptitude, and the greater their future achievements would be.
Chapter 4, paragraph 17
Then the field, the lights, and the verdict.
His expression solemn, Chen Bo stepped into the flower field on the opposite bank.
Chapter 4, paragraph 19
The lights converged on Chen Bo and entered his body.
Chapter 4, paragraph 20
What the room is really doing
Two things at once. Children are being measured (see Aptitude for the arithmetic, and elders are competing, using those measurements as ammunition. Gu Yue Chi Lian has his grandson's result forged upward, and celebrates it at another elder's face.
Gu Yue Chi Lian shouted with a triumphant laugh, glaring challengingly at Gu Yue Mo Chen.
Chapter 4, paragraph 50
Why it matters
It is the novel's first exam, and it teaches the reader the rules of the world in one scene: what a Gu Master is, what a grade buys, what happens to those who fail, and that a five-hundred-year-old cultivator is standing quietly in the middle of it, about to receive a verdict he has already outgrown.