The basin earned its name later, whispered by those few who survived the descent and found themselves in need of a word that felt smaller, more manageable, than the reality of the stone throat they had been cast into. The men who built the sect never called it anything at all.
On the morning of the examination, the mountain itself seemed to exhale a cold, damp mist that clung to the skin. The attendants spoke rarely; they used poles and blunt, barked commands to drive the entrants forward. Thousands of martial artists, the pride of their respective villages and minor clans, were herded through the jagged outer paths. They were pressed downward in a suffocating human tide until the land simply vanished beneath their boots. No one was rushed, yet no one received a moment's reprieve.
The depression was a natural scar in the earth, though centuries of use had honed its cruelty. Stone ridges ringed the space, rising so steeply that the morning sky was reduced to a thin, grey ribbon of light. The floor sloped inward toward a central point, resembling a shallow wound cut into the mountain's granite flesh. It was a graveyard of history-broken slabs of basalt and half-buried stone pillars littered the floor, the wreckage of previous tests offering the illusion of cover while ensuring that no footing was truly stable.
This was a machine built for sorting the living from the dead.
Above the basin, stone platforms jutted from the ridges. The stewards took their places first, their robes of slate-grey snapping in the mountain wind. They held tablets of dark wood, their eyes moving with the mechanical efficiency of clerks counting bags of grain. They spoke rarely to one another. Marks were made on the wood; names were not yet worth the ink.
The elders arrived with the silence of falling snow. They made no announcement of their presence with shouts or displays of power. They simply were. Some stood with hands tucked into their sleeves, while others sat upon stone chairs carved into the cliffside. Their presence pressed down with the absolute, unyielding weight of law rather than physical force.
Below, the atmosphere shifted as the crowd realized they were being watched. Thousands of men and women, who had spent their lives believing they were masters of their own strength, suddenly felt the crushing reality of height. Some gripped weapon hilts until their knuckles turned the color of bone. Others rolled their shoulders, trying to shake off a chill that had nothing to do with the weather.
"Too many," a steward murmured, his voice low as he leaned toward a colleague.
"The mountain is always hungry," the second replied, eyes fixed on a group of entrants in the center who were already eyeing one another with bared teeth. "Most are just meat. The rest will become a lesson."
A young man leaned against the stone railing of the central platform, his posture so loose it bordered on insult to the gravity of the occasion. He wore robes of a finer silk than the stewards, a deep, bruised purple that caught what little light reached the heights. He watched the masses below with his chin resting in his hand, his eyes half-lidded and bored.
"Core disciple."
"Jiang Rui."
The name passed in whispers before anyone dared speak it aloud.
Jiang Rui made no acknowledgment of the attention. He looked down at the thousands of desperate souls as if watching ants struggle over a crumb.
A steward stepped to the edge of the highest rise. His voice carried through the basin's silence, whetted and sharp.
"This is the Judgment Field."
The murmurs died instantly. The quiet that followed was thick, tasting of iron and old dust.
"There will be no demonstrations," the steward continued. "No explanations. When the formation opens, you will enter. Inside the boundary, you may fight. You may cripple. You may kill. To leave the boundary is to fail. To interfere with an observer is to die."
A man near the front, his chest broad and his face scarred by previous battles, swallowed hard. "By what standard are we judged?" he shouted, his voice cracking.
"By ours."
A soft, lazy laugh drifted down from the central platform. Jiang Rui shifted his weight, his voice carrying a light, melodic arrogance. "So many faces," he mused, as if speaking to himself. "If you think this is a test of courage, you will die for nothing. If you think it is a test of fairness, you will die confused."
The formation flared.
A ripple of pale, sickly light shivered across the floor of the basin, marking a perimeter that felt like a sudden drop in temperature.
"Enter."
The surge wasn't panic, but a desperate, sharpened urgency. Thousands of boots scraped against stone as the entrants rushed to claim what little high ground or cover the basin offered.
Xu Qian stepped to the side, allowing the first wave of frantic bodies to pass him. His shoulder throbbed, a rhythmic reminder of the poison still nesting in his marrow.
The first death happened before the crowd had even fully dispersed.
A man of immense girth, his arms thick as tree trunks, seized the nearest entrant. There was no art to it-only raw, brutal strength. He twisted. Two wet, sickening cracks echoed off the ridges. The victim fell to his knees, his arms hanging at impossible angles, his eyes wide with a shock that hadn't yet turned into pain. The big man stepped over the broken body and moved toward the next target. He didn't finish the first. There was no need.
As the minutes stretched, the Judgment Field began to exert its true influence. The air felt heavy, and the sounds of violence-the meaty thud of fists, the slide of steel into soft tissue-seemed amplified.
Predators began to emerge from the chaos.
In the center, a man moved with terrifying, mechanical rhythm. He didn't swing his blade with flair; he carved through the crowd as if he were back in a butcher's stall, hitting only the joints and the vitals. He was a man who understood that a human body was merely a collection of parts to be dismantled.
A man with a spear tried to rally strangers into a line, barking orders as if this were a patrol. Three listened. Two pretended. The moment steel met steel, the line became an invitation. A knife slid into his side between ribs, shallow but placed. He turned in disbelief, and a second blade found his throat. He fell on his back, hands fluttering at air as if the world might be argued with. It could not.
Near a broken slab, a pair tried to retreat together, backs pressed, blades up. For half a breath it looked almost sensible. Then someone threw sand into their faces. Grit, nothing more. One blinked and ate a club across the jaw. Teeth snapped. The other swung wide and hit nothing. A hooked blade caught his hamstring and pulled. He went down hard, screaming, and the scream ended when a boot came down on his throat.
A woman dropped her weapon and raised both hands, voice cracking with panic. "I yield, I yield."
The word meant nothing inside the boundary. A man answered with a short laugh and broke her wrist, then the other, as if correcting an error. He left her alive. She crawled until someone else noticed her movement and ended it out of convenience.
Above, a steward's stylus paused. A mark was made. Not for cruelty. For efficiency.
The basin's sound changed. It became quieter, but not calmer. Breathing grew heavier. Footsteps became careful. People stopped shouting names and started watching hands. The hopeful died. The careful lasted longer.
Loose stone collapsed beneath a runner's feet and swallowed him whole. His shout cut off abruptly. A rope snapped tight at knee height and pitched a woman forward into waiting steel. She fought long enough to leave gouges in the dirt before her throat was opened.
Panic flared, then burned itself out.
Noise thinned. Movement sharpened. Hesitation shortened lifespans.
Above, stewards marked tablets in silence.
Elsewhere, a man survived a flurry of strikes that should have ended him. A spear-point missed his throat by a hair's breadth because he happened to stumble over a loose stone at the exact moment of the thrust. He rolled, came up swinging, and took his attacker's leg.
"Luck," Jiang Rui chuckled, his eyes finally showing a spark of interest. "That one is cursed by fortune. It's almost offensive how he survives."
Alliances formed and collapsed in moments.
"Together," someone whispered, and turned his blade the instant advantage shifted.
A group near the center crushed anyone who approached, laughing as they worked. Traps took one. A knife took another. A predator finished the rest.
Above, elders spoke quietly.
"Waste."
"Acceptable."
Xu Qian stayed near the perimeter, keeping his back to the rising stone wall. A man rushed him, eyes wild with the need to kill something before he was killed himself. He swung a rusted cleaver in a wide, desperate arc. Xu Qian stepped inside the man's reach, his injured shoulder screaming as he drove his elbow into the man's throat. He didn't meet the strength head-on; he avoided it entirely.
The man buckled, clutching his windpipe. Xu Qian delivered a sharp, calculated kick to the side of the man's knee. Bone gave way with a muffled pop. Xu Qian withdrew into the shadows of a broken pillar before the man had even hit the ground. He couldn't afford a long engagement. He had to conserve every ounce of his failing strength.
Above, the stewards' styluses moved incessantly. They weren't looking for the strongest; they were looking for the ones who understood the cost of a strike.
The bell rang-a deep, bronze toll that seemed to vibrate in the very marrow of the survivors' bones.
The violence thinned like a fire running out of fuel. Men who had been seconds away from killing one another froze, their chests heaving, their faces masked in a mixture of gore and disbelief.
The sorting began with the cold precision of a harvest.
Attendants entered the field, moving through the carnage with total absence of emotion. They pointed their staffs at certain individuals. "You. Out."
Survivors began to separate themselves unprompted. The ones still holding weapons lowered them slowly, not out of respect, but out of fear of being mistaken for a threat. A few threw their blades away as if the metal had burned them. One man tried to hide behind a slab, thinking invisibility might turn into mercy. An attendant walked to the slab and tapped it twice with a staff. The man crawled out, trembling. The attendant pointed left. "Out."
Someone else pleaded, voice breaking. "I can still fight. I can still serve."
The attendant replied in an unchanged tone. "You already did."
The steward stepped forward with his tablet.
"Huo Ren." The butcher stepped out, wiping blood from his knuckles.
"Luo Jian." The lucky man limped forward, his jaw set in a hard line.
"Mo Qing." A woman who had spent the entire trial as a ghost, her blades never striking twice, emerged from behind a pillar.
More names followed, spoken in steady rhythm.
Ten.
Eleven.
Twelve.
Thirteen.
Four of them women.
"Inner disciples," the steward announced.
Jiang Rui leaned over the railing, his gaze drifting over the thirteen names called. He stopped when his eyes met Xu Qian's. He didn't smile, but he tilted his head, a predatory curiosity flickering in his expression.
"Not a single wasted movement," Jiang Rui whispered, loud enough for the elders to hear. "He fights like a man who knows exactly how much blood he has left to lose. How droll."
The steward's gaze moved to Xu Qian.
"Xu Qian. Outer disciple."
Xu Qian bowed, his movements stiff but precise. He looked at neither the corpses nor the victors. He looked at the ground, memorizing the cadence of the sect that had just claimed his life.
The Judgment Field was empty of the living within the hour. Behind them, the stone remained, scarred and stained, waiting for next year's "too many."