Chapter 361
As Sien led them through the floating city Matt got to see quite a bit of sect life. Not the Empire propaganda, not the Sect propaganda, not movie recreations, or anything but genuine sect life.
It was… strange.
He shouldn't have been surprised, but for the most part Sect people were just… people. They did normal things like anyone else, but there was something Matt wasn’t able to put his finger on that just made everything seem different.
In the end, he tentatively identified it as arrogance.
Everyone was arrogant. At least, all of the cultivators were, and most people on this floating bubble were cultivators, given the entire area was basically just an outpost for mid-Tier delvers clearing the rifts of the gas giant. Of course, delvers brought with them support, and support required personnel. And personnel brought family, so while there ended up being a decent spread of Tiers, the majority were cultivators in some form or another.
Matt was intrigued by the way people seemed to understand who they could be outwardly arrogant towards and who they couldn’t. There wasn’t anything like a CityNet -he’d checked- and very few people were broadcasting their names through their own AIs. His current theory was that it was something in people’s dress that communicated relative social status, given his lessons on Sect culture, but he’d yet to see any noticeable patterns deeper than which sect someone was associated with. He’d also been able to pretty easily glean which sects were local just by watching who was the most arrogant and had the most members strutting around, but there were definitely nuances he wasn’t picking up on.
There were two major sects of the bubble, the Divine Whispering Winds of Human Might, which Matt mentally shortened to the Whispering Winds sect, and their competitor, Earthly Might Overcomes the Dao. Both were feeder sects to a Tier 38 sect known as the Divine Might sect, and had taken their name as part of their own, a common indicator that they’d been founded by disciples of said higher-Tier sect.
Despite ostensibly being in the same organization, the two sects seemed to butt heads at every opportunity in a way that Matt just wasn’t used to in the Empire. If there was an official Earth Might shop, no matter what it was, there was a Whispering Winds competing shop just a building or two away, which often made for interesting interactions.
Just as they were walking to their dinner, they saw an alchemy shop having an open battle between their disciples in the middle of the street. They were each making potions and comparing the results while onlookers watched and commentated. When the Whispering Winds’ shop was defeated, they tried to slink away, but they were instead harangued by both the watchers and the Earthly Might sects people.