Theo's first lesson

"This is fucking insane," Tiana whispered while scrubbing the floor of the Inn with a crumbled cloth in her hands.

She was sitting down on her knees, pushing at the floor with the entire weight of her body for every scrub. Her task was to simply clear the fifth of the ground level's floor… but in the time the Inn was abandoned, the dirt eat right into the wood, making it night impossible to properly scrub it clean.

"Don't speak!" Luo barked from across the main room of the Inn that likely used to serve as the dining hall. "We don't know when he will be back. And you don't want our master to catch you complaining!"

Theo didn't bother to stay with his disciples.

The second he brought all five of them to the Inn, he ordered them to properly clean the entire place and showed them all the tools and utilities they might need for the task. Then, without uttering a single spare word, he simply turned around and left.

Back then, Theo's disciples had only two choices.

One was to sit around and do nothing, by refusing to follow their master's command. And save for how it would be considered a cardinal sin in the eyes of the sects as Theo's order didn't cross any moral lines, it would mean their new residence would remain as dirty as it was when they entered it for the first time.

The second choice was simple. It was to swallow their pride and obediently follow their orders.

'First, he's telling us to run like idiots, now we are busying ourselves scrapping the floor for him…' Kaya thought, gritting her teeth as she continued to fight with the dirt hidden in the small crevices of the wooden panels of the floor. 'Are we his disciples or damn laborers?!'

Kaya could feel her blood boiling. But the pain of her tired hands, the annoyance of the blisters forming on her fine skin, the disgrace of doing the menial work that would be usually completed by the servants back before she left her family to join the sect…

All of those feelings continued to bottle up in the girl's soul. And whenever she would give her companions in torture a glance, she could recognize that she wasn't the only one feeling like that.

Still, they were ordered to scrub the floor, so scrub they did.

After a few hours that seemed like an eternity, Hugo convinced everyone that the floor reached an acceptable state and thus they should move on to work on something else.

A short deliberation later, the group decided to fix all the walls, using the wooden scraps and sot to fill in the tiny holes and gaps. Yet, barely after they got to work on their new tasks, the doors to the Inn opened, announcing the return of their master.

"What the hell, guys!" Theo moaned right upon entry, his face twisting in annoyance. "I didn't expect you to slack so damn much!"

Kaya tightened her hands into fists, using all of her willpower to stop herself from exploding.

The exhaustion of working hard for hours combined with all the feelings she noticed in herself before. The figure of her master turned from a crafty schemer to a sadistic maniac.

And yet…

He was a cultivator. An inner disciple, but a cultivator still.

'Even if we jump him all at once, just finding a sword and throwing ourselves at it would likely be a less painful way to go,' she thought, forcing her fury to die down.

"Master, we were working extremely hard through all this time!" Hugo stepped forward.

His hands were trembling… but there was no look of fear or hesitation on his face.

For the sake of all five of them, the youngest stepped forward and confronted their maniac of a master. A sin equal to telling on one's parents, a crime on the same level as insulting or even striking one's own mother.

And yet, Theo… didn't fly into a rage. Instead, he simply smiled.

"Let me guess," their master muttered as he took a quick glance at the details of the scene. Then, his eyes landed on the wet rags that Kaya and her fellow disciples used to clean the floor. "You were trying to fix the floor… with those?"

Theo raised his left eyebrow and crossed his hands on his chest.

Hugo gulped his saliva down before nodding his head.

Apparently, replying to his master in such a rude way once was the limit of what his courage and sense of duty towards his fellow disciples could afford him.

"Well, I can't complain at all," Theo said as he put a wide smile on his face. "Since this is the first lesson for you all," he said as he walked across the relatively clean floor towards the corner where he left all the tools for his disciples to use.

He ignored all the equipment that one would instantly recognize to be used for a clearing… Only to pull out a long stick with a circular plate mounted at one of its ends.

'Isn't this... That weird, scrappy stick?' Kaya thought, recalling her own attempt at figuring out the use of this weird tool. Yet, save for how it was extremely easy to brush the skin off her hand by moving it down the bottom of this circular, metal plate, she couldn't figure out a single thing about it.

Theo, however, didn't hesitate even for a second.

He slammed the circular plate of the tool right on the floor. He then stepped down on it, as if to force it into the floor… before taking a step back, securing his hold on the long stick… and pulling back.

For Theo, it was as simple as just mopping the floor. Yet, from the noise that both the tool and the floor made, dragging the tool across the floor required quite a bit of strength.

At first, no one knew what Theo did that for. Yet, as their master pointed his finger at the original location where he stepped on the tool…

Kaya gulped her saliva down.

The small area that Theo dragged the tool across was incomparably cleaner than the parts they were all working on before!

Sure, by treating the floor like that, Theo scrapped a layer of the wood from the floor and turned it pretty sharp to step on… But without a doubt, it was now properly free of all the dirt that Theo removed along with the upper layer from the planks that made up the floor.

"Once you scrap the floor, you need to roughly polish it," Theo explained, switching over to nearly exactly the same tool as the one he used first. The only difference was how fine the grains at the bottom of its circular platform were. "Don't overdo it. It's fine as long as it won't hurt your skin if you step on it directly."

Theo then repeated the presentation from before by placing the tool down, stepping on it, and then dragging it across the scrapped part of the floor.

Theo then put the tool away before turning towards his disciples.

"Let this be my first lesson to you." Theo raised his chin but kept his hands falling freely across his sides. "Most of the orders I will give you will be beyond your understanding."

Kaya gulped down.

'Is that why he made us work our asses off for hours?' she thought, using all of her willpower not to commit suicide by jumping at her master with the intention of ripping his throat apart. 'All to just reinforce the message?!'

"Now then, I guess we can put the cleaning for later," Theo said before pointing at a sizeable box that he left outside of the inn. "Your training tools are over there. Bring them all over so I can show you how I want you all to train for the rest of today!"