A Grade

Natural talent for opening and filling an aperture is graded on a four-step scale from A down to D. ^{ch. 4} A grade sits at the top of that scale. Clan talk before the Gu Yue clan Awakening Ceremony already treats an A grade result as the outcome worth the heaviest investment, including competition for the clan head seat once the youth reaches rank four. ^{ch. 1 ch. 4}

How the grade is measured

On Qing Mao Mountain, the Awakening Ceremony measures talent by how far a fifteen-year-old walks into the moon orchid flower sea while Hope Gu enter the body. Fang Yuan states the bands used there: below ten steps means no cultivation talent, ten to twenty is D grade, twenty to thirty C grade, thirty to forty B grade, and forty to fifty A grade. ^{ch. 5}

Gu Yue Fang Zheng walks forty-three steps and is named an A grade talent on the spot, the first such result the clan has seen in three years. ^{ch. 6}

What A grade governs

The grade governs how much of the aperture the primeval sea fills, and therefore how much essence the Gu Master holds and how fast that essence recovers. ^{ch. 7 ch. 10} The academy elder states that an A grade talent’s primeval sea takes up eight to nine layers of the aperture, and that this talent is the most suitable for Gu Master cultivation, able to reach rank five. ^{ch. 7} Clan expectation talk earlier places an A grade youth on a path to rank four in about ten years with great care, and treats that height as enough to contest the clan head position. ^{ch. 4}

Recovery rate follows the same gap. Fang Zheng recovers about eight percent of his aperture store per hour, forty-eight percent in six hours, twice the natural rate of a C grade talent like Fang Yuan. ^{ch. 10 ch. 50} That surplus is why, during the academy’s vital Gu refinement test, an A grade youth can keep refining a Moonlight Gu from natural recovery alone while a C grade youth must burn primeval stones to hold progress. ^{ch. 10}

Talent grades sit beside the aperture mechanics on aperture and primeval essence. The ceremony that produces the grade is on Awakening Ceremony. The full ladder is on Aptitude. The other steps are B grade, C grade, and D grade.