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The veil is a barrier that separates our world from a parallel realm, in which demons inhabit. This veil prevents one reality from bleeding into another, although their our occasions in which demons can sleep through the barrier when it is weakened enough. The Aztec empire is a large civilization that practices human sacrifice, and seeks to harness the energy from the demon realm for their purposes. These sacrifices are done by cutting the heart out of an individual one after the other. By weakening the barrier, they can summon demons across the veil to enslave.

A violent act such as a murder can cause a slight ripple in the barrier, causing it to theoretically weaken. The ripple from a murder is too weak to open a passageway. The Aztecs must cause a large sacrifice through a ritual in order to weaken the barrier enough for the summoning to be effective. But there is another problem. The ripple caused by each murder lasts less than a nanosecond, and is not long enough to weaken the veil to be useful. By the time the next sacrifice is made, the effect from the first ripple has passed, rendering it useless.

For summonings to work, individuals must all be sacrificed together. These deaths must occur at the exact same time, down to the very second. This is an issue. If the priests are even slightly off, the ritual fails and the sacrifice is waisted.

Is there any way to synchronize their efforts to make this ritual work?

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    $\begingroup$ How is this a question of worldbuilding? This boils down to a choice of characters between multiple methods of making things happen at the same time. Interesting back story, but ultimately the query is story based. $\endgroup$
    – elemtilas
    Commented Mar 29, 2020 at 17:15
  • $\begingroup$ This is a plot question, not worldbuilding $\endgroup$
    – user62562
    Commented Mar 29, 2020 at 18:06
  • $\begingroup$ I fail to see how this is any more story-based than many questions ob WB. That said, if the OP really needs nanosecond timing, that's practically impossible with modern technology, let alone Aztec. $\endgroup$
    – Matthew
    Commented Mar 29, 2020 at 18:47

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Just use music. Music is murder.

No wait that is not what I meant to say.

Ahem. Get the rhythm from a large drum or another percussion instrument and have all the priests doing the sacrifice be at the same distance from the drum. The priest can then use the sound to synchronize. If they are in rhythm with the drum beat and they are all the same distance from the drum they will be in sync with each other as well.

Rhythmic songs or music are actually what people used for working in sync historically.

Only issue is that the distance the sound carries might be a limiting factor for very large sacrifices. Also once the distance from the drum is large enough wind will start to be an issue. But in practice these issue will probably not be an issue unless the numbers are very large or the idiots start the ritual during a storm.

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