The iron wheels of the hired cart rattled over the cobblestones of Nuoding City just as the morning watch sounded from the central bell tower.
The Grandmaster’s face was drawn, his deep-set eyes shadowed by dark, bruised bags of exhaustion.
He had not slept a single moment during the long drive back from the hunting forest.
Instead, he had spent the journey hunched over a parchment scroll by the light of a swaying oil lantern, his quill scratching furiously as he documented every micro-shift in Tang San’s pulse, skin temperature, and meridian capacity during the ring assimilation.
When the cart finally halted before the white marble archway of the academy, the Grandmaster rolled up his scroll with a definitive snap.
“I must compile these field notes before the memory of the energetic resonance fades,” he said, his voice raspy but burning with an intense, manic clarity.
“Return to your dormitory, San’er.
Wash the dried blood from your skin.
Before the midday meal, take this token to the Nuoding Spirit Hall branch in the city center.
You must formally register your breakthrough to claim your imperial stipend.”
He handed her a small bronze medallion engraved with the academy’s insignia.
“Yes, Master,” Tang San said, accepting the token.
She stepped down from the cart, her body feeling completely alien yet perfectly calibrated.
The fatigue of a sleepless night and a life-and-death struggle against a four-hundred-year predator had been entirely erased by the surging vitality of the Datura Serpent’s ring.
Every breath she drew felt crisp, pulling ambient atmospheric energy effortlessly through her expanded meridians.
She returned to Dormitory Seven, slipping inside while the other working students were already out sweeping the courtyards or hauling firewood for the kitchen.
The barracks were empty.
Xiao Wu’s bed was a messy nest of red quilt and goose down, abandoned in the morning rush.
Tang San retrieved her spare gray tunic and a block of coarse lye soap from her burlap bundle, heading to the cold-water washroom behind the barracks.
She scrubbed the dried flakes of blood from her neck and arms, noting with clinical detachment that her skin had grown marginally paler, taking on a subtle, resilient sheen that repelled water like oiled silk.
The physical tempering of the first ring had increased her dermal density by at least fifteen percent.
Dressed in clean cotton, she left the academy grounds and walked into the bustling heart of Nuoding City.
The Nuoding Spirit Hall branch was located at the intersection of the two widest avenues in the provincial capital.
It was a domed structure constructed from heavy blocks of polished brown sandstone, its arched windows framed in brass, and its towering double doors guarded by two statues of armored paladins resting their hands on downward-pointing broadswords.
Tang San climbed the wide stone steps, her hemp sandals making no sound, and entered the grand foyer.
The interior smelled of expensive incense, polished cedar, and beeswax.
High vaulted ceilings magnified the quiet murmurs of the clerks and the clinking of coins at the registration desks.
She approached the front counter, a polished expanse of mahogany that rose to the level of her chin.
The clerk behind the desk was a balding man in his late thirties, wearing the beige tunic of a senior administrator.
He was busy entering figures into a thick ledger and did not look up when she approached.
“The auxiliary entrance for servant deliveries is in the alley,” the clerk muttered, waving a hand dismissively at the sight of her patched gray working-student uniform.
Tang San placed the Grandmaster’s bronze medallion onto the mahogany surface.
Beside it, she placed her official awakening certificate, signed by Deacon Su Yuntao.
“I am a student of Nuoding Academy,” Tang San stated, her voice clear, lacking any trace of the timid reverence expected of a rural child in an imperial hall.
“I have obtained my first spirit ring.
I am here for rank evaluation and to register as a Spirit Master.”
The clerk paused, his quill hovering over the ledger.
He looked down at the bronze medallion, then at the girl’s face.
He picked up the awakening certificate, his eyes scanning the lines.
“Innate Full Spirit Power?” The clerk’s brow furrowed.
He read the next line, and a loud, abrupt snort of laughter escaped his nose.
“Blue Silver Grass?
Little girl, did you buy a ten-year white ring from a dying bamboo rat in the academy garden?
Fine, fine.
The empire pays for every registered rank, even the useless ones.”
He gestured to a crystal evaluation orb resting on a velvet cushion at the end of the counter.
It was larger and clearer than the cloudy sphere Su Yuntao had used in the village.
“Place your hand on the sphere.
Release your martial soul and channel your spirit power.”
Tang San stepped sideways, raising her right hand and resting it flat against the cold crystal.
She did not mobilize the full depth of the Mysterious Heaven Skill.
She merely allowed the ambient surface tension of her meridians to interact with the testing array.
WUUUM.
The crystal orb flared with a brilliant, blinding sapphire light that instantly illuminated the entire mahogany counter, casting sharp shadows against the high vaulted ceiling.
The light was so dense, so purely condensed, that it seemed to turn the crystal into a sphere of liquid blue fire.
The clerk jerked backward, knocking his inkwell over.
Black ink pooled across his ledger, but his eyes were completely dilated, locked onto the glowing numbers forming within the matrix of the orb.
“Thirteen…” the clerk gasped, his voice cracking.
“Rank Thirteen?!
You just acquired your first ring and you instantly jumped three ranks?!”
“Martial soul, release,” Tang San murmured.
Shing.
From her palm, the Blue Silver Grass emerged. Read this novel at novelping.com for the best experience.
It did not sprout like a fragile weed.
A thick, muscular vine, clad in overlapping dark green metallic scales, coiled upward into the air.
It was as thick as a child’s arm, lined with fine, translucent barbs that dripped with pale amber dew.
The air around the counter instantly soured with the faint, sweet, rotting-peach stench of neurotoxin.
From beneath Tang San’s feet, a single, brilliant yellow halo rose, oscillating with a deep, heavy, oppressive hum that made the wooden counter vibrate.
“Hundred-year ring…” The clerk was trembling now, pressing his back against the filing cabinets behind him, staring at the terrifying, spiked serpent of a vine that swayed in the air.
“A hundred-year ring…
on a weed?
That’s impossible…
The venom…
the scales…
what kind of monster did you absorb?”
“Does my evaluation meet the imperial standard?” Tang San asked quietly, withdrawing her spirit power.
The scaled vine dissolved into green motes of light, and the heavy yellow ring vanished, instantly plunging the foyer back into its quiet, incense-scented normalcy.
The clerk swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat.
He practically scrambled to a locked iron drawer beneath the counter, his hands shaking as he extracted a small brass badge stamped with a single crossed sword, along with a velvet pouch containing a single, heavy gold coin.
“Yes…
yes, Spirit Master Tang,” the clerk stammered, sliding the items across the desk as if she might bite him.
“Your registration is complete.
You will receive one gold spirit coin per month as your imperial stipend.
If you break through to the Grand Spirit Master realm, the stipend will increase to ten gold coins.”
“Thank you,” Tang San said.
She took the badge and the coin, slipping them seamlessly into the twenty-fourth jade of her belt.
She walked out of the Spirit Hall, her face impassive.
Beneath her calm exterior, her mind was rapidly calculating the purchasing power of the heavy gold disc in her spatial belt.
One gold spirit coin is equal to ten silver coins, which is equal to one thousand copper coins, she evaluated.
With this, I no longer need to scavenge low-grade pig iron from the academy slag pile.
I can purchase refined spring-steel, antimony, and high-density lead for counterweights.
The mechanical components of the silent sleeve dart require precision tools I do not possess; I must rent an anvil and a jeweller’s file.
By the time she returned to the academy gates, the midday bell had rung, signaling the end of morning lectures and the beginning of the lunch recess.
Tang San bypassed the crowded mess hall, heading straight for Dormitory Seven to retrieve her leather pouch of hidden weapon drafts before heading to the city’s blacksmith district.
As she pushed open the creaking timber doors of the barracks, she found the room entirely empty, save for one figure.
Xiao Wu was sitting cross-legged on his bed, the red quilt bunched around his waist.
He was holding a large, bright orange carrot in both hands, nibbling at it with rapid, systematic crunches.
He stopped mid-bite as she entered.
His long scorpion braid twitched.
His large, dark eyes narrowed, his pupils contracting into sharp, vertical slits for a fraction of a second before expanding back into their usual round, luminous shape.
Tang San paused in the aisle.
The boy’s sensory perception was terrifyingly acute.
He had not looked at her face; his eyes had instantly locked onto her center of mass, his small nose flaring as he drew in the scent of her clothing.
“You smell like blood,” Xiao Wu said, his voice entirely devoid of its usual playful bounce.
It was low, flat, carrying the cold, instinctive wariness of the deep woods.
“And…
sour rot.
Like old peaches left in the sun.”
“I was in the hunting forest,” Tang San replied, stepping toward her own cot.
“I acquired my first spirit ring.”
Xiao Wu hopped off his bed.
His cloth shoes made absolutely no sound against the timber floorboards.
He stepped into the aisle, closing the distance between them until he was standing scarcely an arm’s length away, his face tilted up to look at her.
“Let me see it,” he demanded.
Tang San looked down at the boy.
In the Tang Sect, revealing one’s capabilities outside of a life-and-death struggle was a breach of operational security.
But this world’s cultivation culture revolved around the display of rings; hiding it completely from a dorm-mate was more suspicious than showing it.
She raised her right hand.
The thick, iron-scaled vine erupted from her palm, coiling tightly around her forearm like a dark green python.
The brilliant yellow ring rose from the floorboards, bathing the dusty barracks in golden light.
Xiao Wu did not flinch at the sight of the jagged, venom-dripping barbs.
Instead, he leaned closer, his nose twitching as he scented the scaled surface of the vine.
“Datura Serpent,” Xiao Wu muttered, his eyes widening with genuine shock.
He looked up at her, the playful arrogance entirely wiped from his face.
“Four hundred years.
The absolute limit of a mortal frame’s first ring. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
And you forced it into a plant soul without your meridians turning to ash?”
Tang San’s internal alarm tripped.
He identified the exact species and the precise age limit from scent and visual inspection alone, she analyzed instantly, the muscles in her legs coiling, ready to execute the Ghost Shadow Perplexing Track.
The Grandmaster required decades of theoretical research to recognize that threshold.
This boy is six years old.
A regional peasant child does not possess innate encyclopedic knowledge of apex predators.
“You know your beasts,” Tang San said, her voice cool and perfectly level.
Xiao Wu realized he had spoken too freely.
His eyes darted toward the window, a brief flash of panic crossing his delicate features, before he forced a wide, bright smile, his little canines flashing.
“Of course I do!” he lied smoothly, putting his hands on his hips and puffing out his chest.
“My village is right on the edge of the southern beast forests!
The hunters bring back carcasses all the time.
I’ve seen a Datura Serpent skin before!”
It was a plausible lie, delivered with excellent childhood bravado.
But Tang San’s Purple Demon Eyes tracked the micro-expressions: the dilation of his capillaries, the slight elevation in his heart rate, and the unconscious, defensive shifting of his weight onto the balls of his feet.
He is hiding something fundamental to his nature, she concluded.
But he exhibits no killing intent.
His deceit is defensive, not predatory.
“I see,” Tang San said, dismissing her martial soul.
The yellow ring faded into the floorboards.
“You promised a sparring match once you obtained your ring.
Have you acquired one?”
Xiao Wu’s smile turned into a sharp, triumphant grin.
“I have!” he declared, bouncing lightly on his toes.
“I went home during the weekend recess while you were gone.
My family helped me hunt a hundred-year beast!”
From beneath his soft cloth shoes, a brilliant yellow ring surged upward, matching hers in intensity and coherence.
The phantom silhouette of a white rabbit flickered briefly behind his shoulders before dissolving into his physical frame.
His eyes turned a faint shade of crimson, and the muscles in his slender legs visibly tightened, coiling with terrifying kinetic tension.
“So, Boss Tang San,” Xiao Wu said, raising his small fists, his scorpion braid swaying like a pendulum behind him.
“Do we fight now?
Or are you too tired from hunting snakes?”
Tang San looked at his perfectly balanced stance.
She had just broken through to Rank Thirteen.
Her internal energy was boiling, seeking a physical outlet to temper the newly expanded meridians.
A sparring session against a high-agility beast-soul cultivator was the optimal method to calibrate her muscle memory to her new kinetic output.
She dropped her burlap bundle onto her cot, turning back to the aisle.
Her feet slid apart, her center of gravity dropping three inches.
Her right hand extended forward, palm open, her left hand hovering near her hip.
“The space here is narrow,” Tang San said quietly, her eyes locking onto his center of mass.
“First to touch the floor with anything other than the soles of their feet loses.”
Xiao Wu let out a high, ringing laugh.
“You talk too much like an old man, San’er!”
He vanished.
His speed had doubled since their first encounter.
The hundred-year ring had augmented his muscle fibers to a terrifying degree.
He did not run down the aisle; he bounded off the iron frame of a cot, using the vertical plane to launch himself into a diving, twisting drop-kick aimed directly at the back of her neck.
Too fast for linear evasion, Tang San calculated.
She did not turn around.
She did not raise her arms to block.
Ghost Shadow Perplexing Track.
Her body seemed to lose all physical substance, bending forward at an impossible, physics-defying angle, like a reed flattening under a hurricane.
Xiao Wu’s kick passed mere millimeters above her dark hair.
As he flew over her, Tang San’s hand shot upward.
Controlling Crane Capturing Dragon.
Her fingers caught the trailing end of his long scorpion braid.
With a vicious, calculated snap of her wrist, she used his own airborne momentum against him, whipping him downward toward the unforgiving timber floor.
“Hey!” Xiao Wu yelped in mid-air.
Instead of crashing, his spine coiled.
His hands slapped the floorboards, acting as temporary springs, and his legs whipped around in a lethal arc, attempting to lock her waist in his Waist Bow technique once again.
Tang San’s eyes narrowed.
The spar had begun, and the dusty confines of Dormitory Seven became a blur of clashing silhouettes, the sound of their impacts ringing out over the quiet midday campus.