The air in Dormitory Seven cracked with kinetic torque.
Xiao Wu’s legs closed around Tang San’s waist like an iron vise.
The instant his ankles crossed behind her lower back, his first yellow spirit ring flared with intense, incandescent light.
First Spirit Skill: Waist Bow.
His slender frame did not merely flex; it generated an explosive multiplier of physical force.
Tang San felt the torque immediately—an instantaneous amplification of roughly one hundred percent of his baseline skeletal power.
He intended to whip her upward into the ceiling joists and smash her downward through the pine planks.
A fifty-percent kinetic surge from the ring alone, Tang San analyzed, her internal timeline slowing down under the calm of the Purple Demon Eyes.
He relies entirely on rotational leverage.
If the axis shifts, the torque bleeds into empty air.
Her left hand did not reach for his throat.
Instead, her palm slapped downward, flat against the iron bedframe beside them.
Controlling Crane Capturing Dragon: Grounding the Mountain.
Using the iron frame as an external anchor, Tang San channeled the violent backward arch of Xiao Wu’s throw straight into the structural iron of the cot.
The bed screeched against the floorboards, its four legs sliding half an inch through the dust, absorbing sixty percent of his rotational momentum.
Simultaneously, her right hand rose.
“First Spirit Skill,” she murmured, her voice entirely flat.
Shing—!
From beneath her boots, the Datura Serpent’s yellow ring expanded.
The Blue Silver Grass did not erupt from her palm as a single lash this time.
The moment her spirit power surged through the newly opened Ren and Du channels, sixteen thick, scaled vines burst directly from the cracks in the floorboards surrounding her feet.
They rose like striking vipers.
First Spirit Skill: Entangling Bind.
The vines moved with hydraulic, whip-like speed.
Before Xiao Wu could complete his backward rotation, the vines had already coiled around his calves, his knees, and his wrists.
The interlocking dark green scales bit into his cotton sleeves.
The microscopic barbs did not pierce deeply enough to inject a lethal dose of the Datura neurotoxin—Tang San had clamped her internal control down to three percent of the venom yield—but the ambient numbness of the contact was instantaneous.
Xiao Wu’s muscles went slack.
The explosive force of his Waist Bow evaporated as the nerve channels in his thighs seized under the localized paralytic charge.
Thump.
Tang San twisted her hips, slipped out of his loosened grip, and stepped back two paces onto the clean boards.
Her right hand closed into a loose fist.
The sixteen vines snapped taut simultaneously, suspending Xiao Wu three feet off the ground in a rigid, web-like cradle of coiled, scaled briars.
He was bound at four points, his arms pinned to his torso, his legs held straight, completely immobilized in mid-air.
The room fell dead silent.
Xiao Wu hung in the vines, blinking.
His pink-cheeked face was upside down, his long scorpion braid dangling toward the floorboards, sweeping the dust with its frayed tip.
He tried to flex his calves.
The muscles refused to fire, twitching weakly beneath the scales.
“You…” Xiao Wu’s mouth opened, his voice a mixture of absolute outrage and bewildered confusion.
“My legs are asleep!
“That is the secondary attribute of the Datura Serpent,” Tang San said, walking over and coming to a halt beneath him.
Her hands were folded behind her back, her breathing perfectly measured.
“The barbs contain a neurotoxin that blocks neuromuscular transmission.
At full output, your respiratory diaphragm would paralyze within forty seconds.
I used less than five drops of diluted venom across the contact points.
The numbness will dissipate in half an incense stick.”
Xiao Wu glared down at her, his large black eyes watering slightly with frustration.
“You cheated!” he sputtered, wriggling his shoulders like an angry caterpillar trapped in a web.
“You used your spirit skill while I was mid-air!
You didn’t even let my feet touch the cot!”
“In a lethal encounter,” Tang San replied, her eyes cool and unyielding as winter slate, “an enemy does not wait for your feet to find purchase.
You committed your entire mass to an airborne attack without maintaining a secondary vector of retreat.
An assassin from the mountain sects would have run a three-inch bodkin through your kidneys while you were rotating.”
Xiao Wu stopped squirming.
His gaze locked onto her face.
Beneath his petulant pout, that same ancient, complex shadow flickered behind his dark pupils—a sharp, penetrating recognition that this girl was not reciting academy manuals.
She spoke with the bone-chilling casualness of someone who had watched bodies cool in the dirt.
“You’re bossy,” Xiao Wu muttered, turning his face away and blowing a stray lock of hair off his nose.
“And your vines smell like bad wine.”
Tang San flicked her wrist.
The sixteen vines dissolved into emerald-blue light motes, instantly releasing him.
Xiao Wu fell, but even with his legs eighty percent numb, his natural acrobatic instincts took over.
His hands hit the floorboards first, his torso rolling smoothly to dissipate the kinetic impact, ending in a sitting position against the leg of his cot.
He rubbed his calves vigorously, his teeth gritted as the pins-and-needles sensation of recovering circulation surged through his nerves.
“I lost,” he grumbled, refusing to look at her.
“You’re still the Boss.”
“A spar is for calibration, not dominance,” Tang San said, turning back toward her bundle to retrieve her small wooden comb.
“You have exceptional kinetic bursts, but you lack defensive endurance.
If an opponent survives your initial throw, you have zero armor.”
Xiao Wu scoffed, but his hands continued to massage his numb shins with quiet obedience.
Tang San sat on the edge of her straw mattress, unfastening the strip of grass that held her own long black hair.
Her hair was unusually thick, cascading down her back like a sheet of dark silk, carrying subtle, deep blue undertones that seemed to drink the afternoon light.
She raised her wooden comb, beginning the tedious process of working through the tangles caused by the forest brush and the night spent in the open cart.
The comb caught on a stubborn knot near her shoulder blade.
She paused, adjusting her grip to avoid snapping the teeth of the cheap pine tool.
A soft, hesitant rustle came from the floor.
Xiao Wu had crawled over on his hands and knees.
The numbness had receded enough for him to move, though his gait was still slightly clumsy.
He knelt beside her cot, his chin resting on the edge of the rough hemp blanket, his large eyes looking up at the wooden comb in her hand.
“You do it wrong,” he said quietly.
Tang San looked down at him.
“It is merely hair.”
“It’s not ‘merely hair,'” Xiao Wu said, a sudden, fragile softness creeping into his tone that made the hair on Tang San’s arms prickle with strange caution. Find the original chapter at g.com.
“My mother used to say…
a person’s hair holds the threads of their life.
If you pull it with anger, your heart grows crooked.
You have to comb it from the roots to the tips, slowly, so the knots don’t break the strand.”
He reached out his small, slender hands, his fingers hovering an inch from the comb.
“Let me,” he whispered.
Tang San’s body tensed by habit.
In her second life, allowing anyone to stand behind her with their hands near her cervical vertebrae and carotid arteries was a capital violation of survival doctrine.
In the Tang Sect, two fingers behind the skull could drive a concealed bone needle straight into the brainstem before a breath could be drawn.
She looked at Xiao Wu’s eyes.
There was no murderous intent.
There was no political calculation.
There was only a profound, bottomless loneliness—the look of an orphaned cub reaching out toward the only warm thing in a cold cave.
Slowly, against every doctrine of the Outer Sect, Tang San opened her fingers.
She handed him the wooden comb.
Xiao Wu’s face lit up with a quiet, brilliant radiance.
He climbed onto the edge of the cot behind her, kneeling with his weight balanced on his shins.
His small hands were surprisingly warm, extraordinarily gentle.
He took a thick section of her dark, blue-tinted hair, separating the strands with his fingertips before drawing the pine teeth through them.
He did not rush.
He worked through the knot near her shoulder with infinite, rhythmic patience, his breath warm against the back of her neck.
“San’er,” he murmured after several dozen strokes, the comb gliding smoothly through the dark silk.
“Do you have a mother?”
The question was simple, dropped like a pebble into a deep cistern.
Tang San’s eyes remained fixed on the dusty floorboards.
“No,” she said.
“She died when I was born.”
Xiao Wu’s hands paused for half a second before resuming their gentle, downward sweep.
“I don’t have one either,” he said softly, his voice dropping until it was barely audible above the rustle of the hair.
“She…
she was taken away.
A long time ago.
Before I came to this city.”
He leaned forward slightly, resting his forehead against the fabric between her shoulder blades for a brief, fleeting moment—a contact so light, so fragile, that it felt like a fallen leaf brushing against an iron shield.
“From now on,” Xiao Wu said, his voice regaining a tiny shred of its stubborn, playful resolve, “I’ll comb your hair every morning.
And you…
you protect me from the noble bullies.
Deal?”
Tang San sat motionless, feeling the strange, unaccustomed warmth of another living creature resting against her back.
Across three lives, across thirty-five years of modern calculations, poison manuals, and iron anvils, she had never had a brother, a companion, or an equal who asked for nothing more than to comb her hair in exchange for shelter from the wind.
She drew a slow breath through her teeth, her internal energy settling into a deep, protective quiet.
“Deal,” she said softly.
Xiao Wu smiled behind her, his small canines catching the afternoon sun, and pulled the comb once more through the dark silk of her hair.