The midday soup in the working-student mess hall was always thin, but that afternoon, no one even lifted their wooden spoons.
Dormitory Seven was packed to the doorway.
Twenty-odd commoner students—boys ranging from eight to thirteen, their slate-gray tunics patched at the elbows and stiff with dried pond silt—stood huddled around the long central table.
Wang Sheng paced back and forth, his heavy boots clattering against the pine floorboards.
His face was a mottled, anxious red, his broad fingers repeatedly opening and closing into tight, sweating fists.
“Liu Long ran straight to the northern dormitories,” Wang Sheng growled, running a thick hand through his cropped black hair.
“Boss…
Big Sister, you don’t understand who Xiao Chenyu is.
His father isn’t a minor bailiff.
His father is the Castellan of Nuoding City!
Xiao Chenyu is in his final year at the academy.
Level Eleven, Spirit Master rank, Beast Soul: Lone Wolf!
He has six senior students backing him, every single one of them at Rank Nine or Ten!”
Tang San sat at the end of the rough trestle table.
Her back was upright, her small hands resting flat against the scrubbed pine surface.
Before her sat an earthenware bowl filled with boiled wild greens and coarse barley.
She dipped her spoon into the broth, took a measured sip, and chewed twelve times before swallowing with absolute, unhurried calm.
“A Castellan is an administrative official of the sixth imperial rank,” she said, her voice dropping into the cool, analytical cadence of her first life’s civil service registers.
“He commands the local city watch, allocates municipal grain reserves, and collects market duties.
He does not hold military jurisdiction over the Heaven Dou regular army, nor does he possess the authority to overturn imperial academy charters.”
Wang Sheng stopped mid-pace, his jaw hanging slightly slack.
“Imperial charters?!
Big Sister, this isn’t an imperial court!
Xiao Chenyu doesn’t use magistrate seals to break bones!
In Nuoding Academy, the guards look the other way when noble scions discipline working students.
If they catch you outside the perimeter gate, they’ll break both your shins and claim you slipped on river shale!”
“Let them try,” a sharp, musical voice rang from the corner.
Xiao Wu was sitting cross-legged on a water cask near the wall, swinging his legs with rhythmic, careless insolence.
He was tossing a small, dried walnut into the air, catching it with his left palm, his long scorpion braid swaying across his shoulders.
His crimson-tinted eyes glittered with bright, combative mischief.
“A six-year-old wolf who hasn’t even grown full teeth,” Xiao Wu laughed, displaying his sharp little canines.
“I’ve kicked mountain wildcats twice his size into briar pits!
If he brings seven people, we break fourteen legs!
Right, San’er?”
Tang San set her spoon down into the empty wooden bowl without making a click.
“Violence without strategic purpose is merely an expenditure of calories,” she said, turning her dark blue-tinged eyes toward Wang Sheng.
“Did Liu Long bring a formal challenge?”
Wang Sheng swallowed hard, pulling a crumpled piece of red-waxed paper from his sleeve.
“Tonight.
At the third watch.
In the cedar grove behind the academy’s northern hill.
Xiao Chenyu said…
if Dormitory Seven doesn’t show up, he will have his followers bar the gates of the mess hall tomorrow morning.
He said if we lose, every working student must kneel in the courtyard and bark like a hound whenever a noble student passes.”
The boys in the barracks went completely still.
Several of the younger ones looked down at their straw sandals, their lips trembling with familiar, bitter humiliation.
“And if we win?” Tang San asked.
Wang Sheng’s eyes flared with a desperate, wild light.
“He swore on his father’s coat-of-arms: if Dormitory Seven wins, the northern dormitories will never harass a working student again.
Furthermore…
the noble students will cede their monthly meat vouchers from the academy kitchen to our barracks.”
“Meat vouchers,” Xiao Wu’s ears perked up instantly, his dark eyes expanding to twice their normal size.
“Fresh pork?
“Yes,” Wang Sheng said bitterly.
“They get eight catties of cured beef and lard-fried flatbread every week while we choke on boiled turnip skins.”
Tang San stood up.
Her gray uniform fell in clean, straight lines around her ankles.
She smoothed the front of her tunic, her left hand lightly resting over the concealed casing of the silent sleeve dart beneath her wrist.
“A challenge issued on an ancestral coat-of-arms is a binding social contract within the feudal hierarchy of Heaven Dou,” she analyzed.
“To refuse it means perpetual economic and physical harassment.
To win it decisively establishes territorial deterrence.”
She looked at Wang Sheng.
“Tell his messenger we will be there.
But only three will enter the woods.”
Wang Sheng blinked.
“Three?
Big Sister, he has seven combatants!
Even if you and Second Boss are terrifying, we need bodies to absorb their flanking rushes!”
“In a night forest,” Tang San said, her eyes turning cold and lightless as frozen slate, “extra bodies who lack stealth and night-vision are merely obstructions that block my firing lines.
You, Xiao Wu, and I.
The rest remain in the barracks.”
***
The third watch brought a biting, dry wind out of the northern mountains.
The sky above Nuoding Academy was clear, ink-black, studded with sharp, merciless stars that cast a pale, icy sheen over the bare branches of the northern cedar ridge.
The grove behind the mountain was a secluded hollow, forty paces across, carpeted with thick pine needles and flanked by sheer granite outcrops that blocked the wind.
Waiting in the center of the clearing were ten boys.
Lanterns fashioned from oiled parchment and iron wire hung from the low cedar boughs, casting long, swaying pools of yellow light across the frozen dirt.
Standing at the front of the group was Xiao Chenyu.
He was twelve years old, tall, with broad, well-fed shoulders and an arrogant, handsome face carved with the easy confidence of a boy who had never been denied an imperial luxury.
He wore a heavy riding tunic of charcoal-gray fur trimmed with silver embroidery, high-topped calfskin boots lined with fleece, and a silver belt carrying the wolf-head crest of the Nuoding Castellan.
Behind him stood Liu Long, his nose still swollen and purple from Xiao Wu’s pear strike, along with five other older students holding iron cudgels and hunting spears.
As the dried pine needles crunched at the edge of the hollow, Xiao Chenyu tilted his head up, his eyes narrowing into cold slits.
Three figures emerged from the shadows.
Tang San walked in the lead, her hands tucked neatly inside her gray working-student sleeves, her stride silent as a ghost drifting through a graveyard.
Half a step to her left, Xiao Wu bounded lightly on the balls of his feet, his hands resting behind his head, his long scorpion braid swaying.
Wang Sheng walked behind them, his face pale, his fists clenched so hard his knuckles were chalk-white.
Xiao Chenyu laughed—a dry, barking sound that set the pine needles shivering.
“Wang Sheng,” Xiao Chenyu called out, crossing his arms over his heavy fur collar.
“You’ve truly fallen low.
You couldn’t defend your title as Boss of the beggars, so you hid behind two six-year-old runts?
One of whom is a little girl who smells of forge soot?”
Wang Sheng took a step forward, his chest heaving, but Tang San raised two fingers of her right hand.
Wang Sheng stopped instantly.
Tang San stepped into the center of the yellow lantern light.
The cold night air lifted the blue-tinted bangs from her forehead, exposing features that were unnervingly delicate, eerily calm, and entirely devoid of fear.
“Castellan’s heir, Xiao Chenyu,” she said, her voice clear, carrying the crisp, ringing timber of an iron needle struck against porcelain.
“The terms were stated: if we win, the noble students cease all harassment and surrender their meat vouchers to Dormitory Seven.
If you lose, does your father’s wolf crest still hold value?”
Xiao Chenyu’s eyebrows twitched.
He had expected tears.
He had expected peasant stuttering or a frantic plea for mercy.
Instead, this girl looked at him the way an imperial magistrate looked at a dead pig on an inspection block—measuring the weight, calculating the yield, completely unconcerned with the animal’s squeals.
“My word is iron in this city, little girl,” Xiao Chenyu sneered, taking a step forward.
“I am a gentleman; I don’t bully children who haven’t grown teeth.
Liu Long, step out.
Teach her what happens when commoners forget their place.”
Liu Long stepped into the clearing, drawing a three-foot ash quarterstaff from his back, his swollen face twisting into a savage grin.
let’s see if you can break a fence post with your teeth!”
“I’ll handle this one,” Xiao Wu said, already stepping past Tang San with a bright, terrifying smile.
“No spirit skills,” Tang San instructed softly.
“Conserve your reserves.”
“Half an incense stick, San’er!” Xiao Wu laughed.
Before his last word had faded, Xiao Wu vanished.
His speed on the frozen pine needles was miraculous.
His soft shoes skimmed over the slick needles without slipping an inch, his body low, weaving through the lantern light in a zig-zag trajectory that left afterimages in Liu Long’s vision.
*What—*
Liu Long’s ash staff came up in a frantic, sweeping horizontal arc.
Xiao Wu did not duck.
He leaped.
His body seemed to ignore gravity, soaring clean over the whistling wood of the staff.
His slender thighs clamped around Liu Long’s neck in mid-air with the precision of a guillotine.
*Snap!*
*Waist Bow: Inverted Throw!*
Xiao Wu did not use his yellow spirit ring.
He relied purely on the terrifying, native leverage of his rabbit martial soul.
His torso snapped backward in mid-air, using Liu Long’s own forward momentum as a pivot.
*CRASH!*
Liu Long was lifted completely off his boots, spun one hundred and eighty degrees through the air, and slammed face-first into the frozen dirt with a catastrophic, breath-stealing thud.
The ash staff flew from his fingers, spinning into the darkness, while Liu Long lay motionless in the pine needles, groaning like a crushed toad, completely knocked cold.
The entire grove went dead silent.
Xiao Wu landed lightly on his feet beside the unconscious boy, tapped his cloth shoes together to knock the dirt from his soles, and flipped his long scorpion braid over his shoulder.
“Next,” Xiao Wu chirped cheerfully.
Xiao Chenyu’s sallow face went rigid.
His eyes dilated, looking from Liu Long’s limp body to the small boy in pink.
A six-year-old child, defeating a twelve-year-old senior student in under two seconds without even activating a spirit ring.
“A beast soul of high agility…” Xiao Chenyu muttered, his jaw grinding until his molars clicked.
He reached down, unbuckling his heavy fur riding cloak, and hurled it into the snow.
Beneath the fur, his frame was thick, clad in a tight leather combat jerkin.
He stepped forward, his eyes burning with genuine, dangerous fury.
“I won’t play games with you beggars,” Xiao Chenyu growled, his voice dropping into a guttural, feral rasp.
His chest expanded violently.
Gray, coarse fur erupted across his jaw and forearms, his fingernails lengthening into black, curved claws.
From beneath his boots, a single ring of light surged upward, bathing the dark cedars in a bright, lemon-yellow glow.
A hundred-year spirit ring.
“Xiao Chenyu, Spirit Master, Rank Eleven, Martial Soul: Lone Wolf!”
He roared, his claws slashing through the freezing air, his yellow ring pulsing with raw, feral bloodlust.
“Come forward, little weed!
Let me see what you used to break my fence!”
Tang San took one step forward.
Her straw sandals settled onto the pine needles.
Her right hand extended, her palm facing upward, while her left hand rested behind her small hip.
Her dark blue-tinged eyes caught the reflection of his yellow ring, cold, lightless, and utterly immovable:
“Tang San.
Working student.
Rank Thirteen.”
*Shing—!*
From beneath her feet, a brilliant, deep-amber halo rose into the night, pulsing with an oppressive, suffocating hum that instantly swallowed Xiao Chenyu’s yellow light in a sea of pure, crushing golden radiance.
The air in the cedar grove dropped five degrees.
And from her palm, the thick, iron-scaled vine of the Datura Serpent erupted like an ancient dragon waking from the frozen earth.