Tang Hao didn’t flinch.
He picked at his ear with a dirty fingernail, then turned his back on them.
“Do whatever you want,” he muttered as he walked into the dark.
“If she fails, she comes back and finishes the fifteen hoes.
If she leaves…
don’t expect me to pay a single copper for her room and board.”
“You…
you beast!” Jack shouted, his face turning purple with indignation.
He turned back to Tang San, clutching her small shoulder with his dry, calloused hand.
“Don’t listen to him, child.
Three days from now, at the village ancestral hall.
Wear your cleanest clothes.
Grandpa Jack will come to fetch you personally.”
“Thank you, Grandpa Jack,” Tang San said, bowing again with the precise, unflinching courtesy of an Outer Sect scholar.
“I will be ready.”
Old Jack sighed, patted her head with a rough hand, and shuffled off down the dirt path, still muttering curses at the sky.
Tang San stood in the yard, watching his hunched figure disappear between the stone fences of the village.
The wind blew from the south, carrying the scent of damp earth, blooming wild plums, and the sharp, alkaline tang of river silt.
She looked down at her hands.
Her right palm was smooth, small, and seemingly weak.
Her left palm was clenched tight within her sleeve, her internal energy coiling beneath the skin, pressing against that stubborn, immovable threshold in her meridians.
Three days.
She looked toward the distant northern horizon, where the dirt road wound like a pale snake toward the provincial capital of Nuoding.
In her first life, she had believed that the universe was an indifferent machine of mass and velocity.
In her second life, she had believed that power was an art of shadows, poison, and hidden steel.
Now, in this third world, a new system stood before her—one that turned human souls into weapons and categorized lives by the glow of colored rings.
“A weed,” she whispered to the wind, her lips curving into a cold, faint smile that belonged to the grandmaster of the Tang Sect Outer Library.
“Weeds are the first things to crack concrete.
Weeds are the last things to die when the winter burns the forest to ash.
If my soul is grass…
then let the earth see how deep a weed’s roots can grow.”
She turned, stepped over the threshold, and picked up the thirty-pound hammer once more.
The three days passed with the mechanical rhythm of water dripping into a stone basin.
Tang San woke at the fourth watch, climbed the eastern ridge, drew the violet qi into her optic channels, and descended to bank the coals.
She did not speak to Tang Hao of spirits, nor of the city.
When she struck the iron, her blows were neither hurried nor hesitant; by dusk of the second day, fifteen hoe heads—cleanly edged, their carbon content compacted until the metal rang with a clear, bell-like hum—lay stacked in three neat pyramids beside the wooden door.
On the morning of the third day, the frost lay thick over Holy Spirit Village, coating the withered bean stalks in sugar-white crusts.
Old Jack arrived promptly, wearing a dark blue woolen robe that had spent the winter packed in cedar shavings.
He took Tang San’s hand—noting with quiet pity how small it was, though its grip was remarkably dry and firm—and led her through the village lanes to the ancestral hall.
The ancestral hall was a wooden pavilion with peeling red lacquer and roof beams carved with simple grain motifs.
Inside, seven other children had already gathered, accompanied by their parents.
Most were sniffling, their wool mittens wet with snot, their eyes darting nervously toward the platform where a young man stood.
The man appeared scarcely twenty years of age.
His hair was trimmed close, oiled and combed back with military precision.
He wore an immaculate white tunic with silver threading along the cuffs, a dark red cape pinned at his right shoulder with an iron clasp, and a bronze medallion bearing three engraved longswords hanging over his breast: a Grand Spirit Master of the Spirit Hall.
“Deacon Su,” Old Jack called, bending his back into a deep, sweeping bow that set his joints popping.
“These are the village children of this year’s cohort.
In total, eight.
This last one is San’er, the daughter of our village blacksmith.”
Su Yuntao cast an indifferent glance over the ragged group.
His gaze lingered for half a heartbeat on Tang San—not because he recognized anything unusual, but because her posture lacked the trembling, hunched terror of the peasant boys around her.
She stood with her feet set precisely shoulder-width apart, her weight balanced evenly between the balls of her feet and her heels, her chin level.
“Stand aside, old man,” Su Yuntao said briskly.
“I have five more villages to visit before sundown, and the road to Nuoding is turning to mud with this thaw.”
He unclasped a black velvet bag from his belt, reached inside, and withdrew six smooth, dark river stones, each roughly the size of a goose egg.
With a series of sharp, practiced flicks, he cast them onto the wooden boards of the floor.
They did not scatter randomly.
They struck the cedar planks and slid into a precise, six-sided array, forming a circle roughly six paces across.
From the bag, he then took a sphere of cloudy, pale blue crystal, setting it upon the altar table beside a cold bronze brazier.
“Do not panic, whatever you see,” Su Yuntao warned the children, his tone dry from reciting the same phrase across dozens of rural hamlets.
“This is the manifestation of my martial soul.”
He stepped back, inhaled through his teeth, and barked a single syllable:
“Lone Wolf, possess!”
Crack!
The sound of his transformation was wet and violent, like green wood splitting under an axe.
Su Yuntao’s shoulders broadened, straining the seams of his white tunic.
Coarse, slate-gray fur sprouted along his forearms, crawling up the sides of his throat to swallow his jawline.
His canines lengthened, hooking down past his lower lip, and his fingernails blackened, thickening into curved, triangular talons.
Beneath his boots, two rings of light surged up through the floorboards: the first a pale, flickering white, the second a rich, vibrant yellow that pulsed with a low, rhythmic hum.
A boy in the front row screamed, stumbled backward over his own heels, and wet his trousers.
Tang San’s eyes did not widen.
Under the shadow of her dark bangs, her pupils contracted into cold, analytical apertures.
Transformation latency: one-point-two seconds, her Tang Sect mind registered with mathematical detachment.
The primary muscular shift favors the latissimus dorsi and pectorals, but the cervical vertebrae are locked forward by the elongation of the trapezius.
His lateral peripheral field is compromised by at least twenty-five degrees on both flanks.
The white ring oscillates at low frequency—ten-year threshold.
The yellow ring is five times denser, stabilizing his bio-energetic envelope.
Hundred-year.
If this man were an Outer Sect enforcer hunting her through a bamboo grove, she would not waste iron on his chest.
A single bone needle dipped in powdered nightshade, driven through the exposed carotid artery just beneath the jawline during that one-second transformation lag, would terminate his motor functions before his talons fully formed.
“Step into the array,” Su Yuntao ordered, his voice distorted into a guttural growl by his elongated palate.
The children were pushed forward one by one by their trembling parents.
“Sickle.
Tool soul.
Zero spirit power.
Next.”
“Wooden club.
Zero spirit power.
Useless.
Next.”
“Blue Silver Grass.
Standard trash soul.
Zero spirit power.
Next.”
Six times the golden light rose from the stones; six times the cloudy blue sphere remained dark and cold.
Su Yuntao’s breathing grew audibly heavier.
Maintaining an active beast soul transformation while channeling spirit power into an induction array took a steady toll on a Grand Spirit Master’s reserves.
“Last one,” Su Yuntao muttered, wiping a drop of sweat from his snout with the back of his gray-furred hand.
“Hurry up, little girl.”
Tang San stepped into the center of the six black stones.
Her hemp sandals settled cleanly onto the floorboards.
She adjusted her breathing, setting the Mysterious Heaven Skill into a quiet, idling cycle.
Su Yuntao thrust his hands forward, pumping two streams of pale green spirit power into the basal conduits.
Hum—
The basalt stones did not merely flicker; they caught like dry kindling in a furnace blast.
A thick, viscous dome of golden radiance erupted from the circle, swirling upward with the roar of an enclosed draft.
Tang San felt the ambient air pressure spike dramatically.
It was as though she had stepped into a bath of warm, liquid amber that seeped through every pore of her skin, sinking straight toward the core of her chest.
Inside her lower Dantian, the stubborn, frozen mercury ball of internal energy reacted violently.
Crack.
The barrier at the intersection of the Ren and Du channels—the bottleneck that had defied nine months of brutal physical conditioning and breath control—shattered like a thin sheet of glass beneath a sledgehammer.
The internal energy broke free, roaring up her spine like a dragon uncoiling from a winter cave, flooding the twelve regular meridians in a blinding, instantaneous circuit.
Wait!
Her left wrist jerked violently downward.
A cold, catastrophic weight manifested within the marrow of her left hand—a sensation of compressed iron, thunderous gravity, and ancient slaughter that threatened to tear the delicate ligaments of her fingers apart.
It smelled of pulverized granite and burning copper.
Suppress!
Three lives of assassin’s discipline took command in an instant.
Using the inward-pulling force of the Controlling Crane Capturing Dragon, she locked her left forearm muscles into an iron vice, driving that dark, roaring weight down into her bone marrow, refusing to let the black iron break the skin.
Simultaneously, she opened her right palm toward the ceiling.
Shing.
A spray of soft, emerald-blue motes drifted from her skin.
Between her small, calloused fingers, a cluster of wild grass sprouted, growing three inches within the span of a single breath.
The blades were slender, translucent, carrying the deep color of mountain water under shade, their edges traced with a faint, almost invisible seam of pale silver.
Su Yuntao leaned forward, his yellow eyes squinting through the fading light.
Then, his wolfish shoulders slumped in disgust.
“Blue Silver Grass,” he muttered, letting his arms fall.
“Another useless weed.
This village is truly barren.”
Tang San looked down at the tiny plant in her hand.
It felt warm, breathing with a tiny, delicate pulse that matched the beat of her own blood.
“Uncle,” she said, her voice clear, level, and completely devoid of childish fear.
“You haven’t tested my spirit power.”
Su Yuntao scoffed, already turning toward the altar table to collect his stones.
“Little girl, do you understand what Blue Silver Grass is?
It is the most common trash soul in the entire Heaven Dou Empire.
It cannot fight, it cannot defend, and it cannot assist.
In the four-hundred-year archives of the Spirit Hall, there has never been a single possessor of Blue Silver Grass who had even half a rank of innate spirit power.
It is an empty vessel.
It cannot hold charge.”
“The imperial charter of the Spirit Hall,” Tang San replied, her clear blue-tinged eyes locking onto his wolfish face with an unhurried, razor-sharp calm, “states that every citizen who awakens a soul must complete the crystal test before the registry roll is certified.
Or does Deacon Su intend to sign an incomplete record for Holy Spirit Village?”
Su Yuntao’s wolf ears pinned back.
A cold shiver ran down his spine—not from spirit pressure, but from the chilling, unchildlike precision of her voice.
“Fine!” he snapped, grabbing the cloudy blue sphere and shoving it directly into her chest.
“Touch it!
Let your heart die completely, then go back to your father’s kitchen!”
Tang San lifted her right hand and laid her small palm flat against the cold surface of the crystal.
She did not need to force anything.
The Mysterious Heaven Skill, having just completed its grand circulation through her newly unlocked meridians, poured through the Laogong acupoint in her palm like a mountain torrent finding an open sluice gate.
The blue sphere did not merely glow.
WUUUUUUM—
A deep, resonant vibration shook the very floorboards of the ancestral hall.
A blinding, sapphire-white radiance exploded from the core of the crystal, so violent that the shadows of the rafters and the trembling children were thrown against the back wall in stark, pitch-black relief.
The light flooded through the gaps in the window shutters, cutting into the morning fog outside like silver spears.
The crystal shivered violently in Su Yuntao’s clawed hands, its internal cloudy matrix dissolving into liquid diamond as it absorbed the boundless, perfectly pure internal energy from her body.
“What—” Su Yuntao stumbled back, his wolfish eyes bulging, his jaw dropping so far that a string of saliva stretched from his fangs.
“Innate…
Innate Full Spirit Power?!”
The hall fell dead silent, save for the hum of the vibrating sphere.
Tang San withdrew her hand.
The blinding sapphire light collapsed instantly, leaving the hall plunged once more into the dull gray shadows of morning.
Her breathing remained entirely even.
Her Blue Silver Grass rested quietly against her palm, green and delicate.
Behind her back, hidden within the rough hemp of her left sleeve, her fist remained clenched like an iron vise, holding back the dark, crushing thunder that slept within her bones.
“Innate Full Spirit Power,” Su Yuntao whispered, his voice cracking like dry parchment as he stared at the little girl as though looking at a ghost.
“A weed…
born with Rank Ten spirit power.
The heavens…
what kind of grotesque joke is this?”
Tang San bowed, her small voice cutting through the thick gloom with the quiet, inexorable weight of an iron needle finding its mark:
“Thank you, Deacon Su.
May I have my certification parchment now?”