The fifth watch in midsummer arrived with the shrill, deafening chorus of cicadas in the weeping willows outside the academy’s eastern wall.
Tang San sat cross-legged atop the ridge tiles of the rear woodshed.
The slate was slick with lukewarm morning condensation, smelling of bird droppings and baked clay.
Below her, the working students’ vegetable patch lay choked with vigorous green weeds—dandelion, crabgrass, wild plantain, and sprawling mats of common Blue Silver Grass that burst through every crack in the irrigation borders.
To the east, the horizon bruised from charcoal to indigo, then tore open in a sharp seam of pale rose.
Tang San drew her breath inward through her nose.
Eight counts in.
Hold for four.
Eight counts out.
At the exact instant the upper rim of the sun crested the limestone hills outside Nuoding, an ephemeral sliver of purple qi—no thicker than a hair sheared from a horse’s mane—flickered in the dawn mist.
Her pupils dilated.
Purple Demon Eyes: Subtlety Tier.
The violet thread did not merely illuminate her corneas; it was drawn through the Jingming and Chengqi ocular acupoints like water pulled through hollow glass needles, washing through the optic nerves and plunging down the governor vessel along the inside of her skull.
The world shifted its resolution.
Before her eyes, the gray courtyard ceased to be composed of stone and dust.
She saw the thermal plumes rising from the kitchen flues like rippling pillars of amber glass.
She saw the microscopic fungal spores drifting on the draft, six inches above the gravel walks.
And most terrifyingly, she saw the vegetative network below.
The millions of blades of Blue Silver Grass choking the ditch were not independent plants.
Seen through the Subtlety Tier, they formed a single, continental nervous system.
Thin, emerald-blue filaments of residual spirit power branched through the root beds three inches under the clay, interlocking, pulsing with a slow, biological rhythm that matched the groundwater’s ebb and flow.
Tang San lowered her right hand, her palm skimming the air two feet above the eaves.
She did not summon her martial soul.
She simply released a micro-pulse of the Mysterious Heaven Skill, frequency-matched to the Datura Serpent’s vegetative resonance.
*Rustle—*
Every blade of grass across forty paces of perimeter ditch turned its leaf-tips toward the woodshed.
It was not a wind draft.
It was phototropism inverted—bio-energetic alignment.
A flood of chaotic, microscopic sensory data surged back up the energetic thread into her nervous system: the vibration of an earthworm three feet down; the cold tread of a stray hunting cat sixty paces to the west; the heavy, dragging footsteps of the academy baker carrying forty catties of rye flour through the southern kitchen alley.
*The grass is an acoustic diaphragm,* Tang San realized, her mind recording the phenomenon with clinical precision.
*An unbroken network of millions of microscopic sensory conduits.
If I learn to filter the background noise of earth and insects, no living creature can step upon the soil within my sensory radius without their footprint being registered by the roots.*
She stood up on the slick ridge tiles, smoothing the slate-gray cotton of her tunic.
Her physical frame had continued its quiet, relentless transformation.
At seven and a half years old, she was half a head taller than Xiao Wu, her shoulders squared, her collarbones defined and sharp as iron chisels.
Her long black hair, carrying that deep, unnatural sapphire undertone, was plaited into a neat scholar’s braid tied with a strip of tanned deer-hide.
Underneath her loose tunic, the twenty-four jades of the spatial belt rested flush against her abdomen.
She climbed down the corner post of the woodshed using the frictionless descents of the Ghost Shadow Perplexing Track, her boots touching the damp weeds without making a sound.
“San’er.”
A low, dry voice sounded from the shade of the willow tree.
The Grandmaster stood there, hands clasped behind his spine.
He wore his usual unadorned charcoal-gray robe, though his face looked even more drawn than during the spring term, the skin beneath his cheekbones hollowed by endless nights of theoretical calculations.
Tang San bowed thirty degrees.
“Master.”
The Grandmaster did not offer a morning greeting.
He took a three-inch crystal testing orb from his sleeve, holding it out between two ink-stained fingers.
“Hold it,” he ordered.
Tang San reached out her right hand, her palm closing around the cold, polished mineral.
She mobilized the Mysterious Heaven Skill.
*WUUUM.*
A blinding, saturated flash of deep sapphire light detonated within the core of the crystal.
The sphere did not merely glow; the internal matrix turned entirely opaque, humming with a high-pitched, metallic resonance that made the glass rattle against the Grandmaster’s signet ring.
The light reached the outer perimeter of the glass and stopped dead, held behind an impenetrable, rigid energetic ceiling.
“A full breakthrough to the peak of the Spirit Master realm.
In one year and two months…
from Rank Thirteen to the bottleneck of the second ring.”
He snatched the orb back, tucking it into his robe with hands that trembled despite his iron discipline.
“Your foundation is completely solid,” the Grandmaster muttered, pacing two steps through the weeds, his mind racing through theoretical charts.
“No meridian thinning.
No energetic turbulence.
The daily physical loading with raw hematite forced your skeletal marrow to expand its hematopoietic capacity to match the internal cultivation rate.
Most noble heirs who advance this quickly suffer from meridian burnout by their tenth year; your channels are thicker than a thirty-year-old garrison veteran’s.”
“My internal force reached the ceiling three nights ago, Master,” Tang San reported calmly.
“The meridians can no longer expand under the current energetic pressure.
The vessel is full; it requires an external biological catalyst to breach the threshold.”
“The second spirit ring,” the Grandmaster said, stopping his pace and turning to face her, his gaze dead serious.
“Under my Third Core Competency, the absolute theoretical limit for a mortal human frame’s second ring is seven hundred and sixty-four years.
Beyond that, the spiritual backlash causes irreversible neurological trauma and arterial rupture.”
He looked at her shoulders, measuring the density of her frame.
“We cannot hunt in the Nuoding reserve again.
The Heaven Dou imperial foresters cull every beast exceeding five hundred years within that enclosure to protect the junior cadets.
For a seven-hundred-year predator…
we must venture into the wild buffer zones of the southern borders, or enter the outer perimeter of the Star Dou Great Forest.”
Tang San’s eyes narrowed slightly.
*The Star Dou Great Forest.*
The largest, most ancient biological reserve on the Douluo Continent.
An untamed wilderness spanning three provinces, where hundred-thousand-year apex leviathans slept in the deep swamps and imperial legions dared not march without three Title Douluo vanguard divisions.
“The Star Dou perimeter is five hundred miles south,” Tang San said, her mind calculating logistics with the speed of an Outer Sect quartermaster.
“A carriage requires twelve days of continuous travel.
We need iron rations, twelve glass vials of concentrated Datura venom for my sleeve mechanisms, two hundred rounds of spring-steel needles, and four jars of sulphur paste to deter parasitic leeches.”
“We depart at dawn tomorrow,” the Grandmaster said.
“The term recess begins tonight.
You have three hours to settle your affairs in Dormitory Seven.”
“Yes, Master.”
Tang San bowed, turned on her heel, and walked briskly back toward the working-student barracks.
***
Dormitory Seven was a scene of controlled chaos.
Because the summer recess had arrived, the twenty-odd working students were packing their meager belongings into coarse burlap sacks, preparing to walk back to their auxiliary villages to help their families with the summer barley harvest.
Wang Sheng was tying a pair of worn leather boots to his waist, shouting instructions to two younger boys who were scrubbing the wash-basins.
As Tang San stepped through the door, the entire barracks went silent.
Every single boy—even those who had once thrown cudgels behind Liu Long—stood straight, their arms dropping to their sides in immediate, respectful attention.
In twelve months, Dormitory Seven had not lost a single fistfight, had not missed a single meat ration, and had become an untouchable fortress within the academy grounds.
“Big Sister,” Wang Sheng said, stepping forward with an awkward, toothy grin.
“We’re almost finished clearing the floorboards.
The kitchen porters gave us four smoked ham-hocks to take home for our families—the ones Xiao Chenyu’s cohort forfeited last week.”
“Divide them equally among the junior students whose hamlets suffered from the spring drought,” Tang San instructed smoothly.
“Take two copper coins from the communal tea tin for each boy’s road rations.”
“Yes, Big Sister!” Wang Sheng bowed his thick neck.
Tang San walked down the aisle to her cot near the window.
Xiao Wu was sitting on the edge of the mattress, his pink cloth shoes dangling two inches above the scrubbed timber.
His red quilt was already rolled into a tight bundle, and his goose-down pillow was tucked beneath his left arm.
His face was drawn into a deep, stubborn pout, his cheeks puffed out like an angry river toad’s, his large dark eyes staring fixedly at the floorboards between his feet.
Tang San sat down beside him, unfastening her leather wrist-guards to check the tension of the silent sleeve dart’s internal springs.
“The term is over,” she said softly.
“Are you returning to your village in the south?”
Xiao Wu didn’t look up. This story is hosted at g.com.
His small canines bit down hard on his lower lip.
“I don’t have a village,” he whispered.
The words were flat, small, carrying that terrifying, bottomless chill she had heard in the woodshed five months ago.
Tang San’s fingers paused on the spring casing.
“Your awakened registration scroll recorded an auxiliary hamlet near the Star Dou perimeter,” she noted.
“I made it up,” Xiao Wu muttered, his fingers clutching the down pillow so tightly that the white goose feathers threatened to burst through the red linen seams.
“The clerk asked for a name.
I gave him the name of a mountain ridge where the wild hares sleep.
I don’t have a house.
I don’t have a clan.
I have…
nobody.”
He turned his head slowly, his large eyes looking into hers.
They were rimmed with faint crimson, bright with unshed tears that he refused to let fall, filled with the desperate, defensive pride of a creature that had run through three hundred miles of thorny brush with hounds howling behind it.
“You’re going home to Holy Spirit Village, aren’t you?” Xiao Wu asked, his voice shaking by a fraction of a tone.
“To your blacksmith father?
You’re going to leave me in this empty dormitory for two months while the stoves go cold.”
Tang San looked at the boy.
Across three lifetimes, she had calculated every human interaction through the cold lens of utility, survival, and sect preservation.
Disciples were assets; elders were commanders; outsiders were potential assassins.
Yet this strange, wild creature had spent twelve months sitting by her feet while she hammered iron, untangling her dark hair every dawn with hands that never carried a poisoned blade, asking for nothing more than a shared steamed bun and a place to sleep out of the rain.
*A stray beast,* she thought, a rare, quiet warmth thawing the iron core of her chest.
*If you leave a young hare in an abandoned pen, the wolves will come before the moon wanes.*
Tang San closed the inspection port of her sleeve dart with a soft, clean *click*.
She reached out her right hand, her jade-white fingers gently catching his chin, tilting his face up until his dark eyes met hers.
“I am not going directly to Holy Spirit Village,” Tang San said, her voice clear, level, and entirely immovable.
“Master and I are traveling south tomorrow morning to hunt my second spirit ring.”
Xiao Wu blinked, the tears freezing in his eyelashes.
“South?”
“To the perimeter of the Star Dou Great Forest,” she continued.
“And after the ring is bound…
you are coming with me to Holy Spirit Village.
My father’s smithy has two rooms, plenty of coarse grain, and an iron hearth that never goes cold.”
Xiao Wu stared at her, his mouth falling slightly open.
“I…
I can come with you?” he whispered, his long scorpion braid twitching behind his shoulders.
“To your home?”
“You may,” Tang San replied, a faint, almost invisible curve touching the corner of her lips.
“Provided you help carry the spare iron ingots on the road…
and do not eat the blacksmith’s turnips raw.”
Xiao Wu let out a wild, high-pitched squeal that shattered the solemn quiet of Dormitory Seven.
He leaped from the cot, throwing his arms around her neck with such violent, kinetic momentum that both of them tumbled backward onto the straw mattress in a tangled heap of gray cotton, red linen, and bouncing scorpion braid.
“Deal!
It’s a deal!
San’er, you can’t take it back!” Xiao Wu shouted, his nose burying into her collarbone, laughing with pure, hysterical, unbridled joy.
“If you take it back, I’ll kick your anvil into the river!”
Tang San lay on the rough hemp sheet, the breath knocked from her lungs by sixty pounds of flying rabbit, her hands instinctively catching his waist to keep him from cracking his skull against the bedpost.
“Xiao Wu,” she gasped, her voice carrying a rare, exasperated warmth.
“Get off my sternum.
You are crushing the trigger sear.”
Outside the barracks window, the summer sun rose into a clear, merciless azure sky, pointing the way south toward the ancient, savage green of the great forest.