The flagstone avenue inside Nuoding Academy was lined with manicured silver poplars whose pale leaves rustled in the late afternoon draft.
Old Jack had wept two more times before Tang San gently persuaded him to turn back toward Holy Spirit Village, pressing half of her copper coins into the old man’s pocket so he could hire a donkey cart from the southern gate.
Only when his stooped, blue-robed figure had fully vanished down the outer avenue did she turn back to follow the man in the charcoal-gray robe.
The Grandmaster walked with his hands clasped loosely behind his spine.
His gait was neither hurried nor leisurely; it was an even, mechanical stride that seemed calculated to cover the maximum distance with the minimum expenditure of caloric energy.
Tang San matched his cadence effortlessly, remaining exactly two paces behind his right shoulder.
Her footsteps produced no audible scrape against the stone, her hemp sandals skimming over the joints of the pavers like dry leaves pushed by an autumn breeze.
For five hundred paces, neither of them spoke.
They passed the main teaching building—a three-story structure of whitewashed masonry with tall arched windows—and took a gravel path leading away from the noisy athletic fields toward an isolated two-story pavilion flanked by dense bamboo groves.
The air here was cooler, smelling of moist soil, decaying pine needles, and the bitter, sharp fragrance of dried wolfsbane drifting from open second-floor shutters.
The Grandmaster stopped beneath the shade of a large locust tree whose roots had buckled the gray flagstones.
Without turning around, he spoke:
“You called me ‘teacher’ at the gate.”
His voice was dry, flat, carrying the gravelly texture of someone who rarely spoke to large audiences.
“Yes,” Tang San replied, her tone level.
“Why?” The Grandmaster turned around slowly.
His dark, deep-set eyes pinned her with an unblinking, heavy stare.
“The gatekeeper called me ‘Grandmaster.’ The instructors in that hall call me a madman, an eccentric, or an uninvited guest who relies on the headmaster’s old friendship to leech academy grain.
No student in Nuoding has ever addressed me as teacher.”
Tang San’s posture did not shift.
Her dark blue-tinged eyes met his without shrinking.
“The gatekeeper bowed because he feared your title or your standing with the authorities,” she said calmly.
“The common crowd mocks what it cannot comprehend.
But when you looked at that certificate, you did not look at the word ‘weed.’ You examined the ink density of the seal, the pressure of Deacon Su’s quill, and the biological contradiction of the entry.
A man who looks at reality rather than reputation is worthy of being called an instructor.”
The Grandmaster’s eyebrows twitched.
A long, slow breath escaped his thin lips, carrying the scent of dry parchment and weak green tea.
“Observation, deduction, and an utter lack of childish awe,” he murmured, more to himself than to her.
“You are six years old, yet your bone alignment, the calm of your pulse, and the way you diverted that brute’s kick at the gate belong to a veteran pugilist who has survived twenty mountain ambushes.”
He took the folded certificate from his sleeve and held it between two long, ink-stained fingers.
“Deacon Su believes this document records a tragedy,” the Grandmaster said, tapping the paper.
“A defective anomaly.
A monstrous waste of Innate Full Spirit Power granted to the lowest weed on the continent.
Su Yuntao is an ordinary Grand Spirit Master of the twenty-sixth rank; he possesses the standard training of a Spirit Hall regional clerk, which means his intellectual horizon is bounded by the standard encyclopedia issued to provincial garrisons.”
He stepped closer, his shadow falling over her small frame.
“He does not know the fundamental laws of soul transmission.
According to the First Corollary of my ‘Ten Great Core Competencies,’ innate spirit power is directly proportional to the quality and latent energetic density of the awakened martial soul.
A martial soul is the vessel; innate spirit power is the fluid that fills it at birth.
The higher the potential of the vessel, the more innate spirit power it can contain.”
The Grandmaster leaned down slightly, his voice dropping into a razor-thin whisper that was meant for no other ears in the courtyard:
“Blue Silver Grass is the most abundant, lowest-tier vegetative soul in existence.
Its cellular wall density is negligible, its energetic capacity is near absolute zero, and its natural threshold cannot retain even a quarter-rank of innate spirit power.
Even if a wild mutation occurred—a one-in-a-million genetic distortion—the maximum limit a mutated grass soul could reach upon awakening would not exceed Rank Three.”
Tang San’s heart did not jump.
Her internal force remained steady as a stagnant pond, but her mind sharpened into an assassin’s focus.
*He arrived at this conclusion entirely through external theoretical modeling,* she noted, her Tang Sect instincts measuring the threat level of this scholar.
*He has no divine sight.
He has no knowledge of my past lives.
He relies purely on systematic taxonomy and energetic deduction.*
“Therefore,” the Grandmaster continued, his dark eyes burning with the terrifying, fanatical fire of a scientist who had just seen an impossible formula balance out on the board, “for you to possess Innate Full Spirit Power, there is only one mathematical and biological explanation under the laws of continental soul transmission.”
He paused, letting the silence hang like an unsheathed blade between them.
“Besides that sprig of Blue Silver Grass…
you possess a second martial soul.”
The breeze rustled through the bamboo stalks behind the pavilion, sending a shower of pale yellow leaves drifting across the flagstones.
Tang San’s right hand rested casually behind her hip.
Beneath the coarse hemp of her sleeve, the index and middle fingers of her right hand slid half an inch forward, their tips lightly resting against the cold, sharpened head of an iron needle tucked inside her cuff.
Her father’s words echoed through her mind: *In this life, you may never reveal that hammer to a single living soul.*
Tang Hao had not said she must kill anyone who deduced it on their own, but in the Tang Sect, a secret that concerned the survival of an entire lineage was never left in the hands of an outsider’s discretion.
If this man intended to turn her over to Spirit Hall as an experimental specimen, or to publish her existence in his papers to redeem his ridiculed academic reputation, then regardless of his intellect or his status, an iron needle through the Fengchi acupoint behind his ear would silence the theory before sundown.
“You seem very confident in your deduction, Grandmaster,” Tang San said, her voice dropping into a cool, flat rhythm that held not a trace of childish inflection.
“I am confident because science does not bend to human superstition,” the Grandmaster replied, completely oblivious to the lethal tension coiled inside the little girl standing two paces away.
“In the documented history of the Douluo Continent across the last millennium, there have been only two recorded instances of Dual Martial Souls.
Both individuals were born from the union of two top-tier clans, where the genetic strength of both parents’ martial souls reached an identical, equilibrium threshold of high-density energy, preventing either soul from suppressing the other during embryonic development.”
He looked down at her face, his gaze tracing the delicate, aristocratic line of her nose, the cool balance of her brow, and the subtle, otherworldly clarity of her blue-tinged pupils.
“Blue Silver Grass cannot compete with any high-tier soul.
If your other soul had been an ordinary tool soul—a bronze sword, a hunting spear, an iron shield—the grass would have been utterly annihilated in the womb, and you would have awakened only the weapon.
But the grass survived.
That means your other soul is of such an exalted, terrifyingly high rank that it bypassed the suppression mechanism entirely, forcing your energetic pathways to develop two independent spiritual chambers to prevent your body from exploding at birth.”
The Grandmaster took a deep breath, his knuckles turning white as he clenched his hands behind his back.
“Tell me, little girl…
what is your second martial soul?”
Tang San did not answer immediately.
Her *Purple Demon Eyes* remained active behind her dark irises, dissecting the Grandmaster’s physiological state.
His pulse was beating at ninety-two beats per minute—elevated by intellectual excitement, not malice.
His respiratory rate was shallow.
There was no mobilization of spirit power in his meridians; his energetic field was stagnant, trapped at the twenty-ninth rank, carrying the unmistakable residue of an energetic mutation gone wrong.
He had no guards.
He had no retainers waiting in the bamboo grove.
More importantly, she saw in his eyes an expression she knew intimately from her first life: the desperate, agonizing hunger of an unappreciated researcher who had spent decades being mocked by tenured fools, suddenly standing before the living proof of his life’s work.
He did not want to sell her.
He wanted to prove that he was right.
Tang San slowly withdrew her right fingers from the needle in her sleeve.
The lethal tension dissolved back into the marrow of her bones, leaving her stance loose, natural, and unassuming.
“My father told me,” she said, her voice quiet and steady, “that I must never show my other hand to anyone.
He told me that if I revealed it, calamity would fall upon my head.”
A bitter, sorrowful smile crossed the Grandmaster’s long face.
He turned slightly, looking up at the gray tiles of the pavilion roof.
“Your father is a wise man,” he murmured.
“Dual Martial Souls are a miracle, but to the powers that govern this continent—to Spirit Hall, to the imperial courts of Heaven Dou and Star Luo—a miracle outside their control is merely a catastrophe waiting to be executed in its crib.
If Deacon Su had realized what you were, you would not be standing in Nuoding today; you would already be locked inside an iron carriage bound for the Supreme Pontiff Palace, never to see the light of your village again.”
He turned back to her, his expression suddenly dropping all trace of academic pride, replaced by a solemn, heavy sincerity.
“I have spent thirty years compiling the ‘Ten Great Core Competencies.’ The Spirit Master clans call my work the delusions of a useless cripple who cannot cross the thirtieth rank.
They say my theories are paper talk that cannot produce a single true sovereign under the heavens.”
He took one step forward, stopping directly before her.
“I do not want your secret to sell to the Spirit Hall.
I do not care to offer you to the imperial academies to beg for an imperial stipend.
I want to guide a blank sheet of paper…
a soul that the entire world considers trash, combined with an inheritance that can overturn the heavens…
and prove that my path is the absolute truth.”
The Grandmaster bowed his head slightly toward the six-year-old child, an act of shocking, unprecedented gravity for an adult scholar before an auxiliary student.
“Will you take me as your master, Tang San?”
Tang San looked at him.
In her second life within the Tang Sect, the master-disciple bond was not an employment contract, nor was it a casual transaction of knowledge for tuition.
It was a bond forged in blood and spirit, second only to the biological ties of the ancestral hall.
*A master for a day, a father for a lifetime.*
She had evaluated this man’s mind.
His theoretical framework was rigorous, his observational capacity was terrifyingly sharp, and his moral core—at least for now—was anchored by an obsession with empirical truth rather than political opportunism.
In this unfamiliar world where the laws of spirits replaced the laws of physics, she needed an analytical guide who could help her navigate the native taxonomy while she forged her Tang Sect arts into this new reality.
Tang San stepped backward three paces onto the gray flagstones.
Her knees bent.
She dropped smoothly to both knees, her spine straight as an arrow, her palms pressed flat against the stone pavers before her knees.
She lowered her forehead until it touched the cold rock.
*Clack.*
*Clack.*
*Clack.*
Three formal kowtows, executed with the rigid, solemn antiquity of the Tang Sect’s Inner Gate disciples.
When she raised her head, her dark blue-tinged eyes were clear, steady, and resolute.
“Disciple Tang San,” she said, her voice ringing clear through the quiet locust grove, “pays respects to Master.”
The Grandmaster stood frozen for two heartbeats.
A sudden, violent tremor ran through his shoulders.
He reached down with both hands, his long, calloused fingers catching her small elbows and lifting her up from the stone with surprising gentleness.
“Good…
good!” His voice cracked slightly, a wet sheen appearing at the corners of his deep-set eyes before he quickly blinked it away behind his mask of academic discipline.
“Three kowtows…
an ancient ritual rarely seen in modern academies.
One bow would have sufficed.”
“One bow is for a common instructor who sells lessons for silver,” Tang San replied calmly, dusting the stone dust from the knees of her trousers.
“Three kowtows are for a master who shoulders the fate of a disciple’s path.
Since Master has taken this burden, disciple will not treat the bond lightly.”
The Grandmaster stared at her, an expression of profound, complex emotion passing through his weathered face.
He gave a heavy, deliberate nod.
“Follow me to my study,” he said, turning toward the quiet two-story pavilion.
“Before the administrative bureau issues your dormitory assignment, we must resolve the most urgent matter before you.”
“The first spirit ring?” Tang San asked, stepping into stride behind him.
“Precisely,” the Grandmaster said, his tone returning to its sharp, clinical precision.
“A weed is frail, but the nature of grass is adaptation.
We must find a beast that does not merely provide you with an offensive skill…
but one that transforms the biological structure of your Blue Silver Grass from a fragile meadow flower into an iron-scaled serpent that can strangle an armored wolf.”