The air split with the high, thin hiss of parted silk.
Xiao Wu did not run; he leaped.
His knees bent and straightened in a fraction of a heartbeat, his tendons storing and releasing kinetic elastic tension like tempered bamboo snares.
He launched himself forward at an angle scarcely twenty degrees off the floorboards, his slender frame horizontal to the ground, his long scorpion braid trailing behind him like a dark whip.
His right foot snapped out.
The soft cloth shoe looked harmless, but Tang San’s eyes—already cycling the first subtle tier of Purple Demon Eyes—tracked the micro-vibrations in his ankle joint.
The strike was aimed not at her ribs, but directly at the hollow above her left clavicle, a precision impact designed to compress the brachial plexus and collapse her entire upper guard.
*Innate agility index: exceptional,* Tang San calculated in the span of an inhalation.
*Muscular tension: near zero prior to ignition.
A natural predator’s kinetic delivery.*
She did not retreat.
To retreat against an opponent with superior raw velocity was to surrender space, allowing their momentum to compound with each bound until their speed exceeded the reactionary limit of human optic nerves.
Tang San’s right foot slid forward three inches, planting her weight firmly into the center of the wooden planks.
Her waist coiled, her spine acting as a central torsion axle, and her right hand came up with the quiet, effortless float of a willow branch catching the wind.
Controlling Crane Capturing Dragon: Dispersing Palm.
Her small, pale palm made contact with the instep of Xiao Wu’s flying kick.
She did not meet his strike with rigid bone.
The moment the sole of his shoe pressed against her skin, her wrist yielded by a quarter-inch, rotating in a smooth, spiral arc that absorbed eighty percent of his forward thrust, channeling the kinetic impact down through her forearm, along her latissimus dorsi, and discharging it directly into the timber floorboards beneath her boots.
The wood beneath her groaned with a sharp, dry *creak*.
Xiao Wu’s eyes widened.
He had expected her arm to snap, or at least to stumble backward into the row of iron cots.
Instead, it felt as though his foot had struck a spinning ball of wet silk.
His forward momentum was instantly swallowed, stolen by an invisible eddy that pulled his leg sideways.
Yet his reaction was horrifyingly fast.
Instead of fighting the pull, Xiao Wu used the momentum of her redirect.
His waist snapped in mid-air with an impossible, serpentine flexibility that defied human skeletal anatomy.
His left leg whipped upward, coiling around Tang San’s outstretched right arm like a climbing vine, while his upper body twisted violently toward her face.
*Bone-softening technique?* Tang San’s mind registered the anomaly.
*No.
Not technique—natural physiology.
His cartilage density is absurdly high; his joints possess zero axial stiffness.*
“Caught you!” Xiao Wu grinned, his sharp little canines flashing white in the dim dusk.
Both of his slender legs clamped onto her right shoulder and neck with the speed of an iron bear-trap.
His small hands shot forward, gripping the fabric of her coarse hemp tunic at the lapels, and his entire body dropped backward into empty space, using his full body weight and the lever-arm of her spine to execute a violent, neck-snapping suplex straight toward the rough timber boards.
*Soft Bones Rabbit: First Skill Vector—Waist Bow!*
Wang Sheng and the younger boys gasped, their hands flying to their mouths.
To them, it looked as though the new girl was about to have her skull driven into the cedar planks.
Tang San’s expression did not flicker.
In her second life, she had fought assassins from the Shadow Hall who coated their joints in serpent oil and could dislocate their own shoulders to slip through locked iron cages.
A joint lock was only effective if the pivot point remained anchored to an unyielding axis.
The moment Xiao Wu’s thighs tightened around her neck, Tang San did not resist the backward pull.
Her knees softened instantly.
Her spine, instead of stiffening against the backward torque, rounded into a smooth, frictionless crescent.
Ghost Shadow Perplexing Track: Submerged Willow.
As Xiao Wu threw his weight backward, expecting the resistance of her standing frame to snap her balance, Tang San dropped her center of gravity entirely, sliding forward along the floorboards beneath him.
Her body became as weightless as a falling leaf caught in a gale.
Xiao Wu’s backward arch found no anchor.
The violent leverage he had counted on collapsed into empty air, his own momentum dragging them both into a rolling tumble.
Before his back could touch the floor, Tang San’s left hand struck.
Mysterious Jade Hand.
Her small fingers, translucent and hard as river jade, tapped three times in lightning succession against the weizhong acupoints behind Xiao Wu’s knees.
A sharp, numbing electric shock shot up Xiao Wu’s sciatic nerves.
His legs reflexively loosened, the iron grip around her neck going completely limp for a third of a second.
That third of a second was all she needed.
Tang San twisted her torso like a swimming carp, slipping cleanly out of his leg lock.
Her right palm pressed flat against his chest—not with blunt, bone-crushing force, but with the steady, hydraulic pressure of the Mysterious Heaven Skill.
*Push.*
Xiao Wu flew backward through the air, sailing four paces down the central aisle between the cots.
He twisted in mid-flight with instinctive feline grace, his hands slapping the floorboards to disperse the fall, his soft shoes skidding another two feet before he brought himself to a halt in a low, predatory crouch.
His chest heaved.
His glossy scorpion braid was slightly tousled, falling over one large, dark eye that burned with fierce, disbelieving light.
His breathing was rapid, hot, his upper lip lifted just enough to expose his sharp teeth.
“You…” Xiao Wu’s voice was breathless, his cheeks flushed a deep, feverish pink.
“What kind of martial soul do you have?
You don’t have fur, you don’t have claws, but your hands are harder than river stones!”
Tang San stood five paces away, her feet set evenly shoulder-width apart, her gray working-student uniform completely unwrinkled.
Her hands hung loose at her sides, the jade sheen on her skin already dissolving back into pale, sun-browned flesh.
“I have not summoned my soul,” she said calmly, her tone as even as an instructor counting paces in a courtyard.
“Those were basic martial arts.”
“Basic?!” Xiao Wu leaped to his feet, stamping his cloth shoe against the floorboards with a petulant clatter.
“I’ve spent six years rolling through the southern forests!
No one has ever slipped out of my Waist Bow!
Not even…
not even the mountain lynxes!”
He stared at her hands, his eyes narrowing with a strange, feral intensity.
Beneath his playful exterior, an ancient, instinctual wariness had awakened.
This girl was small, delicate, wearing the same patched hemp as the village beggars, but her movements carried the quiet, lightless perfection of a steel snare hidden beneath dead leaves.
There was no wildness in her; there was only terrifying, calculated economy.
Wang Sheng stumbled forward, his jaw nearly scraping the dust on his boots.
“Boss…
Big Sister…” Wang Sheng stammered, looking from Tang San to Xiao Wu, completely overwhelmed.
“You two…
are you two really six years old?
Did the village elder feed you iron ore from the cradle?”
“Is the spar concluded?”
Wang Sheng raised both hands in immediate, unconditional surrender, bowing his thick neck until his chin touched his collar.
“Concluded!
Fully concluded!
From today onward, you are the Boss of Dormitory Seven!
Whatever Big Sister says, we obey!”
Tang San looked at Xiao Wu.
The boy in the pink tunic stood with his hands on his hips, pouting slightly, his scorpion braid swaying behind his back.
He was clearly annoyed that his surprise attack had been dismantled so cleanly, but there was no venom in his gaze—only the bright, stubborn curiosity of a wild animal that had encountered a creature it couldn’t intimidate.
“What is your name?” Xiao Wu demanded, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Tang San,” she replied.
“Tang San…” Xiao Wu rolled the syllables on his tongue, his head tilting to one side.
“Fine!
You beat me this time because I didn’t use my spirit soul!
Next time, when I have my spirit ring, we fight again!”
“Whenever you wish,” Tang San said, her expression neutral.
Xiao Wu snorted, then picked up his large, fluffy goose-down pillow and bright red quilt from the floor, marching straight toward the bed Tang San had selected near the window.
With a decisive slap, he tossed his pillow onto the neighboring cot frame, scarcely two feet away from hers.
“I’m sleeping here,” Xiao Wu declared, turning around and sitting on the edge of the mattress, his legs swinging back and forth.
“Since you’re the Boss, you have to protect me from the noble bullies Wang Sheng was crying about.”
Tang San looked at the red quilt, then at the boy’s open, guileless face.
In her first life, modern personal space was measured in meters and locked doors.
In her second life, an assassin slept alone with a poisoned dagger under the tongue, waking at the slightest shift in air pressure.
To have an energetic anomaly—a boy whose bio-electric field hummed with the faint, wild resonance of an untamed beast—sleeping two feet away went against every survival doctrine she had ever memorized.
*A six-year-old child,* she reminded herself, suppressing the instinct to plant iron spikes along the boundary between their cots.
*And his presence will serve as a useful benchmark for observing the physical parameters of native beast-soul cultivators.*
“The academy regulations require working students to perform three hours of manual labor every morning,” Tang San said, unpacking her spare hemp tunic from her burlap bundle and laying it neatly at the foot of her straw tick.
“Can you sweep leaves?”
Xiao Wu’s face froze.
His pink lips pursed into a horrified scowl.
“Sweep leaves?!” he squeaked, his voice cracking with pure outrage.
“I came to the city to eat carrots and fight strong masters, not to sweep dirt with an old broom!”
Wang Sheng chuckled nervously from the aisle.
“Second Boss…
every working student has to sweep.
If we don’t finish before the midday bell, the bursar docks our food rations.”
Xiao Wu groveled backward onto his fluffy pillow, pulling his red quilt over his face and letting out a long, theatrical groan of misery that echoed through the dusty rafters of Dormitory Seven.
Tang San looked out the paper window.
The last rim of twilight had sunk below the western roofs of Nuoding City, replaced by the deep, bruised indigo of night.
In the distance, the stone towers of the teaching halls glowed with yellow lantern light, orderly, proud, and indifferent.
She sat cross-legged on her straw mattress, her back aligning with the wall, and closed her eyes.
Inside her lower Dantian, the Mysterious Heaven Skill circulated with slow, liquid perfection, its clear currents washing through her newly cleared meridians, waiting for the hunt that lay two sunrises ahead.