"Heh. Talent unknown, but the airs are impressive."
Long Tao shook his head, sparing a sidelong glance at Luo Fanchen inside the formation before turning to the chief and villagers with a disdainful sneer.
"Allow me to share a cruel truth with you all."
"Every unawakened peasant child fancies themselves extraordinary and clings to hope. What they don't know is that peasants have no powerhouses among their ancestors. The bloodline isn't there. No amount of effort will ever awaken a powerful martial soul."
"The empire's nobles and the scions of the great sects? Even their most worthless trash awakens a martial soul of Rank Three or above."
"If not for the mercy of the Divine Temple's supreme Female Pontiff, you peasants wouldn't even get the chance to awaken. You'd spend your whole lives as slaves."
The children who had failed their awakenings, and their parents, felt the words slam into their chests — a weight so heavy they could hardly breathe, a bone-deep smallness and despair.
Long Tao was working himself into a strange fervor.
"I look down on you — and is it because you aren't honest and hardworking enough?"
"Wrong!" he bellowed. "It's because you're weak. Because you're weak, you deserve to swallow my insults without daring to answer back. That is reality, dripping red."
The commoners' hearts stung deep. Fists clenched — then heads bowed low in ingrained inferiority.
At that moment, a young man's cold laugh rang out.
"Oh? Is that so."
"Then tell me, honored Temple Deacon — which great family were you born into?"
Long Tao turned to find Luo Fanchen's eyes open. The formation had sat silent all this time, and contempt flooded back into the Deacon's gaze.
"So you're another piece of trash that can't awaken a martial soul. And to think I took you for some hidden master's scion and considered currying favor."
Long Tao owned it magnanimously. "That's right — this deacon was born a peasant himself. Those who haven't tasted another's suffering have no right to preach forgiveness. None of you have any idea how much I suffered for being a peasant."
"If my lizard dragon martial soul didn't carry a wisp of noble dragon bloodline, I'd never have clawed my way up in this lifetime."
He despised the peasant he had once been — and so he loathed all peasants.
"The peasant Long Tao is dead. Now every one of you will honor me as Lord Long Tao." A violent superiority spread across his face, streaked with mania.
"You say I can't awaken a martial soul?" A confident arc lifted the corner of Luo Fanchen's mouth. "Then you'd best open your eyes wide and watch closely."
The words fell — and as if in answer:
"HUMMM!"
The entire six-pointed star awakening formation began to thrum.
The obsidian stones lit up one after another in rapid succession.
"SWISH—"
One stone, two... six... every last obsidian stone blazed alive, golden light rippling and surging across their surfaces.
"What?"
Long Tao's pupils contracted. The boy had stood in the formation so long without the slightest response that he'd already written him off as trash — hence the venom.
But the commotion of this awakening...
The villagers all around caught their breath. However little they knew, they could sense something extraordinary. For everyone before, lighting even two obsidian stones had been a fine result.
"BOOM!"
Dazzling golden light howled up from the obsidian, leaping skyward.
One zhang of golden light.
Three zhang!
Five zhang!!
In a blink it reached six zhang without the slightest resistance — and kept climbing.
"Heavens above — seven zhang of golden light!" The beaten-down villagers cried out in disbelief.
"No. It won't stop there." Su Jiu'er's quiet voice carried absolute certainty. The man the Nine-Tailed Demon Empress had chosen would not disappoint.
"Eight... eight zhang." Long Tao's jaw hung slack. In his own awakening, straining with everything he had, he'd managed five zhang — and that had been enough to overturn his entire fate.
"This... what is this kid??"
He wondered if he was dreaming and bit down savagely on his tongue. In the instant the pain snapped him back to clarity, the golden light around Luo Fanchen surged undiminished — and slammed up to the height of nine zhang.
"Impossible!"
"Absolutely impossible!!"
Long Tao's face drained white. Thunder cracked through his skull as he cried out in disbelief.
"You're a mere villager! How could you reach nine zhang? Even among imperial nobility and the pride of the great clans, reaching that height is the stuff of legend!"
Seeing Deacon Long Tao lose his composure so utterly, the villagers grasped at once that Luo Fanchen's martial soul had to be more terrifying than anything they'd imagined.
The despair and self-loathing that had crushed them minutes ago began to melt away. Their spirits lifted.
One villager pumped his fist, as if injected with new life. "Who says we peasants are born to the bottom? Our village raises geniuses too!"
"Fanchen, my boy — Grandpa Lu knew you had it in you." Old Chief Lu beamed with a grandfather's gratified love.
Bathed in the golden light, Luo Fanchen stood like a war god descended, an exiled immortal come to earth, his deep black eyes locking across the distance onto the stunned Long Tao.
His face held none of the wild joy everyone expected. Only solemn gravity.
"Long Tao. Measured against yours — how is my awakening?"
"I... I..." Long Tao stood tongue-tied, with no idea how to answer.
The question gutted him completely. Set against this boy's talent, what the hell was Long Tao?
The nine-zhang limit! The stuff of divine legend!!
Who could have dreamed it would surface in a crude, forgotten village — a true dragon bursting from a mud pond? Who could ever have seen it coming?
"Speak. Answer me." Luo Fanchen's gaze was steady, his voice flat.
Long Tao's thoughts scattered in panic. The boy carried no mighty pressure of soul power at all — so why did facing him feel like a subject standing before his sovereign?
"The golden light has already peaked — so why, why hasn't your martial soul manifested? This defies every rule there is!"
The villagers didn't understand. Even Su Jiu'er's brow creased in puzzlement. Soul beasts needed no awakening ceremony, but she knew well enough: nine zhang was the very limit of human talent.
Every eye strained to see what martial soul Luo Fanchen would reveal.
"Peaked?" Luo Fanchen shook his head and said mildly, "Who told you this was my peak?"
"What did you say?!!" A tempest tore through Long Tao's chest.
"A paltry nine zhang. I'll simply break through it."
As his voice fell, the golden light stalled at nine zhang — surged upward once more.
"Nine zhang one."
A singular pulse welled out of Luo Fanchen's body. The martial soul emerging; soul power igniting. It was the tremor of a martial soul — the tremor of soul power itself.
"Nine zhang five!"
The outline of a phantom began to take shape at Luo Fanchen's back.
"Nine zhang eight!!"
Before the crowd's horrified eyes, the silhouette swelled larger and larger.
"It still hasn't stopped!"
"It... still hasn't... stopped??"
Long Tao's eyes strained to bursting, nailed to Luo Fanchen. The villagers stared, dumbstruck. Even Su Jiu'er drew a sharp breath of cold air. Just what depth of potential did her little man hold?
The awakening radiance climbed on.
The mortal limit — nine zhang, nine chi, nine cun of golden light!!!
"ROOOAR!"
A world-shaking dragon cry split the air, rattling every heart. The phantom outline behind Luo Fanchen expanded to dozens of meters — the image of a true dragon.
The others were merely stunned. Long Tao's very bloodline convulsed. His martial soul possession collapsed outright under that dragon cry, and the separated lizard-dragon soul trembled uncontrollably alongside its master.
"A dragon!"
"How can it be a dragon-class martial soul?!"
Long Tao's scalp crawled, his words tumbling out in disorder:
"Just how high does this martial soul's station reach, for my lizard dragon to grovel before it in terror?"
Su Jiu'er's soul quaked, her lips parting. She had known her man would not be weak — but she had never imagined a martial soul so strong that even she, an Empress, would feel a wisp of pressure. Suppression at the level of the bloodline itself.
Heavens. Could the little man's martial soul innately suppress soul beasts? Su Jiu'er covered her red lips, long curled lashes trembling.
Huzi whispered, "It... couldn't still not be over... could it?"
"What would a backwoods peasant know!" Long Tao, shaken to the core, burst into a tirade. "If the empire's Founding Ancestor rose from the dead — if the Temple's old Pontiff crawled out of his coffin — even they could never surpass nine zhang nine. Im! Poss! Ible!!"
"SWISH SWISH!"
The golden light churned without pause, straining higher still — but nine zhang, nine chi, nine cun truly seemed the mortal world's utmost limit, as though some invisible barrier hung above it.
"BOOM BOOM BOOM!"
The light never rested, hurling assault after assault upward. Long Tao's expression cycled through every color imaginable, while Su Jiu'er and the villagers stared without daring to blink.
Would there be a miracle?
"RUMBLE!"
Dark clouds massed across the sky. Thunder rolled. The oppressive momentum of heaven and earth itself came bearing down.
Su Jiu'er's heart lurched.
"A heavenly tribulation?"
"No!!"
She screamed toward the square: "Fanchen, stop now! You've touched the forbidden domain — a taboo martial soul talent that Heaven itself will not permit!!!"
Every soul present felt their breath crushed short, panic spreading. A chill shot down Long Tao's spine. What kind of monstrous martial soul talent could rouse Heaven's own jealousy — offend the very sky?
"Ptth!"
Luo Fanchen grunted in pain, blood spilling from the corner of his mouth, staining his collar red.
Two singular powers inside him were awakening, fighting to take form in the world — and the momentum of this heaven and earth was bearing down to stop them.
"Boy, give it up! Nine zhang already makes you invincible — the momentum of heaven and earth cannot be defied. Don't war against the sky!" Even Long Tao grew frantic, unable to stomach watching a peerless prodigy die before his eyes. "Stop now — you'll die!"
Luo Fanchen lifted his face to the sky, his expression cold as frost.
He might play the careless rake with women and friends, but when it mattered, there were principles he would not bend.
Cries of alarm and warning pressed against his ears. The gathering horror of the tribulation mirrored in his pupils. A wild, defiant grin cut across his face as he flung his question upward:
"All I want is to awaken the martial soul that is mine. Why must you stand in my way?"
Luo Fanchen was a son of Huaxia — and he had his dear System besides. Why would he fear the mandate of some foreign heaven?
The ancestors of Huaxia myth were nothing like the gods of the West. They fought the heavens, fought the earth — and never once bowed to any so-called destiny.
"I am no heaven-defying rebel. I would not trouble the sky."
"But if Heaven insists on severing my path of cultivation — then what of it, if I defy this heaven's will?"
In that instant, the hair rose on the necks of Long Tao and every villager present, their hearts shuddering. Broken to fate, domesticated by nobles and the strong — when had they ever heard words of such magnificent treason?
Su Jiu'er's hand covered her wide-open red lips, her eyes brimming with shock. Never had she dreamed her man would utter words to shake the world.
Bowing to no heaven, serving no god — what boundless audacity was this? Her heart could not help but flutter.
If what she had felt before was gratitude that far outweighed love, then in this moment, what stirred in her toward Luo Fanchen was the real thing — a woman's admiration, favor, and racing heart for a man.
Su Jiu'er began gathering every thread of power in her body, ready to strike at any moment, her gaze resolute. If her little man had the mettle for this, then she would guard his path even unto death.
"SWISH SWISH!!"
The dark clouds pressed low; thunder rolled on thunder.
In the village drowned in darkness, only the golden radiance blazed, ramming the limit again and again, while the dragon phantom at Luo Fanchen's back roared its unbowed fury.
"Crack... crack..."
Spiderweb fissures crawled across the surface of the obsidian stones as they shuddered.
"BOOM BOOM!"
The horizon whitened. Bolt after bolt of lightning smashed down, punching through the ground around Luo Fanchen and scorching it black. The crowd stumbled back in terror — and one graceful figure alone walked forward against it.
"Ptth!"
Luo Fanchen sprayed out a great mouthful of blood, eyes burning with stubborn, unyielding light, pouring out the last of his strength.
Behind him, wonders bloomed on wonders.
"Walk to where the waters end. Sit, and watch the clouds rise. Now — BREAK!!"
"CRACK—"
In a single instant, every obsidian stone detonated to powder — and the nine-zhang-nine golden light that had nowhere left to climb vaulted upward.
The carp leapt the dragon gate. The sea spread wide, the sky soared high. Ten zhang of golden light — unprecedented in all of history.
Luo Fanchen lowered his gaze to Long Tao, his eyes deep and still, and said quietly:
"Man is not born to submit."
"Do you understand?"
With a cataclysmic roar, the true dragon phantom finally manifested in full — vast and majestic, dragon-might rolling off it in tides as it bellowed at the heavens.
"THUD!"
The lizard-dragon martial soul behind Long Tao knelt first. A second later, its master's knees followed it to the ground.
Among the soul beast race — and beast-class martial souls too — nothing outweighed the station of the bloodline.
A lizard dragon with a thread of dragon vein could never withstand the pressure of a true dragon martial soul.
"CRACK—"
The heavens raged. A pillar of annihilating punishment as thick as a well came smashing down from the ninth heaven. Every person in the village was flattened prostrate, the searing light striking them blind.
In the moment of life and death, a gentle, tender voice rang out.
"Don't be afraid, little man. I am here!"
Every cell in Su Jiu'er's body screamed warning. The apocalyptic power within that tribulation was beyond even her — and still her slender frame defied its own instincts and shot forward, hurling herself into the air above Luo Fanchen to meet it.
She had already resolved to die.
That day's grace, repaid this day.
A life for a life.
And then...
The vast heavenly thunder passed straight through every defense Su Jiu'er raised — as if through phantom shadows, through all obstruction — and slammed, whole and undiminished, into Luo Fanchen's body.
TL Notes:
TL Note: Chi and cun — Subdivisions of the zhang (ten chi to a zhang, ten cun to a chi); nine zhang nine chi nine cun is a hair's breadth short of a full ten zhang.