After returning to his room, Xia Tian shut the door tightly.
Then he used his spiritual power to scan the room, confirming there were no issues and no surveillance methods.
After cautiously confirming the environment was safe, he finally relaxed completely.
He casually sat on the bed, leaning against the headboard, and a bit of a pampered young noble's lazy air appeared on him.
After his martial soul awakened, the disguise Xia Tian had woven for six years gradually cracked open.
Although Xia Tian had never liked the whole noble style, in his previous life he came from the House of Black, so he had still been cultivated with some aristocratic bearing.
But that noble aura vanished in an instant.
Xia Tian turned back into an ordinary little boy—just very cute at most.
"Right now I'm an Angel God believer, so I must make a holy clean break from the Dark Lord identity!"
"Light will cover the continent, and justice belongs to the Angel God!"
"Amen~"
By the end, Xia Tian's face carried a believer's temperament—serene, peaceful, somewhat similar to Qian Daoliu's.
A cicada's cry sounded.
The Autumn Cicada martial soul appeared in Xia Tian's hand.
Xia Tian looked at the spirit ring on the Autumn Cicada, a hint of meaning surfacing in his eyes.
A butterfly-shaped shadow suddenly flew out from his right hand.
It was the soul of the butterfly spirit beast Xia Tian had killed.
But now it was a mini version, about the same size as the Autumn Cicada martial soul.
What Qian Feng didn't know was that while absorbing the spirit ring, Xia Tian had also casually seized the butterfly spirit beast's soul into his wand.
This proved that a spirit beast's soul and a spirit ring could be separated.
After absorbing his first spirit ring, Xia Tian had gained deeper understanding of his two martial souls.
The Autumn Cicada martial soul: dual attributes of time and space.
The Autumn Cicada martial soul seemed to have completed its mutation, but in fact, after absorbing a suitable spirit ring, it was still continuing to grow.
That meant the Autumn Cicada martial soul had not yet reached its limit.
And the true first spirit ring skill of the Autumn Cicada martial soul was not the Space Concealment Xia Tian had shown earlier.
That skill, Space Concealment, came from the butterfly spirit beast's soul—it was essentially the butterfly's own ability.
The Autumn Cicada martial soul's real first spirit skill was named by Xia Tian as Phantom Projection Wander!
It was similar to Apparition, a powerful displacement-type spirit skill.
Skill effect: Consume all spirit power to set a spatial anchor point somewhere. Consume all spirit power again to arrive at the location of that spatial anchor point. No distance limit.
To cancel a spatial anchor point, you must consume all spirit power to erase it.
Every ten levels adds one additional spatial anchor point.
It was an extremely special skill—unrestricted by level, a purely "mechanism-based" special utility-type spirit skill.
Even if Xia Tian reached Titled Douluo in the future, performing one spatial teleport would still consume all his spirit power.
But without a doubt, regardless of Xia Tian's level, this skill would always remain usable.
He only needed to set an absolutely safe spatial anchor point.
Then if Xia Tian ever wanted to leave, the road would be right beneath his feet.
Right now, Xia Tian had already set one spatial anchor point—in the valley where they hunted souls.
It was the anchor he planted while demonstrating Space Concealment to Qian Feng.
In other words, if Xia Tian sensed danger within Spirit Hall, he could escape at any time.
If one categorizes spirit skills by combat function, they can roughly be divided into five types: attack, defense, control, support, and special utility.
Xia Tian's first spirit skill belonged to special utility.
From Xia Tian's summary: for low-year spirit rings, in terms of long-term value, special utility skills are more valuable than support skills, and support skills are more valuable than the other three categories.
If you ignore the future and only look at current combat power, the value ranking is the reverse.
Most spirit masters with low innate spirit power and limited future potential will prioritize attack, defense, and control skills to raise their combat strength as much as possible.
Conversely, those with high innate spirit power and strong future prospects should prioritize support and special utility skills, so that after becoming powerful in the future, their early spirit skills won't become useless.
After all, not every martial soul is like the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Pagoda, whose spirit ring skill effects scale along with the spirit master's level.
For most spirit masters, the skills obtained early are completely fixed and will not exceed the power ceiling of the spirit ring's year limit.
In battles between Titled Douluo-level powerhouses, an attack-type skill from a hundred-year spirit ring is almost useless.
Only a small number of spirit masters with extremely high comprehension can "develop" their ring skills a second time, making those skills usable in combination with their own strength.
So when people say the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Pagoda suffers the jealousy of heaven and its spirit masters can only cultivate to level 79, everyone feels it makes sense.
If the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Pagoda didn't have that limitation, the major factions would have long since been unable to sleep.
That martial soul's inheritance might even have been forcibly cut off long ago.
In this era of the Douluo Continent, spirit masters have no concept of combat techniques, so many spirit masters can only master nine spirit skills in their entire lives. Every additional useful spirit skill clearly increases a spirit master's combat strength.
Xia Tian was extremely satisfied with the Autumn Cicada martial soul's first spirit skill.
"It's just unclear how many more suitable spirit rings I'll need to absorb before the Autumn Cicada martial soul evolves again." Xia Tian was curious.
Next was the wand martial soul.
The wand martial soul's ability to control souls was extraordinary.
It could not only control souls and command them as assistants, but also forcibly use the power of those souls.
Most importantly, the number of souls the wand martial soul could control was not fixed. As Xia Tian's strength increased, he would be able to control more souls.
And as the wand martial soul controlled more souls, the wand martial soul's power would also increase.
This ability of the wand martial soul could be considered a top-tier martial soul special ability.
A top-tier martial soul ranks just below god-tier and divine beast martial souls, making it among the most elite martial souls on the Douluo Continent, and it often possesses special capabilities.
It was also precisely because the wand martial soul's quality was top-tier that, even after the Autumn Cicada martial soul siphoned away nine and a half levels of Xia Tian's innate spirit power, Xia Tian still maintained full innate spirit power talent without damaging his foundation.
…
Xia Tian held the Autumn Cicada martial soul in his hand and began cultivating on the bed.
This was his first true cultivation session after becoming a spirit master.
Previously, at most he used meditation to recover spirit power, and around Qian Daoliu and Qian Feng, he only used basic meditation to restore spirit power.
Now he could finally run the Space-Time Meditation Method.
Xia Tian clearly sensed that his growth speed had slowed.
It wasn't because his absorption of the world's energy had decreased, but because the "experience bar" required for each level increased as he leveled.
There was no such thing as cultivation speed automatically increasing as strength increased.
Xia Tian quickly understood why.
Normally, when spirit masters advance, their spiritual power rises as well, and cultivation speed increases accordingly.
But Xia Tian's spiritual power was already very strong.
By his estimation, it should be at least around the level of a level-60 spirit master.
So all along, he had been cultivating at the speed of a full innate spirit power spirit master at level 60.
After breaking through to spirit master, his spiritual power did not significantly increase, so his cultivation speed didn't change—thus it seemed slower.
"Before, the Autumn Cicada martial soul was dragging me down. So to be accurate, my cultivation speed in the past few months hadn't even reached the cultivation speed of a full innate spirit power spirit master."
"But now the Autumn Cicada martial soul is no longer a burden. And the heaven-and-earth energy here is richer…"
"Even though each level in the spirit master stage requires more spirit power, if I calculate it out, my cultivation speed is actually increasing, not decreasing!"
Xia Tian felt that at the spirit master stage, the time he needed to raise one level might be less than a month.
Especially because over the past two days he kept draining all his spirit power and then recovering it, his internal potential was stimulated.
Thus he gained a short-term acceleration effect for cultivation.
"Is my cultivation speed going to be too shocking?"
Xia Tian began weighing the pros and cons of exposing his talent