Returning to the others, Hu Cheng clapped his hands to get their attention.
"Alright, I already told you what to focus on. Now I'll give you the exact instructions."
He turned to Sheng Ming.
"Sheng Ming. Every morning — a run around the dormitory grounds, route's up to you. First day, five kilometers. Spirit Power is off-limits."
He glanced at Qin Ye.
"But you won't just be running for nothing. Qin Ye, while she runs, you'll press down on her with your Spirit Pressure."
She gave a short nod, accepting the role of assistant without a single objection.
"After the run, second stage," Hu Cheng continued. "Qin Ye will throw balls of light at you. First few days, train with both eyes open. After five days, start closing one — alternate right and left. Then we'll move on to training fully blindfolded."
Sheng Ming blinked in surprise.
"Fully closed? How am I supposed to—"
"You don't just need sharp eyesight," Hu Cheng cut in. "You need to sharpen your entire perception. That'll let you dodge things you can't even see directly."
Sheng Ming nodded along with his words. The method itself wasn't any secret — most support-type Spirit Masters simply never trained this way, preferring to rely on their teammates for protection.
"Hui Mi," Hu Cheng went on without pausing. "Every one of your training sessions starts with half an hour of meditation. Xiao Yu will be annoying you, insulting you, doing everything he can think of to get under your skin. Your job is not to respond. Hold your focus, don't let your emotions take over."
Xiao Yu blinked.
"Um... Uncle Hu Cheng, I'll be honest. The second I open my mouth, he's just going to beat me up! Do you even know what he did back at the Academy? They used to call him the Mad Dog!"
Hui Mi frowned.
"Hey! Xiao Yu, I hope you know who came up with that nickname."
"Of course! For a small fee, I'll give you the whole list!"
"Ha-ha, don't worry," Hu Cheng said with a lazy, mocking grin. "I'll beat him up before he even gets the chance to do anything to you. Or well — if he does manage something while I'm gone, it'll be worse for him."
The words came out breezy, but Xiao Yu's face immediately broke into a wide, exaggeratedly grateful smile.
"Well, since that's how it is, how could I, Xiao Yu, abandon a comrade in his hour of need!" He proudly thumped his fist against his chest.
Hui Mi gave him a long, piercing look.
"After the meditation," Hu Cheng continued, as if he hadn't noticed the look at all, "you'll play tag. Xiao Yu, you've got complete freedom — attack, provoke, whatever you want. Hui Mi, you're forbidden from injuring him. Your job is to catch and restrain him."
Xiao Yu's smile vanished instantly.
"Wait! He's going to do it on purpose then—!"
Hu Cheng nodded along understandingly, the very picture of a man listening intently.
"Yeah, yeah."
Realizing there was no point arguing, Xiao Yu fell into resigned silence.
"You've got technique and footwork," Hu Cheng turned to Zhou Shengyang.
He nodded silently, but when Hu Cheng crouched down and drew a circle roughly three meters in diameter on the ground, he watched with interest, waiting to see what would come next.
"First — footwork. Not the kind you use for moving across a field, but for close combat specifically. There's a massive difference between the two."
Hu Cheng straightened up and ran through a series of short, measured movements inside the drawn circle, deliberately leaving clear tracks in the dirt so Zhou Shengyang could follow the pattern.
<
"This isn't a complete stepping technique. More like basic principles — how to close the distance with an opponent, how to hold the right range without losing your chance to strike. The circle is the zone you need to be able to move within, closing in and pulling back at maximum speed without ever stepping outside it. I know at your cultivation level you want a bigger range — but for now, three meters is your max."
Zhou Shengyang glanced briefly at the cramped border of the circle, as though it had wounded his pride somehow.
"Next — catching projectiles," Hu Cheng continued. "Xiao Yu will throw small stones at you, reinforced with wind. Your job is to catch every single one, without letting any of them drop. Catch one in a hand, catch the next in the same hand, without letting go of the first. We'll add weights later."
"Xiao Yu," Hu Cheng turned back to him, "you're not just helping these two. This doubles as your own training too. I'll show you a method for concentrating force into a single point. You'll practice it right during the throws — compress the wind stream tightly enough that the stone doesn't fly apart, while still hitting maximum force and speed on the throw."
Xiao Yu groaned in despair, clutching his head.
"Uncle Hu Cheng, you're a monster. I'd rather be helping someone like Jin Luo."
"You've got one job," Hu Cheng, ignoring him entirely, had already turned to Jin Luo himself. "Cultivate, and master the Compression Technique. You need to compress your internal spirit power reserve — make the energy itself denser, not just increase its volume."
Jin Luo let out a heavy sigh, as though the mere suggestion of training caused him physical pain.
"That's literally the most common technique in the army."
"Exactly why it suits you," Hu Cheng replied evenly, shoving a book on the technique into his hands. "Simple, boring, and even with your laziness, cultivating it won't be any trouble."
Jin Luo found nothing to say to that and just sighed heavily, accepting his fate.
Last, Hu Cheng's gaze settled on Hao Ming.
"You can keep training however you see fit, for now."
"Everyone clear on everything?" Hu Cheng swept his gaze across the group.
They all nodded.
"Then get to it. I need to step out for a bit."
With that, he vanished as suddenly as he always appeared.
Xie Ruyang's office sat on the top floor of the Federal Academy's administrative building, overlooking the entire student campus and the mountain range beyond it. Hu Cheng materialized out of nowhere in the room, without any warning as usual.
"Ra-ra-ra! Here I am!" he announced, dropping into a free armchair as though it were his own.
Xie Ruyang, without looking up from the teachers' reports, only sighed.
"You're like a savage. Ever consider trying the door, like a normal person, just for variety?"
"What's the point?" Hu Cheng threw a leg over the armrest.
Besides the office's owner, two others sat at the table. The President of the Federation, Qin Tianmo, a handsome, mature man with gold hair touched by gray at the temples and sky-colored eyes, carried himself with the faint half-smile of someone accustomed to staying calm in any situation. Beside him, settled in an armchair by the window, sat Shu Lao, an old man in white-and-green robes, with a long, thick white beard and equally white hair combed back, his gaze soft and kind. He could easily be mistaken for an ordinary old man, but he was the head of the School of Life.
"Judging by the fact that you called all of us here," Shu Lao said, "this must genuinely be important."
"Couldn't be more important," the smile slid off Hu Cheng's face.
A pause settled over the four of them — but there was no awkwardness or tension in it. If anything, the opposite: the silence of people who'd known each other far too long to feel any obligation to fill it.
"Alright," Hu Cheng clapped his hands. "Just missing Little Yue now."
He glanced toward the center of the room. The air there rippled for a moment, like the surface of water, and in the next instant a figure wove itself into being in the empty space — a woman with hair the color of moonlit silver and a thin crescent-moon symbol on her forehead. Semi-transparent, faintly shimmering at the edges, but with completely lively, warm eyes.
"Sorry for being late," Lan Yue said, dipping her head in a small bow. "Too much to deal with. Had to send a clone."
Qin Tianmo and Xie Ruyang broke into wide smiles at the sight of her.
"Finally deigned to show up!" Xie Ruyang exclaimed, relief mixing with mock offense in his voice. "We'd started to think you'd vanished for good! And once you came back, you didn't even bother to visit us! It's already been two years since you returned!"
"Now, now, Ruyang," Qin Tianmo gently reined him in. "Lan Yue deserves to rest. She's trying to make up for the time she missed with her family, after all."
Lan Yue smiled apologetically.
"I'm sorry... Thank you, President."
Qin Tianmo waved a hand.
"I'm off duty right now. So you don't need to address me so formally."
"Disciple, don't apologize to this old man," Hu Cheng snorted.
Lan Yue walked forward and sat down on the sofa.
Once everyone had gathered, Hu Cheng's posture grew more composed.
"Qin Tianmo and Xie Ruyang already know who this is about. But I want to say upfront — this is a personal request from me. I need help solving a problem concerning my grandson. So everything said here stays within these walls. This is also a secret of the Federation Army."
Lan Yue's eyes went wide.
"Huh?! Teacher, you have a grandson, and you never told me?!"
Shu Lao raised a bushy eyebrow in surprise.
"A grandson?" he repeated, as if he'd misheard. "Where on earth did he come from? You never even had children."
"I said I have one, so I have one!" Hu Cheng shot a look at Lan Yue. "You're one to talk. I only found out you had children two years ago!"
Lan Yue lowered her head guiltily.
"Well, Teacher... you know the reason yourself..."
Hu Cheng waved a hand.
"No, I don't!"
<
After that, Hu Cheng gave a brief, to-the-point account of Hao Ming.
About how Qin Ye had run into Hao Ming while investigating the Rift. About how he'd originally been from their world, but had somehow ended up in a world beyond the Rift and spent years there. About how he had not a drop of Spirit Power, no Battle Soul, and yet his physical strength was on par with a Titled cultivator's. And about the discovered restriction — invisible chains binding his body.
Qin Tianmo and Xie Ruyang sipped their tea calmly — as two of the most important people in the Federation, they naturally already knew the whole of Hao Ming's story from start to finish. But the part about the restriction, they were hearing for the first time.
Shu Lao scratched his beard and asked.
"Hm... so you want to remove this restriction?"
"That's exactly why I called you all here," Hu Cheng spread his hands. "If this could be solved with brute force, your involvement wouldn't be necessary. Do any of you know what this is? Maybe someone sealed his body?"
Xie Ruyang and Qin Tianmo fell into thought.
Lan Yue listened in silence, and with every word her expression grew more focused.
"Hm... this problem sounds familiar to me," she finally said.
Hu Cheng and the others looked at her, waiting to hear what she'd say next.
"When I ended up in another world and stayed there for a long time, I started noticing that my cultivation was being suppressed. Eventually, I lost the ability to use Spirit Power entirely. At first, I didn't understand why, but through investigation I learned that the Laws of the Plane of that world were suppressing me."
"But the Laws of a Plane aren't absolute. If the plane itself isn't well-developed, and the strength of the local cultivators doesn't exceed the God rank, and there's no Divine Realm there — a God-rank Spirit Master will find it much easier to remove those restrictions, even though he doesn't belong to that plane. But there are nuances. I was heavily wounded, and my cultivation had dropped to the Titled (9) rank. That world had no Divine Realm, but just like ours, it did have cultivators of the God rank — so the Laws suppressed my power."
"And how did you solve the problem?" Shu Lao asked calmly.
Lan Yue held up two fingers.
"I found two methods. Either force your way through — and make the Laws of the Plane accept you — or simply submit to them."
"I got lucky, and managed to obtain the cultivation technique of the Plane of the Crimson Mother by sheer chance. So I took the second path. Gradually, I discovered nine seals on my body. To break a seal — say, the third one, which corresponded to the thirtieth rank — I first had to reach the matching cultivation rank along the Crimson Mother's cultivation path. And the moment the seal broke, I'd get my own strength back. In effect, I became both a Spirit Master and a cultivator under the Plane's own system at the same time."
"Hm... so you doubled your strength?" Qin Tianmo asked.
"You could put it that way. But there are complications. Maintaining two cultivation systems at once is extremely dangerous — the two different forces inside my body started to conflict. I nearly died."
"If the boy is serious about this and willing to take the risk, he'd be better off taking the second path. It's dangerous, yes, but I can help bring the two forces into balance," Lan Yue said.
Xie Ruyang, meanwhile, frowned and shook his head.
"It won't work. Hao Ming can't become a Spirit Master — he has neither a Battle Soul nor Spirit Power."
Xie Ruyang's words struck right at the heart of the problem. They went on talking for a long while after that, turning the problem over, searching for a solution.