The dawn broke over Silvershade City not with a whimper, but with the rhythmic thudding of small feet against hard-packed earth.
In the backyard of Bill's home, the morning mist was swirling around four figures. Bill stood in the center, his single eye critical and sharp, watching the triplets move through the forms he had designed.
"Lower, Finn," Bill commanded gently. "Your center of gravity is floating. If you float, you fly. If you fly, you die."
Finn gritted his teeth, his small, six-year-old face a mask of concentration. He dropped his hips lower into the Horse Stance, his quads trembling. Beside him, Jory was holding two small rocks, practicing grip strength, his knuckles white. Elara was balancing on a wooden beam Bill had installed, her arms out, eyes closed, learning to sense the world through the soles of her feet.
Bill wasn't just playing games anymore. He was engineering their biology.
Bone density is increasing, Bill noted, his Analysis skill active at a low, sustainable hum. He saw the faint white outline of their developing meridian networks. Jory has a blockage near the scapula, likely from sleeping wrong. I'll need to massage that out later. Elara's balance center is hyper-active; she might lean towards a sensory-type spirit.
"Five more breaths," Bill announced. "Deep diaphragm. Pull the oxygen into the blood. Feed the fire."
The kids inhaled in unison, a synchronized hiss of air. They were stronger than any other six-year-olds in the neighborhood. While other children were sleeping or playing with dolls, Bill's children were preparing for war, disguised as morning calisthenics.
"And… break," Bill clapped.
The triplets collapsed onto the grass, panting but grinning. The endorphin rush of exertion was becoming a habit for them.
"Good work," Bill smiled, the stern teacher vanishing, replaced by the proud father. "Go wash up. Mom has breakfast ready."
As they scrambled inside, Bill took a moment to stretch his own back. His spine popped—a satisfying release of tension. Rank 43 felt good. His body felt like a coiled spring, vastly different from the broken vessel he had occupied just weeks ago.
He walked into the kitchen, and the smell hit him—rich, savory, and expensive.
The table was set with new porcelain. In the center lay a platter of roasted Spirit Boar sausages, glistening with fat. There was a bowl of glowing Emerald Fruits, imported from the south, known to gently cleanse impurities from the body.
Sarah was humming as she arranged the napkins. She wore a new dress, a soft blue silk that hugged her curves—curves that were firmer and more defined thanks to her recent breakthrough.
"Smells like a feast for a king," Bill said, wrapping his arms around her waist from behind and kissing her neck.
"Well, my husband earns like a king now," Sarah teased, leaning back into him. "So we eat like royalty."
She turned in his arms, her eyes sparkling. "I was thinking, Bill. The awakening is coming up. The kids… they can't go in rags. I saw these beautiful velvet outfits at the tailor's yesterday. Deep crimson with gold stitching. They would look like little nobles."
Bill looked at the spread on the table, then at his wife's excited face. The thirty gold coins from the Spirit Hall advance had changed the atmosphere of the house entirely. The stress of survival was gone, replaced by the thrill of prosperity.
"Get them," Bill said, stealing a sausage from the platter. "Get them whatever you want. But make sure the fabric breathes. I don't want them restricted when they summon their spirits."
"You and your practicality," Sarah laughed, swatting his hand. "Go sit. The monsters are coming."
The breakfast was a chaotic, joyous affair. The kids devoured the Spirit Boar meat, their bodies instinctively craving the high energy density. Bill watched them eat, his mind already calculating the metabolic conversion rates. Every bite was fuel for the awakening.
—————
The walk to the academy was different now. People waved. Shopkeepers bowed. The "One-Eyed Teacher" had become a local celebrity, the man who turned dullards into geniuses.
Bill entered the Year 3 classroom, the morning sun casting long shadows across the desks. Thirty students stood up instantly.
"Good morning, Teacher Bill!"
"Sit," Bill commanded.
Today's lesson was on Pressure Points and Energy Nodes.
"You hit a rock with a hammer, it chips," Bill said, holding up a piece of granite he had brought from the garden. "You hit a rock with a needle at the fault line…"
He tapped the stone with a small chisel, applying a burst of Rank 43 soul power concentrated into a pinpoint.
Crack.
The stone split cleanly in two.
"Precision," Bill said. "Is power."
The lesson was intense. He walked the rows, correcting postures, adjusting grips. The atmosphere was thick with focus.
Suddenly, near the back, a boy named Thomas—Rank 9 for six months—gasped.
"Teacher! My… my chest is burning!"
Bill was there in a second. He placed a hand on Thomas's back. Analysis flared. The boy's spirit, a Red-Tailed Hawk, was trying to break the barrier. The energy was swirling chaotically in his lungs.
"Don't fight the burn, Thomas," Bill said calmly, his voice anchoring the boy. "The heat is the spirit expanding. Let it rise. Exhale the resistance."
Thomas screamed, a burst of red light erupting from his body.
Then, from the left side of the room, another gasp. Lily, the Blue River Grass girl. Then Marcus.
It was a chain reaction. The resonance Bill had taught them meant their energies were attuned to each other. When one surged, the ambient soul power in the room vibrated, triggering the others who were on the brink.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Five pillars of faint soul light erupted in the classroom.
Five breakthroughs in ten seconds.
The other students stared in awe. The air in the room was electric, smelling of ozone and sweat.
Bill stood amidst the chaotic energy, the Celestial Scroll in his soul realm spinning wildly, drinking in the data of mass evolution.
"Steady!" Bill's voice cut through the excitement like a whip. "Those who broke through, sit down and stabilize. The rest of you, observe. This is what success looks like. Memorize the feeling."
By the time the bell rang, the class was buzzing with a fervor that bordered on religious. They looked at Bill not just as a teacher, but as a prophet of power.
—————
Lunch was a sanctuary.
Bill met Jenny in the small administrative breakroom. It had become their ritual.
Jenny looked radiant. The job suited her. She was organizing the chaotic archives of the academy with the same precision she used to organize her home. But more importantly, she was cultivating.
"Rank 17," she whispered as they sat down, her knee brushing his under the table. "I felt it shift this morning while I was filing the beast encyclopedia."
"You're moving fast," Bill nodded, impressed. "Faster than Sarah."
"Maybe I'm just more desperate," Jenny smiled, though the sadness in her eyes was mostly gone. "Or maybe I have a better teacher."
Lucas and Mia ran in from the playground, their faces flushed. They hugged Bill before attacking their sandwiches.
"Uncle Bill! Uncle Bill!" Lucas shouted. "I beat the Year 2 bully in a race today! I used the breathing thing! I didn't get tired, but he was wheezing!"
"Aerobic efficiency," Bill winked at the boy. "Oxygen is the fuel, Lucas. Never forget that."
Watching them, Bill felt a profound sense of satisfaction. He was rebuilding a broken family, brick by brick. And in return, they gave him a place where he didn't have to be the stoic provider, but simply the man who brought the sandwiches.
—————
The afternoon class with the Year 4s was a different beast. These were the elites.
Bill stood before the eleven Spirit Masters.
"The standard meditation method of the Heaven Dou Empire is called Inner Heaven," Bill said, pacing the room. "It visualizes the body as a cup filling with water. It is passive. It is safe. It is… boring."
He drew a complex diagram on the board. It looked like a schematic for a pump system.
"I have revised it," Bill announced. "We will call this the Active Cycle."
He explained the theory: Instead of waiting for energy to enter, one used their own spirit to create a vacuum in the body, forcefully pulling ambient energy in. Then, instead of letting it settle, they spun it—centrifugal force compressing the energy against the walls of the meridians, widening them over time.
"This is dangerous," Elian, the Wind Wolf boy, noted, his eyes narrowing. "If we spin it too fast, we damage our channels."
"Correct," Bill pointed a finger at him. "High risk. High reward. The Inner Heaven is walking. The Active Cycle is sprinting. You will trip. You will bleed. But you will get there twice as fast."
He looked at them. "Who wants to walk?"
Silence.
"Who wants to fly?"
Eleven hands shot up.
Bill spent the next three hours monitoring them like a hawk. He used his Analysis to micro-manage their internal flows, stopping them before they hurt themselves, pushing them when they were too timid.
It was exhausting work. But the Celestial Scroll was feasting.
[New Cultivation Method Field Test: In Progress.][Data Correlation: 98% Efficiency Increase.][Host Understanding of Soul Mechanics: Deepening.]
—————
As the sun began to set, Bill left the school and headed not home, but to the industrial district.
The Spirit Hall workshop was a place of heat and noise. Usually, Soul Masters avoided it, leaving the dirty work to commoners. But Bill walked in like he owned the place.
"Master Bill!" The head craftsman, a burly man with a Hammer spirit, wiped grease from his face and bowed.
"How is the prototype, Gorn?"
"It's a beauty, sir. A beauty!" Gorn led him to the back.
There it stood. The Printing Press. It was a fusion of metal gears and glowing runic arrays.
"Watch this." Gorn flipped a switch. A low hum filled the room as the soul array activated.
Clack-whoosh. Clack-whoosh.
Paper fed through. The ceramic plates, inked perfectly by a minor water-element array, kissed the pages.
In one minute, fifty pages of the Basic Soul Beast Guide shot out into the hopper. Perfectly legible. Uniform.
"We ran it all afternoon," Gorn grinned. "Five thousand copies. Sir, this used to take ten scribes a month."
Bill ran his hand over the cold metal. This machine was going to change the world. Knowledge was power, and he was about to flood the continent with cheap knowledge.
"Deacon Silas is pleased?"
"Pleased? He's ecstatic. He's already talking about shipping units to the Heaven Dou City branch."
Bill smiled. Every unit shipped was gold in his pocket. Every page printed was his influence spreading.
—————
Two weeks passed in a blur of progress.
The Active Cycle method took root in the Year 4 class. The students were growing stronger, their auras denser.
On a Tuesday afternoon, while grading papers, Bill felt the familiar, massive surge in his gut.
He didn't even need to meditate. He was walking down the hallway when it happened. The feedback from twenty different sources—his students, his wives (in spirit if not law), his machine—converged.
Click.
[Rank 44 reached.]
He stumbled slightly, catching himself on the wall. Rank 44. He was approaching the peak of the Spirit Ancestor realm. At this rate, he would be a Spirit King (Rank 50) within the year. A feat that usually took a lifetime.
Later that week, two of his Year 3 students—Marcus (Iron Rod) and Lily (Blue River Grass)—hit Rank 10.
It was a momentous occasion.
Director Hanes organized the hunt personally. "I'll take them to the Hunting Forest," Hanes told Bill. "You've done the hard work. I'll handle the danger. You can't risk your other eye."
Bill agreed, though he gave Marcus and Lily detailed instructions on what beasts to look for—advice derived from his biological database, not superstition.
"Marcus, don't look for a heavy beast. Look for the Bashing Beetle. You want impact, not weight. Lily, find a Ghost Vine. You need tenacity and parasitic draining."
They left with eyes full of determination.
—————
The domestic front was equally volatile.
Sarah hit Rank 34. Her Faithful Hound was now broken through, its fur shimmering with a metallic sheen.
Jenny hit Rank 18. Her Needle spirit had gained a new property—it vibrated. She could sew through leather as if it were silk.
And then came the Friday night.
Sarah had been observing Bill all week. She saw the power rolling off him. She saw the way the neighbors looked at him. She saw the gold in the pantry.
She waited until the kids were asleep.
When Bill came into the bedroom, she didn't say a word. She locked the door.
She was wearing one of the new silk nightgowns she had bought—a translucent crimson thing that left little to the imagination. But it wasn't the silk that caught Bill's attention. It was her eyes.
Her pupils were slit, like a beast's. Her spirit was active, resonating with her primal instincts.
"You broke through again," she purred, stalking towards him. It wasn't a question.
"Rank 44," Bill admitted, loosening his collar.
"My genius husband," she whispered, pushing him down onto the bed with a strength that surprised him.
What followed was less of a romance and more of a claiming. Sarah unleashed the beast spirit's energy in the most intimate way possible. She was fierce, demanding, and insatiable. She scratched his back, she bit his shoulder, she rode the waves of their combined soul power with a wild abandonment.
Bill matched her, his own enhanced vitality allowing him to keep pace with her enhanced stamina. The room grew hot, the air thick with the musk of exertion and the ozone of colliding auras.
When they finally collapsed, tangled in the ruined sheets, Sarah fell asleep instantly, a satisfied smile on her face.
Bill lay awake, staring at the ceiling. His body was exhausted, but his mind was racing.
Tomorrow was the day.
The triplets turn six tomorrow.
The Awakening Ceremony.
He had wealth. He had strength. He had influence. But all of it—every gold coin, every drop of sweat, every secret physics lesson—was for this.
He carefully extracted himself from Sarah's grip. He went downstairs to his study.
On the desk lay three boxes.
Inside were rare herbs he had bought from a traveling merchant using his Spirit Hall connections. Dragon Saliva Grass for constitution. Star Anise for mental clarity.
He began to grind them. He would make a broth for them in the morning.
He summoned the Celestial Scroll.
"Calculate probabilities," he whispered.
The scroll unrolled.
[Subjects: Jory, Finn, Elara.][Genetic Profile: Father (Scroll/Junk?), Mother (Hound/Beast).][External Factors: Enhanced Nutrition, Meridian Clearing Exercises, Advanced Theory Exposure.][Awakening Prognosis: …]
The text flickered.
[Probability of Junk Spirit: 15%.][Probability of Mutated Spirit: 40%.][Probability of Innate Soul Power > 5: 85%.][Probability of Innate Full Soul Power: 2%.]
Bill stared at the numbers.
In a normal family, the chance of Junk Spirit would be 50%. The chance of high soul power would be near zero.
He had tilted the scales. He had rigged the game.
"Tomorrow," Bill whispered, closing his fist over the herbs. "Tomorrow, we see if I've created monsters."
He looked out the window at the sleeping city. The timeline of the "memories" said chaos was coming. But in this house, under his watch, a new force was about to be born.
[Current Status: Bill][Rank: 44][Event: The Awakening Imminent]