The first thing Yanran discovered about reading with two bodies was that it was significantly faster than reading with one.
In hindsight, it wasn't a surprising conclusion — the logical endpoint of something that had been true since before either body could walk. But there's a real difference between understanding something in theory and actually putting it to deliberate use. For the first week in the Pope Hall library, the Yanran-body simply read on its own, absorbing and cataloguing at the natural pace of a single set of eyes moving across pages, while the Hao-body's awareness drifted toward other things. It was only when the Hao-body sat idle one afternoon with nothing demanding its attention that the shared mind simply extended itself across — the same way you might absent-mindedly become aware of what your other hand is doing — and found the Yanran-body mid-chapter on soul beast taxonomy.
Two sets of eyes on the same page.
The processing happened in parallel, but not identically. What became immediately clear was that the benefit wasn't simply doubled reading speed. It was a division of cognitive function that no single-body person could ever replicate, because a single-body person couldn't split their attention without degrading both streams. One body could hold the structural framework of an entire chapter while the other examined a single paragraph's implications in full depth and traced them outward into adjacent territory. One could track the main argument while the other flagged inconsistencies against things read three texts earlier. One could read while the other understood, or one could understand while the other cross-referenced — or both could push at the same problem from slightly different angles simultaneously and arrive somewhere neither would have reached alone.
A single consciousness distributed across two bodies, applied deliberately to scholarship, turned out to be extraordinarily efficient. By the end of the second week, more ground had been covered in the Pope Hall library than most disciples managed in an entire year of study.
The discovery came on a quiet Tuesday.
Most of the Academy students were occupied with practical training. The library was nearly empty, and a full alcove was available for undisturbed work.
The text in question was a theoretical examination of innate soul power — specifically the factors that determined its upper ceiling, the documented upper bounds across known cases, and several instances where a spirit master's recorded innate rank had seemed curiously inconsistent with their later cultivation trajectory. Dry, careful academic work, written by someone who had spent decades measuring things meticulously and was constitutionally opposed to speculation.
Some surfaced the way something surfaces when you've been circling it for a while without looking at it directly — and then you do, and you realise it was there the whole time.
The Seraph and the Chimera. Opposite attributes, directly conflicting. Active suppression running in both directions, the Chimera dominant because it was chosen to be dominant and held there by will. The question arrived quietly: what would the innate soul power ceiling be if only one of those two spirits existed?
Both halves of the mind worked the same structure from their respective angles. The Seraph alone — what the ceiling would be, what the innate rank would express as if the Chimera's suppression were removed entirely. The number built itself up carefully from every relevant piece of cultivation theory absorbed over the past two weeks.
The current innate rank was ten. Ten, with the Chimera actively pressing down on the Seraph's contribution, the two opposing pressures balancing each other at ten as a kind of compromise. Remove the Chimera's suppression, and the Seraph expressed at its uncompressed ceiling.
Twenty.
The weight of the number settled in slowly.
Twenty. Tang San's innate rank was nine — the highest on record. Hu Liena's innate rank was nine — the highest Bibi Dong had personally encountered in her lifetime other than Qian Renxue. Twenty had no precedent in any text in this library, or in any text likely to exist anywhere in this world. Which was presumably exactly why the body had found a way to not be twenty — the two opposing spirits locking each other into an equilibrium that produced ten as its compromise, a ceiling compressed from both sides simultaneously until it arrived at something the world could process without immediate consequences.
But there is a thing that Qian Renxue didn't initially had rank 20 innate soul power, it was bestowed by Angel god. But if it's true, how can my martial soul despite having opposing attribute were able to gain 10 innate soul power. Either, it's Galbrena's own original talent, or I was supposed to have Seraph martial soul initially and due to adding Galbrena's template, I should have got level 20 innate Seraph martial soul and with Chimera suppression, it went down to level 10.
The same logic extended cleanly to the other body.
Sirius — the martial soul Jiang Hao had named after the dog star in Canis Major, because it deserved at minimum a dignified name regardless of everything else about its appearance — had a nature that was fundamentally draconic. And the second martial soul, Silver Battle Body, hidden from everyone, was anti-draconic in origin. Two directly opposing attributes in constant low-level conflict, suppression running both ways, the compromise expression being Sirius himself.
Without Ragna's template already integrated — without the thread of anti-draconic attribute present in the Hao-body's constitution from the pull, providing enough draconic resonance to keep the innate rank viable despite the opposing pressure — the suppression would have dragged the innate rank considerably lower. Possibly low enough to be genuinely concerning. Possibly low enough that the awakening would have produced something that didn't look like seven at all.
And without the template providing that anti-draconic interference, the second spirit would have had nothing to conflict with. It would have awakened cleanly, in full. Holy Light Dragon, most likely, expressing without suppression or compromise.
Sirius exists because of the conflict between the two spirits, the mind noted, with the particular tone it reserved for conclusions that were both logically sound and mildly absurd. He is a symptom of the suppression. Extremely cute, and apparently becoming something considerably more interesting than a dog — but structurally speaking: a symptom.
Both bodies were running at reduced capacity. The attribute conflicts on both sides were compressing the actual ceilings. For now, with the System asleep and no mechanism available to resolve either conflict, that was simply the reality — something to work around and eventually work through, not a problem with an immediate solution.
It was worth noting, for the record, that Bibi Dong had been exceptionally fortunate in this regard. Both her martial souls were spider-type — same attribute family, compatible rather than conflicting. No suppression, no ceiling compression, no compromise expression. The dual spirit advantage in her case had been purely additive. Tang San's situation would have been same as me, if he didn't had his cultivation technique from past live to fill his innate soul power. Two spirits in opposition were something considerably more complicated, with a ceiling problem that no cultivation text had thought to address — because no cultivation text had ever imagined the combination.
The month on both sides ran simultaneously, the single mind managing two schedules the way it managed two sets of eyes — not by dividing attention between them but by being fully present in both without effort, the way you occupy your own body without having to concentrate on it.
Every morning: running until there was nothing left to run on, then resting exactly long enough to begin again. The goal wasn't conventional endurance training. The goal was the physical container — building its quality before beginning to fill it with cultivation, because a poorly constructed container was a limitation that would compound over decades. Better to do this correctly at the start than to patch it later.
The food situation developed with the particular inevitability of things that make too much sense to resist. Pope Hall's resources extended to nutrition at a level that was genuinely extraordinary relative to six years of orphanage provision — soups built from century-old medicinal herbs, ingredients carrying enough latent spirit energy to function as passive cultivation aids with every meal. Eating well on Yanran's side. Sending half of everything across to Hao's side through the System inventory, which retained its basic storage and transfer functions even through the recovery sleep.
Is this embezzlement? the mind had wondered, the first time spirit-herb broth appeared in the Hao-body's dormitory room from nowhere visible.
It is resource sharing within a single host, the mind answered itself without particular delay. The System is asleep. What she does not currently know about will not interfere with her recovery.
The conversations with Bibi Dong had accumulated across the month. Some were formal — curriculum discussions, theoretical frameworks to establish before spirit ring acquisition, the Academy's structure and schedule. Others were less structured: the kind that develop when someone stops by to check on a disciple's progress and the check stretches to two hours because both parties find the territory genuinely worth exploring. Bibi Dong was sharp in ways that made conversation genuinely interesting rather than merely informative. She held multiple frameworks simultaneously without losing the thread of any of them, she caught implications before they were fully articulated, and her questions had the quality of observations that required a response.
And the longer she was observed — the longer her movements within Spirit Hall were watched, the longer her decision-making patterns accumulated — the clearer a particular shape became. Spirit Hall moving in ways that generated conflict with methodical consistency. Potential allies isolated before they could become actual allies. Enemies manufactured carefully, at intervals that suggested planning rather than accident. Not incompetence in any dimension. The precise opposite of incompetence. A long game, played by someone who had fixed the endgame decades ago and was spending her present building toward it one careful step at a time.
The whole architecture was visible, seen through the lens of someone who already knew how it concluded.
She's driving Spirit Hall into a corner deliberately, the mind observed, during a slow cooldown walk through the outer courtyards one evening. Manufacturing the exact circumstances her plan requires. Destroy the Angel Clan, ascend to Godhood, let Spirit Hall's accumulated infamy become the fuel. She's building something — and burning everything else to do it.
And she never accounted for her own feelings. All the thing that is driving her is Rakshasa's Divine mind controlling Bibi Dong hatred. That's where the long calculation ultimately failed her.