Three months after the spirit awakening ceremony, Jiang Hao was scrubbing a corridor floor at Bing City Elementary Spirit Academy for ten copper coins.
Objectively speaking, this was a reasonable outcome given the circumstances.
The academy was the closest one to the village — close enough that the walk each morning was manageable even in the bitter cold that Bing City wore like a second skin for most of the year. The work-study arrangement was straightforward: cleaning duties before the regular school day started, in exchange for room, board, and a small wage. The dormitory was clean, properly divided by gender, and heated adequately through the night, which was more than could be said for some of the arrangements he'd heard about at other academies in the region. The whole school was apparently sponsored by the Shui family, whose name appeared on a polished plaque near the main entrance and whose investment in the building was visible in small ways throughout — decent furniture that hadn't warped from years of cold, actual functioning heating systems, a library with a respectable number of books that had clearly been read rather than just placed on shelves for appearance.
All things considered, it was a functional situation. He had accepted it with the pragmatism of someone who understood that functional situations were worth maintaining.
Making friends with the graduating seniors had taken less than a week.
People talked freely to someone willing to listen without interrupting or redirecting, and Jiang Hao had always been good at listening. Within a few days of his arrival he had a reasonably complete picture of the local academic path — what the seniors knew, what they expected, and where they expected to go.
The system, as far as he could piece it together, ran on the Shui family's connections rather than any centralised institution. The family had deep roots in Five Element City in Capital district, and those roots extended outward into the various elemental academies scattered across the region. When a student graduated from Bing City Elementary with a clearly defined elemental attribute — fire, water, earth, wind, lightning — the Shui family's name opened doors. A word in the right ear, a letter with the right seal, and that student had a path forward: a recommendation to whichever elemental academy in Five Element City matched their nature. Fire attributes went to the Chi Huo (Blazing) Academy in the capital district. Water attributes — unsurprisingly, given whose name was on the plaque — tended toward the TianShui (SkyWater) Academy, where the Shui family's influence was strongest. The others followed similar logic, each channelled toward the institution where their element would be recognised and developed properly.
It was a tidy arrangement for those it applied to.
For those it didn't, the picture was considerably less tidy. Students who graduated without a clearly defined elemental attribute — those with no elemental martial souls or other elemental martial soul that didn't fit neatly into any of the five elemental categories — received a graduation certificate and little else. No recommendation letter. No family name opening doors on their behalf. They finished their elementary education and then found their own way forward: independent cultivation, apprenticeship with a local master if they were lucky enough to find one willing to take them, or the slow drift toward becoming a rogue soul master — skilled enough to survive, but without the institutional backing that made the difference between surviving and genuinely advancing.
He filed that information, noted its implications for his own situation, and moved on to the more immediately useful question.
Where to find his first soul ring.
The academy's resource room maintained records on common soul beasts under a thousand years old, with occasional references to beasts in the thousand-year range when the information was considered safe to share with students at this level. That was about the extent of it. The controlled distribution of soul beast information was something he had noticed from the beginning — the further from the major centers of power you got, the less anyone knew about what lived in the surrounding wilderness and what it was actually capable of. The system, he had concluded, actively benefited from keeping people at this level working with incomplete knowledge. It kept them dependent on the structure above them for guidance, and it kept them from making independent decisions that the structure hadn't sanctioned.
He was, fortunately, not in the same position as the other students.
The Spirit Hall library's knowledge gave him a considerably different view of the landscape. He knew about hunting zones that the local resource room didn't mention. He knew which zones near the Extreme North were accessible to a careful first-ring cultivator and which were effectively off-limits — not because the rules said so, but because the soul beasts that had settled in those territories were old enough and powerful enough that approaching them without a proper team and multiple rings was simply a way of dying efficiently.
The proximity to the Extreme North was both a complication and a convenience.
The complication: the deep, bone-settling cold that rolled off the northern wastes deterred most soul beasts from establishing territory too close to Bing City, which meant the variety of huntable beasts in the immediate vicinity was thin. A student looking for their first ring within easy walking distance of the academy had limited options.
The convenience: that same cold had kept the region quiet. No major predators circling close to the city, no territorial disputes spilling over into the hunting areas, no complications arising from the kind of dense soul beast population that gathered in warmer, richer territories. It had been, for the past three months, peaceful enough for Sirius's development to proceed without interruption.
Which brought him to the more important matter.
Sirius had changed.
That was the most accurate way to describe it — not dramatically, not in the sudden transformative way that would have drawn attention or made concealment difficult. But the change was unmistakable to anyone who had been watching closely, and Jiang Hao had been watching very closely indeed.
The creature that had hatched from the golden egg three months ago had been chubby in the specific way of very young things — soft-edged and round and slightly bewildered by the existence of the world it had just arrived in, with a pig-like nose is gone. That version of Sirius was gone. What remained had grown into something more defined, more deliberate in its appearance, as though the body had spent three months deciding what it actually wanted to look like and had now committed to the answer.
The softness had resolved into something leaner, though still compact. Scales had emerged across his back and sides in patches — not full coverage yet, but clearly the beginning of something that intended to be. They caught the light in a way that shifted between gold and deep amber depending on the angle, and they had the look of things that would harden further over time. The small horn between his ears, previously barely a nub, had extended several centimetres and carried itself with a certain quiet authority, as though it was perfectly aware of what it was eventually going to become. The wings, which had emerged from the egg damp and uncertain and slightly indignant about their own existence, had dried and filled out into functional structures — not large enough yet for sustained flight, but capable of generating genuine lift on a calm day, something Sirius demonstrated periodically when the mood struck him and the dormitory room was empty.
The pig nose was entirely gone. The resemblance to Yu Xiaogang's martial soul — the Yellow Level spirit that had caused no small amount of quiet internal amusement during the awakening ceremony — had been completely outgrown. What Sirius looked like now, if you had to describe it to someone unfamiliar with the situation, was a dragon cub. Small, certainly. Young, obviously. But unmistakably draconic in bearing, with the particular kind of dignity that very young things sometimes carry when they have a strong opinion about what they are, even before they've fully grown into it.
The physical feedback from cultivating Sirius had started early and continued steadily across all three months. Every cultivation session produced a quiet return current through the body — not soul power in the conventional sense, more like the accumulated effect of physical conditioning that would normally require weeks of dedicated training to achieve in a single day. Stamina improving in increments that felt small daily and significant across weeks. Strength building in the same quiet, consistent way. Reflexes sharpening. The body becoming, in general, more capable than it had any business being at this stage of a conventional cultivation path, and doing so at a rate that had nothing to do with the normal pace of development.
This had shaped everything about the strategy going forward.
The plan had two parts, both worked out carefully over the past three months.
First: bring Sirius to his maximum development level before acquiring any spirit ring for him. The cultivation feedback was proportional to Sirius's current development — the more complete the martial soul, the stronger and more efficient the return current, and the greater the physical reinforcement it produced. Interrupting that process early by locking in a spirit ring would set a ceiling — capping both the feedback and the physical reinforcement at whatever level Sirius had reached at that moment. A spirit ring, once absorbed, defined a stage. Better by far to develop the foundation fully first, and then build on top of a solid base, than to set that ceiling prematurely and spend years working within limits that could have been higher.
Second: develop Sirius to completion before adding any ring to the second martial soul — the hidden one, the one that existed in no school record and had been introduced to no one outside of the single consciousness that managed both bodies simultaneously. That spirit would come later, when the timing was right and the groundwork was solid. Rushing it served no purpose and introduced unnecessary risk. Patience here was the same thing as investment.
The first ring target was already identified.
A draconic-trait soul beast, in any age range that was actually absorbable at the current cultivation level. The compatibility requirement ruled out most candidates immediately — Sirius's nature demanded something that resonated with draconic bloodline, however diluted across generations, and the majority of common soul beasts in the region carried no such trace. But one candidate fit the requirement precisely: the White Scaled Snake.
Rare, and worth being rare. The White Scaled Snake carried a trace of true dragon blood woven through its lineage — distant and diluted across countless generations, but present enough to registered as a semi-draconic beast. Its attribute aligned with ice and light, which was little compatible with light attribute Sirius had been developing in. It was not a common beast. It did not make itself easy to find. But it appeared occasionally in the hunting grounds of the edge of Extreme North, in the territory the locals called the IceBound Forest — and occasionally was enough.
The IceBound Forest sat at the very edge of the Extreme North, neither fully within the frozen wastes nor safely removed from them. It occupied a kind of threshold — the last place where trees still grew, though they did so reluctantly. The pines there were short and twisted, their trunks bent by decades of wind that came off the northern wastes without interruption, their branches heavy with ice that accumulated through the long winter and never fully melted even in the warmer months. The canopy they formed was sparse and uneven, letting in cold grey light in broken patches that never quite managed to warm the ground beneath.
The forest floor was a mixed terrain of hard-packed permafrost and deep snow, broken by occasional clearings where the wind had scoured the surface down to bare frozen earth. In the shallower sections near the treeline, where human hunters occasionally ventured for the easier soul beasts that lived in the outer reaches, the going was manageable. Further in, where the canopy thickened and the temperature dropped by several degrees more, the character of the place changed. The silence got heavier. The snow undisturbed by any recent passage. The soul beasts that made their homes in those deeper sections had adapted to conditions that kept most cultivators at the elementary level well away — the cold alone was a deterrent, and the beasts that thrived there were patient hunters, shaped by an environment that rewarded stillness and punished carelessness.
It was not a place that invited casual exploration.
But for someone who knew what they were looking for and how to move carefully through cold terrain without announcing their presence, it was not inaccessible either. The White Scaled Snake favoured the deeper sections of the IceBound Forest — the colder, quieter areas where hunting pressure from human cultivators was lowest and the permafrost provided the stable, frigid conditions the species preferred. They were ambush hunters by nature: patient in the way that cold-adapted things are patient, capable of remaining completely motionless for hours beneath the surface of the snow, their white scales making them nearly invisible against the terrain they had evolved to disappear into. Finding one required knowing how to read the signs they left behind — the faint linear depression in fresh snow that marked the path of a body moving just beneath the surface, the slightly warmer hollow in a snowdrift where one had rested, the particular quality of stillness in a section of forest that felt emptier than the surrounding terrain but in a way that suggested presence rather than absence.
He knew what to look for. The Spirit Hall library had been thorough on the subject, and three months of quiet observation in the outer edges of the forest during evening walks had added practical texture to the theoretical knowledge.
The body was ready. Sirius was close to ready. The IceBound Forest was less than an hour's walk from the dormitory at a reasonable pace, and his evenings were free.
He could be patient for a little longer. But not much longer now.
The foundation was almost complete.