On the other side of the continent, at the outer edge of Star Dou Forest, three figures moved through the trees with the quiet efficiency of people who had absolutely no interest in drawing attention from anything living in the deeper sections.
Two of them were female. The third was not — though confirming this required a specific detail, namely the faint outline of an Adam's apple visible above his collar. Without it, Yue Guan could have walked through most of the empire without anyone questioning the assumption. He appeared entirely unbothered by this, in the way of someone who had been unbothered by it long enough that it had simply stopped being worth addressing.
Bibi Dong — the Pope of Spirit Hall, the most powerful soul master on the continent — moved through the outer forest with the ease of someone to whom most things in it posed no meaningful threat. Her dark hair was tied back practically, her expression composed and watchful. There was a quality to how she carried herself in natural spaces that was different from how she moved through Spirit Hall's stone corridors. Less careful. More at home. As though the cultivated authority she wore indoors was simply not required out here and could be set down for a while.
Beside her, considerably shorter, was Yanran.
Six years old, white hair with blue-tipped edges, fluorescent purple eyes scanning the tree line with an attention that had nothing childlike about it. She moved quietly — deliberately quietly — matching pace and choosing each step with care, as though she had been doing this long enough that silence had become habit rather than effort.
"Yanran." Bibi Dong's voice was low, carrying just enough to reach her and no further. "Stay alert. Watch how we manage our time here. Efficiency matters more than thoroughness in this zone."
"Yes, Teacher."
A brief pause in the walking. "You're certain about targeting a fire-type soul beast? Your martial soul is dark and devouring in nature. The attribute difference is something worth considering carefully."
"I'm certain." No hesitation. "The Chimera carries a trace of fire origin — fire is part of the beast composite that makes up its nature. As long as the soul beast is animal-type, the Chimera won't have a compatibility problem absorbing it. And having fire alongside dark gives me two separate attack attributes to develop, rather than just doubling down on one."
Bibi Dong considered this for a moment. "There is a four-hundred-year Ashfang Panther cub approximately two li to the northeast. Age-appropriate for a first ring."
"Teacher." A careful pause. "I want to absorb above seven hundred years."
Bibi Dong stopped walking.
She turned and looked at Yanran with the expression of someone whose patience had just encountered something it was not expecting.
"Yanran. The standard texts state clearly that the absorption limit for a first soul ring is four hundred and twenty-three years. You read the material I gave you."
"I did read it." Equally calm. "I also read a book called Record of Spirit Ring Limitations — a compiled study of over a hundred soul masters documenting their first ring absorption results. The same limit appears across all of them. Four hundred and twenty-three years. But the way it's recorded matters." She paused, making sure the next part landed properly. "Every single record describes that limit as applying to an average soul master. Average, Teacher. Which means it's a ceiling for typical conditions. Not an absolute boundary of what's physically possible."
"Consider the difference," Yanran continued, "between a Soul Trainee and a Soul Grandmaster attempting to absorb a seven-hundred-year soul ring. That's well beyond what a Trainee could survive. But the Grandmaster can handle it — because their body has been rebuilt and strengthened through years of previous soul ring absorptions. Each ring doesn't just add power. It physically reinforces the body, makes it more capable of handling the next one. The limit isn't arbitrary. It reflects what an untrained body can withstand."
She let that sit for a moment.
"So what if a Soul Trainee built that physical foundation before taking their first ring, rather than through previous rings? What if the body was already at the level it needed to be — just through a different method?"
Bibi Dong said nothing. She was listening.
"I delayed my first ring by three months specifically for this. Every piece of soul beast meat I've consumed through the Chimera's devouring ability has given passive physical feedback — increased strength, resilience, body density. The physical foundation I've built is not a standard six-year-old's foundation. I am ninety-nine percent certain I can absorb a seven-hundred-year or above soul ring."
"And the remaining one percent?"
Yanran looked up at her steadily. "Whether you'll allow it."
The silence stretched.
Then Bibi Dong exhaled slowly. "If anything goes wrong — any second something looks dangerous — I will interrupt the absorption. Even if interrupting it causes you damage. Understood?"
"Understood. Thank you, Teacher."
"Don't thank me. Just be alive when it's finished." A pause. Something moved briefly in her expression that wasn't quite visible enough to name. "If what you're describing is actually possible, it changes how every soul master on this continent should be thinking about their first ring. Don't waste it."
"I won't."
They found it less than an hour later, and even Yue Guan paused when they did.
"Yanran." His voice was quiet, with a careful quality to it. "It appears your luck is somewhat unreasonable."
The soul beast ahead of them was large for its age — not from unusual growth, but because the mutation that had produced it tended to build differently from the baseline type. A Nether Blaze Lion. A dark mutation of the standard Blazing Lion lineage, carrying both fire and dark attributes in a combination that most soul beasts of this type never developed. The dark colouration — deep, shadowed fur where there should have been bright flame-orange — was almost certainly why its pack had abandoned it. Mutations like this were regularly rejected by groups of the same species, left to fend alone at an age when surviving alone was genuinely difficult.
It had survived anyway. That alone said something about it.
The soul power it radiated sat at just under eight hundred years.
"Seven hundred and ninety-nine," Yue Guan said quietly, after a moment of careful assessment. "Just at the edge."
"It fits," Yanran said simply.
Bibi Dong looked at the lion. Then at Yanran. Then made a decision with the efficiency of someone who had already made it in principle and was simply confirming it. "Yue Guan."
He stepped forward without ceremony. His first soul ring lit — a delicate-looking thing, which seemed at odds with what followed. Several razor-edged flower blade constructs condensed from thin air and flashed outward with precision, targeting the lion's legs and shoulders, deliberately avoiding anything vital. The goal was immobilization, not a killing blow — that part had a different purpose. The Nether Blaze Lion roared and snapped and thrashed, but the strikes had found their marks, and after a short, fierce struggle it was down, breathing heavily, its coordination failing.
Bibi Dong produced a knife and held it out.
Yanran took it.
"The first kill is something soul masters tend to remember," Bibi Dong said, with the tone of someone delivering information that also served as preparation. "It may not be—"
Yanran's hand moved. One clean, precise strike. The lion's breathing stopped.
Bibi Dong was quiet for a moment.
She had been ready for hesitation. Or for the controlled expression of someone pushing through discomfort and managing it carefully. What she had seen instead was decisiveness — not cruelty, not cold detachment, but the specific kind of resolved quickness that comes from someone who had already worked out that doing a necessary thing slowly was the unkindness, not the mercy.
She was six years old.
Bibi Dong looked at her for a moment longer than she had intended to, and found herself thinking about what kind of person became this particular kind of child. If she herself had been this composed at this age — if she had been able to see this clearly before the years inside Spirit Hall had ground certain things into the shapes they now occupied — perhaps some things would have gone differently. Some paths might have stayed open that were now permanently closed.
She set the thought aside, with the practice of someone who had been setting thoughts aside for decades.
"Sit. Begin when you're ready."
Yanran settled cross-legged beside the lion and began the absorption.
From the outside, it looked straightforward at first. Yue Guan and Bibi Dong took positions on either side, watching carefully, hands ready. For the first twenty minutes, nothing unusual was visible — the faint glow of soul power beginning to transfer, the slight tension in Yanran's posture that indicated concentration rather than distress.
Then, around the forty-minute mark, the pressure increased sharply.
The signs were subtle but readable to someone who knew what to look for — a tightening at the corners of her mouth, a shift in her breathing pattern, a slight rigidity entering her frame. Bibi Dong's hands moved slightly, positioning for intervention.
Then the Chimera activated.
Both of them saw it — the dark arm manifesting partially, the devouring property engaging at the precise moment the absorption pressure reached its peak. The soul ring's final resistance — the last surge of a seven-hundred-and-ninety-nine-year beast's accumulated power pushing back — met something that consumed resistance as a basic function rather than fighting it. The pressure spike resolved. Yanran's posture eased.
At just over an hour, the ring settled into place.
A dark yellow ring with a faint thread of purple running through it — the purple barely visible, like a colour that hadn't quite committed to being present. It circled at ankle height, pulsed once, and stabilized.
Yanran opened her eyes.
She activated the ring immediately — which was not what most new soul masters did after an hour of exhausting absorption, but the information it provided was more useful than the rest. The dark blue flame that appeared on her hand was different from standard fire. It burned with a quality that suggested it was feeding on something other than ordinary fuel. When it made contact with the ambient soul power traces drifting in the air around her hand, those traces destabilized and scattered rather than burning cleanly — consumed rather than ignited.
"Teacher." She looked up. "First soul ring confirmed. 20% attack power bonus as the baseline. And additional 10% attack power for every soul ring added to martial soul. The flame burns on contact with soul power — once it catches on an opponent's soul power output, it continues to feed on it rather than extinguishing."
Bibi Dong studied the flame for a long moment. Then looked at the soul ring. Then looked at Yanran.
"Seven hundred and ninety-nine years," she said. "First ring."
"Yes, Teacher."
A pause.
"You were right about the one percent."
"I usually am about that kind of thing," Yanran said — and then appeared to consider, a half-second too late, whether that had been the wisest thing to say out loud.
Something crossed Bibi Dong's expression that was not quite a smile but occupied approximately the same location on her face.
"Don't push it," she said. "Rest. We move in an hour."