Two weeks passed.
Jiang Hao had not yet absorbed his first spirit ring, for the straightforward reason that Xue Di had not given him any opportunity to go looking for one. His days had acquired a new shape entirely: wake before the light changed, practice sword fundamentals until his body refused to cooperate, rest briefly, and then continue.
On day 9, Xue Di produced — a dark yellow crystal, dense and faintly luminous, the kind of material that looked expensive even before you understood what it was. Ten thousand years or above, judging by the depth of the color. It came from the brain of a whale-type soul beast and it is called Whale Rubber, and before he could consume it Xue Di melted it down over a flame drawn from a captured fire-type soul beast, because apparently the temperature had to be high enough that ordinary fire wasn't sufficient for the process.
The melted form smelled like a decision he would not have made.
Whale Rubber's strong effect was popular in between adult soul masters — for vigorous energy to keep up for night. For a 6-year old boy, due to not reaching adolescent what he got instead was most positive effect in his physical body. A deep, insistent heat spreading through his muscles, bones, and meridians all at once, like his body was being renovated from the inside by a team of workers who had not asked his opinion and were not going to. His meridians felt wider afterward. His bones felt denser in a way that was difficult to describe but impossible to ignore. The capacity his body could bear for soul ring absorption had quietly expanded by a significant margin.
None of this made it taste better.
He did not ask for seconds.
The sword work was the center of everything.
Xue Di had started him on a single wooden training sword, straight and unadorned, and had made her expectations clear on the first morning: correct fundamentals before anything else. Speed, strength, and techniques would come later. Right now, the only thing that mattered was building the right foundation.
He understood that without needing it explained. Swordsmanship was not the kind of thing you could shortcut. Every practitioner who had ever tried to skip the basics had spent years later dismantling bad habits that had calcified into muscle memory — errors that became harder to fix the longer they were left alone. He had no interest in doing that work twice.
What he had not expected was how much there was to learn simply about how a body could move a sword.
"Your grip is your first problem," Xue Di said on the second morning, watching him go through his practice swings. She moved forward and adjusted his fingers with precise, unhurried hands — not roughly, but with the firmness of someone who knew exactly where each finger needed to be and saw no reason to approximate. "You're holding it like you intend to keep the sword from escaping. You don't need to strangle it. A rigid grip kills your range of motion at the wrist and transfers every impact directly to the joints up the arm. Firm contact, not compression. The sword should feel like an extension, not a captive."
He adjusted. Repeated the swing. The difference was immediately perceptible — something looser but paradoxically more controlled.
"Better. Now the wrist is moving correctly. Watch what happens when you swing from here versus here—" she demonstrated both positions with the economy of motion that came from having had, presumably, tens of thousands of years to think about how bodies moved. "That small difference in starting position changes where the weight of the blade lands at the end of the arc. You want it landing here, not here. That's the difference between a strike with momentum and a strike with your arm strength alone."
Jiang Hao practiced until the distinction was no longer something he had to consciously remember and had started to become something his body understood on its own terms.
The grip was only the beginning.
On day four, she turned to his stance, and he discovered that he had been treating his feet as a stable platform when they were meant to be a dynamic one.
"Force comes from your legs," Xue Di said, demonstrating a basic forward cut so slowly that he could see each element of it activate in sequence. "Most beginners understand this in theory and ignore it in practice, because the arm is what's holding the sword and the arm is what they pay attention to. Watch." She ran through the cut again, this time with only her arm — isolated, the rest of her body perfectly still. The result was visibly smaller, slower, less committed. Then she ran through it again with full body engagement: the back foot pressing into the ground, the force traveling up through the leg, rotating through the hip, passing through the core and shoulder, and finally emerging at the blade. The difference was not subtle.
"The arm delivers. Everything below generates. Once you understand that, you can start working on how to engage those sources correctly."
She spent the better part of two days on weight transfer alone — teaching him how to push off the rear foot at the beginning of a strike rather than simply stepping, how to let the rotation of the hip add to the momentum of the swing, how to keep his core engaged through the full arc rather than letting it go soft at the extension. Each element was small. Their combination was not.
"You're losing the hip rotation too early," she observed on day five, watching him repeat a sequence he had been drilling for two hours. "You're committing the arm before the hip has finished its work. They need to arrive together, or you're leaving force behind."
He repeated the sequence with that correction held in mind. And again. And again, until the timing started to sync.
"There it is, you just need to repeat enough that this will engrave on your instinct" she said, and said nothing else about it. She didn't need to.
Bing Di watched from her usual perch with the air of someone who found the whole enterprise quietly entertaining. "You know, for a being of ice, you explain anatomy quite well," she remarked on one occasion.
"I've once faced a human swordman, so I learnt from observing him." Xue Di said, not looking up from her observation of Jiang Hao's footwork.
"Mmm. Mostly so you could predict how they'd attack you?"
"Initially. Later I was fascinated by sword and learnt it. I remember that human saying, The master swordsman isn't about killing people. It's about perfecting his art. If killing is swordsmanship, then it can be done with hands, but what he meant by swordsmanship being art is about, a way of sword, that's need strong discipline and character. He was a talentless human being of spirit power less than 80, but his sword skill was strong enough to injure an ordinary 100,000 years soul beast. "
Bing Di seemed to find this answer satisfying in some private way, and returned to watching.
What Jiang Hao noticed, across the first two weeks, was that Xue Di never taught something without a reason he could understand. She was demanding without being harsh about it — a distinction that required considerably more precision than simply being strict. When she corrected him, the correction came with an explanation of what the error was costing him and why the adjustment fixed it. When she set him to drill something repetitively, it was because the thing genuinely required repetition before the body would internalize it; she did not make him repeat things for the sake of making a point.
He found he trusted her teaching, which was not something he extended lightly.
On day seven, she had him practice maintaining his grip and form while exhausted — not as punishment, but because exhaustion, she explained, was when form deteriorated, and if the correct form was only accessible when he was fresh then it wasn't truly his yet. "You'll never fight at full strength," she said. "You'll fight tired, or injured, or cold, or afraid. The form has to hold regardless. So we practice it when you're tired, until it does."
He accepted this as the practical truth it was and practiced accordingly.
By the end of the second week, his grip was no longer something he had to actively maintain — it had settled into his hands. His footwork was not yet automatic, but the understanding behind it was genuine rather than rote. His strikes carried notably more force than they had fourteen days earlier, and more importantly, he understood why they did, which meant he could continue developing that understanding on his own.
Meanwhile, in the Spirit Hall academy, Yanran was in the martial soul hall corridor with a stack of books when the golden-haired girl appeared.
She looked about fifteen, unhurried, with the kind of quiet confidence that came from knowing exactly where you stood without needing to announce it. Her golden eyes moved over Yanran with a brief, evaluating look — finding whatever they were looking for — and settled into something that was almost approving.
"You must be the new disciple that woman took," she said.
Yanran shifted the stack of books to a more comfortable position. "I'm Xia Yanran. Second disciple of the Pope." She met the older girl's eyes steadily. "And you are?"
"Just call me Sister Xue." The girl glanced at the books with genuine curiosity. "You're always in the library. What are you actually getting from it — are you collecting knowledge, or do you have thoughts about what you're reading?"
"There's a difference?"
"Plenty of people collect knowledge. Fewer have thoughts about it."
Yanran considered this for a second. "Thoughts, then."
"Tell me one."
She shifted the books again. "Most of the books in this library don't have an author's name on them. Among the ones that do, you can see two types clearly — some authors documented their discoveries properly, showing their reasoning and how they tested things. The rest mostly built on those, adding to them or finding new angles. That's fine, that's how knowledge grows. But the updates don't connect properly. Nobody's maintaining a central record. So important ideas end up buried in obscure books that almost nobody reads." She paused. "There's a book in there called Human Can Be Their Own Martial Soul — specifically about body martial souls, different parts of the human body awakening as the martial soul. But in every record I've found, even the recent ones, body martial souls are still being classified under beast martial soul. As if nobody read that book, or nobody thought to update the classification. A whole category of knowledge, just sitting in a corner."
Qian Renxue was listening with considerably more attention than her expression showed.
"Another example," Yanran continued, slightly warming to it now. "There's a book called Martial Soul Root — it explains the difference between absorbing any available soul ring versus absorbing one that's actually compatible with the nature of your martial soul at its core. The difference in outcomes is significant. But it's not referenced anywhere in the main cultivation texts. If you didn't specifically go looking for that book you'd never know it existed."
"So the library is useful."
"The library is a treasure." Yanran said it simply, without drama. "Most people walk past half of it."
Qian Renxue followed her gaze to the far end of the corridor, where one particular book sat at the very edge of Yanran's reading pile, separated from the rest by a noticeable gap. "What about that one? The Ten Core Spirit Competencies. You've put it quite far away from everything else."
Yanran looked at it.
"That one was written by a man named Yu Xiaogang," she said. "He calls himself the Grandmaster. The content reads like someone who spent a great deal of time in this library, copied out the ideas that sounded most impressive, and then presented them as his own conclusions without fully understanding what any of it was based on. I feel like he is praising himself more than explaining what his theory is actually about. Half the theories in it are lifted directly from documented work in the library without credit or citation, and the other half are wrong in ways that become obvious the moment you try to test them against real examples." She paused. "It might be useful as a first introduction for someone with no access to any other resources. If you have no other option, it's better than nothing. But calling it scholarship is an insult to scholar."
Qian Renxue was quiet for a moment.
Bibi Dong, she thought, practically worshipped that book. Had personally given a copy of it to her disciple.
And her second disciple, apparently, had placed it at the far end of the table and just spent thirty seconds quietly taking it apart without raising her voice once.
She looked at Yanran with renewed attention. There was no performance in it — the girl wasn't showing off, wasn't angling for a reaction. She had been asked a direct question and given a direct answer. Somehow that made it more interesting, not less.
"You're not worried about saying that?" Qian Renxue asked. "Your teacher gave you that book personally."
Yanran looked at the book, then back at her.
"Teacher gave it to me because she thought it would be useful," she said. "If I pretended it was better than it is out of politeness, that would be disrespectful to her judgment, not respectful of it. She's not someone who needs me to agree with her. She needs me to think properly."
Qian Renxue held her expression perfectly steady.
Internally, she was rather amused.
This girl, she thought, is going to be very interesting indeed.