The absorption was done.
I sat still for a while after, just breathing, letting everything settle into place. My body felt different in the way that things feel different when something fundamental about them has changed — not wrong, just new, like wearing clothes that fit better than anything you've worn before and needing a moment to stop noticing them.
Tianmeng had gone quiet.
Not gone — I could still feel him, a presence resting somewhere deep behind my awareness, dormant in the way that something sleeps when it has given a great deal of itself and needs time to recover before it can give anything more. He had shared the pain of the soul bone fusion with me, taking a portion of it onto himself on top of everything the tribulation lightning had already done to his spirit. His form had cracked under the very first bolt before he had even fully completed the transfer. He had done all of that without hesitation, without complaint, and now he was resting.
I didn't try to wake him. He had earned every moment of that rest.
There was something else I noticed, sitting quietly in the aftermath. Something that I hadn't been certain about until now.
There was a boundary in my mind — a clear division between Tianmeng's presence and everything else. The System. The memories I carried from my previous life. The arrangement behind my existence that I had never fully explained to anyone. All of that sat on one side of a wall that Tianmeng simply could not see past. From where he rested inside me, there was only an unknown presence somewhere in the background — something he couldn't read, that was clearly protecting the inner space without announcing what it was or why it was there.
He had no access to any of it. He couldn't see the System. He couldn't read my memories.
Good. That was considerably better than I had hoped for.
I turned my attention to what I had actually received — and began going through the new abilities one by one, carefully and completely, the way you inventory something important before deciding what to do with it.
The First Soul Skill — Silverine Construct
The first skill condensed spiritual energy — the energy of the mind, separate from physical soul power — into a physical construct of any shape imaginable. The key thing about it was what it targeted: not the body, but the spirit directly. Physical defense, no matter how strong, meant nothing against it. All the armour and toughness in the world was irrelevant if the attack bypassed the body entirely and went for the mind. It carried the combined attributes of the Silverine Battle Body — anti-dragon, ice, all-round enhancement — compressed into a single precise strike.
The Second Soul Skill — Phantom Scatter
The second skill was purely survival-oriented. It dissolved my body into a cloud of spiritual butterflies, each one carrying a fragment of awareness, the whole swarm still being me but spread across space instead of concentrated in one vulnerable point. Physical attacks passed straight through — there was nothing solid to hit. Spiritual attacks could still reach me, but at drastically reduced effect, approximately ten percent getting through under normal conditions. And can be maintained until last reserve of soul power.
The limitation was the cooldown after returning to normal form. Sixty seconds before it could be used again. In a real fight, that minute would need to be managed carefully — being untouchable for a short window and then locked out of the ability for a full minute was not a simple equation. Knowing when to use it and when to hold it was going to matter.
The Third Soul Skill — Emperor's Gaze
The third skill was a control ability. It pressed mental suppression onto an opponent — not attacking them directly, but clouding their thinking and slowing their reactions, making everything they tried to do slightly harder and slightly slower. Against someone significantly stronger than me, the effect was small, around 5%. Against someone weaker or unprepared, it could reach upto 80% — the difference between an opponent who was functioning at full capacity and one who was effectively fighting through fog.
It wasn't a finishing move. It was a tool for shifting the balance before a fight fully started, landing a quiet disadvantage on someone who didn't know it was coming.
The Fourth Soul Skill — Ethereal Anchor
The fourth skill generated butterflies — one every five minutes, up to a maximum of ten at a time. Each butterfly amplified my mental strength by ten percent and extended a web of connected awareness outward from me, starting at a range of ten meters and expanding further as my mental strength grew over time. Anyone or anything inside that network can have shared awareness with me — I could feel what they felt, sense what they sensed, as though I had multiple sets of eyes rather than one. It's like Spiritual Sharing just like Huo Yuhao, and I can also control whom I connect the network with.
The butterflies couldn't be destroyed by physical means. Only sufficient mental strength pressing directly against them could block them. The entire network reset if I lost concentration or chose to cancel it.
The range starting at ten meters was modest. But mental strength grew with cultivation, and the network grew with it. What was ten meters now would be considerably more in a few years.
Then the soul bone skills — and these were different in nature. Soul ring skills could be roughly predicted based on the soul beast that gave them. Soul bone skills were rarer, less predictable, and permanent in a way that soul rings were not. They changed what you were at a fundamental level.
The First Soul Bone Skill — Spiritual Stack
The first was passive — it ran constantly in the background without requiring any attention or activation. It accumulated mental strength steadily, storing a reserve that built up over time. When a strong mental attack came in, it could deploy that entire stored reserve in a single moment to absorb the blow completely, letting nothing through.
The thing that made it genuinely valuable rather than just useful was the control aspect. I could choose, in the moment of impact, whether to let the block engage or not. An ability that was purely automatic was a tool. An ability that was automatic but could be consciously overridden was a much more sophisticated one — it meant I could pretend to be hurt, pretend to be affected, let something through deliberately if there was a reason to.
The Second Soul Bone Skill — Mirage Avatar
The second was active. It could add or remove apparent mass from my body, reshape my appearance in fine detail, mask my soul power level so I registered as weaker or stronger than I was, hide my mental strength completely, and disguise my martial soul and soul rings from anyone trying to sense them. The execution worked like sculpting — not an illusion projected outward, but a restructuring of what was actually being projected by my body in the first place. There was no image to see through. Someone looking directly at me would see exactly what the skill chose to show them, because what the skill showed them was, as far as any sense could determine, simply real.
Then Xue Di took time digesting about my whole soul skill and expressed her thought.
"Better than I expected." Her tone was the same level, direct quality it always had — she wasn't being generous, she was giving an assessment. "Those skills can't be self-developed through training. Anyone can sharpen their mental strength over time and develop basic detection or attack abilities naturally — so if Tianmeng had given you that, it would have been partially wasted on someone who would have gotten there anyway. What he gave you instead is things you could never have built on your own." She paused, working through it. "Your butterfly network has a wider detection range than anything currently known, and it can share that awareness with others, not just keep it for yourself. The passive bone skill is a safety guarantee that most titled Douluo — the strongest soul masters in the world — would genuinely envy. And the disguise—" Another pause. "The disguise is going to be useful in ways that aren't obvious yet. Trust me on that one."
"The control skill," Bing Di added from the cave entrance. She had been listening without appearing to be listening, which seemed to be a habit of hers. "A debuff that strong is nearly impossible to counter if the opponent doesn't know it's coming. They'll think they're just having a slow day. And combined with the survival skill — you're both difficult to pin down physically and difficult to think clearly against at the same time. That combination is genuinely irritating to fight."
I didn't say anything for a moment.
"At your current level," Xue Di continued, "your spiritual abilities put you completely out of reach of anyone in the same cultivation rank. Against Soul Ancestors — soul masters several ranks above where you are now — you have real advantages, not theoretical ones. Against an ordinary Soul King, which is four soul ring above your current ring count, you can hold your own without being automatically overwhelmed." She looked at me steadily. "That is not a normal situation for someone your age and ring count. I'm not flattering you. That's the honest assessment of where you stand."
"I know," I said.
She almost looked satisfied. It was a very small expression, but it was there.
"Good. Now." She shifted into the particular tone that meant the next part of the plan was being laid out. "For the next six months to a year, we focus on the sword. Your body needs time to fully adapt to the changes the soul bone has made before it's ready to absorb another soul ring — pushing that too fast creates instability. The sword training fills that time usefully and builds the foundation you'll need for what comes after."
"And after the sword training?"
"After you absorb your second soul ring, I'll send you against a thousand-year soul beast. Alone." She said it the way she said most things — as a straightforward statement of the next step, not a threat or a challenge. "Alongside the sword work, Bing Di and I will also teach you ice application. Not just the basic attribute — the full range of it, the variety of what ice can be. Ice is not one thing." A brief pause. "Most people who have ice as an attribute think they understand it because they can freeze water and lower temperature. They don't understand it. You will."
I looked at her across the cold stone floor of the cave.
Six months of sword training. Then any thousand-year soul beast, alone. Then real ice application from two beings who had spent tens of thousands of years understanding what cold actually meant at every level it could exist.
"Understood," I said.
Outside, the Extreme North was quiet and vast and completely unchanged, as indifferent to what had happened inside this small cave as it had always been to everything else. The peaks caught the light in their usual blues and greens. The cold pressed against the stone.