The meeting happened three days after the ceremony.
Elder Zhao came to their house in the evening, after the fields had emptied and the village had settled into its quieter nighttime rhythm. He arrived without ceremony — just a knock on the door and the old man standing on the threshold with a plain cloth bag over one shoulder and the expression of someone who had decided what needed to be said and was here to say it.
Wei Lan had prepared tea. It was the good tea, the kind she kept in a small tin at the back of the storage shelf for occasions that warranted it. Lou Chen noticed her take it out earlier in the afternoon and said nothing. His mother understood the weight of this conversation before it had even begun.
They sat around the small table — Elder Zhao across from Lou Shan and Wei Lan, Lou Chen beside his mother. The oil lamp burned between them, casting its warm unsteady light across four faces with four different relationships to what was about to be discussed.
Elder Zhao wrapped both hands around his tea cup and looked at Lou Chen for a moment before he began.
"I will speak plainly," he said. "I am too old for careful phrasing and you deserve honest information more than comfortable words."
Lou Shan nodded once. "We appreciate that."
"Good." The elder set down his cup. "Let me start with what Dual Spirit means in practical terms, since I suspect your understanding is limited. A normal Spirit Master awakens one spirit. That spirit determines their cultivation path, their fighting style, their ceiling. Everything flows from that single source." He held up one finger. "Dual Spirit means two sources. Two cultivation paths running simultaneously. In theory — and in documented historical cases — this produces a Spirit Master capable of reaching levels of power that single-spirit cultivators cannot match. The ceiling is dramatically higher."
Wei Lan's hands tightened slightly around her cup.
"However," Elder Zhao continued, "the difficulty is proportionally greater. Two spirits must be cultivated in parallel. Two sets of spirit rings must be obtained. The internal management of two opposing attributes — fire and ice in your son's case, which are about as opposite as two elements can be — requires a degree of control that most Spirit Masters never need to develop. If the balance breaks, the consequences are severe."
"What kind of consequences?" Lou Shan asked.
"Internal attribute conflict. The fire and ice elements fighting each other inside the body rather than coexisting. In mild cases — pain, reduced cultivation speed, instability during combat. In severe cases—" He paused. "Permanent damage to the spirit channels. In the worst cases on record, death."
The room was quiet.
Lou Chen already knew this. He had read about it, studied it in the theoretical context of a reader analyzing a story's power system. Knowing it abstractly and hearing it stated plainly across a small table from a retired Spirit Master while his mother sat beside him were two different experiences. He kept his face composed and watched his parents absorb the information.
Wei Lan had gone very still. Lou Shan's jaw was tight.
"Is there a way to prevent that?" Wei Lan asked. Her voice was steady. Lou Chen recognized the particular quality of it — the steadiness of a person who has decided that falling apart is not useful right now.
"Yes," Elder Zhao said. "Proper early training. Learning to maintain the balance between attributes before the cultivation reaches a level where imbalance becomes dangerous. This is the single most important thing for your son in the next few years — not advancing his rank quickly, not obtaining spirit rings, not winning tournaments. Balance first. Everything else second." He looked at Lou Chen directly. "Do you understand what I mean by that?"
"Train the control before the power," Lou Chen said.
"Exactly." The elder held his gaze for a moment. "You are a perceptive child. I say that without flattery — it is a relevant observation for what I am about to tell you next."
He reached into the cloth bag beside his chair and withdrew a worn book. The cover was plain, the binding old, the pages thick with the slight yellowing of something that had sat on a shelf for decades. He set it on the table and pushed it toward Lou Chen.
"This is the only text I possess on Dual Spirit cultivation theory. It is not comprehensive — I obtained it secondhand from a traveling scholar twenty years ago and it covers only foundational principles. But it is better than nothing, which is what most people in your situation have access to." He tapped the cover once. "Read it. All of it. Then read it again."
Lou Chen pulled the book toward him and looked at the title stamped faintly into the cover: On the Nature of Plural Spirits: A Theoretical Examination. He opened to the first page and scanned the opening paragraph with the reading speed of a twenty-four-year-old brain operating inside a six-year-old body.
Dense but readable. Academic in tone but not impenetrable. He could work with this.
"Thank you," he said.
Elder Zhao watched him scan the page and said nothing for a moment. Then he turned back to Lou Shan and Wei Lan.
"Now," he said, "the second matter. And this one is more immediately pressing."
He folded his hands on the table.
"Word travels fast, even from a small village. The Awakening Ceremony was witnessed by forty families. By tonight, everyone in Black Stone Village knows what happened. By the end of the week, people in the nearest town will know. Within a month, depending on who carries the story and how far they travel, it will reach the cities."
Lou Shan said, "And that brings unwanted attention."
"It brings all kinds of attention," Elder Zhao said. "Some of it is fine — academies, legitimate sponsors, Spirit Master organizations looking for talented young cultivators to recruit. That kind of attention can be managed and in many cases is genuinely useful." He paused. "But Dual Spirit is not merely rare in the way that an unusually high spirit rank is rare. It is the kind of rarity that has historically attracted more dangerous interest."
"What kind of dangerous interest?" Wei Lan asked.
"There are organizations in this continent — I will not name them specifically tonight, but I will say they exist and they are real — that collect rare spirit talents. Not recruit. Collect." His voice was flat and careful. "Some do so to study them. Some do so to use them as living cultivation resources — a process that is as unpleasant as it sounds. Some pursue ancient records suggesting that certain rare spirit combinations are components of larger ritual frameworks." He looked at Lou Chen. "Dual Spirit with opposing elemental attributes appears in several such records."
The oil lamp flickered. No one spoke for a moment.
Lou Chen kept his expression neutral, processing. He had known something like this was coming — the manhua world was not a gentle place for exceptional talents, and the Sekte Abadi in his roadmap was far from the only organization with an interest in rare spirits. But hearing the elder lay it out this plainly, watching his parents' faces as they received information about threats to their child that they had no framework to counter — that was harder to sit with than the abstract knowledge.
"What do we do?" Lou Shan asked. His voice had a new quality in it — not fear exactly, but the focused urgency of a man who has identified a problem and is looking for actionable solutions.
"Several things," Elder Zhao said. "First — do not publicize the details of what was awakened. Dual Spirit is already known to the village. But the specific attributes, the specific form of the spirits — keep that information contained as much as possible going forward. The more specific the details that travel, the more specifically dangerous the attention." He paused. "Second — get the boy to an academy. A proper one, with walls and staff and institutional protection. A child alone in a village is exposed. A registered student at a legitimate academy has a degree of institutional cover that makes certain kinds of approaches more complicated for those who would make them."
"Academy fees," Lou Shan said. Not a complaint — a statement of the obstacle.
"There are merit scholarships," Elder Zhao said. "With a Dual Spirit awakening on record — which it now is, since I am required to file ceremony documentation with the regional Spirit Master registry — any accredited academy in this region will consider Lou Chen a priority scholarship candidate." He glanced between the parents. "I have already drafted the initial documentation. With your permission, I will submit it to the Suling Gold Academy in the city. They are the closest accredited institution and their scholarship process takes approximately one month."
Lou Shan and Wei Lan exchanged a look across the table — one of those rapid, wordless exchanges that long-partnered people conducted entirely in expression and angle. Lou Chen watched it happen, reading both sides: his father's carefully managed hope, his mother's layered conflict between wanting the best for her son and the specific fear that sending him away was also sending him toward exactly the kind of danger Elder Zhao was describing.
"One month," Wei Lan said finally. "He has one month here before anything is decided?"
"At minimum," Elder Zhao said. "The process takes time. Nothing happens overnight."
She nodded slowly.
"Then yes," Lou Shan said. "Submit the documentation."
Elder Zhao left an hour later, stepping out into the dark village road with his cloth bag over his shoulder and the unhurried pace of a man who had delivered what he came to deliver and was satisfied with the result.
Lou Chen's parents sat at the table after he left, speaking quietly between themselves in the way adults did when they had heavy things to discuss and had not yet worked out where to begin. Lou Chen excused himself, took the book Elder Zhao had left, and went to his room.
He sat on the edge of his bed and opened the book under the lamp.
The first chapter covered basic theory — the nature of spirit duality, historical records of confirmed Dual Spirit users, theoretical models for how two spirits coexisted within a single spiritual framework. Lou Chen read it methodically, cross-referencing what he found against his prior knowledge, noting where the text confirmed what he already believed and where it offered information genuinely new to him.
He was three chapters in when he heard his parents' voices lower to the specific register that meant they thought he was asleep.
He did not strain to listen. He caught fragments — his father's voice, measured and deliberate. His mother's, quieter, with that particular careful quality she used when she was managing fear with logic. The word academy several times. The word danger once, spoken by his mother in a tone that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up briefly before he consciously settled it back down.
They were afraid. They loved him and they were afraid and they were trying to work out how to protect something they did not yet fully understand, in a world that was not going to be gentle about it.
Lou Chen looked down at the book in his hands.
He read until the lamp oil burned low, then set the book carefully on the floor beside his bed and lay back in the dark.
He thought about what Elder Zhao had said. Rare things attract attention. Not all of it welcome.
He thought about the organizations the elder had described — the collectors, the researchers, the ones who read ancient records and found names like Dual Spirit Sovereign and decided that finding it was a priority.
He thought about the Sharingan sitting dormant behind his eyes, the second secret he was carrying in a body that had already declared one of its secrets publicly. When that one surfaced — and it would, eventually, because power under pressure never stayed hidden forever — the attention would double.
He needed to be strong before that happened.
Not eventually. Not someday. He needed to be strong with deliberate, focused urgency. Every day he spent not training was a day the gap between himself and what was coming stayed wider than it needed to be.
One month in the village, he thought. Then the academy. Use the month well.
He made a list in his head — the things he would do over the next thirty days. Read the book. Begin basic spirit control exercises without guidance, using the theory he was already absorbing. Observe the training ground at the northern edge of the village and understand what resources it offered. Learn the practical layout of his own spiritual framework through careful daily attention.
Prepare.
Outside his window, Black Stone Village was dark and quiet. His parents' voices had gone silent. The lamp in the main room had been extinguished.
Lou Chen lay in the dark and thought about fire and ice sitting side by side in his chest, balanced and patient and waiting.
He was six years old in this body.
He had no spirit rings. No formal training. No institutional backing yet. By every visible measure he was still a poor farmer's son in a forgotten village at the edge of the continent.
But he had knowledge that no one else in this world possessed. He had two weapons sleeping in his chest. He had eyes that carried the ghost of something ancient and powerful, waiting for the pressure that would wake them fully.
And he had one month.
It would be enough to start.
End of Chapter 5