It wasn't logical to trust him—every fibre of her upbringing screamed that a porter could never possess such profound wisdom—but for reasons she couldn't explain, Berry found William's words to be unshakable.
There was a gravity in his voice that transcended his age. Besides, she was a genius; she would soon see for herself if his claims held any weight against the legacy of her ancestors.
"Here," William finally said, exhaling a long breath as he set the brush down. Nearly half an hour had passed in silence, punctuated only by the scratching of the red brush against the yellow parchment.
He hadn't just scribbled on a couple of pages; he had used a dozen, filling them with intricate diagrams and meticulous, detailed instructions. "This set is for your Dragon spirit, and this set is for your Phoenix," he explained, dividing the stack and handing them to her.
To say she was interested would have been a massive understatement. The moment he extended the papers, Berry practically jumped forward, grabbing them with a speed that blurred her hands.
She ignored the Phoenix set for a moment, her eyes locking onto the papers he had designated as the Dragon spirit manual.
The documents were incredibly detailed. They didn't just contain standard text; they featured drawings describing the precise body postures required for the $Circulation \text{ } Phase$ of training.
William had gone even further, writing down specific, personalised instructions on how to channel her energy through the deepest recesses of her torso.
He had even sketched a simple map of lines and seven distinct dots scattered along the body. He marked these as 'meridians' and 'gates,' making her heart skip a beat as she recalled his earlier slip of the tongue. But the most astonishing part wasn't the anatomical detail—it was the foundation.
Every training manuscript contained a basic incantation that served as the anchor for the soul. The moment Berry read through the incantation William had written, she felt her soul tremble. It wasn't a violent shake, but a faint, resonant vibration, like a bell being struck by a soft hammer.
What did this imply? She hadn't felt so much as a spark of reaction from her soul in over a year and a half. Her family's treasured manual, the very same one that had birthed legends, had become a silent, dead thing in her hands. Yet this yellow parchment, written by a porter in a dark forest, made her inner fire stir.
The mere thought of the potential behind this made her heart palpitate with a rhythm she hadn't felt since her awakening ceremony.
Hope... At this moment, she truly felt hope—not as a vague concept, but as something tangible, like she could reach out and grab it for real.
"This..." she whispered, her voice cracking. The more she read, the more her astonishment grew.
As a daughter of a high-tier clan, Berry had been trained from a young age in the art of assessment. She knew that even the most powerful families used supplementary manuals to shore up the weaknesses of their core legacy.
To survive in the spirit world, one had to know how to judge the intrinsic value of a technique. And right now, the sophisticated concepts and advanced practices described on these yellow pages were melting her mind.
To put it simply: if this manual was considered second-rate, she doubted any other manual in the known world could claim to be first. It was a masterpiece of spiritual engineering.
"This..." As she reached this staggering conclusion, she slowly raised her head, her words failing her.
She didn't need to finish her sentence. William watched her, his expression calm. He knew she lacked the context of the vast spirit world outside their realm, but he could see in her eyes that she finally realised the true value of the gift he had just handed her. She wasn't holding paper; she was holding a treasure.
This was one of the most famous and highly effective manuals in the true spirit world—the boundless universe that existed far beyond the horizons of this backwater realm.
According to his master's teachings, the Dual-Sun Harmonic Path was considered a legendary scripture, a pinnacle technique specifically forged for fire-natured spirits.
William had been extremely careful in his selection. He knew the manual shouldn't be solely directed toward dragons. While Berry was currently defined by her Draconic lineage, she also possessed a Phoenix spirit that had been starved and battered.
One of the primary reasons for her stagnation was the damage her family's "useless" manual had inflicted upon her secondary spirit. By fueling the Dragon and neglecting the Phoenix, the family technique had caused the two souls to grind against each other during their natural merger.
In the future, she would end up with a spirit that was neither purely Dragon nor purely Phoenix. While William couldn't predict the exact final form of this mutation, he knew it would be a transcendent fire entity.
After all, the singular commonality between the King of Earth and the Queen of the Sky was their absolute affinity with the flame.
"Check the other one," William said, gently diverting her attention. "You shouldn't try to train your Dragon spirit just yet. We first need to nourish your Phoenix spirit before we attempt anything else. If we don't bring it up to par, the Dragon will simply consume it during the next phase."
"...Ok..." Berry nodded, her usual fire replaced by an almost childlike obedience. She burned with the desire to ask where a porter had found such a world-shaking treasure, or how someone holding such a manual could possibly be in such a lowly state.
William could see the questions dancing in her eyes, but he had no intention of answering them.
His current situation was that of a "loser," a fact he planned to change through sheer force of will in the coming months, but for now, secrecy was his only shield. To prevent her from digging deeper, he focused her on the second stack of papers.
He didn't expect her to be even more shocked than before.
The second manual was a pure Phoenix Sovereignty Technique. While the first manual was intended to be her lifelong path, this secondary manual was a specialised "correction" tool designed to solve the impending twin-spirit crisis.
Currently, Berry's Dragon spirit was rampant, while her Phoenix spirit was being brutally suppressed. If she only trained the legendary fire manual, the power gap would widen, leading to her inevitable collapse. The Phoenix manual was meant to restore the balance.
The moment Berry began to scan the second set of papers, her eyes instinctively went to the incantation. She was eager, perhaps too eager, to feel that long-lost sensation of her soul stirring once more. But as the words left her lips, something catastrophic occurred.
"Sh*t!" William hissed, his heart dropping. He had made a grave miscalculation. He hadn't accounted for just how starved the Phoenix spirit was. Just like a man dying of thirst in a desert, the moment it sensed a drop of "water" from the incantation, it didn't just drink—it rampaged.
Events unfolded at a dizzying speed. The moment Berry whispered the final syllable of the incantation, a faint red light—a shimmering, ethereal pink—erupted from her core and surged through her body.
The transformation was total. Her hair, her eyes, and even the pigment of her skin shifted into a faint, glowing red.
The Phoenix spirit had seized control of her physical vessel and begun to pull spirit power from the surrounding nature with a terrifying, vacuum-like intensity. The air around them began to swirl into a localised gale as the forest's energy was sucked into her pores.
"Damn! What should I do now?" In this unexpected crisis, William was caught between laughter and tears. His master had always warned him that training didn't just depend on the quality of the manuals or the strength of the spirits—it depended on the current state of the practitioner's mind and heart.