—————
Darkness.
Not the comforting darkness of the deep jungle, rich with chemical information and thermal signatures. This was a different darkness—enclosed, absolute, the interior of a space that had been sealed for… how long? I had lost track of time during the transformation, consciousness fragmenting into disconnected moments of agony and restructuring.
But the pain had stopped. The changes had completed. And I was… different.
I became aware of my body in stages, each new perception bringing confusion and disorientation. There was weight—not the distributed weight of a serpentine form pressed against the ground, but concentrated weight, centered in ways that felt fundamentally wrong. There were… protrusions. Extensions of myself that occupied space in directions I had never experienced.
Limbs. I had limbs.
The realization triggered something between horror and fascination. For over three years, I had existed as a creature of singular, elongated form. Every movement had been a ripple of muscle against scale, every action a coordination of a body designed for ground-level existence. Now that body was gone, replaced by something alien.
Something human.
I attempted movement and immediately regretted it. The limbs did not respond as expected—signals that should have produced smooth motion instead created awkward twitches and spasms. I felt myself topple within the enclosed space of the cocoon, new body parts colliding with the hardened shell in a tangle of uncoordinated flesh.
Control yourself, I commanded internally, forcing the panic down through sheer will. Analyze the situation.
I stilled my attempts at movement and focused on cataloging what I could perceive.
The cocoon's interior was cramped—far more cramped than it should have been given my former size. The shell pressed against me from all directions, limiting my ability to experiment with my new form. I needed to emerge before I could properly assess the transformation's results.
But even as I contemplated escape, I became aware of something within me—something that had survived the transformation intact.
My soul.
The spiritual core that had accumulated a hundred thousand years of cultivation remained, though altered in form and structure. I could feel it pulsing at my center, a reservoir of power that was somehow both familiar and entirely new. And orbiting that core, visible even to my internal perception, a ring of yellow light rotated with steady, measured rhythm.
My first soul ring. Five hundred and four years of condensed cultivation, crystallized during the transformation itself.
The ring's presence meant something critical: I was not starting from nothing. The transformation had automatically structured my accumulated power into the format used by Spirit Masters, giving me a foundation that would have taken ordinary cultivators years to establish.
Level eleven. The assessment came instinctively, knowledge that seemed to have been granted alongside the transformation. A Spirit Master of the eleventh rank, possessing a single soul ring and the cultivation base to support it.
Pathetic, by the standards of the power I had wielded as a soul beast. But functional. A starting point from which to rebuild.
And there was something else—a presence within my spiritual structure that felt achingly familiar despite its diminished state. My spirit. The manifestation of my fundamental nature, preserved through the transformation.
I turned my attention inward, examining this aspect of my new existence with careful focus.
The Scaled Serpent.
That was what it was—what I was, at the deepest level of my transformed being. The spirit manifested in my mind's eye as a perfect representation of my original form: fifteen feet of midnight-black scales, the subtle pattern of deeper darkness running along the length, the heat pits and forked tongue and cold, calculating eyes that had defined my existence for over three years.
The spirit was me. My true self, compressed into a human shell but fundamentally unchanged.
And with the spirit came the potential for my soul skills.
I reached for the pathways that had connected me to my abilities, seeking the familiar channels of power that had served me throughout my cultivation.
Most were dormant. The connections existed, but they lacked the energy to function—my reserves had been almost entirely consumed by the transformation, leaving insufficient power to activate the more demanding skills.
But one pathway responded.
The Void Embrace.
The skill ignited with a flicker of recognition, power flowing through channels that the soul ring's formation had cleared. I could feel the ability activating—diminished, far weaker than its original form, but functional.
My first skill had survived the transformation. The others would follow as I condensed additional rings and restored my cultivation.
I was not helpless.
—————
I focused on the cocoon's shell, searching for weakness. My new hands—the sensation was bizarre, fingers moving independently rather than as part of a unified whole—pressed against the hardened material. It resisted initially, the same impenetrable substance that had protected me during the tribulation. But it was designed to be broken from within, and eventually I found a seam, a line of slightly reduced density that yielded to sustained pressure.
The shell cracked. Light—dim, filtered, the ambient glow of a deep cavern—flooded through the gap. I widened the opening with clumsy motions, each movement a lesson in the mechanics of a form I had never inhabited.
I emerged into the cavern like a creature being born, which in many ways was precisely what I was.
—————
The first hours were dedicated entirely to physical adaptation.
I lay on the cold stone floor of the cavern, systematically testing each component of my new body. The process was humiliating in its clumsiness—a hundred-thousand-year soul beast reduced to the helpless flailing of an infant learning to control its own flesh.
But humiliation was irrelevant. Only functionality mattered.
Physical Assessment: New Form
The body was small. Far smaller than I had anticipated. Based on proportions and my limited knowledge of human development, I estimated my apparent age at approximately six years. A child. I had transformed into a child.
The implications were complex. A child's body would attract less suspicion in human society—would be dismissed as harmless, beneath notice. But it would also impose limitations on physical capability, on credibility, on the options available for establishing myself in this world.
The face—I explored it with fingers that were gradually becoming more coordinated—was unremarkable. Features that I could not evaluate without a reflective surface, but which felt… ordinary. Neither handsome nor ugly by the standards I remembered from my previous life. Simply a face, a mask to wear among humans.
The hair was dark, almost black, matching the coloration of my original scales. The skin was pale, lacking the sun-exposure that would characterize a child who spent time outdoors. The eyes—I touched the lids carefully—felt normal, though I would not know their color until I found a way to examine my reflection.
The body itself was thin, almost emaciated. The transformation had consumed physical resources as well as spiritual ones, leaving me with minimal reserves of either type. I would need sustenance soon—both food for the body and cultivation to restore my soul power.
The most disorienting aspect was the sensory difference.
My serpentine senses—the chemical perception, the heat pits, the vibration sensitivity—were gone. In their place were the ordinary human faculties of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The reduction in information was staggering. Where I had once perceived the world in layers of overlapping data, I now experienced only what these limited organs could provide.
I felt blind. Deaf. Numb to the world around me.
But the Scaled Serpent spirit remained within me, and with it, the potential for recovering my abilities. The Void Embrace was already functional, if weak. The others—Thermal Sovereignty, Essence Trace, Silent Passage, Absolute Perception, Venom Mastery—waited in dormancy, requiring additional soul rings and restored power to reactivate.
I would rebuild. Patient accumulation had brought me to a hundred thousand years. Patient accumulation would restore what the transformation had cost.
—————
Standing was a challenge that consumed most of the remaining daylight hours.
The bipedal configuration was fundamentally unstable compared to my former serpentine form. Two points of contact with the ground, a high center of gravity, constant micro-adjustments required to maintain balance. I fell repeatedly, each impact against the stone floor teaching me something new about the body's limitations and capabilities.
But eventually, I stood. Wobbled. Took a step. Fell. Rose. Stepped again.
By nightfall, I could walk—not smoothly, not quickly, but functionally. The movements remained awkward, requiring conscious attention that would have been unnecessary for a natural-born human. But I could traverse distance, could navigate terrain, could accomplish the basic locomotion required for survival.
I tested my Void Embrace during these exercises, observing its effects in my diminished state. The skill activated with a thought, shadows gathering around my small body, light bending away from my form. The effect was weak—barely sufficient to blur my outline rather than rendering me invisible—but it was present and responsive.
The yellow soul ring appeared around my body when I channeled the skill, orbiting my form with slow, steady rotation. Five hundred and four years of condensed cultivation, visible evidence of my Spirit Master status.
This ring would be my passport into human society. A child with an awakened spirit and a soul ring was a resource to be cultivated, not a threat to be eliminated. The academies and sects of this world actively sought such individuals, offering shelter and training in exchange for future service.
I would use their systems for my own purposes.
The cavern system was as I remembered it from my desperate flight before the transformation. Dark, deep, isolated. The tribulation's lightning had scarred the upper passages—I found evidence of strikes that had penetrated dozens of feet into the stone—but my refuge had remained protected.
I had survived. Against all probability, against the odds that killed most soul beasts attempting the hundred-thousand transformation, I had survived.
Now I needed to consolidate that survival into something sustainable.
—————
The journey out of the cavern system took most of the following day.
My child's body lacked the endurance of my former serpentine form, requiring frequent rest stops that stretched the travel time significantly. The passages that I had navigated easily as a snake now presented challenges—climbs that my short limbs struggled with, gaps that required detours rather than simple slithering through.
But I emerged eventually, blinking in the late afternoon sunlight, experiencing the surface world for the first time through human eyes.
The jungle was as I remembered it—dense, dark, dangerous. But my perception of it had changed fundamentally. Without my enhanced senses, the forest seemed flatter, less detailed, stripped of the layers of information that had made it legible to my serpentine self. Scent trails were invisible. Thermal signatures were imperceptible. Vibrations registered only as the vague awareness of my bare feet against the ground.
I was vulnerable in ways I had never been, even during my earliest days in this world.
But I was also something I had never been before: human. Or at least human-appearing. And that opened possibilities that had been closed to my beast form.
I needed to find human civilization. To learn how this world's societies functioned. To establish myself in a way that would allow continued cultivation without attracting the attention that had nearly killed me twice already.
I oriented myself using the sun's position—basic navigation that did not require enhanced senses—and began walking. The direction was roughly northeast, toward the regions where my long-ago observations had detected human activity. The distance was substantial, but manageable with patience.
The serpent had always been patient. The human would be no different.
—————
Three days of travel through the deep jungle nearly killed me multiple times.
Without my combat capabilities, without my detection skills, without even the basic physical advantages of my serpentine form, I was prey to creatures that would have fled from my previous incarnation. I survived through a combination of luck, the marginal concealment provided by my weakened Void Embrace, and an increasingly refined understanding of my new body's capabilities.
The jungle gradually thinned as I traveled, ancient growth giving way to younger forest, then to scrubland, then to something that made my heart—this new, strange heart that beat in my chest—accelerate with anticipation.
Cleared land. Fields. The unmistakable evidence of human agriculture.
I approached the first village from a position of careful observation, spending an entire day watching from concealment before attempting any closer approach. The settlement was small—perhaps thirty structures clustered around a central well—and its inhabitants appeared to be simple farmers, their lives structured around the rhythms of planting and harvest.
None of them appeared to be Spirit Masters. I detected no spiritual pressure, no manifestation of soul power, no evidence of cultivation among the population. This was a community of ordinary humans, far from the centers of power that dominated this world's political landscape.
Perfect for my initial purposes.
I waited until full darkness before moving into the village itself. My Void Embrace, weak as it was, proved sufficient to blur my passage through the moonlit streets. I was small, dark-clothed in shadows, moving with the developing grace that my adaptation period had provided.
The first priority was clothing. My transformation had left me naked—the cocoon had not included garments—and a nude child wandering into a village would attract precisely the attention I needed to avoid.
I found what I needed hanging from a line behind one of the smaller structures: children's clothing, simple but serviceable. Pants of rough cloth. A tunic that was slightly too large for my emaciated frame. No shoes—those would need to wait—but the basics of human covering.
I dressed quickly, fumbling with the unfamiliar fastenings, and retreated before any occupant could notice the theft.
Food was the second priority. I found a storage structure—a barn or granary of some kind—that contained dried vegetables, preserved meat, and containers of grain. I took sparingly, cognizant that obvious theft would trigger investigation. A handful here, a small portion there. Nothing that would be missed in casual inventory.
The food was strange to my new digestive system, but I forced myself to eat regardless. The body needed fuel. Preference was irrelevant.
I retreated to the village's edge before dawn, finding a concealed position in a drainage ditch where I could rest and observe without being discovered.
The real work—learning to function in this society—would begin with the morning.
—————
The language was my first obstacle.
I could hear the villagers speaking, their voices carrying clearly in the quiet rural air. But the words meant nothing—a stream of sounds that my human ears could perceive but my mind could not interpret.
This was not the language I had spoken in my previous life. This was something entirely different, presumably the common tongue of the Douluo continent. And I had never learned it, had never needed to learn it, had spent my entire existence in this world as a creature for whom human speech was irrelevant.
Now it was essential.
I settled into a pattern of observation and study that would occupy me for the following month.
During the days, I remained concealed at the village's edge, listening to conversations, watching interactions, building a mental database of sounds and their apparent meanings. The process was painstaking—context had to be inferred, meanings had to be deduced, connections between words and referents had to be established through repeated observation.
The villagers discussed crops. Weather. Neighbors. Children. Animals. The small concerns of agricultural life, repeated in patterns that gradually became recognizable.
I learned that the word spoken when pointing at the sun meant "sun" or "day" or "light." I learned that the word spoken when food was served meant "eat" or "food" or "meal." I learned the sounds that indicated greeting, farewell, gratitude, displeasure.
During the nights, I ranged more widely, visiting multiple villages to supplement my supplies and expand my observations. I discovered that the region contained perhaps a dozen such settlements, all following similar patterns of agricultural existence, all speaking the same language with minor variations in accent.
I also discovered something valuable: the villages occasionally received visitors from larger settlements. Traders, officials, and sometimes—rarely—Spirit Masters.
I observed one such Spirit Master from a distance of approximately two hundred feet, my Void Embrace active to minimize detection risk. The individual was young, perhaps in his twenties, with three soul rings visible when he demonstrated his abilities for the impressed villagers. His spirit appeared to be some form of enhanced strength—he lifted a cart that would have required four men to move, drawing gasps of amazement from his audience.
The villagers treated him with a mixture of awe and fear. They offered food, lodging, whatever he requested. He accepted with the casual entitlement of someone accustomed to such treatment.
This was the relationship between Spirit Masters and ordinary humans. Power commanded deference. Cultivation elevated one above the common population.
I would use this dynamic.
The month passed in disciplined routine.
My language acquisition accelerated as my vocabulary expanded, context becoming easier to establish as more words became familiar. By the second week, I could follow simple conversations with reasonable comprehension. By the third week, I was beginning to understand grammatical structures, the rules that governed word order and conjugation.
I practiced speaking in private, my child's voice shaping the unfamiliar sounds with gradually improving accuracy. The accent would mark me as a foreigner—I had no way to perfectly replicate the native pronunciation—but this could be explained as originating from a distant region.
During this period, I also worked to strengthen my body and restore my spiritual reserves.
The food I had been consuming—stolen in small quantities from multiple villages—was gradually addressing my emaciated condition. My frame remained thin, but the bones were no longer as prominent, the muscles were developing marginal definition, and my energy levels had improved significantly.
More importantly, my soul power was recovering through natural regeneration. The Void Embrace grew marginally stronger with each passing day. My spiritual reserves slowly filled, preparing the foundation for future development.
By the end of the month, I had achieved functional competence in the local language. My vocabulary was limited, my grammar occasionally awkward, but I could communicate basic concepts and understand most of what was said around me.
I had also gathered critical information about my destination.
The nearest significant city was called Barak—a trading hub approximately five days' travel to the northeast. The villagers mentioned it frequently as the source of goods they could not produce locally and the destination for their surplus crops. More importantly, they spoke of a Spirit Master academy there, an institution where young people with cultivation potential could be tested and trained.
An academy. And according to overheard conversations, the Heaven Dou Empire provided stipends to registered Spirit Masters—monthly payments that acknowledged their value to the realm and encouraged their development.
A Spirit Master with a soul ring, even a child, would qualify for such support.
It was time to move to the next phase.
—————
The journey to Barak City took six days rather than the five the villagers had estimated.
My child's body tired easily, requiring more frequent rest stops than an adult would need. The roads—when there were roads—were rough, unsuited to bare feet that had only recently adapted to bipedal locomotion. And I remained cautious, avoiding other travelers when possible, unwilling to test my language skills and social capabilities until absolutely necessary.
But I reached the city eventually, emerging from the forest onto a proper road that led to gates of stone and timber.
Barak City was larger than I had imagined.
The settlement sprawled across a river valley, structures of multiple stories crowding streets that seemed designed for far less traffic than they currently carried. The population was dense, thousands of humans going about their daily activities in patterns that were overwhelming to my still-adjusting human senses.
And there were Spirit Masters here.
I could not detect them through spiritual senses—my skills remained too weak—but I could identify them through observation. Individuals who moved with confidence that exceeded their apparent physical capabilities. People whose clothing bore symbols of academies or sects. Young adults who carried themselves like predators despite their unremarkable appearance.
They were not common, but neither were they rare. Perhaps one in a hundred of the people I observed seemed to belong to the cultivation world.
I needed to navigate carefully.
My first priority was establishing the financial foundation for my existence in this city. A homeless child wandering the streets would attract attention from authorities or predators, neither of which served my purposes. But a registered Spirit Master, even one as young and weak as my current form suggested, would be treated differently.
I spent two days observing the city's structure, identifying the relevant institutions and their locations. The Spirit Master Hall—a branch of the organization that governed cultivation affairs throughout the Heaven Dou Empire—occupied a prominent building near the city's center. This was where Spirit Masters registered their status, reported their cultivation progress, and received their imperial stipends.
On the third day, I presented myself at the Hall's entrance.
The building's interior was functional rather than grand—a reception area staffed by clerks, several private offices for more detailed consultations, and a testing room visible through an open doorway. The atmosphere was businesslike, processing Spirit Masters with the efficiency of any administrative institution.
A clerk—a middle-aged woman with the tired patience of someone who dealt with the public regularly—looked up as I approached her desk. Her expression shifted through surprise to skepticism as she took in my appearance: a small, thin child in worn clothing, alone and apparently seeking services.
"Can I help you?" The question carried undertones of doubt.
"I wish to register as a Spirit Master," I said, carefully enunciating each word to minimize my accent's impact. "And to inquire about the imperial stipend."
The skepticism deepened. "Children your age typically come with parents or guardians. Where are yours?"
"Dead." I allowed my voice to carry appropriate weight. "A soul beast attack on our village. I am the only survivor."
The clerk's expression softened marginally—not sympathy exactly, but the acknowledgment that such tragedies were common enough to be plausible. "I'm sorry to hear that. But registration requires proof of spirit awakening and cultivation level. Do you have any documentation? Test results from a previous evaluation?"
"No documentation. But I can demonstrate." I held out my hand, palm up, and channeled soul power with careful control.
The Scaled Serpent manifested above my palm.
It was smaller than its true form—perhaps eight inches in length—rendered in translucent spiritual energy that nonetheless captured every detail of my original body. Black scales that seemed to drink in light. The subtle pattern of deeper darkness along the length. Cold, intelligent eyes that reflected the room's illumination.
And orbiting the serpent's form, clearly visible, my soul ring of yellow light.
The clerk's eyes widened. Whatever she had expected from a ragged child claiming Spirit Master status, this was not it.
"You have a soul ring," she said, statement rather than question. "How? You can't be more than six or seven years old."
I had prepared for this question. The story needed to be plausible, verifiable to the extent possible, and simple enough that a traumatized child might believably relate it.
"A Spirit Master," I said. "He came through our village before the attack. He tested the children for spirit potential and found that I had awakened. He said my spirit was unusual, worth developing." I paused, manufacturing the appearance of difficult memory. "He helped me hunt a soul beast. A young one, in the forest near our village. He said the ring would protect me, would give me a chance to survive if danger came."
"And did it?" the clerk asked. "Protect you?"
"The village was destroyed three days later. Everyone died except me. I hid, used my spirit's ability to conceal myself until the beasts left." I met her eyes with the steady gaze of a child who had learned too early that the world was cruel. "Then I walked here. I heard there was an academy. That Spirit Masters received support from the Empire."
The clerk studied me for a long moment, her expression unreadable. I maintained my composure, projecting the calculated mixture of trauma, determination, and childish hope that the situation demanded.
"The Spirit Master who helped you," she said finally. "Do you know his name? His affiliation?"
"He didn't say. He wore dark clothing, had two rings—one yellow, one purple. He said he was traveling and would not stay long." I shook my head with apparent frustration. "I wish I had asked more questions. But I was young, and he seemed so powerful, and then everything happened so fast…"
The story was thin. I knew it was thin. But it was also unverifiable—a nameless traveling Spirit Master who had passed through an isolated village, now destroyed, leaving no witnesses to contradict or confirm.
"Your spirit," the clerk said, changing subjects. "I don't recognize the type. It's not in the common registries."
"The Spirit Master called it a Scaled Serpent. He said it was rare, that he had never seen one exactly like it before." This much was likely true—my original species apparently did not exist in the catalogued records of this world's serpentine spirits. "He seemed excited by it. Said it had potential."
The clerk made notes on a document, her writing quick and efficient. "We'll need to conduct a formal evaluation. Verify your cultivation level, register your spirit type, establish your identity in our records." She looked up. "If everything checks out, you'll be eligible for the imperial stipend. For a Spirit Master of your level—assuming you're genuinely rank eleven as that ring suggests—the monthly payment would be approximately half a gold coin."
Half a gold coin per month. I had observed enough of the city's economy to understand what this meant: modest but sustainable income, sufficient for basic food and lodging, enough to survive while I focused on cultivation and longer-term planning.
"I understand," I said. "I am ready for evaluation."
—————
The formal evaluation took place in the testing room, conducted by an older Spirit Master whose spiritual presence suggested significant cultivation—Spirit King level at minimum, possibly higher. His examination was thorough but not aggressive, the routine assessment of a professional rather than the suspicious interrogation I had feared.
The testing stone confirmed my soul ring at five hundred and four years—yellow grade, appropriate for a first ring. My cultivation level registered at rank eleven, exactly as my internal assessment had indicated. My spirit manifested clearly, the Scaled Serpent coiling above the stone with its distinctive dark coloration and light-drinking scales.
"Unusual spirit," the examiner commented, his tone carrying professional interest rather than suspicion. "I've seen serpent-type spirits before, but nothing quite like this. The coloration is distinctive, and the pattern on the scales suggests potential for darkness-attribute abilities."
"The Spirit Master who helped me said something similar," I replied, maintaining my established narrative. "He mentioned that the spirit might develop unusual capabilities as I cultivated."
"He wasn't wrong. Rare spirits often have unique development paths." The examiner made notes on his evaluation form. "Your cultivation base is solid for your ring level. The soul power flow is efficient, well-established. Whoever helped you with your awakening knew what they were doing."
I accepted the implied compliment with appropriate humility. "He seemed very experienced."
"A shame he didn't stay to mentor you properly. A spirit like this would benefit from specialized guidance." The examiner completed his notes and stamped the document with an official seal. "Very well. Your registration is approved. You are now officially recognized as a Spirit Master of the Heaven Dou Empire, entitled to all associated benefits and responsibilities."
He handed me a small metal token—my identification as a registered cultivator—and a document that would allow me to collect my stipend from any Spirit Master Hall in the Empire.
"The monthly payment will be available starting next month. Present this document at any Hall to receive your funds." He paused, studying me with something approaching genuine interest. "Have you considered academy enrollment? A child your age with your potential would benefit from formal training. The Barak Branch Academy accepts students throughout the year."
"I have considered it," I said. "But I wanted to establish my registration first. To ensure I had stable support before committing to study."
"Practical thinking for one so young." The examiner nodded approvingly. "The Academy offers dormitory housing and meals in addition to training. Something to consider, given your circumstances."
"I will consider it carefully," I promised.
And I would. The academy represented exactly what I needed—shelter, resources, training in Spirit Master techniques, and a legitimate identity in human society. But I wanted to establish my financial independence first, to have options if the academy environment proved unsuitable.
The serpent always kept escape routes available.
—————
The following month was dedicated to establishing my position in Barak City.
The stipend—half a gold coin, collected on the first day of the month—provided sufficient funds for basic survival. I rented a small room in a modest boarding house, paying the minimum required for a space barely large enough to sleep and store my few possessions. The remainder of my funds went to food, clothing appropriate for my supposed status as a young Spirit Master, and the gradual accumulation of resources that might prove useful.
During this period, I continued to develop my understanding of human society and the cultivation world's structure.
The Barak Branch Academy, I learned, was a minor institution in the larger hierarchy of Spirit Master education. It served as a feeder school for the more prestigious Heaven Dou Imperial Academy, accepting students of various backgrounds and preparing them for potential advancement to higher-level training.
The academy's standards were not particularly rigorous. Any child with an awakened spirit could enroll; those with soul rings received preferential treatment and additional resources. The training focused on basic cultivation techniques, spirit control, and the foundational knowledge required for Spirit Master careers.
For my purposes, it was ideal. The academy would provide structured training that I could not easily obtain independently, while its relatively low profile would minimize the attention my unusual spirit might attract.
I also spent time practicing with my Void Embrace, testing its capabilities and limitations in urban environments.
The skill remained weak compared to its original form, but it was gradually strengthening as my soul power reserves recovered. In dark alleys and shadowed corners, I could blur my presence enough to avoid casual notice. In crowded spaces, the effect was less useful—too many eyes, too many angles of observation for the diminished concealment to cover completely.
But it was sufficient for basic purposes. Sufficient to move through the city without attracting unwanted attention. Sufficient to observe without being observed.
The Scaled Serpent spirit responded well to my cultivation efforts. I could feel it growing stronger as my soul power accumulated, its manifestation becoming slightly more defined with each passing day. The connection between spirit and soul ring was stabilizing, the foundation for future development solidifying.
I would need additional rings to reactivate my dormant skills. Each ring would unlock another pathway, restore another capability, bring me closer to the power I had wielded as a soul beast.
But that would require hunting. Killing soul beasts and absorbing their rings, the fundamental practice of Spirit Master cultivation.
I was not yet ready for that. My body was too weak, my single skill too limited, my reserves too shallow to sustain combat against even modest opponents. I needed training, preparation, the systematic development that the academy could provide.
It was time to enroll.
—————
The Academy's enrollment office occupied a building adjacent to the main training grounds. The administrative staff processed my application with the efficiency I had come to expect from institutions that handled large numbers of students.
"Name?" The enrollment clerk was young, probably a junior Spirit Master assigned to administrative duties as part of his training.
"Lin Xiao," I said. The name I had chosen during my month of preparation—common enough to avoid standing out, generic enough that false claims of heritage could not be easily verified.
"Age?"
"Six years."
The clerk's eyebrows rose slightly. "Young for enrollment. Most students are eight to ten when they begin training." He made a note on his documentation. "Spirit awakening confirmed?"
"Registered with the Spirit Master Hall three weeks ago." I presented my identification token and stipend document. "Cultivation level eleven, one soul ring."
The clerk examined the documents with visible surprise. A six-year-old with an existing soul ring was unusual enough to warrant attention. His attitude shifted from routine processing to genuine interest.
"This is legitimate," he said, almost to himself. "How did you obtain a ring at your age?"
I repeated my established story—the traveling Spirit Master, the assisted hunt, the village destruction. The clerk listened with the same mixture of skepticism and acceptance I had encountered at the Hall.
"Unusual circumstances," he said when I finished. "But your documentation is in order, and your registration is genuine. The Academy will accept your enrollment." He stamped my application with the institutional seal. "As a student with an existing soul ring, you'll be placed in the intermediate training group rather than the beginner class. You'll also receive enhanced resources—private cultivation space, priority access to training facilities, and additional instruction from senior students."
"Thank you," I said, and meant it only in the sense that the arrangement served my purposes.
"Dormitory assignment will be provided. Classes begin tomorrow morning." The clerk handed me a bundle of documents—schedules, maps, rules of conduct. "Welcome to the Barak Branch Academy, Lin Xiao. Work hard, cultivate diligently, and you may find yourself at the Imperial Academy within a few years."
I accepted the documents with an appropriately grateful expression.
Inside, the cold serpent of my true nature coiled with satisfaction.
Phase one of my integration into human society was complete. The academy would provide shelter, resources, and training. The registration with the Spirit Master Hall ensured financial stability and official recognition. The cover story of the orphaned child with unusual circumstances would explain any gaps in my background.
And while they trained me in the techniques of Spirit Masters, I would continue my own cultivation. More soul rings to condense from my accumulated power. More skills to reactivate. More strength to accumulate.
The serpent endures, I reminded myself. Even in human form. Even among humans.
Especially among humans.
The path forward was clear. Master the basics of Spirit Master cultivation through academy training. Strengthen my body and develop my Void Embrace to functional levels. When I was ready, hunt for my second ring—a hunt that would reactivate another of my dormant skills.
Then the third ring. The fourth. Each one bringing me closer to the power I had once wielded, each one adding another layer of capability to my human existence.
I would be patient. I had always been patient. The transformation had changed my form but not my nature.
And one day, when I had accumulated enough power to face any threat this world could produce, I would decide what to do with that power.
But that day was still distant. For now, there was training to undergo, cultivation to pursue, and a role to play.
The human mask was in place. The serpent beneath it watched and waited.
All according to plan.