Song Miaozhu sounded calm in her reply, but inside, she was anything but. This wasn't information posted on The SEIU's public app. It must be something only internal members knew. Honestly, she should have figured it out earlier.
Before she activated her spiritual platform, she had already noticed that spiritual energy had a strengthening effect on the body. But once she opened the spiritual platform and started cultivating her own spiritual power, she stopped paying attention to that kind of thing.
Physical changes were usually easy to detect, but since she hadn't noticed anything obvious at the time, it had slowly slipped from her mind. Now that she thought about it, spiritual power probably enhanced physical strength and agility the most. She had definitely noticed her hands getting faster when crafting paper dolls. Could that be related?
Oh, and her jumping ability too.
Looking at Zhao Huoyan's message, Song Miaozhu did a quick squat and jump.
"Ow!" she cried out, holding her head.
She looked up in disbelief. There was only one thing above her— the ceiling.
Which meant… she had jumped and hit her head on the ceiling?
No way! Even though it was a basement and the ceiling was lower than average, it was still two and a half meters high.
She jumped from flat ground and hit the ceiling?
She immediately wanted to test this somewhere more open. She thought about calling a little paper servant to clean up the bowl of rooster blood and her needle, but then remembered most of her little paper servants and all of her paper soldiers had been destroyed.
So she pulled out her spiritual paper and carefully recut and restored them all, filling them with spiritual energy. By the time she finished, it was already late at night. Before leaving for her ghost instructor's class in the underworld, she headed out to the yard. She picked a spot with nothing overhead and gave it her all.
Her view suddenly soared.
She saw the canopy of the old pagoda tree, the roof of the main house, and even the streetlights of the ancient town below the mountain.
Wide-eyed with shock, she gasped, "I jumped as high as the old tree!"
That had to be at least twenty meters. Back in high school, she had barely scraped by the long jump requirement. Now she could leap twenty meters into the air? What even was that?
Beneath the moonlight, beside the old tree, her silhouette kept leaping and landing. If she hadn't promised to meet her ghost instructor, she could've jumped all night. After returning from class, while it was still dark, Song Miaozhu went behind the house to the bamboo grove for a light workout.
As soon as she started running, she realized how fast the bamboo was zipping past her. She ran full speed, made a complete lap around the Xiaozhu hill, and returned to the front gate. When she checked the time, only six minutes had passed. The path around the hill had to be at least three to four kilometers long. Which meant she had run nearly as fast as an e-bike.
Halfway through the run, she had started to feel short of breath, but with a slight circulation of spiritual power, she was instantly recovered. By the time she finished, it was like she had just taken a walk— no redness in her face, no shortness of breath. Wasn't this cultivation? Why did it feel like she was turning into a superhero?
Song Miaozhu waited impatiently for sunrise. "Team Leader Zhao should be awake by now, right?"
She couldn't resist and sent Zhao Huoyan a message.
Meanwhile, Zhao Huoyan hadn't even slept that night.
First, he contacted the Yun City SEIU branch and ordered repairs for the torn ghost-fence by the river. Then he reported to the central office that Song Miaozhu had taken action against the river ghosts.
Then, a video came in.
It was footage from the Sky Eye surveillance system, covering the Sanyuan River. Every haunted zone in the country was under constant watch. In the footage, Song Miaozhu emerged from the trees and tossed a small stone into the river. A few moments later, ghosts burst out of the water like stunned fish, screeching as they were burned by the sunlight. But within minutes, the river calmed again, and Song Miaozhu left.
Zhao Huoyan had meant what he said about not prying into her secrets or acting against her. If her work benefited The SEIU, he was even willing to help her keep those secrets. But if she exposed herself, The SEIU couldn't just pretend nothing happened. The central SEIU's research team, along with Zhao Huoyan, had spent all night trying to figure out what she had done that day.
But all they saw was a regular stone tossed into the riverbank. Out of respect for her, they didn't dig deeper. That was the end of it. They did, however, station people to monitor the Sanyuan River around the clock from now on. Just as Zhao Huoyan was preparing to finally get some rest, his phone rang with a special alert.
He had set that tone specifically for Song Miaozhu, who was now considered critical to national safety.
He checked the message.
[Miaow Zhu]: Can I ask… how high can people at The SEIU jump, and how fast can they run, once they've started cultivating spiritual power?
[Zhao Huoyan]:Without formal training, the ones with the most noticeable changes are around the level of elite athletes.
Song Miaozhu immediately looked up world records for jumping and running. The high jump world record was 2.45 meters. The men's 100-meter dash record was 9.58 seconds. She had jumped twenty meters and run three to four kilometers in six minutes— through mountainous terrain, no less.
With just that search, she knew: she definitely couldn't attend any SEIU training.
She would be exposed the moment she set foot in a session. Since physical improvements came from spiritual energy, her current cultivation level had to be at least twenty times higher than average.
And physical stats didn't increase linearly. The stronger you got, the harder it became to keep improving. If The SEIU found out, wouldn't they start questioning how she got so much spiritual energy?
She stayed on Xiaozhu Mountain all day. How much spiritual energy could a single mountain possibly hold?
Even if she had absorbed all of it herself, the difference shouldn't be this dramatic. But if spiritual energy really enhanced the body this much, it would be a waste not to train. She couldn't join SEIU training without revealing too much. But she also couldn't leave her abilities untrained.
So, Song Miaozhu turned her thoughts to the underworld. That night, another recruitment notice was posted on the door of the Anshou Hall Ghost Shop.
This time, she was hiring martial instructors.
She found a battle-hardened general, a champion fighter, a gold-medal coach— all ghost instructors, carefully selected to be both thorough and professional. The only problem was that she could only visit them in ghost form. And since the instructors were ghosts too, all they could do was demonstrate some exercises and write out training plans. It was only slightly better than learning from a textbook.
She had to wait until she returned to the mortal realm to actually follow through with the training. It still wasn't as good as being taught in person by professional SEIU coaches who could correct her form on the spot. But it was better than doing nothing. And certainly better than going to SEIU and having her cultivation exposed.
From then on, she added a new task to her daily routine: physical training.
As for Zhao Huoyan, she never mentioned training again. But from that day forward, before dawn each morning, a solitary figure could be seen running and practicing martial arts in the bamboo forest of Xiaozhu Mountain.