Two years.
It didn't feel like a long time when I said it out loud. But when I actually tried to trace the shape of everything that had happened inside those two years — everything built, everything changed, everything quietly becoming something it hadn't been before — the word started feeling inadequate. Like trying to describe an ocean by saying it was wet.
Jiang Hao had Xue Di and Bing Di running him through conditions that I could feel secondhand through our shared awareness and occasionally winced at. The Extreme North itself was a training environment in a way that Spirit Hall's controlled corridors and practice halls simply weren't. Cold that pressed against the body constantly. Terrain that offered no comfortable footing. Under observation of 2 Soul Beast, Jiang Hao's body had been developing at a pace I couldn't match from inside Spirit Hall, and for the first few months I had simply accepted the gap as an unavoidable condition of the situation.
Then I stopped accepting it.
Not recklessly — I still thought through everything I did, still approached training with the same systematic care I applied to everything else. But I stopped building easy days into the schedule and started treating the gap as a problem with a solution rather than a fixed reality. I start following Jiang Hao's training steps, starting from sword training to whole cultivation time.
For a year and a half, I spent them.
The gap closed. Not entirely — the Extreme North was still the Extreme North, and Xue Di's methods were still Xue Di's methods — but it closed enough that the comparison no longer embarrassed me. The Yanran-body had developed into something considerably more capable than Spirit Hall's environment had any reason to produce for a child of this age, and I had done it quietly enough that the only people who fully understood what I was working toward were the ones who shared my awareness.
The library had taken progressively less of my time over the past year.
The important theory texts were catalogued and stored in the Void Archive — not just read, but preserved in full, cross-referenced and indexed in ways the physical library had never managed to be. I didn't need the physical books anymore for most purposes. Whatever was in the Pope Hall library that was worth knowing, I had it. The systematic coverage was finished.
I still went back occasionally when a specific question came up — something the Archive's existing contents didn't answer completely, something I wanted to verify against a primary source rather than my own stored copy. But the hours I had previously spent working through stacks of texts had migrated almost entirely into training time, and the change had been worth every dropped session.
The second soul ring had been a different experience from the first.
Bibi Dong had been occupied — genuinely occupied, not finding an excuse — so it was Yue Guan who accompanied me to the hunting zone. He was, as always, an efficient and quiet presence in the field. No unnecessary conversation, no commentary on what I was doing or why, just clean professional work from someone who had been doing this for long enough that most of it had become reflex.
The soul beast I had been targeting was a Hell Devil Raven. Dark attribute, aerial type — a natural fit for the Chimera's composition. By the time we located one, Yue Guan assessed its soul power output at just under seven thousand years. He disabled it with the same precise flower blade technique he had used on the Nether Blaze Lion two years earlier, quiet and economical, and then stepped back.
The kill was cleaner than the first one. Not easier — that particular weight didn't decrease, and I didn't expect it to. But faster, and without the half-second of hesitation that had been there the first time. I had learned the difference between mercy and delay. Doing a necessary thing quickly was the kinder option, and I had stopped needing to remind myself of that.
The absorption took just over ninety minutes.
When it finished, the soul ring did exactly what the first one had done. The Chimera pulled it inward, took it apart at the source, rebuilt it from the inside as part of itself. Another natal ring. A rich, deep purple soul ring rose from martial soul. It was still clear purple because it still haven't approached the peak of 10,000 years.
The soul skill it produced I named it, Hell Feather — an attack skill with two modes: feathers launched at range as projectiles, or feather blade wielded at close distance as blades. Simple in concept, but with the Chimera's dark attribute running through them and the natal ring continuing to grow underneath, the base damage would keep scaling in ways that a fixed ring could never match. The skill would be stronger in a year than it was today, and stronger again the year after that.
But the more significant development from the absorption was the soul bone.
A wing. Specifically, the right wing — an external soul bone, black and deep purple in the inner feathers, sitting along the right side of my back. External soul bones were rare enough that I had only encountered them in one or two reference texts during two years of library work. And it gives me special soul skill called, Shadow Veil, its a defence type soul skill, which spreads my wing to block 2x attack damage, I could produce, and the multiplier will keep increase with age of external soul bone. Unfortunately, it doesn't give any flight capability, but its soul skill is more than enough.
Finding one attached to a soul beast at that age range was not the kind of outcome I could fully attribute to normal probability. The Chimera's devouring properties were doing something to the absorption process that I still didn't have a complete theoretical framework for — pulling results that shouldn't have been this consistent, this clean. I filed it under things to research more carefully when I had better grounding to work with.
Functional, when I chose to deploy it. Black and purple and precise, sitting along the right side of my back.
And the moment I saw it, one thought arrived immediately and didn't leave: Galbrena looks cool with her wing.
One wing. The right side. The left side was empty.
I started thinking almost immediately about what soul beast could give me the other half — a bird type, fire attribute, high enough age to produce something that matched the dark wing already present in weight and quality. Two wings. Matching attributes. The symmetry wasn't just aesthetic, it was functional — fire and dark, two distinct attack attributes, one on each side, both feeding into the Chimera's composite nature. That was a project for considerably later, when my cultivation had the range to absorb something at the necessary age. But it was on the list, and it was going to stay there.
I should address why I could absorb a seven-thousand-year ring as my second ring when Bibi Dong had estimated my range at somewhere between two and three thousand years.
The answer was the Whale Rubber.
Ten-thousand-year Whale Rubber, specifically — a rare medicinal material that rebuilt the body's capacity to withstand soul ring absorption, effectively expanding the ceiling of what the physical frame could survive. Xue Di had sourced it from the Extreme North, and Jiang Hao had forwarded it through the system inventory quietly, without either of us needing to explain the mechanism to anyone on the Spirit Hall side. It had done what it was supposed to do. My body had been prepared for what the seven-thousand-year ring would put it through, and the absorption had been survivable because of that preparation, not in spite of my natural limits.
Without it, Bibi Dong's estimate would have been accurate.
Bibi Dong noticed the result, obviously. She examined my soul rings after the absorption and went quiet in a particular way that meant she was processing something she hadn't predicted.
"Seven thousand years," she said. Not a question.
"Yes, Teacher."
"You're level twenty-four soul power."
"Yes, Teacher."
She looked at the first ring next — the dark Chimera ring that had been sitting at position one since the Nether Blaze Lion two years ago. Her expression shifted slightly. "Your first ring has changed colour."
I nodded.
"Do you know why?"
I considered the question carefully before answering, which I think she noticed. "I have observations," I said. "But I haven't developed them into anything I'm confident enough to present yet. I don't want to put forward half-formed conclusions as research. When I have something worth presenting, I'll present it."
She looked at me for a long moment with the expression she sometimes wore when she was recalibrating something she hadn't expected to need to recalibrate. Then she made a small sound — not quite approval, not quite skepticism, something that lived between the two.
"Fine," she said. "Not before."
"Yes, Teacher."
She didn't ask again. That restraint was its own kind of acknowledgment.
Now, what exactly had been keeping Bibi Dong so occupied that she had missed my second ring acquisition entirely.
The short answer was: Qian Renxue.
It had started with the citation issue — or rather, Sister Xue'er had started it by raising the citation issue directly in recent meeting of Spirit hall's core member, that's what I heard from Sister Xue'er. The authenticity problem with the theory books had apparently been pointed out in considerable detail: no author attribution, no sourcing, research built on research with no chain of credit visible anywhere, which meant there was no way to verify origins, no way to identify errors at the source, and no way to give proper recognition to the people who had actually done the foundational work that later texts were quietly borrowing from.
The result had been significant. Bibi Dong was handed responsibility for implementing a proper citation framework across the Martial Soul Hall's documentation system and producing a unified Soul Master guide that credited its sources accurately and comprehensively. The work had taken months. The unified guide, when it was eventually completed, drew from dozens of different sources and attributed each one properly for the first time in the hall's history.
Bibi Dong had found the whole thing personally irritating in the specific way she found things irritating when she couldn't refuse them without appearing unreasonable. I knew this because I had overheard fragments of monologue through her study door on multiple occasions that I had not been meant to hear. The name Yu Xiaogang came up with a frequency and a particular colour of feeling that suggested she had recently received information about him that she found deeply, personally offensive in a way that went well past professional.
I had been careful not to be caught listening. I had also been very carefully not asking questions.
What I did know was that Qian Renxue had visited Bibi Dong privately at some point — alone, which already communicated something about how she had calculated the conversation — and had said something in that room that I was not going to know the contents of. What I saw afterward was Renxue coming out of the room with a visible cut on her neck, bleeding enough to be noticeable, walking with the particular calm of someone who had prepared for that outcome in advance and was not surprised by it. She caught my eyes across the corridor. I didn't say anything. She didn't say anything. She kept walking.
I didn't worry about it.
I knew canon story. I knew how it ended — the moment in the original timeline where Bibi Dong, faced with the absolute limit of everything, had given her own life to protect Qian Renxue's. A real mother, whatever complicated history exists between them, whatever anger exists in the middle of the relationship, will not cross that final line. The cut would heal. Whatever Renxue had chosen to say in that room had served whatever purpose she had designed it to serve, and she had walked out on her own feet. That was enough for me to stay entirely out of it.
My relationship with Bibi Dong had its own particular texture that had developed slowly over the past two years.
She had started directing toward me something that I could only describe as the portion of herself that had nowhere else to go. Not motherly in any conscious or acknowledged way — I don't think she would have described it as that, and I would never have said so out loud. But a quality of attention that went beyond the normal space of teacher and disciple. She corrected my training with more patience than she showed anyone else. She sometimes appear in my room without any notice, and spends some time treating me like child and leaves after having a proper mental recovery.
She never said anything about any of it. She just did it and left.
Hu Liena had noticed. To her credit, she was not vindictive about it — our dynamic hadn't broken into anything unpleasant, and I didn't intend to let it. She was the first disciple in every way that mattered in raw cultivation terms, and she knew it, and her response to noticing Bibi Dong's attention was to work harder and demonstrate more clearly what she was capable of rather than to treat me as an opponent. I could respect that approach even while I found it slightly exhausting to be on the receiving end of.
I let her have the first-disciple space without contesting it. It cost me nothing. It seemed to matter to her in a way that making it a competition would have been genuinely petty of me.
Besides — she was good company, when she wasn't actively trying to prove something. Which was most of the time, if I was being fair about it.