That night, Lin Feng sat alone in his room.
The room was small, with bare walls and a narrow sleeping mat on the floor. A single oil lamp burned on the windowsill, throwing a weak orange light across the wooden boards.
Outside, the sound of the wind moved through the pine trees surrounding the clan compound. Somewhere across the courtyard, a dog barked for a while and then went quiet.
Lin Feng sat cross-legged in the center of the room, hands resting on his knees, eyes half-closed.
He was not thinking about the ceremony, nor was he dwelling on the pitying looks or Elder Mao's flat announcement. In his past life, he had faced failure and dismissal enough times to understand that neither one was permanent. What mattered was what came after.
So he breathed, long and slow. Drawing Qi through his meridians the way he had taught himself to do over the past several years, feeling it gather in his lower dantian like warm water pooling in a bowl.
Then he reached for the martial soul. It was still there. Still looking grey and unclear. But he could feel it more now, the way he had never quite been able to before the ceremony.
The awakening had done something to it, even if not what was expected. Like opening a sealed jar slightly, just enough for the smell to escape.
He focused, breathed, and reached. Something changed.
It was not dramatic in any way. There was no explosion of light, no surge of power that shook the room. It was quieter than that. Like a flower opening in slow motion, each petal unfolding at its own pace, unhurried and deliberate.
The grey fog inside his dantian began to part.
Lin Feng kept his eyes half-closed, watching through his internal sight as the murky cloud peeled back like morning mist burning off under sunlight. Beneath it, the real shape of his martial soul began to emerge.
It was a lotus.
But not the formless smear that had appeared during the ceremony. This was clear and precise, its petals sharp and distinct against the darkness of his inner world.
Half of them were black. Deep, absolute black, the kind that seemed to drink in the light around it rather than reflect any of it back. The black petals moved slowly, rotating with a weight and gravity that made the air around them feel heavier.
The other half were white. Pure, almost painful white, the kind that burned against the darkness. The white petals rotated in the opposite direction from the black ones, creating a slow, spiraling motion between the two halves.
And between them, at the exact point where black and white met, something pulsed. A heartbeat, slow and steady and ancient. As if the lotus itself was alive and had been waiting to awaken for a very long time.
Lin Feng held still and watched.
He did not know how long he sat there. Time felt different during deep meditation.
Eventually, the pulsing of the lotus slowed, and a feeling settled over him. He couldn't describe it in words. But it was more like a knowing, the way you understand something in a dream without anyone explaining it.
The lotus could feed.
When he killed, it would take in the Qi and life force of the fallen and carry it back into his dantian. That energy would be absorbed, refined, and converted directly into cultivation power. Not in a slow way, like the normal process of meditation and Qi gathering. But in a quick and efficient way. Like the way a fire devours wood.
Lin Feng turned this over in his mind for a long time.
In his past life, he had been a careful man, patient and methodical. He did not celebrate early. He did not make assumptions from incomplete information. So he made a list in his head.
First: this ability was extraordinary. If it worked the way he sensed it would, it would make him significantly stronger than other cultivators at the same stage, because while they relied on slow Qi gathering through meditation, he could supplement that with combat.
Second: this ability was dangerous to reveal. In any world where power created hierarchies and hierarchies created enemies, a cultivator with a devouring bloodline would attract both greed and fear. People would want to study it, control it, or destroy it. He needed to keep the true nature of his martial soul hidden for as long as possible.
Third: he needed to test it before he completely trusted it.
Understanding was not the same as evidence. He had felt the lotus's nature through meditation. That was a start. But he needed to see it work in practice.
He would go into the mountains tomorrow and hunt. So he could see how it worked.
---
The next morning, Lin Feng rose before the sun and left the clan compound through a gap in the eastern wall that he had discovered two years earlier.
It was a loose section of stones near a drainage ditch, wide enough for a lean twelve-year-old to slip through without touching either side. He moved into the hills before the first light of day touched the mountain peaks.
The forest outside the compound was thick with old trees and undergrowth, the kind of dense natural terrain where small beasts nested in fallen logs and hunted each other through the shadows. The air smelled of damp earth and pine resin.
Lin Feng moved quietly using careful footfalls, weight centered and low the way his past life's training had taught him. Breathe slowly and controlled. He was not a cultivator yet in any formal sense, but his body moved with the smooth efficiency of someone who had spent years learning how not to be seen.
He found a Savage Beast within the first half hour.
A Stone-Back Boar, the common name for a low-level beast with thick grey skin and stumpy tusks, roughly the size of a large dog. It was rooting through a patch of undergrowth near a narrow stream, completely unaware of Lin Feng's presence fifteen meters upwind.
Stone-Back Boars were considered weak even among Savage Beasts. Most cultivators at the first level of the Body Tempering stage could handle one without serious difficulty.
Lin Feng crouched behind a boulder and studied the animal for a moment.
He had no weapon or formal techniques. What he had was a body he had conditioned for years and the muscle memory of a past life's combat training.
He attacked.