Ch.14: Little Time Skip
It had been more than a week since Lu Sheng awakened his martial spirits, and his days had completely changed.
Before, he often slipped into the libraries at night, quietly wandering between shelves until dawn, memorizing and analyzing whatever caught his interest.
Now, almost every hour of daylight was consumed by training.
His mornings began before sunrise with physical exercises that pushed his body to its limit.
After that came a nutritious breakfast of herbal medicines and spirit beast meat, a meal meant not just to fill his stomach but to nourish his body for cultivation.
The moment he finished eating, he entered the next stage of training: exercising under martial spirit possession.
To increased coordination and get a feel of martial spirit synchronization.
To test his real limits.
By the end of those sessions, his body trembled from exhaustion, but the routine was far from over.
A medicinal bath followed, steaming with the aroma of rare herbs, washing away the fatigue and forcing the impurities out of his muscles.
He had originally imagined Zhou Yueling would personally beat him senseless every day until he improved, her personality made it easy to believe.
But she only sparred with him for ten minutes near the end of each morning session.
"Ten minutes of focused pain is better than an hour of flailing," she had said once, adjusting her gloves before walking away to handle city affairs.
For Lu Sheng, it was an unexpected mercy.
Zhou Yueling was not only his teacher but also the future city lord, with her own management duties and cultivation to maintain.
If she had decided to "supervise" him all morning, he would likely have been half-dead by now.
Still, she occasionally took time to guide him personally, and each time she did, her sharp corrections left an impression far deeper than any bruise.
The training ended around nine-thirty.
From then until noon, Lu Sheng alternated between studying with Grandpa Zhou and Grandma Li.
The two old monsters, geniuses who had advanced the continent's knowledge by centuries, taught him in turns.
One day it would be martial soul theories, spirit beast ecology, and soul guidance technology.
The next day, alchemy, herbalism, and the knowledge of human body and its mysteries.
Much of it was practical, forcing him to experiment and observe, not just memorize.
At 1:30, the entire household gathered for lunch.
The old couple always asked about his progress, and Zhou Yueling listened in quiet approval, though her sharp eyes made it clear she noticed every small flaw he mentioned.
The afternoon was his free time.
Most of it he spent back in the libraries or on assigned research, spirit medicine or soul guide blueprints.
In truth, he enjoyed this part the most.
Books didn't judge him.
They didn't expect him to live up to the name of the city lord's family; they simply revealed their secrets if he was patient enough.
When evening came, his focus shifted again.
The hours between five and eight were devoted to cultivating soul power.
Thanks to his unusually high innate spiritual power, Zhou Ming and Li Xueya also began teaching him the basics of spiritual power cultivation.
He hadn't expected to find meditation techniques this early, certainly not in what he thought of as a "beginner village."
Though they were nowhere near the level of the protagonist's Mysterious Heaven Skill or the Purple Demon Eye, but for this world, they were surprisingly refined.
The soul power cultivation method alone was nearly ten times more efficient than the crude "move your soul power along your body" approach most soul masters used.
Not to mention, the number of meridians they used, the knowledge alone will take weeks if not months if someone where to learn without any guidance, and even then the change of injury will be much greater than normal.
And that made sense.
The old couple were monsters of talent themselves, their achievements had pushed civilization forward by multiple centuries in just fifty years.
Creating advanced cultivation techniques was merely one more proof of their brilliance.
After his evening cultivation came dinner, and after dinner, another quiet period dedicated solely to nurturing his spiritual power.
It was during these sessions that Lu Sheng made an interesting discovery: his talent seemed to preserve the best effects of repetition.
Every activity performed once kept the same effect for the next attempt.
As if once you have done something the the maximum, you just need to do the bare minimum the next time but you will have the same level of progress.
Even more astonishing is that the progress is counted in experience percentage not experience points.
Meaning if he made great progress of leveling up a skill at level 1 to 50% it will carry the same effect even if he did the bare minimum for the next time till he upgraded the skill to the max and even beyond.
He quickly realized how absurdly powerful that was.
So he began alternating between short bursts of soul power and spiritual power cultivation in the starting few days, even going as far as pulling out an all-nighter, maximizing the effect.
Then only doing the bare minimum to cultivate, just practicing for 5 minutes the days after.
Though the people observing his strange behavior found it odd even wanting to point it out.
But the old couple and his esteemed master never got the chance to ask.
Afterall, even if the efforts were not there the effect was real, they didn't have anything to criticize of him.
Realizing his lazing around has started to gather attention, Lu Sheng took another project to work on.
He started studying something new, a reward from one of his daily sign-in's, namely 'Sir Aaron's Guide for Mastering Aura.'
Though he had no teacher, no reference, and not even a visual example of aura, but he was certain his unique talent could lead him to the truth of it.
For now, he was content with this rhythm.
It was easy, leisure, somewhat hard earned, but it was progress, the kind that felt real, earned through sweat and quiet determination.
Yet even after all this, one thing remained unchanged: more than a week had passed, and Lu Sheng had yet to obtain his first spirit beast ring.
...
Though more than a week had passed, Lu Sheng had yet to obtain his first spirit ring.\
It wasn't due to negligence or hesitation, but because the people guiding him were cautious — painfully cautious.
There were two reasons behind the delay.
The first was simple.
He needed to strengthen his foundation and adapt to the rhythm of cultivation.
Those born with innate full soul power often lacked the sense of gradual advancement, the experience of breaking through each bottleneck by effort, not by gift.
With that they in turn lacked the control and feel of utilizing soul power.
Without that foundation, absorbing a near-limit spirit ring could easily lead to rejection, or worse, self-destruction.
And no one in Qinglong City wanted to see that happen to him.
The second reason was far more complicated, finding a spirit beast compatible with his martial spirit.
Deoxys was… abnormal.
A martial spirit that didn't fit the world's rules.
The Skill Appraisal had labeled it as a "hybrid," half beast, half tool, something Lu Sheng found strange, it is a living being so it soul be a beast type.
But the game system still categorized it that way.
Its aura pulsed like a living organism, but its structure was orderly and artificial, as if shaped by conscious design.
When finding for suitable spirit beast to hunt for rings.
Even Grandpa Zhou, who had studied hundreds of spirit classifications, couldn't make sense of it.
In the end, he advised choosing something with similar elemental traits, perhaps a spiritual-type, argumentation-type, or space-type beast.
His reasoning odd, even contradicting his own published theory, to choose spirit beasts based on the spirit skill which could be obtained rather than origin of the spirit beast.
His reason being, divine-grade martial spirits didn't evolve through external rings; their strengthening was internal, derived from unearthing their own abilities.
The spirit rings, he said, were only there to draw out potential that already existed.
And that much was true.
Divine martial spirits were pure, complete forms of existence.
Even if all nine rings came from a single perfect lineage, they would merely refine, not transform.
Their evolution followed their own nature, not the nourishment of weaker beings.
But Lu Sheng disagreed.
He didn't refute Grandpa Zhou's logic.
He simply believed in a possibility beyond it.
When asked for his reasoning, he only said, "I want to test my theory."
The old couple had exchanged looks, one of mild amusement, the other of faint sympathy.
Idealistic youth, they thought.
Everyone wanted to dream when they were young, and dreams were harmless as long as they didn't cross into arrogance.
So they let him decide.
If the chosen beast proved incompatible, they could always intervene with something safer, something "more appropriate."
What they didn't know was that Lu Sheng was fully aware divine martial spirits rarely evolved.
He wasn't naive enough to believe otherwise. But his confidence came from somewhere they couldn't imagine.
During his awakening, he had burned through almost all the mutation coupons the system had granted him, items capable of rewriting the very nature of a martial spirit.
Two Growth Potential Extension Gene would have been enough to secure the Max growth potential.
But Lu Sheng used five.
Each one twisted and refined Deoxys's essence, expanding its adaptability, rewriting its core as something infinitely adjustable.
On top of that, he had applied a "mystery gene," said to synchronize and adapt to various form of energy, affinities and origins.
By any standard, both Deoxys and Rayquaza should not have existed in this world.
And yet, here it was, alive, resonating within him with silent power.
With that kind of foundation, Lu Sheng didn't just hope for evolution — he expected it.
So when others saw recklessness in his insistence, what he saw was necessity.
To test the unknown, to walk a path beyond common logic, that was how true power was born.
Now, all that was left was finding the right spirit beast.
For days, the city lord's guard division had been mobilized, searching through nearby forests and mountainous regions.
Their goal was not the strongest beast, but the one most compatible, the one whose essence might spark something inside Deoxys.
Finally, they had found a lead.
At dawn, the message arrived: a suitable target had been confirmed in the Star Dou Great Forest, roughly one hundred eighty kilometers from Qinglong City.
This time, it wouldn't be just a hunt.
It was his first step toward claiming his spirit ring.