White Tiger, a Martial Soul with Its Own Cultivation Method

"As for you..." Xiang Yang considered Dai Mubai's earlier attitude. It had barely been satisfactory, though still much better than the way Xiang Yang remembered him, so he stopped keeping him in suspense.

"I do have some ideas about your Martial Soul, but first we need to settle one thing: what path do you want to take?"

"What do you mean?"

"Let me put it this way. Take your Soul Ring combination, for example. What you told me before was already quite good, and it suits the White Tiger Martial Soul very well.

"You could say it's the kind of foundation a Soul Master family with a long legacy ought to have. But if you make changes, never mind what it might become, the original Martial Soul Fusion Skill is bound to be affected, even if both of you change your Soul Ring Configurations together. Do you understand?"

"I see. No wonder you wanted her to come too." Dai Mubai looked thoughtful, though his expression was conflicted. He had always been proud of his family's Soul Ring combination, but after seeing the three of them use their Soul Skills, he no longer felt much about it.

But he truly didn't want to lose the Martial Soul Fusion Skill. Its power was one reason, but the main reason was that his "fate" with Zhu Zhuqing stemmed from it. Dai Mubai didn't know what she would think when she found out. What if...

Tang San reassured him, "Mubai, if all you want is to become stronger, your original path is already very good. There's no need to take an unknown one. Your situation is different from Hongjun's."

"No, Little San, my situation actually... I only told Little Yang and the teacher before, so you don't really know my family's rules." Dai Mubai gave a wry smile. "You might even think I'm just a young master out having fun and looking for thrills."

He paused for a moment. "I'm actually from the Star Luo Imperial Family—the White Tiger Dai Family. The imperial family has an extremely cruel system for succession to the throne. In every generation, several of the most gifted descendants are chosen to compete. The winner becomes king, while the losers either die or have their cultivation crippled and are locked away."

"And because of the Martial Soul Fusion Skill passed down through the generations, Hell White Tiger, the Hell Spirit Cat Zhu Family sends one woman to form a pair with each heir. In other words, if one pair wins, the woman from the Zhu Family becomes empress, but if they lose, her fate is the same as the heir's," Xiang Yang added.

"That's right. If I fail..." Dai Mubai trailed off. "Is there a reason for that? Otherwise, Boss Dai, with your talent and strength, I don't think you'd be certain to lose, would you?" Seeing that he kept talking about the consequences of failure, Oscar couldn't help making a guess.

"Yeah. That's because there are only two people competing for the throne in this generation: my elder brother Dai Weisi and me. There's little difference between our talents, but he's a full six years older than me."

Ma Hongjun was dumbfounded. "Seriously? You'd only just been born when he started cultivating? How are you supposed to compete with that?"

Dai Mubai nodded bitterly. "That's right. So in most people's eyes, I'm just there to spur him on, to remind him that others are eyeing that position and that it doesn't belong to him yet. But I..."

"But you never wanted to fight him for it, did you?" Xiang Yang picked up where he left off.

"Yeah. I have no desire for that position. Before I awakened my Martial Soul, you could already say it belonged to my elder brother. It only became like this because I had innate level nine Soul Power. I suppose those people thought I could put some pressure on him."

After saying what he had buried in his heart for years, he seemed to feel much more at ease all at once.

Tang San was puzzled. "But knowing full well that you'd have a hard time competing with your elder brother, what's the point of arranging things this way? With your talent, wouldn't it only be a matter of time before you became a Titled Douluo? Why can't they just..."

"Little San, this is where the Star Luo Empire differs from Heaven Dou, and it's also the main reason they've been able to carry on their legacy all this time. After all, one mountain cannot shelter two tigers." Unless one is male and the other female. Ahem. "Many of the imperial family's cruel rules exist to ensure stable, continuous rule, no matter how great the sacrifice."

The others saw Dai Mubai acknowledge Xiang Yang's words with a wry smile. Their reactions differed, but they all felt that such a thing was utterly inhumane.

Xiao Wu simply couldn't imagine humans setting such ruthless rules for their own families. Even among Soul Beasts, it was just the normal survival of the fittest, all for the sake of staying alive. Besides, it basically never happened among members of the same species, much less within one beast family. She only imagined it happening to her for a moment before a faint chill ran through her.

After that day, everyone grew noticeably closer, and the training equipment they had ordered began arriving at the academy one batch after another.

"These are all weighted attachments. We're Soul Masters, so normal training intensity isn't much use. We have to increase the difficulty ourselves. This is an iron post, used for..."

Tang San led everyone through trying each piece of equipment. Some had been inspired by Xiang Yang's memories of his previous life, with Tang San drawing up the plans, while others were tools used for martial training in the Tang Sect, so he also knew how the equipment worked and how to use it.

"Ah, I can't do it anymore. It's so heavy." Following Tang San's recommendation, Ma Hongjun had tried a device that required him to sit down and pull an iron bar attached to a chain downward. It was fine at first, but after only a few pulls, he was already beginning to struggle.

"That's normal. Only when you feel the difficulty can you make progress," Dai Mubai agreed. Since that day, he still hadn't decided which path to choose. Fortunately, he still had some time before reaching level thirty, so he could only demand more and more of himself.

"Hmph! Fatty, you're pathetic." Xiao Wu was on an identical device beside him. She had already pulled it dozens of times, and she mocked him without even getting out of breath.

"Some of these train your arms and upper-body muscles, while others focus on your waist or leg strength. Later, I'll make a chart based on your Martial Souls and fighting styles. After that, you only need to arrange your training plans according to the chart. You can use the rest of your time however you like." Tang San felt somewhat moved. If not for Xiang Yang, he would never have thought to turn materials used for making Hidden Weapons into training equipment to help Soul Masters cultivate.

Looking at the plans Tang San had arranged for them, Oscar felt fortunate that he was a support Soul Master, with fewer demands on his physique. Endurance was the only mandatory part. "By the way, where's Xiang Yang? Why isn't he here?" Looking at the equipment, he suddenly thought of someone closely tied to it.

"Oh, him? He said yesterday that he seemed to have gained some insight and needed to think it through. He didn't even eat breakfast." At that, Tang San was rather looking forward to seeing what new and unusual thing Xiang Yang would come up with this time.

"Sure enough, my idea was right. The so-called Basic Meditation Method is just a set of common routes. Since Martial Souls are different, how could their meditation methods possibly be exactly the same?

"According to awakening theory, Martial Souls themselves have an instinct to absorb energy. That means they must contain cultivation routes similar to a meditation method or cultivation technique. It's just that most are incomplete, difficult to circulate directly, inefficient, and prone to errors."

Xiang Yang had spent more than a month learning the basics of the Mysterious Heaven Skill. Yesterday, he had begun testing an idea he had in mind. As for the result, it was unexpected, yet made sense in hindsight.

The Mysterious Heaven Skill's circulation routes encompassed almost all of his own meditation method, which looked extremely crude by comparison. But beyond that, there were actually several routes outside the scope of the Mysterious Heaven Skill.

After a careful comparison, those routes indeed turned out to have little to do with the Basic Meditation Method (advanced version) he had learned from Grandmaster. Instead, they had appeared naturally after Xiang Yang absorbed his First Soul Ring.

It wasn't just Soul Rings; increases in Soul Power worked the same way. But unless someone compared it with the Basic Meditation Method as he had, they would never discover that every increase of one Soul Power Level automatically extended their cultivation route through a small section of meridian.

The changes were tiny each time, and cultivation was a long, steady process, so it was hard for anyone to notice them. Even if they did, it wouldn't actually be very useful. The differences between Martial Souls were already great enough, to say nothing of differences in quality, so what they found could mostly only be used by themselves.

As it happened, this also explained why differences in quality affected cultivation speed even among identical Martial Souls. The difference in the speed at which they absorbed outside energy and converted it into Soul Power came from these built-in "innate meditation methods." The more talented had more routes, and the less talented had fewer, though there were differences even among those of the same quality.

For example, divide everything into four regions, a, b, c, and d. Yours might be a3 and c5, while someone else's were a1 and a2. Both had two routes, but routes with earlier numbers, or routes that could connect to one another, were noticeably more effective.

The Mysterious Heaven Skill was the same. After each breakthrough to a new realm, its circulation routes would increase compared to the previous realm. In the later stages, one also had to specifically open the Eight Extraordinary Meridians and so on. Only then could one use the energy in the body more efficiently, and cultivation speed could also increase greatly.

That was why nearly everyone in the Soul Master World cultivated the Basic Meditation Method, yet it had never seen much improvement. The basic method had only a few common routes, and the further people cultivated, the greater the differences between their cultivation routes became.

Only Soul Master families with a long legacy were in a position to explore meditation methods suited to their own Martial Souls.

But according to what he had learned before, absorbing a Soul Ring wouldn't cause changes like Xiang Yang's; at most, it would alter certain tendencies. Yet his was practically like awakening a second time. Combined with the fact that his Martial Soul's effects on his body were also different from the norm, that meant... As expected of me!

Ahem. There was simply too little information to draw any useful conclusions for now. Still, from the looks of it, he could use the Mysterious Heaven Skill as a reference and, based on the theory that Martial Souls evolved by absorbing Soul Rings, create a cultivation method of his own that was no inferior to it.

It wasn't impossible. Without the Mysterious Heaven Skill, normal cultivation required lighting up the body's meridians one by one, and a mistake could light up the wrong spot. But with the Mysterious Heaven Skill, it was like having a full-map hack and a god's-eye view. As long as he proceeded step by step, it wouldn't be hard to work out a cultivation technique exclusively suited to himself. Besides, he had the Mysterious Heaven Skill as a fallback, so even a mistake wouldn't matter.