A Martial Soul was a blessing bestowed upon humanity by the plane.
Soul Rings, meanwhile, were the products of the plane's laws taking form.
If the plane were compared to a sect,
ordinary people were the countless masses governed by the sect.
Soul Scholars were servants, while Soul Masters were outer sect disciples, with a place on the roster.
Only after absorbing their first Soul Ring and becoming a Soul Master could they gain further recognition from the plane.
After becoming a One-Ring Soul Master, Mu Han continued forging.
He had already completed his first Thousand Refinement when he was a Level 10 Soul Scholar.
Now, refining each piece of metal through Thousand Refinement came especially easily to him, and he was much faster than before.
His efficiency was higher, and the effort it took was lower.
However, the quality of his Thousand Refinement hadn't improved.
Hundred Refinement and Thousand Refinement both came in different grades.
Generally speaking, Hundred Refinement was divided into three grades: upper, middle, and lower.
The lower grade was the level of a Level 1 Blacksmith.
The middle grade was the standard for a Level 2 Blacksmith, though Level 2 certification also tested component processing.
Reaching the upper grade in Hundred Refinement meant one had the foundation to attempt Thousand Refinement.
Thousand Refinement, in turn, was divided into five grades, with Grade 1 the highest and Grade 5 the lowest.
Grade 5 was enough to count as completing the task,
while Grade 3 and above earned additional rewards.
By the unspoken rules of the blacksmithing world, a success rate of over twenty percent for Grade 2 Thousand Refinement made one a Level 4 Blacksmith.
Grade 1 Thousand Refinement was also called half-Spirit Forging, because it possessed some of the characteristics of Spirit-Forged Metal.
The blacksmithing world had always believed that anyone capable of Grade 1 Thousand Refinement could certainly Spirit Forge once their cultivation was high enough.
But Mu Han's Thousand Refinement was even better than that.
Every forging method in the blacksmithing world involved directly removing impurities and refining the metal.
But in truth, when impurities were being refined, heavy hammer blows inevitably damaged the metal's internal structure.
To forge rare metals well, one had to work with exquisite care from the very beginning.
For an ordinary Thousand Refinement, raising the spirit five feet was already impressive,
but when Mu Han had Thousand Refined Sinking Silver before, its silver light had risen a full ten feet or more.
That meant he had brought the Thousand Refinement of Sinking Silver to its utmost limit,
pushing everything that could be done to a piece of metal through Thousand Refinement to its peak.
In the original story, the protagonist, Tang Wulin, wouldn't achieve that until much later, when he attempted to become a Saint Craftsman.
And the original story had explicitly stated that even Mu Chen, a Level 8 Saint Craftsman, wasn't confident he could do it.
Perhaps only Divine Craftsman Zhen Hua could.
But now Mu Han had easily managed it, thanks to his Martial Soul, Gold-Water Mutual Containment.
Every piece he Thousand Refined was of the utmost quality, far surpassing an ordinary Grade 1 Thousand Refinement.
Mu Chen had even judged its quality to be comparable to ordinary Spirit-Forged Metal.
One had to know that Thousand Refined Metal cost ten times less than Spirit-Forged Metal!
Yet Mu Han had been able to achieve this even as a Level 10 Soul Scholar.
Now he was a One-Ring Soul Master, and he could still only manage this much.
The bottleneck to Spirit Forging wasn't so easy to break through.
Still, it was already more than enough.
He was only eight and a half years old, after all.
Before Mu Han, the youngest person in the history of the Blacksmith Association to take an assessment had been eight years and six months old.
And that person had only been taking the Level 1 Blacksmith exam.
Mu Han, on the other hand, was firmly at the peak of Level 4.
His greatest obstacle now wasn't his forging skill, but his Soul Power Level.
After all, Mu Han had possessed Innate Full Soul Power.
He had suppressed his cultivation for so long in order to challenge Thousand Refinement as a Level 10 Soul Scholar.
After absorbing a Soul Ring and breaking through his bottleneck, his cultivation had begun to advance by leaps and bounds.
More accurately, the progress he'd accumulated had finally burst forth.
It was just that his Soul Skill wasn't quite what he'd hoped for.
His first Soul Skill was Wind Eye.
In the understanding of Soul Masters on Douluo Continent, everything in this world was made up of elements.
Water, fire, earth, and wind were the most basic of them, the fundamental elements that formed the world.
Mu Han had mastered the elements of water, fire, and earth, and had even made them form a balance within his body, circulating in a cycle.
This made the wind element somewhat resistant to him.
His first Soul Skill, Wind Eye, created a vortex that could suck in a thousand-jin boulder or even forcibly tear the blood from someone's body!
It sounded powerful. If someone's blood left their body, how could they possibly survive?
But this could only bully the weak. If he faced someone stronger than himself, they might even use the pull to close in on him.
Unless he could get a Soul Skill that countered Wind Eye by generating repulsive force to wield suction,
the two skills would work together, and the effect would surely be ferocious!
Unfortunately, he only had one Soul Skill for now.
So, when all was said and done, Wind Eye was merely a control-type Soul Skill.
You could call it a Soul Skill version of Controlling Crane Capturing Dragon.
Although Mu Chen, as a Level 8 Saint Craftsman, could certainly find a way to obtain a Soul Bone,
his own daughter didn't even have one. How could his mere adopted son bring himself to ask?
But when Na'er left, just as she had in the original story, Mu Chen sent him a Soul Bone to comfort him.
That moved Mu Han deeply.
He had known Na'er would leave, so he hadn't been angry or sad.
But he hadn't expected Mu Chen to send him a Soul Bone to comfort him.
He had gone to great lengths to become Mu Chen's adopted son, and there had been calculation behind it.
But Mu Chen's feelings for him over the years had been genuine.
His adopted sister, Mu Xi, truly cared about him as well.
Thinking of this, Mu Han didn't absorb the Soul Bone. Instead, he gave it to Mu Xi.
As someone who had transmigrated into a book, Mu Han had always believed he could treat the people in this world like paper figures.
Like the playmates he'd had in the orphanage.
After their Martial Soul Awakening, he'd never contacted them again.
To him, those childhood playmates had been like NPCs in a game.
He'd believed he would never be bound by false feelings like the Silver Dragon King in the original story.
Not for his adoptive father, Mu Chen, or his adopted sister, Mu Xi, or even the Silver Dragon King Gu Yuena.
But it turned out he'd been wrong.
Feelings didn't care what dimension you came from.
He had forgotten the people from the orphanage because they hadn't been close to him in the first place.
Mu Chen and Mu Xi's affection for him was genuine.
What's more, he had truly become a person of Douluo Continent.
So now he truly understood the Silver Dragon King.
Doubt, understanding, becoming, surpassing...
The only thing he could be grateful for was that Mu Han didn't bear any deep blood feud.
People said Ah Yin and Xiaowu were disgraces to Soul Beasts.
But now, it seemed that at most, they were "disgraces to Blue Silver Grass" and "disgraces to Soft Bone Rabbits."
Besides, they had chosen to become human because, with their weak bloodlines, they had no chance of surviving the tribulation.
What's more, at the very least, they'd come out ahead.
With the bloodlines of Blue Silver Grass and Soft Bone Rabbits, they could never have become gods, whether by cultivating normally or by becoming human.
Yet they had become gods.
Even if they'd only done so as accessories, they'd still succeeded in becoming gods.
The Three-Eyed Golden Lion was also a "disgrace to Soul Beasts," but that was mostly because God King Tang had plotted against her.
It was simply a difference in dimensions; nothing could be done about it.
But Gu Yuena was a "disgrace to Soul Beasts" in the truest sense.
The Master of Soul Beasts, who bore the deep blood feud of the Soul Beast race, had ultimately chosen to commit suicide in exchange for peace?
If she'd taken her own life after losing the war, that would've been one thing.
But they'd clearly had "the advantage on our side," and she'd still gone and killed herself?
Wasn't that the very definition of a "disgrace to Soul Beasts"?
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