Imperial Palace

The next day, Li Hanche sat at the edge of the bed and lowered his head to look at his hands.

Over these days, a layer of calluses had already formed across the palms of those hands. They felt rough and hard to the touch, unlike the hands a six-year-old child ought to have.

He clenched his fists, felt that taut, powerful sensation transmitted through them, then loosened them.

He got out of bed and washed up.

In the thin morning mist of Heaven Dou City.

The Heaven Dou Imperial Palace sat at the very center of Heaven Dou City. Its vermilion palace walls towered several zhang high, and every ten paces along the top of the walls stood an imperial guard in armor and bearing weapons, his figure straight as a spear.

The square before the palace gates was paved with smooth white stone slabs. Li Hanche crossed the square and walked up to the palace gate.

The two guards crossed their long halberds at the same time, blocking his path.

The guard on the left lowered his head and glanced at him, his brows knitting slightly. The Heaven Dou Imperial Palace was not a place just anyone could enter; for a child to run here alone, no matter how one looked at it, was rather strange.

"Kid, this is a restricted area of the imperial palace. You can't just barge in."

The guard's tone was not bad, only carrying a businesslike coldness.

Li Hanche raised his head and looked at the guard who was nearly twice his height, then spoke calmly.

"My name is Li Hanche. I seek an audience with His Highness the Crown Prince."

Both guards froze at the same time.

The guard on the left furrowed his brows and was just about to say something when the guard on the right suddenly reached out to stop him.

The guard on the right stared at Li Hanche's face for two breaths, then his expression changed, and he lowered his voice to say a few words to his companion.

"Innate full soul power."

The expression on the left guard's face visibly changed.

The imperial guards of Heaven Dou City were not poorly informed. Some time ago, the Crown Prince had personally arranged for a child from the slums to enter school, bestowed him a residence, and assigned him a maidservant; the matter had long since spread within a certain circle.

That child's name seemed to be Li Hanche. The two exchanged a glance, then withdrew their halberds at the same time.

"His Highness the Crown Prince's bedchamber is on the east side. Follow this main road straight ahead, turn left at the third intersection, and when you see an independent courtyard, that will be it."

The guard's attitude was far more respectful than before, and he even turned slightly sideways to point him in the right direction.

Li Hanche nodded, thanked him, and strode into this cluster of palaces with the greatest authority on the continent.

The interior of the imperial palace was even more spacious than he had imagined.

Neatly trimmed evergreens were planted on both sides of the long palace road, and every so often there was a stone-carved soul beast statue, each with a different form and each lifelike.

Occasionally, palace maids and attendants hurried past. When they saw this unfamiliar face, they would look him over a few extra times, but no one came forward to question him. A child who could walk into the imperial palace alone through the main gate already explained many things in itself.

He followed the route the guard had pointed out and turned left at the third intersection.

An independent palace appeared in his field of view. Two maids stood at the entrance, and when they saw him approaching, one of them came forward to greet him.

"Are you Young Master Li Hanche?"

The maid's voice was gentle; clearly, she had received instructions long ago.

"Yes."

"His Highness is already waiting for you. Please follow me."

The maid turned to lead the way, and Li Hanche followed behind her.

They walked into the main hall of the bedchamber, then passed through a corridor laid with soft carpet. The maid stopped before a carved wooden door, gently pushed it open, and stepped aside.

"Young Master, please enter."

Li Hanche stepped through the doorway.

This was a study that was not particularly large, but it was arranged with exceptional elegance. Several rows of bookshelves stood against the wall, piled full of books and bamboo slips.

Beside the window was a red sandalwood desk. On the desk lay an open book, read halfway through, and beside it was an incense burner from which wisps of faint smoke still curled.

Xue Qinghe was sitting behind the desk.

He wore a moon-white casual long robe, with a plain sash tied around his waist, and his long black hair was loosely bound with a jade hairpin.

Morning light shone in through the window and fell across his handsome, refined side profile, setting off his whole person like an immortal who had walked out of a painting.

The maid withdrew soundlessly and closed the door behind her.

Only two people were left in the study.

Xue Qinghe raised his head, his gaze falling on the child standing properly at the doorway.

The corners of his lips curved slightly, revealing a gentle smile.

"You're here?"

Li Hanche stood at the doorway, somewhat at a loss as to what to do with his hands and feet.

On the way here, he had gone over all the proper matters he needed to say in his mind.

About the plan to obtain a soul ring, about his confidence in breaking through the limit, about the results of his cultivation over these days.

Every single point had been organized with perfect clarity.

But standing here in this study, standing before Xue Qinghe, he suddenly realized he had forgotten something very important.

He did not know what to call him.

"Your Highness the Crown Prince"? Too distant. The other party had let him live in the villa and even assigned maids to him; calling him that would make him seem unable to appreciate kindness.

He hesitated at the doorway for a while, then spoke.

"Uh... Brother Qinghe."

He had said it.

His tone carried that particular shyness and awkwardness of a child unused to being close to adults.

Paired with his slightly lowered head and the reddened tips of his ears, he acted out to perfection the appearance of a child who was not very good at acting spoiled but was trying hard to express closeness.

Xue Qinghe's smile deepened a little.

There was something in that smile that was very hard to detect. It was not the amiability of a crown prince toward his subjects, but more like a hunter, after a long wait, finally seeing his prey step into the trap—that assured, unhurried satisfaction of having everything within his grasp.

But that implication vanished in the blink of an eye.

He closed the scroll in his hand, rose to his feet, walked around the desk to stand before Li Hanche, bent down, and reached out to lightly pat the top of his head.

"What, nervous?"

There was a trace of laughter in his voice.

Li Hanche lifted his eyes and glanced at him, then quickly looked away again, pressing his lips together without speaking.

Xue Qinghe straightened.

"I heard you've been training nonstop these days."

"You haven't even been attending the academy's classes. Lin Ruoxi came to see me twice and said there's a little girl in your class named Su Nianxue who asks every day when you're coming back to the academy."

Li Hanche did not respond. His lips pressed into a straight line, clearly taking the stance of "no matter what you say, I won't take the bait."

Seeing that he said nothing, Xue Qinghe's smile faded a little, taking on that unhurried air of someone who had finished teasing his prey and was ready to discuss proper business.

"Are you confident?"

Li Hanche turned his head and looked straight at Xue Qinghe. The awkwardness and shyness from before had vanished from his eyes, replaced by a firm, unquestionable gaze.

"Mm. A hundred years is too low. I want a thousand-year one."

Xue Qinghe narrowed his eyes.

He rarely made that expression. As the crown prince, his control over his expressions had always been textbook-perfect—gentle, appropriate, making people feel as if bathed in a spring breeze.

But the way he narrowed his eyes now added a hint of sharpness to that face as warm and smooth as jade.

"Do you know what a thousand-year soul ring means?"

Every word carried a pressure that made it impossible to brush him off.

Of course Li Hanche knew.

For him, a rank-ten soul scholar without even his first soul ring, going to hunt a thousand-year soul beast was like an ant proclaiming it would overturn an elephant. And that was not even counting the risks of absorbing the soul ring.

Four hundred and twenty-three years was the publicly acknowledged limit that the human body could endure for a first soul ring. Beyond that age, for every additional year, the mortality rate doubled. Beyond five hundred years, not one in a hundred survived. Beyond eight hundred years, survivors could be counted on one's fingers.

And in the history recorded on the continent, no one had ever used a thousand-year soul beast as their first soul ring.

Never.

Li Hanche looked at Xue Qinghe.

"I know. I did go to school for a few days, after all."

He paused, then continued with a childlike stubbornness.

"If you don't force yourself, you'll never know how outstanding you are."

Xue Qinghe froze for an instant, and then he laughed.

The kind of laugh that came from truly being amused.

"Are you teasing me?"

He asked while laughing.

Li Hanche watched him laugh, the expression on his face not shifting in the slightest.

"Uh... weren't you the one who teased me with Su Nianxue first?"

Xue Qinghe's laughter stopped abruptly.

He stared at Li Hanche for two breaths.

"Fine."

"You remember that quite clearly."

"Sure enough, children and the like aren't cute at all."