Spirit Vision

There was one minute left before the exam began.

Li Lin looked down at the thick stack of blank paper in his hands, then at Angers and Manstein, who stood beside the desk with expectant looks on their faces. He could not help feeling restless.

The 3E Exam, formally known as the "Bloodline Assessment Exam," required candidates to distinguish the different audio segments of "Word Spirit: Emperor" mixed into the music, then instinctively write down the corresponding draconic script while their bloodlines were activated.

The higher a student's bloodline rank, the more accurately they could write the draconic script.

Li Lin felt that, with some soothing and elegant music, he could use the pencil Angers had just sharpened with a folding knife to sketch a few portraits of the two old men.

As he thought this, the hands of the clock on the wall overlapped at 8:30.

Speakers around the screening room immediately began playing the familiar strains of "Für Elise."

This was Li Lin's favorite piano piece. He had heard that Beethoven had been inspired by a girl named Alice, who had sought help everywhere to fulfill an old blind man's wish to see the forest and the sea.

Li Lin had been blind since childhood in his previous life. Before he accidentally learned, at the age of six, how to sense all things through the vibrations of the earth, he had been little different from a cripple.

He raised his pencil over the paper and tried to make sense of the dragon language that might have been hidden in the music, but he gained nothing.

Of course, those without dragon blood could not hear the oracle of Black King Nidhogg.

Why hadn't Xia Mi made her move yet?

Li Lin secretly glanced at Xia Mi, who was seated at the very front of the screening room. He was sitting in the last row and could only see a tiny portion of her back.

He did not know whether Xia Mi had been stirred by "Word Spirit: Emperor," but the Dragon-Slaying Binding System had yet to react. Other than staring helplessly at the blank paper in his hand, there was nothing he could do.

Maybe I should sketch the headmaster instead.

Li Lin looked mournfully at the blank paper in his hand, then glanced at Xia Mi again. For some reason, he felt a little envious...

Wait, where had Xia Mi gone?

He rubbed his eyes. At some point, he had become the only person left in the screening room.

Headmaster Angers and Professor Manstein had both vanished from beside him.

The lights went out one after another, and the desks and chairs around the aisle sank into darkness.

Li Lin lowered his head to look at the blank paper before him as its colors gradually faded away. That life wandering through darkness drifted into his mind for no reason.

The name Topasa came from the Latin "Topazius," meaning yellow gemstone. In truth, no one liked calling him that; most people called him "Toph."

What a pity. The young master of the Northern family, gentle as jade and every inch the refined gentleman, was merely a useless man born blind...

It sounded as if servants were whispering nearby.

For a moment, he had forgotten who he was. He only angrily headed toward the source of the voice, wanting to drag the speaker out and beat him senseless.

Even though he could sense the outlines of the furniture around him and "see" a blurry human figure, walking through the darkness filled him with an increasingly intense sense of discomfort.

Until an elderly woman's voice suddenly rang out beside his ear.

"Oh, you've come back again, another me."

Then, he sensed the space around him opening up in every direction.

Toph mocked him. "You clearly have a pair of eyes that can see. Why do you insist on keeping them shut?"

Li Lin instinctively opened his eyes. He saw a perilous, sheer cliff, and he saw Toph standing atop it.

She was sixty or seventy years older than when he had first met her in his dream. Her hair was white, her body stooped, and she sat cross-legged on a massive boulder, looking down at Li Lin with disdain.

"When we first met, I was only thirteen. Now I'm old enough to die at any moment, and I actually dreamed of you again."

The moment Toph finished speaking, she burst into laughter.

"But so what? I'm still the greatest earthbender in the world!"

She lifted a hand and slapped the boulder beneath her. Her entire body then sank into it, while vast sheets of rock erupted like fountains and submerged Li Lin.

With his bending disabled, Li Lin should have had no way to resist.

Yet strangely, the tsunami of earth and stone came to an abrupt halt in midair.

Li Lin raised his hand and held it back.

The feeling was unexpectedly effortless, as though the earth and mountains had always been a pair of hands waiting for him to grasp them.

The feeling of being embraced by the world was more wonderful than any honor or accomplishment.

His sensitivity to the earth element suddenly increased by tens of thousands of times, reaching a realm that even his former self could never have hoped to attain.

Li Lin pressed his palms together and gently pushed. The torrent of earth and stone before him instantly surged backward, swallowing Toph's phantom and toppling his former self as well.

Toph had not been wrong.

Even after reincarnation, I am still the greatest earthbender in the world.

The boy walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down at a giant dragon spiraling up from the abyss. It beat its wings and raised a hurricane that swept across the world. Its roar nearly shattered the boy's eardrums.

The dragon was "dancing." It did not use dragon language, yet every movement disrupted the earth element around it, splitting the ground and collapsing mountains. This was a dance that could destroy the world.

Using the movement of the body to draw the mind into focus, then controlling the elements—

This was a technique he had mastered long ago.

Come on, fight me...

Li Lin clasped his fists in salute toward the dancing dragon before him, as though provoking it.

The dragon noticed this human who dared challenge it. In an instant, the chaotic earth element crushed down upon the boy on the cliff like an overturning sea.

That unstoppable momentum looked especially familiar, just like Xia Mi's Mountain-Leaning Strike crashing straight toward him.

What should he do next?

Turn the direction of the earth element's force with something like tai chi, then push it back?

But the dragon's "dance" had reached its end. A deep, distant rumble came from the end of the world, and Li Lin instinctively thrust out both hands. The world before him, along with the dragon that felt strangely familiar to him, instantly split in two...

And he split apart with it.

The desk scraped violently across the floor with a piercing screech, jolting Li Lin awake from the dream. Without realizing it, he had stood in the middle of the screening room. The chair he had been sitting on had been twisted into fragments like a pretzel and embedded in the shattered desk.

The near-omnipotent control over the earth element he had possessed in the dream rapidly faded, replaced by an intense weakness and exhaustion.

His heart pounded like a drum. When he turned his head, he found Xia Mi hiding outside the door with terror on her face, while Angers and Manstein stood in front of it like eagles protecting their young.

At some point, Angers had acquired ten exam papers covered from top to bottom in writing. The dragon slayer who had lived for a century stared in utter shock at Li Lin, who had nearly torn the screening room apart with his bare hands.