"I'm interested! Of course I'm interested!"
Gao Dalou sighed. "Ah, just my rotten luck. My father taught me my soul engineering skills when I was little. Our lineage has always passed down through a single heir, a bit like a sect, but without a sect's strength."
"Father thought his abilities were more than enough to teach me, so he never sent me to a Junior Soul Engineer Academy at the start. But when I was fourteen, just after I'd become a Level 3 Soul Engineer, he suddenly died under mysterious circumstances. When we found him, even his internal organs were gone. His death was horrific."
"My father was a miser. He never felt safe leaving our valuables anywhere at home, so he always carried them in his Storage Soul Tool. Well, once he died, our home was stripped bare, as though an army had cleared the fields and fortified the walls. My mother had died early. We originally had a few servants, but with no money to pay them, I soon ended up all alone."
Gao Dalou spoke calmly, but his expression made it clear that his heart had already died-the deepest sorrow of all.
"After that, I had to put soul tool crafting aside to survive and start finding odd jobs in the city. As a soul engineer, I shouldn't have had trouble finding work, but whenever I asked an employer to supply rare metals for my practice, they'd curse me out."
"With no other choice, I could only do whatever manual labor I was capable of. I earned a little money to scrape by while teaching myself from the books Father left behind. It took more than ten years before I finally scraped my way up to the standard of a Level 5 Soul Engineer. But now I've