Dai Youheng and Ling Ya waited patiently for several days in a hotel in Mingdu. Though the Sun Moon Royal Soul Engineer Academy was heavily guarded, it was not a prison entirely cut off from the outside world. Its students had considerable freedom to come and go.
Dai Youheng recalled a detail mentioned in the original novel: every so often, Nana seemed to have no choice but to leave the academy late at night.
She would head to the secret Branch Altar of the Holy Spirit Cult that held her mother's soul captive.
On the one hand, the Branch Altar leader would graciously permit her a brief meeting with her imprisoned parents' souls, using this as a leash to keep her under his control.
On the other hand, he would check her cultivation progress to ensure this pawn remained within his grasp. At this point, Nana had not truly joined the Holy Spirit Cult. The Branch Altar leader intended to offer her to the main headquarters once she had completed her studies at the Sun Moon Royal Soul Engineer Academy.
It was not that Nana had never considered resisting or seeking help. She had once pinned her hopes on the academy's headmaster, Jing Hongchen, the master of the Virtue Hall, only to witness the Holy Spirit Cult's senior members meeting him in secret, plunging her into despair.
In that moment, she understood that not only the Virtue Hall, but perhaps the entire upper echelon of the Sun Moon Empire had reached some filthy bargain or tacit understanding with the Evil Soul Masters.
From then on, she had all but abandoned hope, numbly submitting to their whims.
Though Dai Youheng had never seen Nana in person, he remembered her physical features clearly: a slender figure nearly 1.8 meters tall, strikingly tall