The Library

Spirit Hall's library stood east of the Pope's Palace, two stone corridors away from the quiet chamber where Ning Buhui lived. The building was not particularly tall, only four stories, but it occupied a vast stretch of ground. Its gray-white outer walls had been worn dark by time, and from a distance, it looked less like a library than an old beast crouching at the foot of the city wall.

The gatekeeper was an elderly deacon, dozing with drooping eyelids in an old wooden chair by the door. Ning Buhui handed him the jade token. The old deacon lifted his eyelids, glanced at the token, then at him. Without any particular expression, he pushed one door aside and let him in.

It was much darker inside than out. Sunlight filtered through narrow windows high above, cutting slanted shafts through the gloom. Dust floated in the light like countless tiny living things. Rows of bookshelves reached all the way to the ceiling, with aisles wide enough for only two people to walk abreast. The air carried the scent of old paper and wood. Ning Buhui breathed it in and, unexpectedly, found it somewhat familiar.

In his previous life, he had spent years on end with his mentor in libraries and archives. Being surrounded by walls of books put him more at ease than cultivation did.

He did not rush to browse at random. First, he made a circuit of the ground floor to get a sense of the library's layout. The first floor held basic introductory works-Martial Soul classifications, illustrated guides to Soul Beasts, and overviews of the properties of different types of Soul Power. The higher the floor, the more advanced the contents. The third floor and above were said to contain fragmentary texts on Soul Tools and theoretical manuscripts by high-level Soul Masters, and were not open to outsiders.

Ning Buhui did not try to take on too much. He started reading on the first floor.

It was still early, and there were few people in the building. He picked an empty table in a corner, pulled several books from the shelves, and carried them over to read one by one.

He began with the illustrated guides to Soul Beasts.

There were no books of this kind at Spirit Hall in Nuoding City, let alone in Bluestone Town. From reading the novel in his previous life, Ning Buhui remembered only the famous Soul Beasts, such as the Mandala Snake, Man Faced Demon Spider, Evil Spirit Orca, and Dark Demon Evil God Tiger.

But when he opened the guide, he discovered that what he knew did not amount to even one hair on nine oxen. The book recorded far more than a thousand kinds of Soul Beasts. The most common ones, ranging from ten to a hundred years old, filled hundreds of pages on their own. Each entry came with a rough illustration, its habitat, common age range, and distinctive abilities.

Ning Buhui read at a brisk pace, and the knowledge he read was imprinted in his mind. Ever since awakening his Martial Soul, his spiritual power had been far stronger than an ordinary person's, to the point that he could almost remember anything at a glance. Remembering a bit of knowledge was no trouble at all.

His Nine Hell Soul-Suppressing Pagoda served two purposes in one, and its twin yin and yang fish meant that every Soul Ring he acquired would produce two Soul Skills. In other words, the Soul Beasts he hunted not only had to be old enough, but also had to possess compatible attributes and balanced abilities. Those too specialized in one area would not do, while ordinary ones were pointless.

When he reached the chapters on Soul Ring ages and how to judge them, he grew noticeably more attentive.

The book said that learning to judge a Soul Beast's age was required study for a Soul Master before a hunt. Unlike people, Soul Beasts had no household registration and would not tell you how many years they had lived. There were several ways to judge their age. The most common was to look at their size, color, horns or crests, tail length, and the thickness of their armor plates. Some could also be judged by the patterns in their fur. But these methods were rough and prone to enormous errors. In particular, many Soul Beasts stopped growing larger after reaching a thousand years, making size alone useless for judging them.

A more accurate method was to observe Soul Power fluctuations. The longer a Soul Beast lived, the deeper and richer its Soul Power became. Like aged wine, even a whiff of it carried more weight than new wine. But this required a Soul Master to have sufficiently keen perception, and spiritual-type Soul Masters were better at it. They could use Spiritual Detection to penetrate the surface and sense the total amount of Soul Power within a Soul Beast, making their estimates more precise. They were the beast appraisers of a team. Spirit Hall's Soul Hunting teams had people like this, who dealt with Soul Beasts year-round and could tell almost at a glance whether the wolf before them was seven hundred and sixty or eight hundred and twenty years old.

Ning Buhui paused over the words "beast appraiser." He would surely have to hunt for Soul Rings frequently in the future, and relying on others to judge everything would be far too inconvenient. Knowing how to do it himself was the only reliable way. Besides, he had a natural advantage: his powerful spiritual power.

He switched to another book, one devoted to the compatibility between Soul Rings and Martial Souls. This subject was especially important to him.

The book said that when absorbing a Soul Ring, age was important, but older was not always better. A Soul Ring was like a key made for the lock that was a Martial Soul. Having a key was not enough; its teeth had to match. If a fire-attribute Beast Martial Soul absorbed a fire-attribute Hundred-Year Soul Beast, its energy would be highly compatible with the Martial Soul. But if it were given to an ice-attribute Martial Soul, the resulting Soul Skill's power might be halved at best. At worst, their Soul Power would clash during absorption and cause an immediate backlash.

The more Ning Buhui read, the more interesting he found it. When reading the novel in his previous life, he had focused only on who had absorbed Soul Rings tens of thousands of years old or Hundred Thousand Year Soul Rings. He had never considered that such detailed principles of compatibility lay behind them. The book contained a very rough chart of five-element affinities, with numerous exceptions noted beside it in tiny writing. Rare attributes such as poison, spirit, light, shadow, and space were more complicated and could not simply be fitted into the five elements' relationships of generation and suppression.

He thought of his own Nine Hell Soul-Suppressing Pagoda. One side of the pagoda was yang, the other yin. There were not many Soul Beasts suited to a dual-attribute Martial Soul like this, so how should he choose?

Ning Buhui rested his chin in his hand and tapped a spot on the page: the Netherlight Butterfly, a butterfly-type Soul Beast with both light and dark attributes. Its light wings could grant a target boosts to all attributes, Soul Power recovery speed, and the like, while its dark wings could weaken a target.

It was well suited to his Martial Soul, and their compatibility should be fairly high. It could be a backup target.

Over the next few days, Ning Buhui practically lived in the library.

He went in the morning and read two books, then returned in the afternoon to go through three more. The old deacon paid him no mind, occasionally looking up at him before going back to his nap. Sometimes one or two slightly older Soul Masters came to the library. When they saw a six-year-old child absorbed in a thick book, they showed a little surprise. Some came over out of curiosity and glanced at the titles, but upon seeing they were illustrated guides to Soul Beasts and the like, they paid him no further attention, assuming the Pope's newly accepted little disciple was simply drawn to something new.

Ning Buhui offered no explanation. He had his own method of reading. When he did research in his previous life, his mentor had taught him to examine the table of contents first, then find the key chapters, skip what he could not understand, and grasp the structure and framework. He treated the novel's details that required further interpretation as reference, not absolute truth. The real work lay in comparing what the books said with reality. Whenever he came across which Soul Beasts appeared in which regions, for example, he noted it down. Where the books were incomplete, he filled in the gaps from his memories of his previous life. Putting the two together, he gradually formed a reasonably clear map of Soul Beast distribution in his mind.

He also cleared up a few things he had previously mixed up. For example, the Mandala Snake that Tang San hunted for his First Soul Ring in the original story roamed dark wetlands and had exceptionally sharp fangs, but it was difficult for one to live past a thousand years.

On his eighth day of reading, he found a short passage in an old booklet bearing someone else's annotations. The handwriting was messy, but the substance was solid.

"The marvel of Soul Ring Skills lies not in great age, but in matching affinities. Among exotic beasts that live a hundred years, a thousand kinds arise of their own accord. Even beasts of the same kind differ in nature with age. Taking a ring is like gathering herbs: take the stem, not the root; take the leaf, not the flower. Yet this does not apply where the difference in age is vast. When affinities are close, choose the older one."

Ning Buhui read the passage three times, then slowly closed the booklet and returned it to the depths of the shelf. He did not know who had written it, but anyone capable of writing those words must have had considerable insight.

He grew increasingly certain that coming to the library first had been the right choice. His Soul Ring was still nowhere in sight, but his standards for choosing one were gradually taking shape. Once he had the Whale Rubber, he would be able to find out just how old a Soul Ring he could handle.

On the tenth day, there was still no word about the Whale Rubber.

Ning Buhui did not go to press anyone about it. He went to the library as usual, leaving early and returning late, as quiet as a little bookworm in the building. Sometimes, when his cultivation progressed slowly, he did not grow impatient. He compared what he read with his nighttime cultivation inside the pagoda, then broke down the first stage of Nine Orifices Heart Control and practiced it, pondering it over and over.

Heart Separation Control was, at its core, a secret technique for dividing and precisely manipulating spiritual power. Its essentials were the strength of one's spiritual power and one's control over it, and it had nothing to do with the level of one's Soul Power.

An ordinary Soul Master's spiritual power grew in step with their Soul Power. A level-ten Soul Scholar's spiritual power was extremely weak, far short of the minimum requirement for beginning Heart Separation Control. The Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Sect's orthodox training method likewise began in childhood with exercises in concentration and a foundation in spiritual power. It did not have low-level disciples start cultivating Heart Separation Control right away.

Because his spiritual power had been strengthened, it far surpassed that of Soul Masters at the same level. Once he absorbed his first Soul Ring, he would just barely meet the requirements to cultivate the first stage. For now, he still needed to train his concentration first.

When he returned to his quiet chamber at night, he opened the window and blew out the lamp. The moon was thin, like half a sheet of paper pasted onto black cloth. In the distance, the great bell of the Pope's Palace rang again, its notes rolling across the whole of Spirit City. He sat in the darkness and replayed what he had read over the past few days in his mind. Indeed, none of the books mentioned another use for Whale Rubber.

In truth, he was not certain either. If Whale Rubber really did have no use beyond boosting virility, then the story he had made up before Bibi Dong that day about a unique copy found in a cave would become a joke. But if it worked, his body would be able to absorb a First Soul Ring several hundred or even a thousand years older. The road to becoming a strong person was sometimes a gamble. He was betting that this world was no different from what the book described.

He took a deep breath, closed the window, and entered the Soul Suppressing Pagoda to begin that night's meditation.

Tomorrow, he would go to the library again. For every day the Whale Rubber failed to arrive, he would stay put. His efforts over the past few days had not been wasted; he had learned a great deal that he had not known before.

He had to keep his composure.