The scent of decaying bamboo and ancient, dry ink was grounding. It was a mundane smell, entirely unremarkable, which was exactly why Yu Xiaogang focused on it. He sat cross-legged on the worn wooden floorboards of the lower archives, the moonlight casting long, silver bars across the towering shelves.
The physical world was quiet, but his mind was a roaring ocean of data.
Closing his eyes, Xiaogang retreated inward. The mental space his Essence had constructed wasn't a void, but an immaculate, boundless library of obsidian wood and warm, golden light. It housed every fleeting thought, every read text, and every piece of knowledge he had brought from his past life. He mentally strolled down the endless aisles, his spiritual avatar pausing before a specific, heavily encrypted section. He pulled out a conceptual file, its label hovering in the air: "fanfics all.docx".
He didn't just read it; he absorbed the conceptual logic within it. The file was a repository of wild theories, alternate timelines, and the sheer audacity of fictional protagonists breaking the laws of reality. He wasn't going to copy the paths laid out in those stories—most of them were too loud, too arrogant, too reliant on plot armor that he refused to trust—but as a reference for possibilities, it was a goldmine. It taught him how to look at the rigid, stagnant rules of the Douluo Continent's spirit master system and see the loose threads waiting to be pulled.
Opening his eyes, Xiaogang exhaled a breath that held a faint, almost imperceptible golden mist.
His martial soul was getting restless. Luo San Pao—no, it wasn't the stunted, tragic creature anymore. Deep within his sea of consciousness, a majestic Golden Divine Dragon slumbered, its raw, pure Yang and Light energy continuously washing over his meridians, purging decades of impurities in a matter of hours. The sheer density of his spirit power was terrifying. With his stats pushed to their natural peak, his current level 29 felt more like a compressed, highly volatile ocean than a stagnant puddle.
If he let it loose, the golden pillar of light would likely pierce the roof of the Spirit Hall archives and alert the Supreme Pontiff himself.
'I need a lid for this pot, and I need it yesterday,' Xiaogang thought, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
He stood up, walking down the aisles of the archives. He didn't read the books. He didn't need to. He merely brushed his fingertips against the spines of the scrolls, the leather-bound tomes, and the cracked bamboo slips. The moment his skin made contact, his cheat activated. Any new skill, power, or ability you gain will near instantaneously mature to mastery.
He absorbed the entirety of Spirit Hall's lower and middle-tier array formations, sealing techniques, and meditation manuals in less than twenty minutes. The knowledge flooded his mind, instantly categorized, cross-referenced, and optimized by his Essence. He saw the flaws in their thousand-year-old sealing arrays—the inefficient energy loops, the unnecessary strain on the caster's spiritual sea.
With a flick of his wrist, Xiaogang drew a circle in the dust on the floor. He didn't use spirit power; he used the ambient energy in the room, manipulating the micro-currents of air and the latent spiritual pressure left behind by generations of researchers. He added a stroke here, a dot there, combining a breath-concealment technique from a forgotten assassination sect with a heavy-water compression array used for storing volatile medicinal herbs.
He stepped into the center of the dust circle.
Click.
It wasn't a physical sound, but a conceptual one. The moment the array activated, the suffocating, majestic pressure of the Golden Divine Dragon within him collapsed inward. It didn't disappear; it condensed, folding over itself hundreds of times until it formed a dense, singular core of absolute calm within his dantian. His outward aura plummeted, returning exactly to the pathetic, bottlenecked level 29 of a notoriously crippled researcher.
Xiaogang sagged, his back hitting the nearest bookshelf as the tension left his muscles. He ran a hand through his hair, a dry chuckle escaping his lips.
'Step one: Look like a piece of trash. Complete.'
He stayed there for a while, just breathing, letting the silence of the archives wash over him. It was a lonely kind of safety, but it was safe nonetheless.
The soft shuffle of footsteps broke the quiet just as dawn began to bleed through the high windows. Xiaogang didn't need to look to know who it was. His spiritual sense, now refined to a terrifying degree, had already mapped the rhythmic, slightly uneven gait.
Elder Li walked into the aisle, carrying a wooden tray holding two steaming bowls of congee and a plate of pickled vegetables. The old man looked better. The deep, sickly pallor that had clung to his skin for years was fading, replaced by a healthy, if weathered, flush. The blockage Xiaogang had cleared the day before had evidently allowed his stagnant spirit power to finally nourish his aging body.
"Still here, boy?" Li grumbled, setting the tray down on a small reading desk. "If you keep reading in the dark, you'll go blind before you're thirty. Then what use will your theories be?"
Xiaogang smiled, a genuine, warm expression that reached his eyes. He walked over, taking his seat across from the elder. "The moon was bright enough, Elder. Besides, some theories only make sense when the world is quiet."
Li snorted, passing a bowl across the table. "Eat. You're too skinny. Combat masters need meat, but even a researcher needs sustenance to keep their brain from rotting."
They ate in a comfortable silence. Xiaogang watched the old man out of the corner of his eye.
There was a slight tremor in Li's left hand—a residual nerve damage from the years of flawed cultivation. It wasn't life-threatening, but it clearly bothered the proud old man, making his grip on his chopsticks clumsy.
Xiaogang didn't say a word. He simply reached out for the small teapot on the tray, pouring a cup for Li and then one for himself. As the hot water flowed from the spout, Xiaogang channeled a microscopic, hyper-refined thread of his golden spirit power into the liquid. It was woven so seamlessly into the heat of the tea that it was entirely untraceable. He adjusted the frequency of the energy, tailoring it perfectly to Li's specific meridian structure, turning a simple cup of tea into an elixir that rivaled the rarest immortal herbs in its gentle, healing properties.