William understood better than anyone that his fate was no longer written in stone. He was the architect of his own history now, having already lived through the collapse of the very world he currently stood in.
"My spirit is still in the 'mud phase'... I have a long, agonising road ahead of me," he whispered. He placed the spirit crystal back on the desk, the faint white light of his twelve points mocking him.
He began to tap a rhythmic, measured cadence on the wood with his small fingers. It was a habit of his later years—a physical anchor used to steady a mind processing a thousand variables at once.
Anyone peering through the window at that moment would have been struck by a chilling dissonance.
The body was that of an eleven-year-old boy, but the slumped, heavy posture, the thousand-yard stare, and the sheer gravity of his expression belonged to a man who had seen civilisations crumble. There was no childhood left in those black eyes; there was only the cold, calculated intent of a survivor.
That was to be expected. While his physical form had been reset, his consciousness remained an arsenal of forbidden knowledge. He possessed the refined teachings of his master, the tactical experience of a hundred wars, and the bitter wisdom gained from a world that had ended in fire and fur.
"I have a lot to do," he said, rising from the creaking chair. He crossed the narrow room to the primary drawer, pulling out the heavy leather backpack.
He swung it over his shoulders, the straps feeling strangely loose on his undeveloped frame. "But one truth remains constant, even across the tides of time: Strength is the only thing that truly rules one's life and destiny."
He didn't look back as he closed the door, the latch clicking with a finality that signalled the end of his life as a mere porter.
The world outside was a void of oppressive shadows, far darker than the view from his window had suggested. The air was crisp and carried the scent of pine and damp earth.
It was the dead of night, the hour when even the most diligent students were lost in sleep, yet William walked the empty, winding roads of the campus with the confidence of a ghost. He was heading toward the towering silhouette of the great forest to the south.
This was the Blessing Forest, the northernmost edge of a massive, monster-infested wilderness. The world was divided into two primary continents, connected by five narrow land bridges that served as the focal points of perpetual conflict.
The Aspire Academy sat nestled within the Novistic Kingdom, one of the most formidable powers on the Southern Continent. Within this kingdom, the academy was ranked among the top five; globally, it sat comfortably within the top hundred.
To the people of this era, Aspire Academy was a pinnacle of human achievement and spiritual enlightenment. To William, it was a nursery for the blind.
He looked at the distant spires of the academy with a mix of pity and disdain. In his eyes, their methods were not just rudimentary—they were dangerously retarded. The masters here were weak, their techniques inefficient, and their understanding of the spiritual world fundamentally flawed.
He knew, however, that this wasn't entirely their fault. It was the result of a deep, millennia-old plot orchestrated by the monsters. The "Great Deception" had ensured that human cultivation remained stagnant, distracted by flashy but shallow power, while the true depths of spirit mastery were hidden or demonised.
As someone who had ventured into forbidden zones and studied the ancient, untainted texts of the past, William's simplest observations were now decades ahead of the greatest scholars in the Novistic Kingdom.
Consider the basic classification of spirit masters, for instance.
In this world, a child's potential was tested at age six. The methodology was nearly identical to what William had seen in the outer worlds, but the interpretation was laughably narrow. The local masters focused almost entirely on two metrics: the Innate Spirit Shape and the Initial Spirit Power Value.
If a child manifested a spirit resembling a moustached lion, they were heralded as a future pillar of the kingdom. Those who manifested "Blessed Spirits"—the Flying Tiger, the Holy Spirit, or the Dark Scaled Snake—were treated like young gods, their paths paved with gold.
Then came the numbers. A spirit power value above twenty-five was considered the baseline for a career. Anything above a hundred was the mark of a "once-in-a-generation" genius.
For a boy like William, whose spirit lacked a distinctive shape—a formless "mud" spirit—and whose power value at age eleven was a pathetic twelve, the verdict of society was final: he was a failure. He was the dust beneath the boots of the gifted, destined to carry their luggage until the day he died.
In the world William had come to know during his long years of wandering, the "Spirit Shape" and "Initial Power" so prized by the Novistic Kingdom were considered superficial metrics.
The true spirit master world—the one that existed beyond the deceptive veils of this era—relied on three keystones to assess potential, a concept known as the Holy Triad.
The Triad consisted of Spirit Power, Spirit Purity, and the Cultivation Technique.
To the masters of this time, your starting point was your destiny. To William, your starting point was merely the first coordinate on a map. He focused his thoughts specifically on the second cornerstone: Spirit Purity.
This concept was built on the fundamental truth that every human was born with a spirit, but those spirits were bogged down by a lifetime of physiological and spiritual impurities.
In the eyes of the Academy, a "mud spirit" like William's was a dead end. In reality, a mud spirit was simply a spirit so saturated with chaotic impurities that its true form couldn't manifest. Cleansing those impurities would unlock a human's latent potential, capable of turning a "failure" into a world-shaking hegemony.
However, purity was not easily won. It required a gruelling daily routine of refinement, perfectly synchronised with a high-tier cultivation manual and a constant, aggressive increase in raw spirit power.
It was a holistic, exhausting effort. In his past life, William hadn't even begun this process until he was seventeen—an age widely considered "too late" by even the most liberal standards of the outer worlds. Yet, under his master's brutal and brilliant guidance, he had succeeded.
"If I could achieve the impossible at seventeen, doing it at eleven should be child's play," he whispered to the dark trees.
He didn't doubt his knowledge; he doubted his wallet. "I need to secure capital first."
Money was the lubricant of cultivation. He needed herbs, catalysts, and better spirit crystals, and as a porter from a destitute background, he had no patron to turn to. The only bank he had access to was the Blessing Forest.
The forest was a titanic ecological force, sprawling across the borders of multiple kingdoms and serving as the primary training ground for over a dozen elite academies.
It was a place of immense wealth and even greater danger. The Academy didn't restrict access to the forest—not because they were generous, but because they were indifferent.
If a lowly porter wanted to wander into the jaws of a monster, that was his prerogative. The forest was a natural filter; it kept the weak out through the simple threat of agonising death.
As a member of the Academy, William bypassed the guarded checkpoints easily, sticking to the shadows as he followed the main trail that led into the deeper, unmonitored thickets.
Midway through his march, he stopped to swing his backpack around and dump its contents onto a flat stone.
He stared at his "arsenal" with a look of profound disappointment.
The bag contained exactly three items: a standard-issue iron sword with rust gnawing at the edge of its blade, a half-filled bottle of water, and a small, jagged piece of flare-ore used to signal for help—a signal no one would likely answer for a porter.
This was the equipment of a man intended to be a victim. In his previous life, he had wielded artefacts that could split the sky and wore armour woven from the silk of celestial spiders. Now, he was standing at the edge of a monster-infested hellscape with a piece of scrap metal and a canteen.