Word traveled in Master Feng's school the way it traveled everywhere: through the children.
Specifically through a seven-year-old named Remi who had apparently told her father that the new teaching assistant could break a wooden practice dummy with one punch, which was true — he had done it by accident during a demonstration of proper form and Feng had made him pay for a replacement, which had cost him two days' wages and taught him an important lesson about restraint.
Remi's father told his business partner. His business partner mentioned it to someone at the grain merchant stalls. And two weeks after Jelani had quietly taken the teaching assistant job and started his routine, a merchant's son named Tayo with soft hands and a new cultivation base arrived at Master Feng's school, specifically asking to spar with the assistant.
Jelani looked at him and then looked at Master Feng, who shrugged with the expression of a man who had already been paid for this interaction.
The spar lasted about nine seconds. Not because Jelani ended it — he was actively trying not to — but because Tayo threw a full-force strike at his torso, Jelani deflected it with the lightest possible redirect, and Tayo's own momentum threw him sideways into the practice mat hard enough to knock his breath out.
He was Level 4. Jelani was Level 6. The gap at Body Refinement was not subtle.
Tayo lay on the mat staring at the ceiling for a moment. Then: "Again."
They sparred four more times. Jelani let him get progressively closer each round, offering corrections under his breath — your left is dropping, lead from the hip, you're telegraphing the shoulder — and by the fifth round Tayo landed a clean strike to his ribs.
"You're actually good," Tayo said afterward, slightly less winded. "How long have you been teaching?"
"Not long," Jelani said.
"Where are you from?"
"West district," Jelani said, which was vague enough to be almost true.
Tayo looked at him with the frank, assessing look of someone who had grown up with enough money to say exactly what he thought. "You're going to run out of people to learn from at Feng's school. You know that, right?"
Jelani said nothing.
"My family has connections to the outer ring of the Iron Pillar Sect," Tayo continued. "They're always looking for talented—"
"I'm not interested in sects," Jelani said, and something in his voice ended that particular conversation cleanly.
That evening in the outer fields, he hunted three stone-backs and a Level 3 creature — a ridge-runner, fast and mean — that cost him a gash on his forearm and twenty minutes of careful maneuvering before he brought it down. The universe points were significantly better: twenty-two for the ridge-runner alone.
Level Up: Level 7 Body Refinement
{You are attracting attention,} the system noted. {The spar at Feng's school was witnessed by seven people. The story will spread.}
"I know."
{Do you want me to adjust your training visibility? There are ways to suppress the outward signs of cultivation level in social situations.}
"Not yet. If I look like nothing, no one will take me seriously. If I look like something, people get curious. I need to find the middle."
{Noted. Also — you are now Level 7. The Spirit Sect disciple with the scar is Level 4. Your current combat power exceeds his by a significant margin.}
He stopped walking.
He stood in the evening field for a moment, listening to the insects in the grass.
"Not yet," he said finally.
{You're learning,} the system said, and he couldn't quite tell if it was pleased or simply observing.
He went home, sharpened his focus, saved his universe points, kept his head down, and waited.