Two years of sword training in the Extreme North.
That sentence sounded straightforward until you understood what it actually meant in practice. Xue Di's idea of sword training was not the kind that happened in a comfortable practice hall with a wooden dummy and a patient instructor correcting your grip. It happened outside, in cold that made your fingers slow and your breath fog, on terrain that had no interest in providing stable footing, with an instructor who corrected your mistakes by demonstrating the correct version once and then expecting you to replicate it or discover personally why you couldn't. Bing Di observed from the side and occasionally commented, which was somehow worse than Xue Di's corrections because Bing Di's commentary had a quality of academic interest that made you feel like a specimen.
It worked, though. It genuinely, undeniably worked.
After two years of it, the sword movements had gone from things I thought about to things I simply did — the kind of muscle memory that lives below conscious thought and fires automatically. Form, angle, weight transfer, the small adjustments that happened without me deciding to make them. Advanced basic level, Xue Di had assessed it. Not basic, not intermediate — a category between the two that I privately translated as "no longer embarrassing, not yet impressive."
Coming from Xue Di, that was a reasonable compliment.
But the part that surprised both of us — that neither Yanran nor I had fully anticipated when the training began — was what was happening on the other side of the shared consciousness.
The muscle memory was transferring.
Not perfectly. Not automatically applicable without any work on Yanran's end. But the structural understanding of how a correct sword movement was supposed to feel — the instinctive recognition of what a wrong stance looked like from inside the body, the sense of where weight should be and when — all of that was crossing over with a clarity that had no other explanation. Yanran was absorbing swordsmanship that she had never practiced a single day of directly, carried across by a mechanism that no cultivation text had ever thought to describe because the situation producing it had simply never existed before.
The complication was the body difference. Female muscle arrangement was not male muscle arrangement — the strength distribution was different, the natural balance points were different, certain angles that worked cleanly in my body required adjustment to function properly in hers. What transferred was the foundation. The application still required her own daily practice to build the physical execution that the foundation pointed toward.
But with Tianmeng's soul ring enhancing mental strength of Body Martial soul — the high-quality understanding that his soul skills added to both our cognitive processing — Yanran's rate of learning from the transferred foundation was genuinely accelerated. She understood what she was working toward with unusual clarity. The translation from understanding to execution was still her work to do, but she wasn't doing it blind.
There was also something else that had developed over two years that I found harder to describe but probably more significant in the long run.
Living in two bodies for this long — being one consciousness distributed across two separate physical existences, each with its own daily schedule, its own relationships, its own particular texture of experience — had produced something neither of us had planned for. We had each, gradually and without deliberately deciding to, developed our own personality layer on top of the shared foundation.
Not different people. Still the same fundamental consciousness, the same memories, the same core. But Yanran had her own particular way of being in the world now — shaped by two years of Spirit Hall corridors and Bibi Dong's company and library work and the specific texture of life in that environment. And I had mine — shaped by the Extreme North and Xue Di's directness and Bing Di's dry observations and cold air and sword work and Sirius.
If you somehow put us back into a single body, the result would not be a unified person. It would be a person with two distinct personalities sharing the same mind — each complete, each functional, each genuinely itself. Yanran had pointed this out to me through the shared awareness one evening and I had sat with it for a while and concluded she was right. The identity question, which had been quietly complicated at the start, had resolved itself in a way neither of us had predicted: by producing two clear answers rather than one confused one.
That was fine. Better than fine, actually. Knowing clearly who you were in each context was considerably more useful than being uncertain in all of them.
Now, the soul rings.
Sirius had received two rings over the past two years, and the story of how the first one was acquired deserved to be told in full because it was a window into exactly what kind of person Bing Di was when she decided to be helpful.
The target was a Light Winged Lizard — a sub-dragon species, meaning it carried genuine dragon blood essence threaded through its lineage despite not being a true dragon. Thirty thousand years old. Meaningful dragon bloodline, compatible with Sirius's nature, appropriate for the growth direction I was pushing toward.
Bing Di had located it in its territory and landed directly in front of it.
The Light Winged Lizard had, completely reasonably, begun preparing to defend itself. Thirty thousand years of survival instinct was telling it that something had just arrived that it needed to deal with. But later with some persuasion and the soul beast finally chose to sacrifice itself.
The soul ring that came from the absorption gave a skill I named Golden Holy Dragon Body. What it did was simple: it doubled every physical attribute simultaneously. Strength, speed, defense, endurance — everything, doubled, for the duration of the activation. No conditions, no complexity, no skill expression required. Just a clean doubling of what the body was already capable of and will further increase the multiplier as cultivation will went up.
Brute force. Pure and direct. I liked it immediately.
Sirius also evolved visibly from the absorption — his wings developed from the partial, functional-but-limited structures he'd had before into something properly defined and capable of sustained flight. Watching him test them for the first time, circling the open air above the snowfield with an expression of complete satisfaction, was one of the better moments of the past two years.
Tianmeng, from his resting place inside my soul structure, had also assessed the ring afterward and confirmed something valuable: he could continue increasing the ring's effective age ceiling as my cultivation grew, pushing it forward till 100,000 years and further more if possible. Not technically natal in the way Yanran's Chimera-processed rings were, but functionally similar in the key respect — not fixed, continuing to develop, no ceiling locked in at thirty thousand years. He had put a tentative upper limit at a hundred thousand years, depending on how far the cultivation took us.
That was generous. I appreciated it.
The second ring came from a Golden Earth Tyrant.
The acquisition was due to luck, because the soul beast had many internal injuries and was also has less time left to leave, due to expanding all his energy to forcefully breakthrough, it was a 53,000 years old soul beast, which directly chose to sacrifice after some persuasion.
The soul skill it produced I named Golden Holy Tyrant Body. It was a defensive ability — illusionary golden dragon scales manifesting across the body's surface, each one genuine in the sense that they functioned as actual armor despite being partly spiritual in nature. The defensive boost was three hundred percent. Three times the base defense, clean and unconditional. And will further develop it defence boost with increase of soul power and soul ring age.
Another brute force ability. Stack it on top of the offensive doubling from the first ring, and the combat picture that emerged was simple: harder to hurt, hits twice as hard, continues on.
Xue Di had looked at both skills together after the second absorption and said, with the neutral tone she used for observations that weren't compliments but weren't criticism either: "You're going to be very difficult to kill."
I took that as accurate.
But there was something both abilities kept pointing at that I couldn't fully ignore.
The first skill: Golden Holy Dragon Body. The second skill: Golden Holy Tyrant Body.
The way I named it similar to first 2 soul skill of Tang Wulin GDK, because both soul skill are similar. The fact that these abilities had activated through Sirius at all — Sirius, who was structurally and fundamentally a golden holy dragon martial soul, who was just a part of Golden Holy Dragon's lineage — was something that didn't have a clean explanation.
The official best guess is Sirius is not just a Holy Light Dragon King lineage martial soul. Dragon-type, holy attribute, lineage that would explain the golden naming and the draconic imagery appearing in the skills.
And this all conclude to another answer on the table.
Golden Dragon King.
If it was GDK bloodline expressing through Sirius — it might be possible that Sirius can evolve in to new Golden Dragon king, but it is quite impossible as Golden Dragon king is locked in Divine realm.
Unless I got trace of Golden Dragon King bloodline.
I did not have enough information to reach that conclusion confidently. I was aware that I was pattern-matching against something I had known from the source material, and that pattern-matching wasn't the same as evidence. The Spirit ring skill could be coincidence. The golden imagery could be a natural expression of the soul beasts involved rather than the martial soul's bloodline.
But I kept the thought on the table.
Asura God, one of the five God Kings in the Douluo Divine Realm and one of the God Enforcers along with the God of Destruction and the Goddess of Life. He is the Divine Realm's God of Slaughter; in charge of killings, trials, laws and regulations. He has the responsibility of judging the gods, controlling the divine realm, and maintaining its rules, also judging all the sins in the world and protect all the existence that needs to be protected.
Despite all those reputation, Asura God was not a model god when it comes to own interest. He long since wanted to leave the Divine realm and seek for more freer and stronger world to become a man with great power which comes with no responsibility.
Asura potted against Dragon God to remove the hierarchy of strength to find way to become stronger, but then he realised, he still can't reach the same level as Creator God or Dragon God. So, after long time, he even plotted against Angel God, as some of the divinity regarding Judgement was overlapping, feeling necessary that Angel God divinity might make him stronger. But it still disappointed that he can't breakthrough above god king. So, he finally decided to leave the Divine realm and search for other realm with higher cultivation limit.
Which led him to poke his finger to another realm to seek for a person with great talent, in sense of control, or straight up a control freak who can handle, and inherit his God Throne and even defeat the potential threat of Dragon god. As both half of Dragon are alive, while on is still hiding, biding its time to again emerge in Douluo world.
But in between this process a mistake happened and a foreign object other than Tang San soul entered. Just he attacked to eliminate the foreign object, it divided into 6 parts, with 2 major parts and 4 smaller part. 5 fragment fell into Douluo planets and remaining one went to Desolate plain, where Golden Dragon King was captured. But as Asura went to Desolate Plain for search of the fragment he found, GDK along with the fragment has disappeared into a space-time hole.