"Brother Chen!?"
"How is my business coming along?"
The middle-aged man sitting in the office looked at Youshen with a pleasant surprise, and Youshen waved to him from afar.
This fellow was Ye Han, an old classmate of Youshen's.
Yet compared to Youshen, who could barely be considered somebody, Ye Han's achievements were far too mediocre. At thirty-five years old, he was merely a Level 35 Spirit Grandmaster, and he would likely top out at the Spirit Ancestor level for the rest of his life.
As a Yellow-Cloth Deacon, he had moved beyond the duties of a White-Cloth Patrolling Deacon who constantly had to travel about, and belonged to the backbone tier of the entire Spirit Hall organization.
When manpower was short, he might even be dispatched to serve as the master of a Spirit Hall branch.
To ordinary people, a spirit master was already a big shot, and the rank of a Yellow-Cloth Deacon was close to that of a modern town administrator—someone ordinary people rarely got to see.
However, in Spirit City—the holy land in the hearts of spirit masters across the mainland, where the world's greatest battle prowess gathered—he was nothing more than an insignificant, odd-job-doing nobody.
At first, Ye Han had felt jealous seeing Youshen, whose talent was inferior to his, advance faster and become a spirit master before him. Even after getting severely beaten up by Youshen, he remained unconvinced, cursing Youshen's cultivation speed to slow down in his heart, and later frequently provoking and picking fights with him.
Yet as Youshen time and again displayed the extraordinary and eventually rode the momentum to rise, finally reaching heights Ye Han could only look up to, Ye Han's jealousy transformed instead into worship.
Watching Youshen—whose talent was comparable to his own—rise through exceptional wisdom and effort, Ye Han felt as though he were watching a version of himself who had taken a different path.
Clearly possessing an Innate Spirit Power of only rank 2, Youshen had managed to become a spirit master at age nine, a Great Spirit Master at fifteen, and a Spirit Grandmaster at twenty-one! In contrast, Ye Han himself—also with rank 2 Innate Spirit Power—became a spirit master at twelve, a Great Spirit Master at twenty-one, and didn't become a Spirit Grandmaster until twenty-nine. Such cultivation speed already showed that his lifelong ceiling probably stopped right there.
Fans worship idols and project their own emotions onto them; Ye Han was pretty much like that. He perhaps viewed Youshen as the continuation of his own dream of becoming a powerful spirit master.
When someone who ought to be ordinary breaks through the shackles and rises, they are bound to attract gazes of worship, disgust, or dismissal.
During one instance when Youshen was mocked and provoked, it was Ye Han—who usually didn't get along with Youshen—who stood up and spoke in his defense, and that became the turning point for easing their relationship.
About five years ago, Youshen even attended the wedding of Ye Han and his colleague.
Over such a long time, the conflicts of their youth had long since turned into memories to be laughed off.
Youshen trusted Ye Han, and this trust allowed him to comfortably share some of his requests with Ye Han and have him help secure a post for him in the cities surrounding Notting City.
"It's all sorted."
Ye Han made a reassuring gesture with his hand and said, "Brother Chen, your transfer paperwork is all done. The rest is just the acceptance process over in Notting City. In three days at the earliest, you can get ready to take up your post as... well, a deacon in Notting City."
Even Ye Han found it a bit awkward and hard to say out loud.
After all, Youshen was a Spirit Ancestor on the verge of breaking through to become a Spirit King, and he was also a renowned professor and theoretical master of Spirit Hall! Within the Spirit Hall Research Institute, one went from junior to intermediate to senior researcher before ever attaining a professor title!
A researcher's rank corresponded to White-Cloth and Yellow-Cloth Deacons and Purple-Cloth Bishops. Professors didn't have a fixed official rank, but were graded based on their appointed positions—yet at the very least... shouldn't it be a Black-Cloth Bishop!? A Black-Cloth Bishop was a genuine big shot in Spirit Hall. Taking up a post in some rural backwater was one thing, but how did he end up just becoming a Yellow-Cloth Deacon?! Even though these procedures passed through his own hands, Ye Han still found it somewhat incomprehensible.
He neither understood why the higher-ups in Spirit Hall would assign such a humiliating position, nor did he understand why Youshen chose to leave his post as a researcher to become a lowly deacon at the bottom.
"Brother Chen, I wouldn't bother asking anyone else, but why do you want to go to a tiny place like Notting City? I really don't get it. Isn't it great staying right here in the main hall? I even heard rumors earlier that the Pope seemed quite fond of you and planned to promote you to Director of the Research Institute."
Ye Han's voice was full of sighs and even a hint of indignation.
Just like a fanatic fan seeing their idol accept a commercial endorsement completely beneath their tier, wondering if something had gone wrong somewhere.
"The Pope... fond of me?"
Hearing Ye Han's question, Youshen had a rare moment where he almost couldn't keep a straight face.
"Uh, Brother Chen, is there... is something wrong?"
Seeing Youshen's wry smile, Ye Han realized he had probably said the wrong thing. Lacking certain information that his stratum had no way of knowing, he had blurted out something that made Youshen find it neither funny nor tragic. Seeing Ye Han's awkward expression, Youshen had no intention of holding it against him.
After all, while some matters among Spirit Hall's upper echelons were tacitly understood by everyone up there, those in the lower and middle tiers had no clue about the conflicts at the top, foolishly believing that everyone was one big, loving family and that the higher-ups were all of one heart and mind.
In any organization or institution, such a situation was hardly uncommon news.
Youshen's current achievements and cultivation certainly did not rely solely on the word "effort."
When were there ever fewer hardworking mediocrities in this world? Didn't most of them end up as crop after crop of harvested leeks?
Youshen's ability to cultivate to rank 10 by the age of nine was a speed comparable to even some of the more slack geniuses with rank 5 Innate Spirit Power.
Yet a large part of the reason for this was that spirit power before rank 10 was relatively easy to raise.
Coupled with the fact that Youshen inherited the mindset of scientific training from his past life and adult self-discipline, he managed to overtake others on a bend at a time when his classmates were only six years old and neither capable of focusing single-mindedly on cultivation and study nor able to engage in systematic and scientific training.
However, if Youshen had continued to cultivate step-by-step like that, he might not have turned out much better than Ye Han. A grassroots personnel working for Spirit Hall and handling trivial chores was perhaps what Youshen was supposed to look like.
As his level increased, growing ever closer to his own innate talent shackles, his cultivation speed would only get slower and slower.
Every odd-numbered major realm for a spirit master presented a clear qualitative change.
A First-Ring Spirit Master meant the spirit master possessed their first spirit ability; a third ring for a Spirit Grandmaster was often the spirit master's first conventional thousand-year spirit ring in the traditional sense; a fifth ring for a Spirit King was their first ten-thousand-year spirit ring; the seventh ring for a Spirit Saint was the overbearing and powerful Martial Soul True Body; and the power of a Title Douluo at the ninth ring went without saying.
Yet alongside this qualitative change came even more stubborn shackles.
Especially the seventh and ninth rings—the solidity of these two layers of shackles could be said to be double that of the other odd-numbered realms.
Youshen had read quite a few Douluo fanfictions, and in many of them, the protagonists easily broke through their innate talent shackles, absorbing suitable spirit rings beyond the age limit to make their martial souls evolve, making the path to becoming a Title Douluo smooth and broad.
Therefore, at the very beginning of his martial soul awakening, Youshen did not feel discouraged by his low Innate Spirit Power and mediocre martial soul quality.
Naturally, he could not just give up and lie flat simply because his aptitude was insufficient.
If one wanted to absorb a spirit ring beyond the age limit, whale glue was inevitably the resource most transmigrators thought of first.
Yet even in the era of Douluo I, before the role of whale glue in improving physical constitution had been discovered, this item was by no means cheap—at least, it was certainly not something a grassroots child like Youshen could afford with money.
The best method was to contribute the effects of whale glue to Spirit Hall, seeking this reward in return.
Of course, this "contribution" also came with a choice of methods.
Swaggering up to people and telling them what whale glue was used for was clearly extremely unwise.
It was best for Youshen to take charge of the "discovery" of whale glue's uses himself—meaning, under the guise of researching materials, he would use Spirit Hall's funds as a researcher to purchase thousand-year and even ten-thousand-year whale glue.
At that point, naturally, numerous problems would stem from it.
How to ensure people trusted him? How to ensure he wouldn't be dismissed with a tiny, mosquito-leg reward just because he was too young, letting someone else pluck the fruit of his research? How to maximize benefits while ensuring his own safety?
Youshen's choice was not to make the effects of whale glue public right away, but to first establish his persona as a little genius of theory, and then...
In the year he turned twelve, the same year Yu Xiaogang published *The Ten Core Competencies of Martial Souls*, he published *Refuting the Ten Core Competencies of Martial Souls*.
With that, he drew the gaze and favor of Qian Xunji.
Likewise, he was remembered with hatred from then on by that brain-dead woman.