Six years passed.
In a village outside the Spirit City region, a line of children stood waiting for the most important morning of their young lives. Spirit awakening day — the ceremony that determined everything in this world, the foundation of status and power and possibility. The hall was modest, tended by a local spirit master of unremarkable rank who nonetheless performed the ceremony with the gravity it deserved. One by one, children stepped onto the awakening platform. Blue silver grass appeared with tedious regularity. A kitchen knife, which made one boy's mother begin quietly crying for reasons she refused to explain. A wolf, which made a father in the third row stand visibly straighter. A small cat that hissed at everyone present without apparent discrimination.
Three of the children registered soul power alongside their spirits: a heavyset boy whose bear martial soul came back at level four, a quiet boy with a drawn bow at level three, and a girl with a flower-plant spirit who registered at level one and looked faintly embarrassed about it. Not a bad showing for a village ceremony.
Then Jiang Hao's turn came.
He stepped onto the platform with the sunny smile that had taken the better part of six years to make look natural and effortless. Silver hair — a shade too bright, too clean to be entirely mundane — fell across his cyan eye as he bowed politely to the officiating spirit master. Too striking for a village boy.
The silver hair and cyan eyes came from no human father, no bloodline legacy, no branch of any local family tree. They came from a template — from Ragna, pulled before a first breath had been drawn in this world, whose physical form had settled into the fabric of a reincarnating soul before it had the chance to choose otherwise. The System's golden pull, and Ragna's template had woven itself in like a second skin that was also, and entirely, one's own. Six years of looking in water at that face and it had simply become the face. There was nothing strange about it from the inside.
The ceremony did its work. Something rose — familiar, the same way everything in this body had become familiar — and then kept rising, past where it should have stopped, into territory that made the spirit master's breath catch audibly.
Jiang Hao's eyes went very wide.
Expression held neutral. Spirits stirring in the awakening glow. The martial soul rose fully, let it come, let everyone see: a creature that looked, charitably, like a dog that had made several genuinely unfortunate life choices at every available junction. Pig-nosed, oddly proportioned, carrying the expression of something that had accepted its lot and found it wanting but saw no viable alternatives.
He understood immediately who his father is?
Yu Xiaogang.
A long, slow breath through the nose. The particular stillness of someone who had seen enough of the world — two lifetimes' worth of it — to not be ambushed by irony, however precise.
His mother had died giving birth to him, alone, in a village that hadn't thought to ask too many questions about absent fathers. The man responsible — that wandering spirit scholar with his stolen theories and a wasted martial soul — had apparently not remained in the area long enough to learn that he left a son behind.
Filed away. Not the time. The platform, the watching children, the spirit master whose hand had not yet steadied itself.
The second spirit — not the dog, something else entirely — pressed firmly down before it could surface into view. A flicker in the awakening glow, there for a fraction of a second and then sealed back under. Nobody saw it clearly.
Soul power pillar. Jiang Hao place his hand on cool stone.
Level seven.
The spirit master wrote the number down with hands that had developed a tremor at some point in the last three minutes. Jiang Hao thanked him with genuine politeness, stepped off the platform, and walked toward the exit. Behind him the murmuring had already built into something more audible — And underneath that noise, from a cluster of boys at the back who had apparently decided that the pig-nosed spirit provided excellent material:
"Did you see the pig-nose on that thing? Looks like the pig is the one doing the pulling!"
Laughter. Several enthusiastic oinks, offered for atmosphere.
Jiang Hao walked out into the morning sunlight without looking back.
They were children. Jiang Hao had died at twenty. It could afford to be patient about children.
The sunlight fell warm on this face.
At the same moment, in an orphanage on the other side of the continent, that same morning light fell through a different window onto a different face — paler, younger, white-haired with golden tips, entirely different in every visible way.
Its been 6 years since then, system went to deep sleep, and before being born, the only 10 pull Jiang hao pulled resulted in:
Ragna (Ragna Crimson),Galbrena (Wuthering Waves), Void Archive (Honkai Impact 3rd),
Split Body, Lion's Roar (Genshin Impact),Unlimited Life Analog Watch, Basic Martial Arts Mastery, Advanced Singing Skill, 20 Pellets (Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice), Flute.
First 4 are golden pull, and any one of the golden pull is lucky pull. About other some are purple and others are green.
Due to split body, 2 body born simultaneously carrying same soul or both are connected to same soul. One is Jiang Hao absorbing Ragna template and other is Xia Yanran absorbing Galbrena template. This template make sure that after awakening, both are guaranteed to awaken an useful martial soul. As Soul Land, despite having an infamous quote- "There is no trash spirit only trash soul master." it completely relies on bloodline to awaken an useful martial soul, and commoners get lucky to awaken one but they need to rely on sects or any forces to develop.
In the Spirit Hall orphanage, a small girl stood at the center of her own awakening platform, and waited.
White hair with edges tipped in fine gold-yellow. Golden eyes that moved across the room with the unhurried attention of a child who had learned, early and thoroughly, that watching before acting was the only sensible way to approach an unfamiliar situation. She was six years old, slight, and carried herself with a stillness that the other children in the hall found vaguely unsettling.
The awakening ceremony began. An eerie Martial soul awakened. Dark purple thread extended forming a ball of flame and slowly it shifted to form a beast.
The Chimera.
Lion-faced, python-bodied, crowned with a single spiraling goat horn — it materialised in the awakening light and filled the room in a way that had nothing to do with its physical dimensions. The sound in the hall changed quality. Not silence exactly but the particular compressed hush that happens when a room full of people makes a collective and unspoken decision to be very still. The officiating spirit master, a man of presumably adequate professional experience, had gone to a noticeably pale colour.
As the Chimera rose, something changed in the child awakening her martial soul. The gold-yellow that tipped the edges of white hair shifted — slowly, like temperature dropping, like a colour deciding it had been wrong about itself — and became pale blue. Cold and clear and very precise. The golden of the eyes deepened and brightened simultaneously, resolving into a fluorescent purple that caught and held the light of the awakening platform in a way that the platform's light had not put there. Both changes settled. Both were permanent.
Standing in the center of the Chimera's manifestation, eyes half-closed, hands folded, feeling the martial soul settle into place around this body like something that had been fitted for it specifically, like the way truly correct things fit — without friction, without adjustment. The Chimera was dark and strange and somewhat alarming to the people currently sharing the room with it. It was also, simply, one's own. There was nothing complicated about that part.
Second spirit suppressed without incident. Soul power pillar next —
She put her hand on the soul power pillar.
Innate ten.
The spirit master's hand, writing down the result, was unsteady enough to be visible from the platform. Then the whole crowd dispersed after the ending of Awakening ceremony.
A girl moved through the dispersing crowd with the ease of someone who had grown up inside Spirit Hall's particular rhythms and knew exactly how to be invisible within them when she chose. Spotting the girl after the ceremony ended was not difficult — the blue-tipped hair and the faintly luminous purple eyes made her visible in a crowd of children whose most dramatic feature was occasionally an interesting weapon spirit.
She came up behind Yanran.
Half a second of warning — not quite enough to do anything practical about what happened next, which was Liena's hands finding both cheeks simultaneously and achieving a grip that could plausibly have weathered a moderate structural earthquake.
"Ouch — stop, Sister Nana, stop it, it hurts —" The words came out considerably mangled by the ongoing cheek situation.