"Ha ha." Arthur wiped the grease from the corner of his mouth. "Just take that as a joke."
He said nothing more. Trying to talk Mu Ye around was pointless.
The hundred-thousand-year spirit ring could wait until he reached the fiftieth or sixtieth rank before he absorbed it. That was fine either way.
But Gu Yue had made the suggestion, and since she had, Arthur intended to follow through on it as best he could.
There were layers to this that he couldn't put into words. Those who understood would understand.
Seeing him relent, the tension in Mu Ye's expression finally eased. He pointed at the medicine jar sitting in front of Arthur. "Smart kid. Drink your medicine."
"Actually, train with me first. I'll teach you the Body Sect's innate secret arts. Even if you want to absorb a hundred-thousand-year spirit ring eventually, you'll need a body and Spiritual Power strong enough to bear that kind of weight."
Arthur shook his head. "Let's leave it for now. I may have other things to take care of soon."
Now that he had reached the fortieth rank, he needed to focus entirely on tempering his Spiritual Power.
Mu Ye's brow furrowed again. "Other things? More important than learning the innate secret arts?"
He stared at Arthur, his tone carrying a note of bafflement. "Do you have any idea what these secret arts are? They are the core inheritance of the Body Sect. You are in your golden period right now. You cannot afford to waste it."
His own distraction back in the day was precisely what had left his cultivation stuck in that awkward middle ground.
Arthur met his gaze without flinching. "Teacher, I know what I'm doing."
Mu Ye held that gaze for a long moment without speaking.
Through what he had witnessed during Arthur's breakthrough, he had come to suspect that there was a profound secret beneath the surface.
So he asked nothing more, and said in a low voice, "As long as you've thought it through. Come find me once you've finished what you need to do, and I'll teach you then."
In an open-air training ground at Eastsea Academy, Arthur was stretched out in a chair with a cold drink in hand, soaking up the sun, perfectly at ease.
Everyone else in Class Zero was off to the side getting beaten black and blue. Gu Yue and Na'er were no exception.
Wu Changkong, his fighting spirit restored and his breakthrough to Soul Sage complete, was to them what the strictest father imaginable might be.
Absolutely terrifying.
"Ahhhh."
Arthur took a long sip of his freshly chilled drink, watching his classmates scramble frantically from Wu Changkong, and couldn't hold back a laugh.
Gu Yue condensed her elements into a shield in front of her, only for Wu Changkong to slice through it with a casual flick of his sword, scattering ice chips all over her face.
Na'er twisted and dodged on pure physical ability, but Wu Changkong's sword aura hemmed her in from every angle, cutting off her movement at every turn.
The others were in worse shape still, each one of them yelping and scrambling under Wu Changkong's assault.
Xu Xiaoyan, hanging back at the rear in her support role, was on the verge of tears watching her classmates get battered.
It was daytime, which meant her Absolute Control had no effect. Not that it mattered: she had tried it once in an earlier session.
She had managed to activate it and lock him in place, and the others had seized the moment to pile on and take him down.
Then Wu Changkong had entered his second phase.
Soul power fully released, soul skills fully unleashed.
On a good day he would throw in a third phase for good measure: his two-character Battle Armor descending onto him like a second skin.
They were completely out of options.
Arthur watched with great interest and cracked open a fresh bottle. The contrast between his leisurely pose and the wreckage of his classmates was almost offensively vivid.
"Ah, life," he murmured to himself from time to time, with all the contentment of a man in retirement.
He really was in retirement, in a sense.
He had intended to focus on tempering his Spiritual Power, but when he actually turned his attention inward, he found that it was already cultivating and rising on its own, nourished by the earth's spiritual veins.
His soul power was the same.
With the Red Dragon Furnace Core, each breath in and out brought an automatic increase in soul power, and the rate was incomparably faster than any amount of dedicated meditation could achieve.
All at once, Arthur genuinely had no idea what to do with himself.
When training wrapped up, Xie Xie walked over, face swollen into a patchwork of purple and green, words half-garbled: "Arthur, could you at least go lie somewhere else?! I'm over here getting pummeled and you're just lounging right there in front of me. Do you have any idea how that feels?!"
Xu Xiaoyan drifted over as well, eyes still red around the edges. "Arthur, have some mercy on us. Could you maybe not watch next time? Every time you smile, Teacher Wu gets stricter."
It was a genuine mystery. Arthur simply watching was fine enough. But the moment he cracked a smile, Wu Changkong's brow would draw together and his blows would get heavier.
Tang Wulin scratched his head. Something about Arthur right now reminded him of a familiar feeling: the scent of someone completely adrift.
Gu Yue studied Arthur for a moment, then asked, "What's going on with you? You look thoroughly lost."
"Lost, thoroughly lost!" Arthur's expression went flat. He shot upright with a maddening air of self-satisfaction.
"You tell me: soul power rising on its own, Spiritual Power climbing while I lie here, my days spent eating, sleeping, and watching you all get beaten. Is this any way to live? Where's the ambition?!"
More than anything else, Arthur already had a guaranteed path to divinity. The position of Plane Lord was by any measure a god-rank existence.
All he had to do was continue cultivating as planned. Even if he never created his own divine seat from scratch, ascension was still within reach.
To suddenly not have to struggle anymore was genuinely disorienting.
Xie Xie's freshly nursed cheek twitched again. If anyone else had said something like that, he would have written it off as bragging.
But with Arthur, he believed every word.
In his eyes, Arthur was simply a player who had cheats enabled.
Resentment surged through him.
"You call that lacking ambition? The rest of us are killing ourselves to cultivate, and you can get there lying flat. If you're adrift, then the rest of us should go find a block of tofu to smash our heads into!"
"Exactly, Arthur!" Xu Xiaoyan blinked her still-red eyes, her voice soaked in envy. "If I could be like you, I'd be smiling in my sleep."
"Come on, lying around all day is exhausting in its own way." Arthur laced his fingers behind his head and lay back down, staring up at the white clouds drifting across the sky with a long, theatrical sigh.
"Oh, right. Gu Yue, how's the Battle Armor design coming along?"
"Are you going to manage it or not?"
"No? Then find someone else." Gu Yue gave a cold snort and turned her head away.
The topic was too rarefied and the mood too restless for a real answer.
Hearing that Arthur was already working toward Battle Armor, the others were instantly consumed with envy.
Xie Xie stared at Arthur, his throat working, his expression a portrait of aggrieved indignation. "Battle Armor? You're already working on Battle Armor?"
When he had once pestered Teacher Wu with questions about Battle Armor, he had been shut down in a single sentence: "Come back when you've broken through to Soul Ancestor."
No one could say how long that would take, and that was only the starting point. Actually putting on a set of Battle Armor required Soul King level at minimum.
That was an unknowable number of years away.
And yet here was Arthur, already getting the project underway.
Xu Xiaoyan, ever the devoted admirer, clutched the hem of her clothes with both hands, eyes shining.
"Arthur's Battle Armor is definitely going to be incredible, right? And if Gu Yue is designing it, it'll be amazing and beautiful!"
"You think too highly of me." Gu Yue said, a helpless note in her voice. "It still needs some time."
Designing someone's Battle Armor was an intensely personal thing, and of course she wanted to do it herself for Arthur.
Every book she had ever read said the same: couples' battle armor was always made together.
But Arthur was an impossible force of nature, whose pace of progress refused to be reasoned with, especially for someone who was only ten years old.