Level 10.
The moment I hit that milestone, I could literally feel something blocking my cultivation. It's like hitting a wall in a video game where the tutorial ends and the real content begins. Up until now, cultivating soul power was just about building up energy reserves and strengthening your foundation. But level 10? That's where everything changes, because this is where you need your first soul ring.
And let me tell you, the soul ring system is absolutely wild when you really think about it.
Think of soul rings like mandatory class progression quests in an RPG. You can grind soul power all you want, but you literally cannot advance past level 10 without completing the ritual—hunting down a soul beast that's compatible with your martial spirit, killing it, absorbing its soul ring, and somehow integrating that power into your own martial soul. No ring? No progress. It's a hard gate that everyone has to pass through.
Thanks to my perfect memory and obsessive research habits, I'd already absorbed dozens of accounts about first soul ring expeditions from the academy library. Some stories were absolutely epic—dramatic battles against powerful beasts, last-minute victories, life-changing power awakenings. Others were honestly pretty anticlimactic—quick hunts against weak creatures that barely put up a fight.
But every single account reinforced the same core concept: a soul ring doesn't just give you a power boost. It grants you an actual skill. Like, a literal new ability that you didn't have before. It's basically opening a loot box, except the stakes are your entire future as a soul master, and the RNG can either make you incredibly powerful—or leave you with something completely useless.
Which brings me to this weird pattern I started noticing during my research.
Let's say someone has a fire-type martial soul. Depending on the soul beast they absorb, they might get Fireball, Flame Whip, Fire Punch, or even weird stuff like Flash Ignition or Burning Fog. Sometimes, two soul masters use the same exact kind of fire-type beast—and still walk away with completely different first soul skills. Like, what?
You'd think that having a fire-type martial soul would naturally let you throw fireballs at the very least. But apparently not. If you don't get it from a soul ring, you just… can't do it. Which sounds off.
Isn't Fireball basically the default magic attack in every fantasy system? And yet it's not something every fire-based martial soul can do—unless the soul ring provides that specific "skill."
So, here's my theory: soul rings don't just give you a technique. They awaken a kind of talent—something buried in the structure of your martial soul that you can't normally access. Maybe all fire martial spirits have the potential to launch fire attacks, but without the right "key," that ability stays locked away.
It's not just about copying the power of the beast. It's about aligning that beast's essence with your martial spirit's potential. The beast doesn't hand you a skill—it gives your martial spirit the right push to finally express a hidden function.
That would explain the huge variance in soul skills even from the same soul beast. The outcome depends not just on the beast itself, but on you—your martial spirit, your qualities, maybe even your intent at the moment of fusion.
Which, if I'm right, means soul ring selection is way more than "get the best beast you can kill." It's about compatibility. Resonance. Talent unlocking.
And that... makes things a lot more complicated.
But that's just my theory. I'll need to do way more research to confirm it, and honestly, most people probably don't think about soul rings this analytically. They just want cool powers and don't care about the underlying mechanics.
Anyway, back to my specific situation.
My martial spirit is mental-type, which is apparently pretty rare according to every source I've consulted. Most people get weapon spirits or beast spirits or elemental spirits. Body spirits are uncommon, and mental-type body spirits are like finding a shiny Pokemon—technically possible, but you probably won't see another one for years.
This rarity meant I couldn't just follow standard advice for first soul ring selection. There aren't established guides for "how to optimize your brain-based martial spirit." I had to do original research, cross-reference fragmentary information, and basically become an expert on soul beast compatibility from scratch.
I spent literally months gathering intel. I bribed upperclassmen with custom yoyos to share their expedition experiences. I traded business profits for access to restricted library sections. I even convinced some instructors to give me detailed breakdowns of different beast types by offering to make personalized toys for their kids.
The information gathering was honestly more challenging than I expected. Nobody shares the actual effects of their soul skills—those are considered trade secrets that could get you killed if your enemies knew your exact capabilities. But I managed to collect general compatibility data: which beast ages were survivable for different martial spirit types, what kind of mental resilience was required for different absorption processes, and most importantly, survival statistics for first-time expeditions.
One thing that kept coming up in my research was this concept that the age limit for soul ring absorption isn't actually a hard cap. The conventional wisdom says first-ring soul masters can only absorb rings from beasts that are roughly 10-300 years old as an estimate, but apparently that's more of a safety guideline than an absolute rule.
What really determines compatibility is your physical and mental resilience. During the absorption process, the soul beast's essence may fight back against integration—it's literally trying to overwhelm your consciousness and take control of your body. If your willpower isn't strong enough, you either fail to absorb the ring (wasting the opportunity and potentially getting injured), or worse, the beast's instincts start influencing your personality and decision-making.
This made me realize something kind of disturbing: soul rings aren't just skills or power boosts. They're fragments of another creature's soul being forcibly integrated into your own spiritual foundation. You're literally taking pieces of dead soul beasts and making them part of your core identity.
Which means soul rings don't just give you new abilities—they may give you new aspects of personality, maybe new instincts, maybe even new ways of thinking. They fundamentally reshape who you are at the deepest level.
That's both terrifying and incredibly exciting. My innate ability is perfect memory, but I've always had this gut feeling that my martial spirit has way more potential than just remembering things clearly. There's something else waiting to be unlocked, some deeper capability that I haven't accessed yet.
A soul ring might be the key to discovering what that hidden potential actually is.
To prepare for the eventual expedition, I decided to do some deep exploration of my own capabilities. I closed my eyes, entered a meditative state, and literally dove into my own mindscape to see what was already there.
At first, it was blank—a pure white space. But with each mental step, shelves started sprouting from the floor like digital vines, growing upward and outward until they formed this massive library structure filled with every book, scroll, and document I'd ever read. Each memory was perfectly organized and instantly accessible, categorized by subject, date, relevance, and a dozen other filtering systems.
Then I added another layer. I'm a modern guy, after all.
Rows of glowing monitors materialized around the library space, looking like something straight out of a cyberpunk hacker movie. Terminal windows, search interfaces, data visualization displays, even floating HUD elements that could track multiple information streams simultaneously.
Here's the catch—searching for specific data takes longer the more information I accumulate. Eventually, even perfect memory becomes a bottleneck. My martial soul apparently lets me simulate computer-like interfaces within my own consciousness, cutting down retrieval time by maybe 5-10%. Not exactly game-breaking, but every efficiency improvement compounds over time.
I spent hours exploring this mental space, experimenting with different organizational systems, testing search algorithms, and basically turning my brain into the most advanced personal database anyone in this world had ever seen.
The whole experience made me even more curious about what a soul ring might add to this foundation. If my martial spirit could already simulate a virtual reality in my mind, what would happen when I integrated the essence of a soul beast that specialized in mental abilities?
Finally, after months of preparation and research, it was time to make it official.
I filed my application for a soul ring expedition.
"Chen Ming, right?" the instructor asked, glancing up from his paperwork. He was this middle-aged guy who always looked like he'd rather be doing literally anything else than managing student expeditions. "You've confirmed that you've reached level 10?"
"Yes, teacher. Hit it three days ago."
He nodded and made a note on his list. "Martial soul classification... mental-type body soul, if I recall correctly. And you're that entrepreneur kid, aren't you? The one with the toy business?"
"That's me. SpiritSpin brand. I take custom orders if you're interested," I said with a grin.
"Huh. You've got quite the reputation among the younger students. My daughter actually asked me to get one of your premium models for her birthday."
"Good branding strategy," I replied. "Word-of-mouth marketing is incredibly effective in enclosed communities like the academy."
He actually chuckled at that. "Alright, business kid. I'll report your application to the Dean and we'll get an expedition scheduled. What soul beast are you planning to target?"
This was the moment I'd been preparing for. "Bloody Baboon. I've done extensive research on compatibility factors, and it offers strong mental resistance capabilities, decent agility enhancement, and excellent synergy with spiritual-type martial souls."
His eyebrows shot up slightly. "That's... actually a pretty bold choice for a first ring. Bloody Baboons are dangerous."
"I understand the risks," I said confidently. "But I've calculated that the potential benefits outweigh the danger, especially given my martial spirit's specific characteristics."
He studied me for a moment, probably trying to figure out if I was being recklessly overconfident or genuinely well-prepared. "Alright. I'll make the recommendation. You should receive official notification within the week."
I nodded, trying to keep my excitement from showing too obviously. "Thank you, teacher."
As I walked away from his office, my heart was absolutely pounding. This was it—the real beginning of my journey as a soul master. Everything up until now had been preparation, foundation-building, skill development. But once I got that first soul ring, I'd officially be part of the supernatural power structure of this world.
Time to find out what my martial soul could really do when it had some soul beast essence to work with.
Let's absolutely see what happens next.