Chapter 170 — Animal Spirits, the Five Sides, and a Lady Who Will Not Wait
The forest made its decision before Shen could make his.
The animals did not charge. They did not threaten. They simply moved — converging from every direction with a quiet, practiced ease that told him this was not the first time they had done this, and that they had never once needed to hurry.
Birds folded their luminous wings and settled into the canopy above.
Foxes spread outward in a wide, unhurried arc.
Behind him, the rhino stood breathing slow, its fury apparently concluded.
And at the centre of it all — the Fox King, white and ancient, amber eyes carrying the particular weight of something that has measured ten thousand things and found most of them wanting.
One by one, they placed fruits at his feet.
Large. Glowing softly. Dense with concentrated spirit energy that he could smell from where he stood — rich and strange and absolutely real. His stomach made a sound he chose not to acknowledge.
The Fox King spoke. Its voice carried the gravity of something that does not waste words.
"You are not suitable here."
Not a threat. Not cruelty. A fact, delivered with the same neutrality as stating a direction or a season.
Shen opened his mouth —
The ground opened first.
Pale light bloomed beneath his feet in a perfect circle, the lines too clean and deliberate to be anything natural. A teleportation array — etched into the earth like a seal that had been waiting patiently for exactly the right moment to activate. He felt its energy rise through his boots: ancient, immovable, certain.
He had time to gather the fruits.
He did not have time for anything else.
The forest vanished.
The cave received him without ceremony.
Stone floor. Familiar dark. The distant, watching presence of the training doll several floors above.
Shen stood in the dim light for exactly three seconds — fruits in both arms — and then sat down on the ground and ate.
He ate with the focused, wordless devotion of someone who had been running and fighting and almost dying for two straight days on an empty stomach. The fruit split open easily, yielding flesh that tasted like sunlight filtered through deep water — sweet and layered and faintly electric, each bite driving spirit energy into his depleted reserves like water filling a cracked vessel.
His hands stopped shaking.
The dull roar behind his eyes began, slowly, to quiet.
He did not speak. He did not think. He simply ate.
Lare hovered nearby in his bottle, watching with the careful stillness of someone who understood that interrupting this particular moment was not an option.
When the last fruit was gone, when Shen had sat in silence for a long while staring at nothing in particular, the questions that had been queuing behind the hunger finally stepped forward.
"How," he said.
Lare tilted his head. "How what?"
"All of it."
Shen set his hands on his knees. His voice was quiet but his eyes were working hard.
"They spoke. Every creature in that forest — the rhino, the fox king, the birds at the edge of the trees. Not growls. Not instinct. Words. They used god magic. I could feel it pressing against my skin from twenty metres away."
He paused.
"And that teleportation array — that wasn't beast work. Someone built that. Someone carved it into the earth with understanding and intent and set it to trigger on the right conditions."
He looked at Lare directly.
"What is that forest?"
Lare was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, the sarcasm that usually occupied his voice had been set aside entirely.
"I think," he said carefully, "they are Animal Spirits. And among them — gods."
Shen's expression didn't shift. "Explain."
Lare settled into the air before him, finding the posture of someone preparing to say something that deserves to be said properly.
"Before the Mages Era ended," he began, "the world was divided. Not into countries or kingdoms — into Sides. Five of them. Each one shaped by the nature of what ruled it, each one operating under different laws."
He paused.
"You already know pieces of this. You lived inside it."
Shen nodded slowly.
"The North Side was home to the Northern humans, and to the Dracones — the dragon-descended bloodlines who concealed themselves from the wider world during the height of the Mages Era. Not out of weakness. Out of patience."
He arranged his thoughts.
"The Arcane Deities moved through the North as well — beings old enough that calling them gods feels almost reductive. And the Meshtal: those who could bridge divine inheritance and crafted power. The North was specialised. Precise. It built things that outlasted the people who built them."
"The South?" Shen asked.
"Divided."
Lare's expression shifted slightly.
"The South split into two great currents — the Orthodox and the Unorthodox. The Orthodox side comprised five sects, each one interpreting the laws of power through its own doctrine."
He counted off his fingers.
"The Southern Edge Sect. The Flaming Movement Sect. The Cloud Mountain Sect. The Javanese Sect. The Wind Flows Sect."
"And the Unorthodox?"
"Only two."
Lare's voice dropped half a register.
"The Phylaces Cult — practitioners of pure sun energy, divine light taken to its furthest extreme. And the Divine Shadows Cult."
A pause.
"Most people simply called it the Demon Cult. It worked with inverted spiritual light. Power grown from absence. From what has been extinguished rather than what burns."
Shen was quiet. He filed this the way you file something you have always half-known but never had properly named for you.
"West?" he asked.
"Royals. Merchants. Those who administered the material world while everyone else was busy arguing over spiritual supremacy."
A faint dry note crept back into Lare's voice.
"The West was, practically speaking, the reason civilisation continued to function at all."
"East?"
"The East belonged to no one."
Lare said it simply, and the simplicity of it made it land differently than everything before it.
"No sect claimed it. No bloodline governed it. Just towns, villages, wanderers — people who didn't fit the other four categories and built their lives outside them. Majesty without structure. Freedom without a name for itself."
He met Shen's eyes.
"The East was where most people came from."
A silence settled between them. Shen let it.
"And the forest below us," he said.
"Exists between all five," Lare said.
"A neutral space — older than the Mages Era itself — where Animal Spirits and their gods lived entirely outside every system of classification the Five Sides ever constructed. No sect. No bloodline. No ranking structure that any human institution recognised or governed."
His voice went quiet in a way it rarely did.
"When I sensed them through the bottle, even I felt — "
He stopped. Chose the word carefully.
"Small."
The cave sat around that word for a moment.
"How different is their scale?" Shen asked.
"Let me explain the rankings," Lare said, "and you can judge for yourself."
He began at the foundation.
"The Martial Artist grades form the mortal base — Third Grade Masters, Second Grade, First Grade, Enlightened Masters. Above them, Martial Artist Velream, Supreme Peak Martial Artist Masters, full Martial Artist Masters."
He moved steadily upward.
"Then the Titan ranks begin: Transgendered Masters, Genesis Masters, Mythical Masters, Eternity Masters."
Shen listened without interrupting.
"Above the Titans, the Immortal scales. Immortal Grand Sword — fifteen hundred levels. Sword Masters — three levels. Immortal Grandmasters — ten levels. Immortal Velream — sixty levels. Life and Death Velream — fifty. Mystic Velream at the peak of the Immortal tier."
Lare's voice had taken on the quality of stone that has been inscribed rather than spoken.
"At Mystic Velream, the boundary between mortal and divine begins to dissolve."
"Then gods," Shen said.
"Then gods."
Lare straightened slightly.
"Lowest God — Level One. Low God — Level Three. Old God — Level Five. High God — Level Ten. Supreme God — Level Twenty. Ultimate Suprema — ten levels. Legendary Suprema — ten more. God Masters — one hundred levels."
He kept going, steady and unhurried.
"Above that: Life and Death — sixty thousand levels. Legendary God — ninety. Descended God. Hero God — a thousand levels. Seven Elders — three. True Masters — Level One."
He stopped.
"Is that the ceiling?" Shen asked.
"That is approximately twenty-five percent of the full god ranking system."
A silence that had a specific texture to it.
"Twenty-five," Shen repeated.
"If a common god wishes to ascend directly to God King rank," Lare continued, "they must complete twelve full courses of advancement. All of them. Without exception or shortcut."
He paused.
"If they succeed — they break through. If they fail, they lose their divine fire entirely. What remains isn't quite a god anymore."
"And above God King?"
"Boss King — six levels. Galactic King — six. UNO King — six. World No Masters — six. Galaxy Masters. Galactic Galaxy Administrator. Absolute Masters — ninety levels. Infinity Masters — three hundred and thirty-three."
Each tier landed like a stone dropped into still water.
"Universe Administrator — twelve. Universe King — two. Great Universe King — one."
He paused.
"And at the absolute summit?"
"Comprehensive All-Administrator," Lare said. "One. A single conceptual seat — the system does not make the distinction clearly, and I suspect that is deliberate."
He held the pause.
"And then the Null Void. Which is not a rank. It is a state — the complete absence of all things, including power. Whether anything exists within it, and what that thing would be, is a question I try not to spend too long thinking about."
The cave was very quiet.
Shen stared at a fixed point on the stone floor and did the mathematics of scale in his head.
He found them deeply uncomfortable.
"The fox king," he said. "The rhino. Where do they rank?"
Lare met his eyes evenly.
"Based on what I felt through the bottle — at minimum, the Seven Elders tier. Possibly higher. It is difficult to accurately measure something that does not wish to be measured."
Shen said nothing for a long moment.
He thought about the horn strike that had lifted him clean off the ground.
He thought about the teleportation array laid into the earth like scripture.
He thought about the Fox King's amber eyes, which had looked at him the way you look at something you have already fully understood and filed away.
You are not suitable here.
Not yet, those words had implied. Or perhaps — not in the form you currently wear.
He let this settle. He set it aside to return to later.
"Where do I rank?" he asked. "Right now."
Lare studied him. The expression on his small face was one Shen couldn't quite name — something between careful assessment and something older than assessment.
"You are at the Eternal tier," Lare said. "Which is higher than you should be, at your age, by a margin that is genuinely difficult to account for through standard cultivation theory."
Shen looked at him.
"You advanced approximately eleven tiers in under two years," Lare added, with the tone of someone presenting evidence they find both compelling and slightly alarming.
Silence.
"Is that unusual?" Shen asked.
Lare stared at him for a very long moment.
"Yes," he said. "That is profoundly unusual."
Shen considered this. Turned it over quietly.
Then, with the calm resolve of someone who has decided that the size of the mountain does not change the fact that it needs to be climbed, he leaned back against the cave wall.
"Then we train harder," he said.
He closed his eyes.
Within thirty seconds, the sound of his breathing had evened out completely.
Lare floated in the dimness and stared at him.
"I wasn't finished," he said. "There are still the Sythra and Snathon descent systems. And the Supreme Grand God Masters. And the Heavenly Legendary Tree Kings."
He waited.
"And the blessings. I hadn't even reached the blessings."
Shen slept with total conviction.
Lare sat with the remaining seventy-five percent of the god ranking system undelivered in his chest, and dimmed his glow slowly until the cave was dark enough for sleeping.
"Fine," he said quietly.
He kept watch.
Below, in the silver-lit depths of the underground forest, the stream ran over smooth stones and the bioluminescent canopy breathed its slow light and everything was, on the surface, still.
Beneath the surface it was not still at all.
The animals had shed their forms.
Not abandoned them — shed them, the way you remove a coat when you no longer need it. What stood in the clearing now were figures caught between shapes: neither fully beast nor fully human, inhabiting both with the ease of those who have lived in both for so long that the distinction has become mostly ceremonial.
The Wolf King stood at the centre.
Silver-haired in this form. Tall. Winter-moon eyes that hadn't changed with the shift. It watched the point in the air where the teleportation array had discharged.
Across the clearing, the Rhino's human shape was broad and unhurried, the silver mark that had been its horn now sitting as a faint line across its brow — branded rather than grown.
"You let him hit you," the Wolf King said.
"I tested him first," the Rhino said.
No defensiveness. Just precision.
"He survived the charge under starvation conditions, with less than a quarter of his energy reserves. He activated his god form. And then — "
Its fingers touched the mark on its brow.
"The symbol appeared."
The Wolf King's winter-moon eyes moved to it. "The Sythra mark."
"Yes."
A silence that both of them understood.
"We are bound," the Rhino said, "by a promise older than the Mages Era. The promise Arthas made, and that we have kept. We test those who enter. We break those who do not belong. And we recognise those who carry that mark — and when we do, we do not stand in their way."
It paused.
"I struck him once. I recognised him on the second pass. The sequence was correct."
"And then you sent him back," the Wolf King said.
"With food."
The Rhino's silver eyes moved toward the cave ceiling far above them.
"He needed food more than he needed anything else I could have given him."
A pause.
"He will return. He is not finished here."
"No," the Wolf King said quietly. "He is not."
The Rhino was still for a moment. Then —
"You and I could train him directly, when he descends again. Our methods would complement each other."
The Wolf King said nothing.
"My time in this forest is not unlimited," the Rhino said, and for the first time something that was not quite weight but was adjacent to it entered its voice. "I would rather what remains of it count for something."
A long pause.
"I will consider it," the Wolf King said.
The Rhino nodded once.
And then, without ceremony or announcement, it was simply gone. No light. No shadow. Just a stillness where a large presence had been standing.
The Wolf King remained.
It stood alone in the clearing, looking at nothing in particular, for a long while.
Then —
A footstep.
Somewhere in the canopy above. Light and deliberate, moving with the unhurried confidence of something that has never needed to be careful about where it places itself. A figure descended from the upper branches, landing on the roots below with a grace that was almost architectural in its precision.
A woman.
Or something that wore that form comfortably — not definitively, but as a preference. Her eyes held the same cold azure light as the creatures that had watched from the shadows when Shen first entered the forest.
Ancient. Patient.
And beneath the patience, if you looked carefully enough — faintly, specifically amused.
She looked upward toward the cave. Toward the sleeping figure she could not see but apparently did not need to.
"He is interesting," she said.
"Is that what you came to say?" the Wolf King asked.
"I came," she said, tilting her head by a small, precise degree, "to ask if I can test him."
The Wolf King regarded her. The winter-moon eyes gave nothing away — not empty, but containing too much to read from the surface.
"Can you?" it asked.
The weight on that single word was considerable.
The woman's smile did not waver.
It did not need to. It was the smile of something that had already made its decision and was extending the courtesy of a question purely as a formality.
The forest waited around them.
The stream ran over its smooth stones.
Above, in the cave, Shen slept deeply and without dreams — entirely unaware of what was being arranged for him.
End of Chapter 170