In the years following the Heavenspan Tournament, Bai Xiaochun began to teach. It was not a role he had sought out — he had actively hidden from the teaching assignment when it was announced — but the sect's leadership had insisted, arguing that a cultivator who had survived everything Bai Xiaochun had survived had something to teach the next generation. Specifically, how to survive.

His first class of ten junior disciples stared at him with a mixture of awe and confusion. They had heard the stories — the Shadow Claw Wolf, the Flame-Tailed Tiger, the Blood Stream cultivator who couldn't kill him — and they expected a warrior hero.

What they got was a nervous young man who spent the first ten minutes of class explaining the optimal escape routes from every building in the sect.

'You want us to learn how to run away?' one of the disciples asked.

'Running away is the foundation of all survival,' Bai Xiaochun said. 'If you can't run, you can't survive. If you can't survive, you can't cultivate. If you can't cultivate, why are you even here?'

It was not the inspirational speech they expected. But it was, they would later admit, the most useful thing anyone had told them.

He taught them the Sect Evasion Steps with a precision that surprised even him. He showed them how to build defensive formations from salvaged materials. He demonstrated — multiple times, accidentally — how to survive techniques that should have killed them, because his students kept trying to practice on him and discovered that he really was as durable as the rumors claimed.

By the end of the semester, Bai Xiaochun's survival class had a one hundred percent retention rate and zero fatalities — a record unmatched in the sect's history.