Novel spoilers

 DanTeeQ:

Ranking of the strongest characters ?

From what I remember, by power level from the books, and only talking about characters we've seen so far:

0.5. Shen Shu (original version)

1. Supervisor

2. Wei Yuan

3. Shen Shu (just his disembodied arm), the head of the Yunlu Academy

3.5 Jin Lian

4. All the gold gongs, the other masters of Yunlu Academy, Li Miaozhen, Chu Yuanzhen, Yan Qianhuan

After rank 4 it gets a little too numerous to name. 

The whole assembled Shen Shu was a demigod, halfway between rank 1 and a god.  Currently he's just a disembodied arm and can beat a rank 3 if he tries hard enough. 

Chu Yuanzhen has a weird cultivation thing going on but he's roughly as strong as a rank 4. If he pulls out that sword on his back he could briefly be stronger, about a 3.5 for that one attack. 

Jin Lian (head of the heaven/earth society) is a special case. He was previously a rank 2 but is currently maybe equivalent to a 3-4 I believe. 

 LadyBux:

Does LinAn find her own talent? 

Her talent is being adorable. 

 Singularity:

XQA's dad stole a bunch of the mandate of heaven and stuffed it into XQA, so he has more imperial mojo then anybody, likely including the emperor himself. The dragon can sense the mandate/imperial mojo. 

I don't remember his mother being a imperial descendant but that might be true too. That is not why the dragon likes him though, seeing how Lin An is daughter of the emperor and the dragon doesn't care about that. 

Sorry if I'm using different terms. I read  (listened) to the book in Chinese, not sure what the words the English translation used were. In the book, what I'm referring to as the mandate is literally translated as the "national luck." 

yeah her mum is a descendant of the royal family 500 years ago when the rebellion happened

 Dimelza:

Need a spoiler about Yang Yan and the other guardians. Will they come back soon? 

Acc to the book they take some time, after the buddhists (Tianyu ppl) leave.

 Singularity:

Gotcha, maybe that's why XQA makes for a good mandate-vessel. There's gotta be hundreds of imperial descendants though, that's definitely not what makes him special. 

There is definitely a bunch of things. But wasn't the stuffing the national fortune into the baby Xu Qi An a temporary measure by his father?

Just a stopgap to escape the Supervisor's notice. Sure everything screws up when his mother decides to go against everyone and leave ML in the capital, right under the Supervisor's nose. 

I think that's why the Supervisor chose him - he has national fortune, he is smart, he is Dafeng royalty to a certain degree, he is his father's son, he is a martial artist. All the conditions were optimum and the Supervisor could raise him to be a Martial God! 

 uanaka:

What is this "mandate of heaven", is it actually something tangible? And does XQA ever really get any more of a power upgrade or will he continue to be a MC with the "power of friendship"?

So the mother is descendant of royalty, is the father anyone important aside from the "mandate of heaven" stuff?

XQA gets super OP later. This is a cultivation novel, cultivation novel protagonists don't just get pretty ok at fighting....

The father is actually a main villain. He's a late game boss (after the emperor, probably won't show up this season). 

The mandate of heaven (or imperial luck) is a bit vague in the book, but it's kind of a magic power that belongs to the imperial family. When the nation has the mandate/luck, everything just goes right and things turn out ok. When the nation loses the mandate/luck, stuff starts to go bad and eventually the nation itself might fall. It's not really a power you can directly use, but it bestows good luck and favorable outcomes on whoever/whatever has it. 

IIRC XQA's dad was trying to steal the luck for his own nefarious use, but to evade detection he stuffed it into his son, planning on extracting it later. The opening scene with XQA about to be banished from the capital was actually part of his dad's plot. The idea was that he would kidnap XQA once he's out of the capital (and the Supervisor's view) and extract the luck from him (which would kill XQA), but the untimely events of the first episode prevented this. 

@uanaka  

He's not actually the ultimate big bad. He's the last villain I really cared about though. The really late villains are mostly deities of some kind, which IMO just isn't as interesting.