A Cleaning Servant of Douluo Hall Awakened an Emergency Food?
Suotuo City, in the southern reaches of the Balak Kingdom, Heaven Dou Empire.
A teenage boy and girl were walking side by side along a street just inside the city gates.
"Brother, look over there!! The shops here are several times bigger than the ones in Nuoding City, and the air is full of the smell of roast meat and candied fruit!!"
Xiao Wu excitedly tugged at Tang San's sleeve, her large, bright eyes darting over the dazzling array of stalls lining the street.
Watching Xiao Wu brim with vitality, Tang San smiled dotingly.
He raised a hand to smooth the stray hairs at her temples, tousled by the evening breeze, and said gently, "All right, whatever you want. But Suotuo City is a mix of fish and dragons, and there are far more Soul Masters here than in Nuoding City. We should keep a low profile while we're out."
"I know, I know! With you here, Brother, who would dare bully me??" Xiao Wu scrunched her nose playfully and pulled Tang San by the arm toward the most brilliantly lit district in the city center.
Suddenly, the horned horses pulling carts in the street began pawing the ground uneasily and whinnying in terror. Immediately afterward, even the breeze in the air came to an eerie halt.
"What's going on?"
Tang San abruptly stopped in his tracks. The inner force of his Mysterious Heaven Skill was actually shuddering out of control, and he was startled to discover that the normally gentle Soul Power drifting between heaven and earth around him had turned violent and chaotic in an instant.
Before he could make sense of it, a terrifying, deafening rumble suddenly exploded across the heavens!
"Rumble-!"
Shop windows on both sides of the street shattered in sheets. The bustling marketplace fell deathly silent, only for countless terrified screams from the civilians to erupt moments later...
"Brother!! Look at the sky!!"
Xiao Wu's voice abruptly changed pitch. She instinctively clutched Tang San's arm, her rosy face turning deathly pale in an instant.
Tang San looked up in horror, driving his Mysterious Heaven Skill to its limit and circulating his Purple Demon Eye at full speed without holding anything back. Violet light blazed in his eyes.
When he saw the sight in the night sky clearly, he could not help sucking in a breath of cold air.
The once deep, dark curtain of night above them now resembled a glazed mirror struck hard by a heavy hammer, forcibly split open by a tremendous heavenly chasm that stretched across an unknown number of tens of thousands of li!
Dazzling golden divine light surged wildly from the rift, dyeing more than half the sky in a bizarre kaleidoscope of colors.
Through his Purple Demon Eye, Tang San saw to his horror that behind the heavenly chasm lay the magnificent phantom image of a continent from another world!
Amid the terrifying vortex created by the collision and compression of the two worlds, countless enormous mountain fragments, broken walls and ruins, and strange crystals shimmering with seven-colored light poured down from the heavenly chasm alongside streak after streak of light, like a river of stars bursting through a breached dam. Trailing long tails of light, they whistled down toward every corner of the Douluo Continent!
"What kind of power is this... Could gods be fighting??"
Tang San's heart pounded violently, and his palms were ice-cold.
Streaks of light filled the sky like a swarm of falling stars, cutting through the night.
At the same time, in a deep, secluded valley on the outskirts of the Star Dou Great Forest, far from any human presence, the entire valley shook violently as the purple-gold heavenly chasm tore open overhead. Countless hundred-year and thousand-year Soul Beasts dwelling on the forest's outskirts roared in terror.
Inside a natural stone cave at the end of the valley, a young man sat cross-legged on a flat slab of bluestone.
His name was Chu Yuan. He wore a simple white robe patterned with gold, his ink-black hair falling loose over his shoulders. His face was so handsome it was almost bewitching.
It had been a full six years since he came to this world called the Douluo Continent.
Six years ago, when he had awakened at the edge of this forest, he had carried two entirely different sets of memories in his mind. One belonged to a transmigrator from Earth, and the other to Phanes, the "Primordial One," the first creator god of the Teyvat universe, who had defeated the seven great dragon kings and established the order of heaven and earth.
Phanes had fought the seven great dragon kings in the war of creation, and later fought a brutal "War of Funerary Flame" against the Second Throne, the Vinster King Nibelung, who had returned bringing the "power of the Abyss" with him.
Although Phanes had won a pyrrhic victory, his divine body had been grievously wounded and his authority shattered. He could only wrap Teyvat in the "False Sky" and cling to life.
Over several thousand years, Teyvat's Irminsul and Ley Lines had gradually been almost entirely corroded by the Abyss. The False Sky was on the verge of complete collapse, and all of Teyvat faced the desperate prospect of being swallowed whole by the cosmic Abyss.
To save all the people of Teyvat and restore his divine authority in full, the slumbering Phanes exhausted the last of his prophetic authority and searched the void of the multiverse until he found a vibrant planet on the rise, with a relatively primitive structure of laws: Douluo Star.
Six years ago, Phanes intercepted Chu Yuan, the soul of a transmigrator from Earth, in the void. He fused him with half of his own origin of creation, turning him into a "Seed of Genesis" and sending him in advance to be nurtured on the outskirts of the Douluo Continent's Star Dou Great Forest.
The purpose was to let Chu Yuan grow a physical body adapted to the laws of Douluo Star and become the "world anchor" and the new ruler of Heavenly Principles when the two worlds merged.
During those six years, because the two worlds had yet to formally connect, the primordial divine power within him had remained dormant and self-sealed, waiting for the moment the barriers between the worlds shattered.
And now, the moment had come.
"Boom-!"
The purple-gold heavenly chasm above burst completely open. The seven elemental powers of Teyvat and the laws of Soul Power on the Douluo Continent, like two boundless oceans, began to scour and mingle with one another beyond the atmosphere in the most primal and violent fashion.
Amid the aftershocks of the cross-world laws, powerful enough to crush ordinary living beings to dust in an instant, the shackles that had lain dormant within Chu Yuan for six years shattered with a boom!
"Crack-"
A crisp sound, like a god's sigh and the snapping of shackles, suddenly echoed from the deepest reaches of Chu Yuan's soul.
Chu Yuan's eyes snapped open. His once deep-black pupils became a dazzling interweaving of pale gold and brilliant silver-white.
The air throughout the stone cave froze in an instant, and loose stones on the walls slowly floated into the air.
Calm-faced, Chu Yuan slowly raised his right hand.
"Hum-"
With a clear, ringing chime, an illusory crown of light radiating seven-colored elemental power hovered silently above his palm. Four diamond-shaped, winglike rays of light pulsed slowly on either side of the crown.
First Martial Soul, [Crown of Heavenly Principles]!
The instant the [Crown of Heavenly Principles] appeared, the Douluo Continent's Soul Power drifting through the cave around him was forcibly drawn out and transformed into the purest primordial divine power, surging into every limb and bone in his body.
Immediately afterward, Chu Yuan turned his left hand slightly and curled his five fingers. A tender green branch, as though carved entirely from glazed crystal, blossomed in his left palm.
Second Martial Soul, [Irminsul]!
The instant the branch appeared, Chu Yuan's consciousness seemed to soar infinitely upward. It pierced straight through the stone cave's layers of rock, connecting with the pulse of the earth deep within the Star Dou Great Forest beneath his feet and the fragments of Teyvat's landmass that were still falling and merging high above.
Boom! The instant his Twin Martial Souls fully awakened, the power Chu Yuan had accumulated for six years erupted like a volcano.
Level ten, level twenty, level thirty!
Without encountering a single bottleneck, his physical strength and spiritual sea of consciousness underwent a transformation that shed their old form and remade them under the baptism of primordial divine power. Finally, they settled firmly at level thirty!
"The collision between the laws of the two universes is even more violent than expected... Has Teyvat's landmass been torn into countless fragments, falling onto Douluo Star in batches ahead of time?"
Chu Yuan slowly exhaled a breath of stale air. The golden and silver divine light in his eyes gradually receded, returning them to a black as deep as an abyss.
He looked down at the [Irminsul] trembling slightly in his left palm. Countless pieces of intricate information flooded into his mind through the crystalline branch's sensing of the Ley Lines.
Through Irminsul's feedback, he clearly discerned the cruel law governing the current merging of the two worlds: Douluo Star's native planar consciousness was instinctively rejecting outsiders.
The girls from Teyvat who had been swept onto the Douluo Continent along with the fragments of land had lost the protection of Celestia's Statues of the Seven and been cut off from their native elemental Ley Lines. The Visions and elemental power within them were being fiercely suppressed and corroded by the Douluo Continent's laws of Soul Power.
If no one intervened in time, not only would their strength be greatly reduced, but their elemental power would also run dry and rampage because it had lost its circulation through the Ley Lines. In the better case, they would fall into a lengthy coma; in the worse, their origins would be damaged and their flowers would wither, their jade perish.
"Hum, hum-!"
Irminsul suddenly gave a series of urgent, faint hums. A glazed leaf at its very tip abruptly lit up with a piercing violet light, pointing northeast of the valley.
Chu Yuan raised an eyebrow slightly, and his divine sense spread out in an instant, following Irminsul's guidance.
Within the range of his perception, a purple-gold falling star wreathed in fierce lightning had just landed on a steep, rocky hill less than five li from the secluded valley.
"This violet-heaven lightning intent, condensed like a sword..."
The image of a stunning beauty instantly appeared in his mind: violet hair in twin tails, a splendid purple-and-black formal dress, and a swift, decisive manner.
"The Yuheng of the Liyue Qixing, Keqing? I didn't expect the first girl from Teyvat to fall near me would be the proud Lady Yuheng."
With a thought, Chu Yuan dispersed the two Martial Souls in his palms and became an afterimage that tore through the night, racing toward the rocky hill five li away.