Star Dou Great Forest, Obtaining the Fifth Ring (1)

In the blink of an eye, before even the sun's position in the sky could seem to change, Di Wan had already brought You Chen into the Star Dou Great Forest. A pair of brown eagle wings spread from his back as he held You Chen up with one hand, using Soul Power to shield him from the effects of the high-speed airflow.

"You Chen, your progress is even faster than I expected. A Soul King in your thirties? Wow, doesn't that mean you still have a good chance of reaching Soul Sage!?"

As he flew with You Chen, Di Wan counted on his fingers and exclaimed in amazement.

Di Wan had a special reason for specifically bringing up the Soul Sage realm.

As everyone knew, as long as a Titled Douluo did not suffer from chronic illness or severe old injuries, living for two or three hundred years was no problem. Some long-lived ones could even reach four or five hundred years.

From the perspective of lifespan alone, Titled Douluo were already an entirely different form of life from low-level soul masters.

But when exactly did this leap in life begin?

In truth, a soul master's life essence improved slightly at every stage.

However, the first true leap in life was generally considered to occur at the Soul Sage stage.

At this stage, the Martial Soul underwent sublimation, erupting all its accumulated potential at once and gaining the ability to manifest a Martial Soul Avatar.

For the vast majority of soul masters, their Martial Soul quality improved at this stage. Some soul masters with deep enough foundations could even cause a qualitative transformation in their Martial Souls, achieving Martial Soul Evolution.

If the first three rings relied on inducing mutations while the Martial Soul's origin was still unstable, then the seventh ring was an absolutely positive sublimation achieved through accumulated strength, breaking through its original shackles.

The Martial Soul's sublimation also fed back into the soul master's life essence, indirectly increasing their lifespan.

A Soul Sage without illness or disaster could live to at least one hundred and fifty.

This in turn slowed the decline of their vitality and blood, raising the upper limit of a soul master's golden age of cultivation. It could generally be extended to around seventy years old.

Titled Douluo, on the other hand, were the exact opposite of Soul Sages. Their own life essence evolved, which in turn drove the improvement of their Martial Souls. That was why Titled Douluo lived so much longer than before.

Yet You Chen responded to Di Wan with a speechless expression.

"I am indeed in my thirties, but I'm thirty-five, not thirty-one or thirty-two! Even rounding down, I'm heading toward forty! You know perfectly well that the older one gets, the more obvious the decline in vitality and blood becomes, and the slower cultivation progresses!"

Combined with the increasing difficulty of advancing at later stages and the issue of Martial Soul quality, if he had not just obtained the system, You Chen would have had virtually no chance of breaking through to Soul Sage before the age of fifty.

The more You Chen spoke, the more speechless he became. He could not help rolling his eyes. "And... why does it feel like you're mocking me when you say that? If I remember correctly, when you were thirty-five, you had already started considering your sixth ring, right?"

"Hahaha!"

Di Wan let out a hearty laugh, though compared to his earlier carefree laughter, this one carried a faint hint of malice.

Di Wan was still only in his sixties. So long as he did not fall midway, he absolutely had a chance of becoming a Titled Douluo. Of course, becoming a Super Douluo was out of the question; there was basically no hope for that.

"Alright, I naturally can't compete with you in theory. If I could beat you in an argument, I wouldn't still be a Soul Douluo now. Tell me, what's our target for this soul hunt?"

Seeing that they had finally returned to the main topic, You Chen dropped his casual demeanor, a sharp gleam flashing in his eyes.

The idea of using a breakthrough in energy intensity to drive his Martial Soul Evolution had been part of You Chen's plans even before he obtained the system.

That was also why, when choosing his fourth ring, he had deliberately selected a soul beast centered around the power of stars.

Wind-type soul beasts and soul beasts with earth, fire, water, and wind attributes were relatively common. However, both stellar and sacred attributes were exceedingly rare. Combined with the required age limit, finding a suitable target was far from easy.

Before obtaining the system, the strength of You Chen's three attribute powers ranked with wind as the strongest, stars second, and sacred power extremely weak.

But now, the sacred power that had originally been the weakest had instead leapt to become You Chen's strongest attribute. Naturally, his originally selected soul-hunting target had to change as well.

You Chen had been so attentive even toward his disciple's cultivation. When it concerned his own Martial Soul and cultivation, he naturally would not be careless.

Back when he was a three-ring Soul Elder, around the age of twenty-six, he had already begun researching how to observe and assess the connections between the three types of power within his Martial Soul, as well as their effects on Martial Soul Evolution.

Many mysteries still lay hidden within Martial Soul Evolution. Even with You Chen's level of knowledge, he could not fully comprehend them. Different Martial Souls each had their own requirements and tendencies for evolution.

There could even be multiple branching, web-like evolutionary paths.

This world had virtually no body of knowledge in this field. Even those clans relied mainly on experience.

You Chen could be said to have been researching it from nothing, so the difficulty was obvious.

Fortunately, understanding a Martial Soul that was practically an extension of himself was far easier than studying someone else's Martial Soul.

Although his Martial Soul was not as commonplace as Blue Silver Grass, with countless samples available for research, and You Chen lacked opportunities for trial and error, his extraordinary talent and the urgency brought by his age allowed him to achieve significant results in merely two years.

As mentioned before, Martial Soul Evolution was essentially a mutation caused by an increase in the Martial Soul's origin power.

Soul rings could increase origin power, but that did not mean... they were the only way.

Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures went without saying; those were also methods that relied on external objects.

Then was there no way to increase this so-called origin power through the soul master's own abilities?

Of course there was.

It was simply that when a soul master's level was low, the effort was usually not worth the reward.

Therefore, only Titled Douluo generally did such things, when increasing their Soul Power level had become extraordinarily difficult and required grinding away over a great deal of time.

If You Chen wanted to uncover the mysteries of Martial Soul Evolution, he had no choice but to spend time on this. Otherwise, without any data, input variables, or output variables, such research would be nothing more than pure speculation. Putting mere speculation directly into practical use carried far too much risk.

Thus, You Chen would rather spend a little more time conducting these preliminary experiments.

The two key findings he obtained from them were the "limits of energy" and the "proportions of energy."

The so-called limits of energy meant that before his Martial Soul evolved to its next stage, every type of attribute energy had an upper limit to how much it could be enhanced.

For example, at the three-ring stage, the wind-type energy of his Stardust Young Dragon Martial Soul could reach a score of three on the Martial Soul's six-dimensional rating chart through enhancement, approaching the strength of an advanced wind-type Martial Soul. That was its limit.

The Wind Hatchling Dragon could evolve into the Stardust Young Dragon precisely because its wind power had reached that limit, causing the Martial Soul to evolve naturally.