Listening to Rui Rui's Gossip About the Past

"Still angry?" Wang Rui bumped Huo Yuqing with his shoulder.

They were walking along a narrow path. The carefully manicured vegetation lining the road looked entirely different from the plants of the Star Dou Great Forest, which grew wild and free.

"They were cheating!" Huo Yuqing said indignantly.

The girl was in a bad mood, but Wang Rui was quite pleased.

Huo Yuqing's yearning for Shrek had already turned into disappointment. How could this trashy Auspicious Beast not be happy about that?

"My mother told me many stories," Huo Yuqing said with a frown. "Stories about the Sea God from ten thousand years ago, and all sorts of legends Shrek left across the continent... I only knew that this was an incredibly great school, that every student who successfully graduated from it would have a bright future. Now, though, Shrek is different from what I imagined."

"You shouldn't have had such high expectations for Shrek Academy." Jiang Nannan shrugged. "Everyone starts out thinking that way, but... anyway, welcome to Shrek, a place that only looks at your strength and background."

As they spoke, a small square appeared at the end of the road, where ten statues of Shrek Academy stood.

"There. Those are the statues of the founders and the first-generation Shrek Seven Devils."

"Speaking of Shrek Academy's founders..." Wang Rui thought for a moment and decided not to torture everyone's ears with a series of melodramatic love triangles just yet. He spoke objectively. "The one in the middle is Flender. He established Shrek Academy's tradition of charging outrageous tuition fees with no refunds. The one beside him is the legendary Grandmaster, Yu Xiaogang, the Sea God Tang San's teacher. His representative work was Summary of the Ten Great Common Sense Principles of the Martial Soul World.

"The one on the other side is Liu Erlong, Yu Xiaogang's cousin and also his wife. Mm, their family basically held onto the position of Shrek Academy's dean afterward, passing it from father to son and then grandson. In short, Shrek Academy was practically their family business."

Jiang Nannan listened with great interest. Even though she studied at the Outer Academy, she did not know these specific bits of gossip.

Behind the three founders stood the first-generation Shrek Seven Devils, arranged in a row.

A pretty girl stood at the foot of Ning Rongrong's statue. She had neat, short golden hair, large aqua-blue eyes, long curled lashes, and several adorable freckles scattered across her cheeks.

Wang Rui glanced at her without paying much attention.

"Ah, those behind them are the Shrek Seven Devils..." he said lightly. "Let me tell you a secret. Although the legends circulating across the continent say that only Tang San became a god, all seven of them actually became gods in the end."

The girl looked somewhat surprised, then smiled amiably and nodded to them.

"Classmate, judging from what you said, you seem to know a lot about the first-generation Shrek Seven Devils?" the girl asked with what Wang Rui found to be slightly deliberate curiosity.

"Yeah, my elders told me about it." Wang Rui shrugged. He could roughly guess who this girl was.

She was also wearing a white school uniform, and just now, she had been staring directly at Ning Rongrong's statue. Naturally, she was Ning Tian, the young mistress of the Nine Treasures Glazed Tile Clan.

"Are you a new student too?" Ning Tian tilted her head and smiled. "I'm interested in the stories of the first-generation Shrek Seven Devils too. If we have time later, could we find an opportunity to chat?"

"No problem."

"Alright, then we can talk when we get the chance." Ning Tian nodded politely, turned, and left.

Wang Rui watched her retreating figure thoughtfully.

It seemed the Nine Treasures Glazed Tile Clan had well-informed channels. Between the time he finished registering and Huo Yuqing completed her assessment, Ning Tian had probably already learned that a Soul Elder freshman with an unknown background had enrolled... It looked like she wanted to create a shared topic first, then find an opportunity to win him over.

Nine Treasure Glazed Tile... Wang Rui narrowed his eyes, recalling the way Ning Tian had looked at Ning Rongrong's statue... It seemed she was not all that respectful toward her own sect's ancestor either.

Suddenly, he felt someone tug on his sleeve.

"Wang Rui, I'm from the Star Luo Empire. Can you tell me about White Tiger Douluo and Netherworld Douluo?" Huo Yuqing asked.

Wang Rui vaguely felt that Huo Yuqing seemed a little unhappy, but he could not figure out why.

"White Tiger Douluo and Netherworld Douluo? The two of them inherited the positions of the God of War and the God of Speed..." He wore the expression of someone delighted to stir up gossip. "In the legends circulating on the continent, White Tiger Douluo was extremely devoted and had only one wife in his entire life. But in reality... there were countless women with whom he had fleeting affairs."

Huo Yuqing's eyes widened.

"You also know that the first White Tiger Douluo was Star Luo's emperor. In order to keep his throne from falling into someone else's hands, he and his wife left behind a descendant before going to the Divine Realm, but they hurried off without raising him properly." An inscrutable look appeared on Wang Rui's face.

"But what he did not know was that he had provoked quite a few women while studying at Shrek, so naturally there were other descendants of his bloodline as well. That caused his legitimate son no small amount of trouble... Star Luo had always had a tradition of brothers fighting one another, and he had left in a hurry after becoming a god, before his son had even grown up. Even if he had become a god, gods could not openly interfere in the mortal world... His subordinates and the Netherworld Family each had their own selfish motives, and Star Luo's political situation was a complete mess at the time."

Star Dou had also quietly expanded outward quite a bit during that opportunity, but there was no need to mention that.

Wang Rui stared brightly at Huo Yuqing. With such an unreliable ancestor, you'd better not idolize him! In the end, he even had a second-level god berate a first-level god and forced him to change his surname. It was absolutely disgusting.

"So White Tiger's womanizing has been an old tradition all along..." Huo Yuqing muttered, glaring at Dai Mubai's statue with disgust.

Then, as though he had noticed something, Wang Rui suddenly looked up at Ma Hongjun's statue.

A Swift-tailed Swallow flew over and perched atop Ma Hongjun's statue's head.

"Tsk. You fat bastard, is the Divine Realm really so great that you haven't come down to take a look even once in ten thousand years?" the Swift-tailed Swallow murmured. "Ten thousand years have passed... the Bai Family vanished long ago, and the Shrek you obsessed over wasn't actually much either. When you were still in the human world ten thousand years ago, your title was Phoenix Douluo. Yet now, in Shrek's inheritance, your title has been changed to Evil Phoenix Douluo... Hmph! Evil Phoenix Douluo."

"I chose to accept help, merging my soul with my own martial soul and reincarnating as a soul beast. Perhaps that way, we might have a chance to meet again someday."

"It's just that I no longer know what my feelings for you are now. Maybe it's love, but perhaps it isn't anymore. Still, this feeling is the only fragment of the past that I can hold onto now." The Swift-tailed Swallow—no, Bai Chenxiang—spoke softly.

"Looking back now, the feelings we had when we were young really did seem somewhat unreasonable. But no matter what, you did treat me well later on... Sigh, there's no point in saying all this. I only hope the Auspicious Beast's promise can come true."

After pouring out her heart to the statue, the Swift-tailed Swallow flapped her wings and flew away.