Traveled Through Time, but Still on Douluo Star

Shi Yueyi sat beside the campfire, fiddling with the roasted rabbit in front of her.

"Y-Young... Young Miss..."

Beside her, five young men and women who looked to be in their twenties were tied up.

At that very moment, Shi Yueyi was leisurely eating ingredients she had found in their Soul Tools, while the three men and two women could only watch with tears in their eyes.

Yet whenever they recalled what had happened around ten minutes earlier, they could not help but tremble all over.

They were a spontaneously formed soul-hunting squad, and their cultivation was nothing special. The highest-ranked member, Big Brother Grizzly Bear, was only level twenty-five despite already being in his twenties.

They had come to the outskirts of the Frozen Forest north of the Heaven Dou Empire to try their luck and find a Second Soul Ring for the weakest member of their team.

Instead, they had run into this little girl traveling alone.

Soul Hunting Operations often tested human nature the most.

Not only might people kill others on sight and seize anything valuable, but even small groups could fall apart from within.

The five of them got along well, so they had encountered the first kind of situation.

But they had picked a fight with someone they could not handle.

They had ambushed the girl—after all, any little girl acting alone in the forest was clearly abnormal.

Besides, her clothes were thin, yet she stood steadily amid the ice and snow, as though she possessed some sort of treasure!

Thus, they immediately came to an agreement. The level-twenty-five Grizzly Bear Soul Grandmaster leaped into the air, activated Martial Soul Possession behind her without hesitation, and swung his broad bear paw down at her!

Shi Yueyi's delicate right hand was faster than Grizzly Bear. Before his thick arm could reach the top of her head, she turned and grabbed it.

His First Soul Ring had only just lit up, and his enhancement-type soul skill was about to activate, when her palm changed in the next instant. It became a claw that clamped tightly around his arm. Then the girl's arm gave a slight shake, and Grizzly Bear's elbow joint dislocated instantly.

Grizzly Bear wanted to do something else, only to find that he could not pull his arm back at all. Before he even had time to feel the pain, another delicate hand had already climbed to his neck and lightly tapped it twice with its fingertips.

Then everything went black, and he passed out.

When he woke up again, he found himself tied up with his companions, all five of them leaning against a large tree.

The knots in these ropes were practically works of art. The more they struggled, the tighter the knots became.

"Mm." Hearing someone call for her, Shi Yueyi answered, glanced at them, and continued putting tender, delicious rabbit meat into her mouth.

"Don't be afraid. I won't kill you." She finished the roasted rabbit. "You came from so far away to bring me something this tasty. People ought to repay kindness, shouldn't they?"

"Y-Yes, exactly, isn't that right?" Big Brother Grizzly Bear immediately nodded like a pecking chicken. "If people don't know gratitude, aren't they just beasts?"

"But you ambushed me and wanted to kill me. How should we settle that?"

Shi Yueyi patted the snow on the ground, cleaning her hands... though it looked more like a preparation before an executioner carried out a sentence.

Big Brother Grizzly Bear shuddered and hurriedly said, "I still have a Soul Tool that can store things! There are some..."

"You mean this?" Shi Yueyi held out her hand, revealing several metal objects in her palm. "These are spoils of war. They're mine by right, so they don't count."

"One of them is something I paid a great deal for. It has a lock on it," Big Brother Grizzly Bear said quietly.

Shi Yueyi took out one of the Soul Tools that looked like a ring and said, "How much could something without even a third-grade Core Magic Array possibly be worth?"

A Core Magic Array? What was that?

They watched as Shi Yueyi casually tapped the ring twice with her right hand. Cracks appeared on the Soul Tool, and the items inside were about to spill out.

"See? It breaks at a touch." Shi Yueyi gave them a perfect smile.

This—

Big Brother Grizzly Bear was stunned. He remembered the shopkeeper boasting that even a three-ringed Soul Master might not be able to break this thing by brute force.

"Then what do you say we should do, Young Miss?" Big Brother Grizzly Bear looked at the white-haired girl before him with tears in his eyes.

He felt that she was some centenarian who had made herself look young again. Like the reclusive masters from stories he had heard as a child, who enjoyed playing among ordinary people.

"How about this?"

Shi Yueyi put away her spoils, walked over, crouched in front of them, and patted each of their faces.

"I'm in a good mood, since I haven't seen any living people in a long time, so you're lucky. I don't expect you to bring me any benefits... just tell me about the current state of the continent. For instance, the present year and the balance of power."

Grizzly Bear froze, then let out a low cry.

It was not because he found the girl strange. He had merely wanted to use this opening to try once more to break free of the ropes binding him.

But his dislocated arm made him bare his teeth in pain.

"You're not being good." Shi Yueyi looked at him with a smile.

Seeing the fair hand that had just patted their faces turn into claws again, the girl beside Grizzly Bear's pupils shrank. She hurriedly said, "I'll tell you! I'll tell you everything!"

"This year is 2639 in the Douluo Calendar. The continent is currently divided between the two great empires of Heaven Dou and Star Luo, with Spirit Hall wedged between them!"

She poured out every piece of information she knew in one breath, speaking extremely quickly.

This included how the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Sect and the Blue Lightning Tyrant Dragon Clan were in the Heaven Dou Empire, while the Clear Sky Sect seemed to have gone into seclusion, and so on.

"So it really is like this..."

Shi Yueyi secretly sighed inwardly.

She was not from Douluo Continent.

She came from Sun Moon Continent.

Or, more accurately, she came from the Sun Moon Empire ten thousand years in the future.

She had traveled through time, but not completely. She had not gone to some other world; she had simply followed the course of time all the way back ten thousand years.

No wonder she had awakened from unconsciousness on the western coast, with no one around.

So that place had once been... no, ten thousand years later, it was probably the border between the northern Sun Moon Empire and the Heaven Dou Empire?

After waking up, she discovered that her body had become smaller. She could clearly sense that she had been only six years old then.

But the instincts etched into her bones remained. Following her sense of direction, she headed toward the northern frontier and arrived at this Frozen Forest.

In her previous life, one of her friends had told her that staying only in cities or academies while young was not very helpful for cultivation, because one could not sense "real danger."

After arriving in this forest, she had relied entirely on instincts and techniques she once possessed to survive and train here alone for over a year.

"You're really amazing." The girl who had introduced the continent's situation to Shi Yueyi spoke softly. "Can you tell me what your martial soul is?"

She had probably seen her palms turn into claws during the earlier fight?

But that was not actually her martial soul. It was something she had obtained after forcefully killing a hundred-year soul beast called Thunder Vine during this past year—when that thing had tried to strangle her to death.

An External Right Palm Bone.

Palm bones could generally only be absorbed before arm bones, and her newly reborn body happened to have no soul bones.

The process of attempting to absorb an External Soul Bone before her martial soul had awakened was agonizing, but she had endured it through sheer force of will.

"Don't push your luck." Shi Yueyi came back to her senses. "I'm leaving. Take care of yourselves."

"Don't! Didn't you say you wouldn't kill us?" The girl panicked.

"I didn't kill you." Shi Yueyi looked at her strangely. "But I never said I would let you go. You wanted to kill me, so I can't tie you up?"

"?"

Those people all froze at her words, except for Big Brother Grizzly Bear, who was still hissing and gasping from the pain.

It sounded so reasonable! They could not even refute it!

"How about this?"

As Shi Yueyi spoke, she climbed the tree behind them in just a few movements. Then she took out a small knife and placed it on a branch above their heads.

She jumped directly down from the tree and said, "I left a little dagger in that tree—the one from your Soul Tool. Once it falls, you'll have something to cut the ropes with."

"You lunatic!" another younger-looking girl cursed. "What if it falls and hurts us?"

"You're right, I'm a lunatic." Shi Yueyi smiled, revealing her pearly white teeth. "I like watching my enemies struggle to survive in ice and snow."

If she were not a lunatic, why would she have tried to absorb an External Soul Bone before awakening her martial soul?

"Oh, right. You'd better hurry. There was a fire here just now, so it might attract some soul beast, or another soul-hunting squad." She kindly reminded them.

"So should we thank you, then?" someone else asked through gritted teeth.

"Of course." After saying that, Shi Yueyi walked south in her thin clothes and bare feet, leaving one footprint after another in the snow.

"What do we do?" The others looked at one another.

"What else can we do? Hurry up and ram the tree." One of the young men gave a bitter smile. "Be careful not to get stabbed when the dagger falls."

The assault-type Soul Master among them was Big Brother Grizzly Bear; the other four were not.

But now Big Brother Grizzly Bear seemed to have been poisoned. He could not exert any strength and could only gasp for breath.

It took roughly half an hour for the other four to knock the dagger down, and then another half hour to cut off the ropes around their bodies.

"Go after her!" Big Brother Grizzly Bear said indignantly. "I'm going to get revenge!"

Yet after pursuing southward for less than a quarter of an hour, Shi Yueyi's footprints became a tangled mess and vanished.

"Big Brother, let's not chase her." One of them shivered. "She looks like a little girl, but she feels like some old monster who came out to experience life... If she wanted to kill us, she probably would have done it already."

"Exactly, exactly." Another person took over. "Look at what she's wearing—it's practically summer clothing, yet she's completely unafraid of the cold in this frozen wasteland!"

"Then... fine." Big Brother Grizzly Bear gave in. "Quickly find somewhere to treat my arm!"

Meanwhile, having already left the Frozen Forest, Shi Yueyi looked at the city walls before her and could not help muttering, "I heard that ten thousand years ago, when Spirit Hall still existed, they sent people to awaken children's martial souls every year... Maybe I should go take a look first."