Imperial Fighting Team (II)

With Bai Ge's assurance, Lao Ao finally set his mind at ease.

Grandmaster frowned. "Xiao Bai, doing this all the time isn't good for their development."

Bai Ge chuckled. "I've said it before: if they don't kill or see blood, they'll always just be children playing house.

It can't be considered real combat at all.

But making twelve-year-old children kill people means either you've got something wrong with your head, or you want to destroy them.

For Soul Rings and soul bones, betrayals are simply too numerous to count.

In those situations, the enemy is out to take your life.

That is real combat."

Bai Ge chuckled again and continued, "A match is always just a match. The first rule is that no one is allowed to take a life.

That means when you attack and use Soul Skills, you'll subconsciously hold back.

Because if you kill someone, you lose.

What you call fighting with all your strength is only what you think is all your strength.

So in my eyes, this so-called real combat has little value."

Bai Ge sneered. "The reason I forced the Berserker Team into a Life and Death Battle back then was so you could see what real combat looked like.

And what did you do? Embarrassing! Mu Bai barely held it together, then went back and threw up.

Oscar held on halfway, then couldn't take it anymore.

Fatty, what are you looking at? I'm talking about you. Close your eyes. You really outdid yourself!"

Ma Hongjun had been scolded into looking like a quail, huddling off to one side.

"You're an assault-type battle Soul Master. Protecting your teammates is your responsibility!"

Bai Ge stared at them. "It is only natural for men to stand in front of women!

This has nothing to do with strength!

Even if you're an ordinary person without Soul Power, even if the enemy you face is a Titled Douluo!"

This was also one reason Bai Ge did not think much of Grandmaster. Damn it, he had left Liu Erlong behind and run away alone—what the hell was that?

Liu Erlong's father, who was also Grandmaster's second uncle, was even worse. After having his fun, he refused to acknowledge it and left after pulling up his pants.

Then, more than a decade later, he popped up and told Liu Erlong, "You're my daughter."

That turned Liu Erlong and Grandmaster from lovers into siblings.

But this was truly hard to judge.

Even by the moral and legal standards of Bai Ge's previous life, marriage between close relatives was not allowed.

So, honestly speaking, Grandmaster did not deserve the title of Douluo Continent's number one scumbag. That should go to his second uncle.

As for Bibi Dong, eighty percent of the blame lay with Sealed Room Douluo Qian Xunji for not acting like a human being.

Bibi Dong saw you as her teacher and father, yet you wanted to become her husband.

If not for Qian Xunji, Grandmaster might even have grandsons old enough to run errands by now.

So Qian Xunji and Grandmaster's second uncle—the man whose name was never even mentioned—were the real scumbags.

Grandmaster's tragedy was, at its core, the sorrow of the weak!

As for that saying, "There are no useless martial souls, only useless Soul Masters."

In Bai Ge's eyes, compared to Ma Xiaotao from Soul Land 2, Ma Hongjun was nothing but trash!

Ma Xiaotao cultivated all the way to Soul Emperor and still refused to use that method to vent her Evil Fire.

That girl was truly admirable.

Grandmaster could not improve his cultivation, so he turned to researching theory. He had worked hard to prove himself.

They had worked hard.

But what about Ma Hongjun? He frequented Pleasure Houses whenever he had nothing to do, and only regretted it when he could no longer take Bai Chenxiang to the God Realm.

The original work made it very clear that Grandmaster's theories had been publicly published.

Ordinary civilian Soul Masters, influenced by the great families and sects, did not believe Grandmaster's theories.

Yet those families and sects had each secretly memorized Grandmaster's theories by heart, then followed Grandmaster's guidebook to select Soul Rings for their own descendants.

That was why, in the original work, it seemed as though every top-tier Soul Master knew Grandmaster's theories.

It was the same principle as ordinary people in the West attending public schools while wealthy people attended elite schools.

Before Grandmaster, the major families had a so-called optimal Soul Ring configuration: a hundred-year first ring, a second ring over five hundred years but under a thousand years, and a thousand-year third Soul Ring.

Grandmaster, however, proposed more precise numbers: four hundred and twenty-three years for the first ring, seven hundred and sixty-four years for the second Soul Ring, and one thousand seven hundred and sixty years for the third Soul Ring.

Cultivation on the Douluo Continent was far too crude. There were no cultivation methods, no pills, and even skills were limited to only nine. It was fucking ridiculous.

Dragon Duke Meng Shu was a typical tragedy—his first five rings were two yellow and three purple.

His fifth Soul Ring was over nine thousand years old. He had probably feared dying from his body exploding, so he had not dared choose a ten-thousand-year Soul Ring.

That was the significance of the precise Soul Ring absorption limits proposed by Grandmaster.

If Grandmaster's theory had truly been plagiarized, and Spirit Hall and the major clans all knew it perfectly well, then there was no reason the Peerless Dragon Serpent family would not know it too.

With a Martial Soul Fusion Skill, the two of them should have had no trouble taking down a ten-thousand-year soul beast.

There was only one explanation: when Dragon Duke became a Soul King, Grandmaster had only just been born.

One of them was over eighty, the other over fifty. The difference of roughly thirty years matched up.

Therefore, without theoretical support, the cautious and death-fearing Dragon Duke had chosen a nine-thousand-year Soul Ring for his fifth ring.

Think about it—if Grandmaster's theory had been useless, the upper echelons of the soul master world would not have remembered it.

As for the Star Luo Empire's royal family and the optimal combination of Martial Souls and Soul Rings—please, keep one thing in mind. Their family had always possessed the White Tiger Martial Soul, they had produced Titled Douluo, and every possible pitfall had already been stepped into by their ancestors.

If they still could not figure it out after that, it could only prove they were pigs.

Incidentally, the Star Luo royal family had studied the White Tiger Martial Soul for thousands of years, generation after generation.

Grandmaster, meanwhile, was alone and only in his fifties. He met Bibi Dong in his twenties and began devoting himself to theoretical research.

He had only had a little over thirty years.

The difference between the two was obvious at a glance.

Right and wrong were clear-cut. That was Bai Ge's principle in life.

In fact, the first person to prove Grandmaster's theory was not Tang San, but Bibi Dong.

Every one of Bibi Dong's Soul Rings followed the age limits in Grandmaster's theory.

Furthermore, Grandmaster's theory also stated that the upper limit of the age of a Soul Ring one could endure was directly proportional to one's physical constitution.

Tang San's physical constitution far surpassed that of ordinary people, which was why his Soul Rings exceeded the usual limits.

That likewise proved the correctness of Grandmaster's theory.

As for the claim that Grandmaster plagiarized, it was no different from the claim that the thirty-year-old uncle Xiao Yan molested Xun Er. Both were fan-created secondary settings made up by certain people who ate from the bowl, then cursed the mother who fed them, all for the sake of attracting attention.

In the original Douluo novel's setting, Grandmaster had always been the foremost authority on theory.

Third Young Master's characterization of Grandmaster had been somewhat lacking, but the only basis for the plagiarism accusation was probably that Pope Bibi Dong had once been Grandmaster's girlfriend.

The same went for Xiao Yan. The original novel stated that when he first came into contact with Dou Qi, he felt that it resembled internal force and true qi, yet found it unbelievable and became extremely excited.

So, following the tropes of wuxia novels, he used Xun Er as an experimental guinea pig and tried warming her meridians, but he had no improper thoughts whatsoever.

And under the effects of the protagonist's halo, he successfully tricked himself into getting a wife.

Later, after the spread of some fanfiction called Battle Through the Heavens Dragon Emperor or something like that, he became a middle-aged man who molested little girls.

Fuck, the original novel never mentioned Xiao Yan's age before his transmigration even once!

The claim that Grandmaster's theory was plagiarized was the same. The original novel never mentioned it, yet people had no idea where they had imagined it from.

PS: After several internet purges, it had become almost impossible to find the complete original novels from back then.

And many details were missing from pirated websites, along with plenty of typos.

I began writing this story in the hope of leading a new generation of readers, together with us, to remember the emotions we felt back then.

Online literature had gone through countless upheavals, and the brilliance of its golden age had long become a memory.

Whitebeard once said, "I am a remnant of the old era. There is no ship in the new era that can carry me."

As readers from the older generation of online literature, passing on the splendor and emotions of the web novels that once belonged to us to the next generation of readers was, in a sense, an unshirkable responsibility that we had to shoulder.

Readers continuing unbroken from generation to generation were the true foundation of online literature.

If there were no readers, heh, then online literature would truly be finished.

A reader commented that they did not know what the Mebius Breath and Knight Aura from the first chapter were.

I wanted to cry. Were children nowadays so pitiful that they had not even watched Ultraman?

That was the consequence of readers, viewers, and fans being cut off from one generation to the next.

It was also because I saw that comment that I used this chapter to clarify some widely circulated misconceptions I remembered.

Just because something became a trend did not mean it was correct.

Going along with the crowd was easy, but I did not want to, nor was I willing to become the kind of person I hated.

Would that make us any different from the people we disliked?

If online literature became like this in the future as well, then that would be its death knell.

Please do not bring up fanfiction secondary settings from other works in my story. I do not acknowledge them.

PS: This chapter was filler, so there will be three updates today. One in the afternoon and one in the evening as well.