Gambling Freak? Poison Freak!

Gambling Freak? Poison Freak!

Feeling the looks from those around him, Chen Ming's heart was filled with both excitement and helplessness.

Yes, he was not a native of the Douluo World, but a transmigrator from a certain blue planet.

Before transmigrating, he had been a struggling webnovel author, barely supporting himself on royalties. His only talent—or perhaps trait—was an unusual sixth sense.

From childhood to adulthood, he had relied on that sixth sense to evade being hit by trucks several times, gas explosions, and more than a dozen electrical leaks caused by various reasons. He had dodged countless other disasters too, from slipping underfoot to flowerpots falling from the sky. In the martial world, he was known as the King Who Wouldn't Die.

But how should he put it... A person could beat accidents countless times, but an accident only needed to beat a person once.

On a whim, he had decided to clean his house. While crouching down to clean a dead corner beneath the bookshelf that the vacuum could not reach, the ground suddenly shook. Before he could react, the bookshelf came crashing down onto him.

It was a two-meter-tall solid-wood floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, packed with all sorts of books, chess pieces, and merchandise used as decoration. Its weight was easy to imagine.

And so, Chen Ming was reborn and came to the Douluo Continent. For some reason—perhaps fate—he was still named Chen Ming in this life.

At first, Chen Ming only knew that he had arrived in a fantasy world. Then, as he learned to speak and read, he gradually realized that he had transmigrated into Douluo Continent, the so-called gutter of fantasy worlds from his previous life. And Spirit Hall, Shrek Academy, and the Tang Sect were all things nobody had ever even heard of.

In truth, Chen Ming was not all that... disappointed about transmigrating into the Douluo Continent, a world where power levels made no sense.

He had played Baldur's Gate 3 and the Warhammer games, and he had even signed "contracts of sale." They were only jokes by the developers, but what if they came true? Then after dying, he would not have arrived in Douluo Continent, but reincarnated into the world of Baldur's Gate—or worse, that cesspit known as the Warhammer world.

And among the decorations on his bookshelf were figures from Baldur's Gate and Warhammer...

Compared to that, wasn't Douluo Continent actually pretty good?

When he was two, his parents in this life died after making a mistake while hunting Soul Beasts.

When he was three, after learning to speak and read and becoming capable of running and jumping, he had begun preparing to understand the world and consider how to make his fortune. Then news arrived that Spirit Hall's Pope, Qian Xunji, had been ambushed and killed by Tang Hao of the Clear Sky Sect. Only then did he learn that he was actually just three years older than that little bastard.

That little bastard had not earned that name for nothing. Although Tang San from the first Douluo was not as ruthless or utterly depraved as Tang San from the second, he was still no good person. For the Douluo Continent, he was nothing but a negative influence.

If he did not grow stronger before the continent descended into chaos, then he would have no choices when that chaos came. Rather than having someone hold a blade to his neck and force him into a choice that he would regret for the rest of his life, he might as well train, pick up a blade himself, and do his utmost to ensure he would never regret this life.

Whether he followed the Shrek Seven Devils or stood against them, Chen Ming needed to ensure that he had the ability to make the choice he wanted.

Every day, he maintained a healthy routine, sleeping in several shifts. While getting enough rest for his body to grow, he also gained more time to train. He was never a picky eater. Even medicinal meals that tasted awful, medicinal paste, and all sorts of half-dead bugs were forced down his throat. He trained without fail every day, rain or shine, and before bed each night, he had his family tell him all kinds of information about the continent.

After learning that his family's Martial Soul had congenital issues, he even had his family build him a nest in Scorpion Cave. Every so often, he would move into the cave, eating and living alongside the scorpions while observing their lives, all so that he could achieve the so-called mimicry as much as possible.

After several years, he had observed the scorpions so closely that he had nearly created an entire set of Scorpion Fist techniques from scratch. Even the dim-witted scorpions in Scorpion Cave had grown familiar with Chen Ming, this oversized member of their kind who walked on two legs.

He did not know internal arts like the Mysterious Heaven Skill. He merely trained as hard as he could without leaving permanent injuries, which had given him a body larger, sturdier, and more explosive than those of his peers.

Yet despite giving it everything he had, his Innate Soul Power was still only level five...

How should he put it? It was not as if he had never considered this possibility, but Chen Ming had still hoped that he might possess Innate Full Soul Power or Twin Martial Souls.

As he wrestled with complicated thoughts about where his future should lead, the slight man who had used a bead to detoxify the others put away the bead and rushed to Chen Ming in a few quick strides. He reached out and brushed the scorpion tail that was unconsciously swaying behind Chen Ming.

"Second Uncle, be careful!"

Although he had only just awakened his Martial Soul and did not yet know its quality, Chen Ming had been exposed to his family's inherited Jade Scorpion Martial Soul and all kinds of poisons since childhood. By instinct alone, he could tell that his poison was unusual. Seeing his Second Uncle recklessly touch the scorpion tail behind him, he immediately grew anxious.

"It's fine. I'm a Soul Ancestor, after all. It's not like I'd just... die..."

The man Chen Ming called Second Uncle had been smiling, but his face suddenly turned green, and his body swayed slightly.

As a seasoned Poison Soul Master, the man reacted swiftly. In the span of a single breath, he released his Martial Soul. Two yellow and two purple Soul Rings, four in total, appeared around him.

As the Jade Scorpion Martial Soul emerged and Soul Power surged through him, the green color finally faded from the man's face. Still, he did not look particularly well.

The Chen Family's second-in-command had been poisoned because his hands had wandered and he touched his own nephew's Martial Soul. Wasn't that humiliating?

"Ahem, Xiao Ming is truly a heaven-sent genius..." the man said awkwardly after coughing twice. The spectators wanted to laugh, but none dared to.

The Soul Master with the highest Soul Power Level in the entire city was Bishop Yan Jun of Spirit Hall, a level 67 Control System Soul Emperor. Next came the current head of the Chen Family, a level 54 Control System Soul King.

Poison was not especially effective against Titled Douluo, but before the Soul Saint stage, it could enable someone to challenge opponents above their level. Throughout the continent's history, there had even been many high-level Soul Masters who had been killed by lower-level Poison Soul Masters due to carelessness.

Forget how Yan Jun was now so old that he was nearly dead—even twenty years younger, with his level 67 Soul Power, he might not have gained much of an advantage against the Chen Family head. The Jade Scorpion poison of the Chen Family was widely acknowledged. Let alone a scratch, Soul Masters of the same level would generally lose half their lives from a single touch.

Forget humans—even an ordinary ten-thousand-year Soul Beast could be poisoned into a puddle of water.

Therefore, in Biluo City, even though the Chen Family had few members and was on the verge of dying out, it remained the city's nominal third and actual foremost power. Even if everyone in the city wanted nothing more than to tear off a piece of the Chen Family, no one dared to strike at them in secret.