The Cub Causes Big Trouble (Part 2)

"Brother Barus, is it really okay to sneak off and play in the Nanshan Rainforest like this?"

Dressed in a child's swimsuit made of silk, the young elf girl Elena sat on Barus's back, his body now shrunk to five meters in length.

"Don't worry, it's fine. Even if my dad comes to catch us, he'll have to hit me first."

Barus's dragon mouth spoke.

Wandering on the lake beneath the waterfall, Barus brought the dripping-wet Elena to the dry lakeshore. This time, while taking Elena to play in the Nanshan Rainforest, he'd also grabbed some daily necessities from her home along the way.

Barus set Elena down on the carpet by the campfire, used his soul power to lift a towel, wiped her hair soaked by the lake water, and wrapped her in a bath towel.

Yes, to prevent himself from forgetting the knowledge of Soul Land 2 and Soul Land 3 from his past life, along with the essential differences between elves and humans, Rus Wang had recorded everything with a brush on paper or carved characters into stone slabs. He hid them in a modified cave in the core area of the Nanshan Rainforest (basically like turning a cave into a home in Minecraft) and set up protective arrays.

But no matter how much he guarded against it, he overlooked the little troublemakers at home.

In the Elf Kingdom, money was needed to buy things, and the five cubs had none. They didn't want to cause major trouble, but then had a bright idea: they remembered their father often sneaked into this cave to treat himself to extra meals. So when their father went to the capital, Ravenna, to hear the Elf Prime Minister's report, they barged into Rus Wang's cave and gorged themselves on the basic ingredients he'd bought from the elves.

At that time, two-year-old Barus happened to discover his father's stone-carved records about Soul Land 2, Soul Land 3, and the elves, and committed them to memory.

So on the surface, Barus was still a carefree, foolish son with no plans for his future independent life. But in his heart, he'd always felt tense about humans—the never-met natural enemy of soul beasts—and grew anxious about his father's slow progress in advancing coexistence between soul beasts and elves. (Rus Wang: The father isn't even worried yet, but the son is already panicking.)

Just as his father had recorded on the stone slabs, humans would awaken their martial souls at age six, but most couldn't gain soul power. All elves could gain soul power at age twelve, ranging from Innate Level 1 to Innate Full Soul Power, but because they lacked martial souls, they could only use soul power purely. They couldn't, like humans with soul power, use soul power to drive their martial soul's inherent abilities.

Under his father Rus Wang's influence and from frequent visits to the elf city, Barus understood that binding both sides together firmly required solid interests. So he'd always had ideas about strengthening the bond between elves and soul beasts. That idea revolved around modifying the Soul Spirit Contract Method, finding a way for elves to share soul beasts' abilities without martial souls, and while the soul beast's body didn't die, allowing elves to use soul skills like humans with soul rings. But under this method, the soul beast absolutely couldn't reside in the human's Sea of Consciousness like a soul spirit; instead, it would be an equal relationship, with either party able to unilaterally end the soul ring sharing.

"How's your meditation practice going?"

For this reason, he'd raised Elena since she was young, and now Barus leaned close to her side and asked quietly.

"It's quite amazing. Even I'm scared by the growth in this power—it's too easy to breed greed. No wonder my parents and Uncle Prime Minister don't dare to make it public casually."

Elena replied after a long pause of contemplation. As a child of the upper social circle among the Elf Kingdom's high-ranking figures, though young in body, she hadn't wasted the twenty-six years of her life.

Three years ago, after Barus formally revealed the contents of the stone slabs to her, Elena had gone from Innate Level 6 to her current Level 19 through the human meditation practice Barus taught her. The tangible growth in strength made her fully understand why her parents' generation didn't dare to make this supernatural power system public.

"My mental power has also broken through its limits. My Sea of Consciousness has clearly widened a lot."

"It's a pity. Everything my father carved on those stone slabs is tied to strings of numbers. Maybe we could be more precise instead of fumbling around blindly."

After hearing Elena describe her own situation, Barus scratched his chin. Honestly, his father Rus Wang's records on mental power were all just strings of numbers, so he couldn't help Elena—she had to rely on her own feelings to determine if she'd broken through in mental power.

"Is this the first time you've felt this?"

"Yes, it should be the first time so far. But unlike before, when I couldn't condense mental power in my mind, now I can manipulate it."

"Is that so? Then you should have reached the Spirit Connection Realm."

The Spirit Connection Realm had a very distinct feature: one began to grasp mental power control, truly manipulating their own mental power for their use, able to bear two yellow soul spirits or one purple soul spirit. Coincidentally, Barus was now a soul beast over four thousand years old, which by soul spirit standards made him a purple soul spirit.

"Let my mental power connect with your Sea of Consciousness. We'll do an experiment next."

"Huh? How do we connect?"

Elena nodded but was a bit puzzled. How could another living being connect to her Mental World?

"According to the two humans on the stone slabs, it should be heads touching heads, then using mental power to connect."

As he spoke, Barus's shoulder height grew to 1.8 meters, and his whole dragon body enlarged considerably.

"Eh?"

"Try it, Elena. Those two people were still alive after the mental connection ended."

"Alright, then."

On the waterfall, the second sister Iyuda, on lookout, watched her carefree eldest brother messing around again with his elf friend Elena and felt exhausted.

"Brother, am I the oldest, or are you? Seriously, I always have to watch out for Dad coming to catch us."

Iyuda then looked elsewhere to maintain her watch, completely unaware that her eldest brother was about to pull off something huge.

Barus didn't have much of a concept of the Sea of Consciousness Elena described. He only knew from her words that it was like a small world, but very small, with a pale golden ocean empty all around, and Elena could stand on its surface.

Now, Barus and Elena appeared together in Elena's Sea of Consciousness.

"I can't believe it actually worked."

Feeling that she was truly in her own Sea of Consciousness, Elena looked at Barus's body appearing alongside hers, her face full of disbelief.

"Then next, let's start testing the power-sharing method I adapted from the soul spirit method, Elena."

Barus didn't waste much time and cut straight to the main purpose of entering Elena's Sea of Consciousness.

"But Barus, the soul spirit method is that kind of..."

"I know, Elena. But only practice can give us enough experimental cases. Otherwise, everything stays in theory."

Barus reassured Elena.

"If it fails, I'll take the blame with Mom and Dad. They're not unreasonable beings. To deeply bind ourselves with the elves, we have to keep repeating what you and I are doing now. We're just starting early."

Bakus and Bazel kept spraying each other with [Skill: Water Play] in play, then got hit by a stream of [Skill: Water Play] from afar.

The two brothers, Bakus and Bazel, looked over and were greatly puzzled. The water stream wasn't from their eldest brother, but from Elena. The third sister, Ilian, who hadn't been hit, floated on the lake surface watching, her eyes full of intense curiosity.

"What are you staring for? Let's play!"

As Bakus spoke, the young dragons who had been stunned by Elena's ability to release water immediately joined her and Bakus in a game, then gradually dispersed once the novelty wore off.

Elena was overjoyed by this. Unlike the soul power, this time she had truly shared Barus's ability to control water, proving that Barus's highly risky theoretical practice was correct—it had succeeded on the first try.

"Elena, you said that after forming a contract with me, you can use my abilities. So what would happen if we theoretically contracted our mental power?"

Barus had no intention of stopping there. Riding on this success, he planned to continue experimenting.

"But, Barus, is this really okay?"

Elena hesitated.

"It should be fine, right? Elena, think about it—since you can use my abilities, it means your mental power is at least at the Spirit Connection Realm described in that book. Your mental strength should be able to withstand my over four thousand years as a soul beast."

Barus pleaded with Elena to conduct a mental contract with him within the Sea of Consciousness once more, to carry out the unknown experiment of Spirit Ring Sharing.

"Alright, I understand. If it fails and I become a Soul Spirit, I... I'll take responsibility."

Barus and Elena, one dragon and one elf, once again conducted the experiment within the Sea of Consciousness. But unlike the minor fluctuation from before, this time a massive surge of soul power rippled around them, startling the four siblings who were resting and keeping watch near the great waterfall. They all turned to see the dragon and elf lying unconscious by the lake shore. Sensing something terribly wrong, the four dragons immediately rushed over to check on their eldest brother and their elf friend.

Not far above in the sky, Rus Wang, who had come to retrieve his child, was a Seer Elf with a soul beast age of over two hundred thousand years. He naturally detected the anomaly—a fluctuation in mental power.

"C! My foolish son!"

Rus Wang cursed angrily. How could he not figure out that his own brat had stirred up such a huge mess? Was mental power something just anyone or any dragon could toy with? Even someone like Huo Yuhao, who specialized in mental power and had the backing of that useless million-year white bug, still ended up dizzy and dazed when faced with Wang Dong'er's Santang-brand safety device. Two clueless kids playing with mental power—had they no thought of the consequences?

Rus Wang's massive body quickly descended to the waterfall area, where he saw his four children anxiously gathered around the unconscious Barus and Elena. His dragon head sniffed repeatedly at the unconscious figures, confirming only that they were in some kind of coma with no life-threatening danger. He then asked his second daughter, Iyuda, if she could recount what her eldest brother and Osuen's second daughter, Elena, had been doing during that time.

"Dad, I... I was on full alert above the waterfall the whole time. I couldn't see any details clearly. Then there was a burst of energy, and big brother and Elena both passed out."

How would Iyuda know? As the second sister, when her elder brother liked to play with his elf friend without regard for time or place, even abandoning the duty of keeping watch, she had taken it upon herself to stay above the waterfall, vigilant against potential dangers, so that her three younger siblings could play in peace. At the moment of the incident, she was the farthest from her troublemaking big brother, Barus.

"Dad, I think I caught a few words. They were talking about something like a Meditation Technique, mental power roaming, 'let me show you my mental world,' power sharing, and stuff like that." Bakus thought for a moment and replied.

"Oh, right, Dad. When Fourth Brother said that, it reminded me. Before they passed out, big brother and Elena had their foreheads together and released that kind of disturbance, just not as strong as this time. Anyway, before that, Elena somehow managed to release water, and we had a lot of fun playing with her. Then big brother suddenly got some strange idea and went back to tinkering with Elena."

Ilian, as a young female dragon who had been swimming in the lake and hadn't joined Bakus and Bazel in playing in the water, naturally noticed more.

With no solution in sight from the questioning, Rus Wang could only use his soul power to lift Barus and Elena, leading his four other children toward the Council Forest in the heart of the Nanshan Rainforest. At the same time, he summoned the Dragon Race to convene a meeting on the matter.

When Barus opened his eyes, feeling his inexplicably increased cultivation age and the constant mental connection with Elena, he knew that his experiment—killing hundreds of ten-year and dozens of hundred-year soul beasts, comprehending their spirit rings, and staking his own life as a gamble—had succeeded.

Overjoyed, he tried to get up and look at Elena, but before he could, a massive dragon claw pressed down on him.

It was his mother's claw! As a dragon who had been disciplined many times, Barus knew exactly whose claw this was.

"Awake?"

"Mother?"

Looking at Barus, who had perked up immediately upon waking, and then at Elena—who, under the gaze of all the dragons, had gone from level nineteen to level twenty-five in one go, was prostrating on the ground in fear, tears streaming down, with a glaring purple spirit ring on her back—Thalassa's dragon brain was momentarily unable to process things. The same went for the other female dragons.

"So, did our kid become a Soul Spirit or not?"

Looking at her firstborn son Barus, with the thousand-year spirit ring trailing behind Elena beside him, and sensing Barus's unmistakably real, palpable heartbeat and life reactions, both Rus Wang and the female dragons who had previously investigated humans capturing soul beasts and refining them into Soul Spirits all had question marks pop into their minds. They had never seen such an eerie situation before.

"Elena, are you okay? Dad, Mom, aunties, this has nothing to do with Elena. I was the one who insisted she help me."

After waking up and finding Elena in this state, Barus, regardless of how weak he was before his elders, shielded Elena beneath him and took all the blame upon himself.

"You little fool..."

Before Yanjin (Crimson Fire Dragon) could erupt in fury, Panyan (Earth Rock Dragon) and Lingyi, as if seeing something unbelievable, pulled her back.

"Feel it. Look at Barus's cultivation age."

The dragons focused their senses and indeed noticed something different.

"Yesterday it was over four thousand, and today it's jumped to over five thousand!"

Feeling that Barus, the eldest son of her sister Thalassa, had gone from over four thousand to over five thousand in cultivation age, Lingyi found it utterly incredible. As an experienced dragon, she knew that for a Soul Spirit enslaved by humans to increase its spirit ring age, the human had to kill other soul beasts to plunder upgrades. Barus, after forming this so-called mental contract with an elf, could still keep his physical body and increase his cultivation—she had truly never seen anything like it. (This was 120 years after Huo Yuhao's timeline ended; the Spirit Ascension Platform hadn't been built by the Spirit Pagoda yet.)

"Could Barus's self-created method allow for soul power sharing with elves?"

Ximing (Heavenly Sun Dragon) speculated.

"Probably, but that's not the point. The important thing is whether this new method differs from the servile Soul Spirit method. If there's no difference, it's better not to have it. It's just a pity for Barus."

Xingyue, who had been silent, looked at Elena, now dazed beside Barus due to the arrival of all the dragons, with a grave expression on her face.

For a soul beast, becoming a Soul Spirit was just a different way of dying compared to being hunted by humans. The former was being completely imprisoned until death; the latter was truly dead.

"Regardless, son, can you sever the mental contract with Elena?"

Seeing that the discussion wasn't leading anywhere, Rus Wang asked Barus if he had considered a method that left a way out for soul beasts, unlike the Soul Spirit method that locked them in forever.

"Yes, Dad. Either unilaterally or mutually, but only in theory. Elena, let's go into the mental world for one final experiment and cancel the shared contract."

"O... okay."

Barus nodded, and then their soul power immediately dispersed. Elena's soul power level dropped from level twenty-five back to level nineteen, while Barus returned to the cultivation age of over four thousand years that the dragons had sensed. The mental contract was dissolved that simply.

The female dragons looked at each other, as if encountering something beyond their understanding, momentarily unsure of how to decide.

But Rus Wang's words made their eyes light up.

"This mental contract method, which can be undone at will, is fundamentally different from the human method of enslaving us into Soul Spirits. From now on, it can be widely promoted to deepen the bond between soul beasts and elves. The only question is—if an elf were to become a Title Douluo in the future and use this method to form a mental contract with a ferocious beast like us, instantly gaining a hundred thousand years of cultivation, would it trigger the Heavenly Tribulation, or not?"

"Rus, now or soon, spread the Elves out. In the near future, when an Elf produces a Title Douluo, give it a try?"

Yanjin (Crimson Fire Dragon) thought it over. Since this Mental Power Contract was so miraculous and didn't take the soul beast's life, and since Elves didn't need to plunder soul beast rings to slowly grow their strength anyway, it wasn't a bad way to deepen the bond between soul beasts and Elves.

"Can't rush it, Yanjin. The Elves have just barely left savagery behind. With such extraordinary power, chaos is bound to erupt at the lower levels. Wait until their civilization is more advanced, then pick those with strong mental power to test it on century-level soul beasts."

Rus Wang shook his head at the many excited female dragons, signaling that now wasn't the time. Then he left Barus aside. Under Barus's watchful gaze, his father talked privately with his mother and the other eight aunties behind a sound barrier. After a while, Rus Wang grinned wickedly at him.

"Son, even though you've accidentally created a Mental Power Contract that even we have to take seriously, you still took a minor Elf (Elves reach physical maturity at 45, equivalent to a human at 15) into the core zone of the Nanshan Rainforest without permission. Death penalty can be spared, but living punishment cannot be avoided."

"Ah!"

Barus let out a miserable cry upon hearing this.

"Come on, Dad! Elena is still right here! Give me some face, please."

Watching his eldest son beg for mercy, Rus Wang grinned wickedly. How could he not see through his son's little scheme? He was just using Elena's presence to try and escape punishment.

"Fine. You take Elena back first, then come back and accept your punishment. But if you don't come back afterward, heh heh~~."

Seeing this, Barus wailed inwardly. But knowing that no matter where he hid, he couldn't escape his father's capture, he could only send Elena back first and then return to take his punishment.