In the Douluo World, Soul Beasts were bound by one rule: no matter what, they could never become gods. Even if they reached the million-year level, the Divine Realm would never accept a Soul Beast ascending to its ranks. All of this was because the Dragon God had issued an order: as long as the Dragon God was absent, no divine beast could become a god in the Divine Realm!
At that time, Soul Beasts had three paths open to them. The first was to take human form and marry a human who could become a god, but that path was now closed. Don't ask why. The second was to become a humanoid Soul Spirit like Huo Yuhao's, dwelling in a human's Sea of Consciousness and making it to the Divine Realm that way. But that was a completely different thing from the Elves in Pokémon and Seer—it was more or less like being a slave. In Pokémon, if an Elf wasn't happy, it could doze off during a match, like Ash's Charizard, the overpowered GF. In Seer's early story, when the three-person squad was cornered, Xiaomi immediately recharged and became a three-minute whale, trading one for one with divine beasts and being invincible against anything below them.
The third path was just as hopeless: wait a few hundred years, then face the Heavenly Tribulation and become a Ferocious Beast. But not every Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beast could become a Ferocious Beast. If it couldn't withstand the Heavenly Tribulation, both body and soul would be destroyed. And Rus Wang, who knew the story, also knew why this path was so hopeless. The Silver Dragon King was an idiot. Even in Douluo 4, after becoming the Dragon God, she was still hopelessly incompetent. When Di Tian was on the verge of death, she was nowhere to be seen. He had diligently obeyed her orders for tens of thousands of years, endured all her blunders, and never betrayed her, remaining a loyal subject until the end. In the end, he didn't even become a divine official. He died shielding Lan Xuanyu from the Heavenly Tribulation, and who knew when Lan Xuanyu would finally become a god king.
So when his wife, the Female Water Dragon, prepared to face the Hundred-Thousand-Year Heavenly Tribulation on her own, Rus Wang was truly frantic. His wife wasn't stupid, either. Despite being only a Ten-Thousand-Year Soul Beast, she had learned arithmetic and writing—an impressive feat. If she already had a hundred thousand years under her belt, Rus Wang was confident he could teach her to become a Soul Beast with human intelligence. Whatever she turned out like in the end, as long as she wasn't as dim-witted as the Silver Dragon King, he was willing to indulge her in everything.
"Don't!"
After placing several layers of Energy Shields on his five young ones, Rus Wang chased after the Female Water Dragon. But less than a minute later, he returned to the pool. He was worried about his wife, but he wasn't an idiot. As the king of the Nanshan Rainforest on the Zheer Continent, he knew the circumstances of the Soul Beasts that had fled here like the back of his hand.
A few measly layers of hastily applied Energy Shields were no use. Quite a few Ten-Thousand-Year Soul Beasts could shatter them in just a few blows, despite facing a special Soul Beast with a hundred thousand years under its belt, then kill his young ones.
He dug a hole for the five young ones and put them inside. Then he surrounded them with dozens of Energy Magic Arrays that could trigger attacks using their own abilities. He also fitted them with several more layers of shields, enough to withstand attacks from Ten-Thousand-Year Soul Beasts. Only then did he leave with peace of mind.
The Female Water Dragon headed into the depths of the Nanshan Rainforest. The farther she went, the more trees there were, and the harder it became for sunlight to penetrate the canopy.
Even if there was no hope of reaching a hundred thousand years, she should at least find a suitable place to die.
The Female Water Dragon sensed the disturbance of Rus Wang following her partway before turning back, and began to think.
She wasn't worried about what would happen to her Bloodline Crystal after she was gone. She was happy to entrust her children to Rus Wang. From the moment she had made a request with a JP to that dragonlike Soul Beast, she had known he would be a responsible father. He would look after the children until they reached a thousand years and could fend for themselves.
The Female Water Dragon's life had been full of hardship. She was born in a forest on the continent occupied by the Sun Moon Empire in Douluo 3. Her mother protected her only for the first twenty years of her life, and her father was nowhere to be found. During those twenty years, humans would occasionally send people to hunt Soul Beasts for their Soul Rings. Many of them targeted her while she was still young, but her mother drove them off.
But after her twentieth year, everything changed. Her mother was killed by a human expert and turned into a human's Soul Ring. She was not even four hundred years old then, and had to struggle to survive. Sometimes, she couldn't even beat a fish.
A million desperate escapes, hunts, and life-or-death struggles—all of it boiled down to the most primitive instinct of a living creature: survival.
Eventually, she finally became a Ten-Thousand-Year Soul Beast and gained a lake of her own. But countless experiences of evading human hunters, fighting Soul Beasts, and struggling over food and territory had pushed her mind beyond the brutish instincts typical of Soul Beasts. She had learned to distinguish and think. Those were the hard-won results of her painful struggle to survive, from the age of twenty to more than three thousand.
In the fourth hundred years of her third millennium, she keenly noticed that the humans entering the forest had changed. Their cries were completely different from those of the humans she knew, and they were stronger, bloodthirsty killers. She even saw what happened to the captured Soul Beasts.
They were alive, but imprisoned. Humans stripped them of their bodies and sealed them away as unknown balls of energy, waiting for human children to choose them. That was no way to be alive. It was just a desperate existence, left to the mercy of human choice.
The Female Water Dragon was furious, but her reason and self-restraint kept her calm. At just ten thousand years old, she couldn't defeat the things in human hands. Her urgent priority was still to migrate and survive, not to clash with humans—and, above all, not to be discovered by them.
For the next two hundred years, she kept hiding across the continent where she had grown up, venturing into remote places where people rarely went to escape human eyes.
Gradually, as she migrated farther south, the temperature grew colder. Eventually, she reached a completely white, frozen wasteland. It wasn't a good place for her, a water-attribute Soul Beast, because there was less and less food to find.
But she couldn't shake off the humans. Another group of ice-attribute Soul Beasts was slaughtered by them. With no other choice, the Female Water Dragon headed south, crossing the region where the magnetic field was chaotic. She crossed the empty surface of the sea ice and flew over the bone-chilling ocean, evading the Sea Soul Beasts' ill intentions.
At last, she succeeded, reaching the edge of a New Continent. Even though it was only a frozen wasteland, the concentration of natural energy was much higher than in her first territory in the forest. And the humans didn't follow her here. She could finally rest. When she came upon the first coniferous forest on the New Continent, she went on a rampage, hunting the local "Soul Beasts" and devouring them.
As she enjoyed the long-missed feeling of a full belly, she also felt puzzled. When she killed the creatures on this continent, they didn't produce Soul Rings like the Soul Beasts she had killed on the Old Continent.
The food had truly gone into her stomach and filled it, but the absence of Soul Rings was just as real. These local Soul Beasts might not be Soul Beasts at all, but a new kind of creature. The thought left the Female Water Dragon bewildered.
The New Continent she had stumbled into was far more mysterious than she had imagined.
The Female Water Dragon began exploring everything about this New Continent, and continued heading south—or what she believed was south.
The temperature began to rise, and food became more abundant. Some of the creatures could even hurt her. But, strangely, the New Continent's "Soul Beasts" still didn't produce the Soul Rings that Soul Beasts were supposed to have.
The Female Water Dragon had no choice but to keep investigating and uncover the continent's secrets.
A few months later, she came across a group of upright, two-legged creatures that looked a lot like humans. But their ears were unusually long, and their Soul Power seemed practically nonexistent. This puzzled her.
That can't be right. Are they humans or not? She didn't treat them as human kin and take revenge on them. Instead, she quietly observed them.
For months, the Female Water Dragon kept watching the Pointy-Ears as they hunted as a whole tribe for what she considered food. During that time, she also saw several Soul Beasts like herself, who had fled here, slaughtering the two-legged creatures in revenge.
It was almost entirely one-sided. The Pointy-Ears' powerful warriors seemed not to exist at all. They never appeared, and the Soul Beasts killed them all. After months of observation, the Female Water Dragon tentatively concluded that the Pointy-Ears weren't humans. They even seemed to have no grudge against Soul Beasts. She and those other Soul Beasts were the outsiders on this continent.
The Female Water Dragon decided to continue heading "south." The farther "south" she went, the more concentrated the natural energy became—a fatal temptation to a Soul Beast that lived longer as its years accumulated.
Then, while passing near another Pointy-Ear tribe being slaughtered by other Soul Beasts, she felt a long-missed sense of oppression, like that of a Ferocious Beast with over a hundred thousand years under its belt.
Had a Pointy-Ear warrior finally appeared?
At the time, she hid in the nearest body of water as fast as she could. But that wasn't what happened. A blue, dragon-shaped creature appeared. It was the first time she had seen Rus Wang, the Pointy-Ears' guardian beast, and the most powerful being known on the continent so far.
It killed the Soul Beast slaughtering the Pointy-Ears with almost a single bite. Then it used Soul Power to lift the surviving Pointy-Ears and take them to what was now the Levant Region, where it established a humanlike system of rule.
The Female Water Dragon watched Rus Wang leave, feeling angry, unhappy, and confused.
But as Rus Wang continued killing Soul Beasts that dared to attack the Pointy-Ears, and she observed the long-eared creatures in detail, the Female Water Dragon finally stopped equating the Pointy-Ears with humans.
She discovered that after Rus Wang gave the long-eared creatures various human technologies, the well-fed Pointy-Ears began to grow strong and healthy. Under Rus Wang's protection, without obtaining Soul Rings, they had reached the Soul Power equivalent of human children from the Old Continent who were over twenty levels! And it wasn't just one exceptional case—there were over a hundred of them! Their numbers would only grow with time.
Taking into account the fact that the New Continent's native creatures didn't have Soul Rings, and the behavior of this hundred-thousand-year-level creature protecting the Pointy-Ears—
The Female Water Dragon understood what Rus Wang was doing. He intended to make the Pointy-Ears his kin. Before humans discovered this continent, he wanted to bind them closely to the Soul Beasts. They could increase their cultivation without Soul Beast Soul Rings and might be able to coexist with the foreign Soul Beasts. Then, when humans eventually discovered the continent, the Pointy-Ears and Soul Beasts could join forces to fight them!
He had planned all of this in advance. Killing Soul Beasts to protect the Pointy-Ears wasn't a betrayal of Soul Beasts as a whole. He had seen how different these Pointy-Ears were from humans. In the long run, protecting the still-weak Pointy-Ears was more beneficial than harmful to the Soul Beast Clan.
Gradually, the Female Water Dragon began trying to approach the most powerful "Soul Beast" known on the New Continent.
At first, she was very cautious. She left her scent around the territory, then hid to observe. Thanks to her thousand years of experience, she knew all too well that among dragons, even a female dragon who accidentally trespassed into a male dragon's territory wouldn't be spared. It didn't matter who you were: once you entered its territory, it would attack you, male or female.
Gradually, she sensed that Rus Wang had begun deliberately following her, but he still kept a considerable distance. They watched each other from far away. Later, as they gradually drew closer, the Female Water Dragon finally confirmed that the New Continent's most powerful "Soul Beast" looked a little like a dragon but was indeed one of the Dragon Race. They could speak the same language, and he wanted to have offspring with her. (Rus Wang in Seer only has the water attribute, but I think his design looks like a dragon, so he should have the dragon attribute too.)
As they spent time together, the Female Water Dragon learned the dragon's name: Rus. The Pointy-Ears he protected—the New Continent's native intelligent species, Elves, as he called them—referred to him as Rus Wang.
During their time together, Rus Wang taught the Female Water Dragon Elvish Language, which was different from human speech. He took her through the rainforest and showed her the New Continent's different regions and the locations of the Nanshan Rainforest's rich resources. He also showed her the Ten-Thousand-Year Soul Beasts who had fled there and whom he had settled throughout the rainforest, and let her choose a place to lay her eggs. Later, under his protection, she was able to lay her first clutch of offspring in peace, deep in the rainforest where the natural energy was most concentrated. It was something she had never dared to hope for, after suppressing her breeding urges for so long.
Aside from the twenty years she had spent with her mother, those were the most pleasant two years of her life.
But after Rus Wang brought the Female Water Dragon to visit the Elves' villages several times, she felt that her years were increasing a little too quickly. When she arrived on the New Continent, she had only lived for a little over eighty-five thousand years. When she first reached the Nanshan Rainforest, where the natural energy was most concentrated, she had just over ninety thousand and one hundred years. Now, with just a few months gone by, her years were soaring higher every day.
Won't you even let me have some peace?
After choosing a blessed spot where she would face the Heavenly Tribulation, the Female Water Dragon lay down quietly and looked at the dark clouds gathering overhead.
But so be it. These two years were enough.
The Female Water Dragon made peace with it. She had lived a hard life, struggling and fighting for survival until she was exhausted. After enduring so much pain, a brief moment of peace at the very end, before the Heavenly Tribulation, was enough.
Rustle, rustle, rustle—
Trees were violently snapped aside. Rus's presence!
The Female Water Dragon was horrified. She roared at the pursuing Rus Wang, accusation and disbelief echoing in her mind.
Rus Wang didn't stop. He charged straight toward the Female Water Dragon, who kept backing away.
"I'm begging you, go back! Without me weighing them down, the children will still have you!"
Rus remained silent and just kept running toward the Female Water Dragon. But the lightning of the Heavenly Tribulation didn't care what was happening between them. It struck straight down. At once, the Ten-Thousand-Year Soul Beasts throughout the Nanshan Rainforest felt the commotion of the Heavenly Tribulation and grew restless.
Among them was a Dark Gold Terror Claw Bear with Behemoth blood remaining in its veins and over seventy thousand years under its belt. Unable to suppress its glee, it charged mindlessly into the forbidden zone designated by Rus Wang to investigate in person. Had Rus Wang fallen, or the Female Water Dragon? Or had one of them grown even stronger and chased the other to the ends of the earth?
...Three days later...
[Health Bar: 462/469]
Looking at the Health Bar on his panel, Rus Wang immediately started walking with a swagger.
"This Heavenly Tribulation does less than two digits of damage when it hits a mismatched species in Seer's battle system. Hilarious."
Rus Wang brought the Female Water Dragon, who had weathered most of the Heavenly Tribulation on top of him, successfully broken through the hundred-thousand-year threshold, and stabilized her new realm, toward the young ones' cave. The two stopped in silence.
Everything nearby had been wrecked by the defensive mechanisms Rus Wang had set up around the cave earlier. The culprit who had triggered them—a Dark Gold Terror Claw Bear covered in wounds, with bones exposed—was pinned beneath the claws of a female Dark Night Dragon with over sixty thousand years under her belt. Their own five young ones clustered around the female dragon. It was obvious at a glance who the loyal subject was.
When the Dark Night Dragon saw Rus Wang return with the Female Water Dragon, who had successfully broken through, she lowered her head respectfully.
"Congratulations on breaking through, Your Majesty."
But after she said that, Rus Wang, the Female Water Dragon, the Dark Night Dragon, the Dark Gold Terror Claw Bear, and the five young ones all stared at one another in silence, as if time had stopped.
One millisecond passed, then two.
When the Female Water Dragon realized that, while she was undergoing the Heavenly Tribulation, her children had been targeted by an ill-intentioned beast that refused to submit, and that it had triggered the protective mechanisms her husband had placed on them before going to find her, she let out a roar filled with boundless fury. Rus Wang also immediately activated [Skill: Water and Sky of One Color], boosting his attack power and causing a huge commotion throughout the rainforest.
The Dark Night Dragon silently led the five young ones aside and covered their eyes with her wings so they wouldn't see the Dark Gold Dreadclaw's death.
The entire southern part of the Nanshan Rainforest was thrown into turmoil. Even the Elves in the Levant Region sensed it, and the ground shook nonstop.
Before you continue