Under Rus Wang's wise and mighty rule of noninterference, the high-ranking Elves elected the person with the most votes at the Council of Sages as their new prime minister to govern the country.
The high-ranking Elves who attended the Council of Sages all held senior government positions. Though factions existed among them, they had the Grey Feather Division watching them and a mountain of paperwork submitted daily by the officials below. They had no time to waste on factional infighting that would only add to their workload and troubles.
Rus Wang likened this flawed yet unexpectedly smooth system of electing a prime minister from among a small group to the military and political government of America in his previous life. When war broke out, the military actually had to fight, while the politicians who declared war could hide safely in bunkers far away.
Likewise, every task the high-ranking Elves handled concerned the country's livelihood. Any unexpected incident could bring them an enormous workload. If some fool started factional infighting, the resulting administrative chaos would be impossible to measure or resolve in just a few months. The Elven leadership would band together and deal with the trouble internally, even if it meant they could rest for only a few extra minutes, all before the Grey Feather Division came to arrest anyone.
The Grey Feather Division, an organization in Rus Wang's hands similar to the Imperial Guards, was his personal instrument of force and did not belong to the country's civil service. Youlan and Xingyue managed it, but aside from those two dragons, every member was an Elf.
Elves who joined the Grey Feather Division not only secretly observed officials' corruption and arrested them when necessary, but also underwent specialized training to raise their levels and deal with the various legitimate and illegitimate enforcers of local powers. Those who chose to join the Division had all been mentally screened by Youlan. Some had family members whose safety they needed to protect; they lived in isolation alongside Elves with no family, in the Nanshan Rainforest, where they were paired with one another.
Under Youlan and Xingyue, the two True Dragons, the highest position an Elf could attain in the Grey Feather Division was Grand Mentor. The Grand Mentor also served as the Division's public face and sat among the kingdom's leadership as its representative.
The current Grand Mentor of the Grey Feather Division—and its very first—Ulides, was the son of Evans, the Elf Kingdom's first prime minister. His Soul Douluo cultivation had spared him from disaster, but he could only watch helplessly as his father and younger siblings were poisoned by chicken soup laced with poison.
That became his most direct motive for joining the Grey Feather Division. Fueled by the fire of vengeance, he crossed the Level 90 threshold that so many Elves with cultivation talent dared not cross, becoming the second Titled Douluo in Elven history. He swore to Rus Wang that, for as long as he lived, he would be the Damocles' sword hanging over every high-ranking Elven family and every corrupt official. (Every Elf possessed Soul Power, could live to 300 years old, and only 74 years had passed since the nationwide uprising sparked by Elven Soul Masters in 196. Many who had lived through it were still alive, so Elves generally regarded becoming a Titled Douluo with pessimism, fear, and wariness.)
My name is Ben.
I didn't much like the codename my superior had assigned me. It should have been given to a male agent.
I was an eight-star agent in the most secretive and righteous organization in the Elf Kingdom, the Grey Feather Division. I was currently assigned to the Division's Nanshan Rainforest Border Regiment. My main job was leading the regiment, and my side job was teaching at a kindergarten in a border town on the edge of the Nanshan Rainforest.
Don't get the wrong idea. This was not an easy job. If you walked into a kindergarten and found out that your class was full of Dragon cubs and the children of high-ranking Elven officials, believe me, you'd be sweating too. You couldn't take your eyes off them for even a minute, or the Dragon and Elf children might start fighting over some toy.
These children, whose minds weren't fully mature, were at their most difficult to handle between the ages of six and twelve. Every day spent with them was the most mentally exhausting time for me and my Mental Contract partner, a Turquoise Dragon.
Oh, right. Speaking of my Mental Contract partner, why did I specifically say she was a member of the Dragon Race instead of a Soul Beast? I should clarify that since our Grey Feather Division headquarters was in the heart of the Nanshan Rainforest, we had a much more nuanced understanding of the difference between the dragons living there and Soul Beasts than the crude classifications in the Elf Kingdom's school textbooks.
Just as our Division had clear rules against lumping ordinary Soul Beasts, Ten-Thousand-Year Soul Beasts, and Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beasts together, these three were clearly at different stages in the history of High Elf civilization. Animals wearing High Elf skins, High Elves wearing animal skins, and us High Elves today.
[When the system generated the Folded Ear Continent, it needed to fit it into the Douluo Planet, so it constructed a reasonable evolutionary process and fossil record for the Elves. Like humans, Elves evolved from monkeys, but we diverged from humans at the Australopithecus stage and followed a different evolutionary path: Australopithecus—Highland Spirit Ape—Erect Spirit—High Elf.]
Ordinary Soul Beasts had Soul Power throughout their bodies, but they were no different from wild animals—in fact, they were even worse. Once, I was following the police as they went to kill a thousand-year Soul Beast that had emerged from the Nanshan Rainforest and wandered into town. The thousand-year-old Soul Beast had already been killed by the tail spike of a startled Stegosaurus (a heavy-duty pack animal used for hauling cargo, and a replacement for the Brachiosaurus), which had pierced its head with pinpoint accuracy. It hadn't even tried to dodge.
[The native creatures of the Zheer Continent were a mix of Jurassic dinosaurs and Cenozoic mammals. So Soul Beasts with a hundred or a thousand years of cultivation couldn't throw their weight around on the Zheer Continent. If Panyan weren't keeping an eye on their population, the native creatures there would have wiped them out instead (Allosaurus, Smilodon: Hello).]
All right, back to why my Mental Contract partner was a Turquoise Dragon and not some Soul Beast.
The reason was simple. From the founding of our Elf Kingdom onward, the Dragon Race had helped us build things in every field. Although we Elves had now begun to take the lead in developing those fields, our relationship with the Dragon Race had long been tightly bound together. No matter how much certain idiots in the country tried to cover it up, His Majesty Rus Wang was an obstacle they could never get around.
So a kindergarten like mine, where Elf and Dragon cubs mingled, naturally had to be paired with several Ten-Thousand-Year True Dragons selected and assigned by the Dragon Race. Together, we were subjected to the mental and physical torment of those cubs.
"Those little brats."
At last, the morning class was over. After handing over my duties, I hurried back to my private office in the kindergarten, drew the curtains, and locked the door. Then I gulped down medical disinfectant to release all the stress I'd built up from taking care of the cubs.
I had to admit, the benefits of working for the Grey Feather Division were beyond what even middle-class Elven families could afford. Aside from prohibited items, all I had to do was submit an application for whatever I wanted. It would be delivered to me in as little as three days, or a month at most.
"Thank goodness you dragons reproduce even more slowly than we Elves, Scher. Just looking after fourteen cubs is already exhausting. I can't even imagine the chaos when there are twenty or more."
After finishing his third bottle of medical disinfectant, Ben's face began to flush slightly from the alcohol. His Turquoise Dragon emerged from his Mental World, deliberately shrunk down in size, and collapsed, utterly exhausted, on the carpet. Ben complained to her.
"After all, a Dragon couple is lucky if they have even one cub in a century. His Excellency Rus Wang, for example, managed to have three cubs with each of nine mother dragons in just two hundred and seventy years. Among our male dragons, he's an unusually prolific ladies' man."
Scher, the Turquoise Dragon, took some air-dried Brachiosaurus meat from a box in the office, tore open the packaging, and began eating.
Since the Dragon God's fall, the Dragon Race in Dragon Valley Forest had remained in the critically endangered category Elves used to assess animal populations. Even with the Light Dragon King and successive Dragon Kings protecting the True Dragons of Dragon Valley Forest, the combined threat of the Heavenly Tribulation and human hunters meant the Dragon Race had never managed to pass the threshold of twelve hundred dragons.
So when Rus Wang became the Dragon King of Dragon Valley Forest and called a new Dragon Race gathering for the forest's tribes, telling all the Ten-Thousand-Year dragons present about the Elves and the Zheer Continent, they had wept with joy. The shadow of the Heavenly Tribulation hadn't disappeared, but at least humans were no longer hunting them, right?
What's more, Rus Wang had worked tirelessly to help the Elves in the kingdom's early days. He had already laid a solid foundation for relations between the Dragon Race and the Elves. The dragons weren't stupid enough to destroy that foundation and make enemies of the Elves. Besides, there were so few dragons that relocating to the Folded Ear Continent wouldn't cause any conflict with the areas where the Elves lived.
Besides, Rus Wang and the Elves were the native inhabitants of the Zheer Continent. The dragons of Dragon Valley Forest knew perfectly well what their own status was when they came to live on the Folded Ear Continent.
"But speaking of which, Ben, have you looked into what people outside think of this kindergarten where our Dragon cubs and your Elf cubs are mixed together?"
"Oh, that."
Ben propped himself up on the desk, shaking his head.
"Do you know how His Majesty Rus Wang's eldest son, Barus, is viewed among the Elves?"
"Uh, as an expert in military affairs, Soul Tools, and people's livelihoods, and as someone who's helped develop the kingdom we share?"
Scher thought for a moment. Barus, the eldest son of Rus Wang, the current Dragon King, was a household name even among the Dragon Race, whose numbers were so small. His talent for Dragon Clan Rune Arrays and Soul Tools was beyond the reach of every other dragon.
"No. He's a real-life fairy-tale prince. He and an ordinary Elf girl who lived in the city were childhood sweethearts, and they eventually had a happy ending and married. A few years ago, they even welcomed a girl who hatched from a Dragon egg. The time Rus Wang chased him all around the royal capital of Ravenna was the best-selling issue in the history of The Sun Newspaper."
"I thought Barus was a pseudo-Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beast? And aren't we—"
Scher looked at Ben in shock.
"By common knowledge, once your Dragon Race breaks through the hundred-thousand-year threshold, just like Soul Beasts, there's no longer any reproductive isolation between you and us Elves. Even if the Mental Contract Law boosts our strength by sharing it with you, raising you to pseudo-Hundred-Thousand-Year status, it's still possible."
Scher suddenly remembered that her current cultivation, after the Mental Contract Law had forcibly boosted Ben from Soul Douluo to pseudo-Titled Douluo, had likewise been raised to the pseudo-Hundred-Thousand-Year level.
Considering that Ben was already over a hundred and ninety years old, still didn't have a boyfriend, and had the Dragon King's eldest son Barus as an example to follow—and that Elves had no restrictions on cultivation levels like humans did—she could completely rely on the incredible traits His Majesty Rus Wang had described: Elves who became Titled Douluo could live for 1,200 years, and each subsequent level added another hundred years to their lifespan. She could try breaking through Level 100... Scher's entire Dragon body instinctively shuffled backward a few steps.
"Don't worry, Scher. If I still haven't found an Elf man by the time I'm 215, then I'll consider eating you."
"And don't even think about asking your Dragon council to transfer you out of this post. Don't make me act early."
"...Yes."
Before you continue