----This isn't filler. This chapter mainly answers readers' questions. If needed, there may be another update tonight.----
A quick note up front: Santang is still keeping an eye on Douluo Planet. Rus Wang can't make a move until he has grown into his Lord of Blades form, and that won't happen until just before the Divine Realm is swept into the Space-Time Turbulence. In the meantime, the Elves and intelligent Soul Beasts will face humanity, whose numbers are ten, even dozens of times greater than theirs, as humans spend nearly eight thousand years encroaching on the Zheer Continent.
Without the system's protective measures, the Dragon Race, Soul Beasts, and more than eight million Elves on the Folded Ear Continent would have to face the humans of Huo Yuhao's era right now. There were already 6.2 billion people on the Douluo Continent then, and their population had continued growing for another 350 years.
I'll share the full map of Douluo Planet that I made. Then you'll understand why Rus Wang and the Light Dragon King keep saying that the Douluo Continent poses such a great threat to the Folded Ear Continent. I'd originally planned to keep it hidden and reveal it later.
Unlike the Dou Ling Empire and Star Luo Empire a thousand years later, which were completely separated by the sea, the Folded Ear Continent and the Douluo Continent had a large number of islands between them that could serve as stepping stones.
The system had currently sealed off these islands, so no one could get to them. The Light Dragon King was the only one who could look down upon Douluo Planet with a secret technique and see them.
Once the system's protective measures for the Folded Ear Continent disappeared, the blockade around these islands would disappear as well. The Sun Moon Empire and the Elf Kingdom would clash fiercely there, each driven by the need to expand its territory and defend its borders.
Since we have an omniscient point of view, it feels like no big deal. But the protagonist has to wait until the Elf Kingdom under his rule has unified the entire Folded Ear Continent and he has evolved into Rus Wang, Lord of Blades. Only then can he contend with Santang, while burdened by Silver Dragon King and Di Tian, and dragging along Elves whom he forced into the Industrial Revolution despite their flimsy foundations and lack of capital, fewer than two thousand Dragons, and Soul Beasts that only gained intelligence after ten thousand years. If Santang cheats and intervenes early, the protagonist's side is doomed. So the protagonist is still under immense pressure before he becomes Rus Wang, Lord of Blades.
Also, to clarify the issue of Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beasts: only the Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beasts in Dragon Valley Forest can coexist peacefully with one another.
Before the Dragon God fell, Dragon Valley Forest on Douluo Planet was the home of the Light Dragon King's bloodline and the Heavenly Sun Dragon clan. It had an established ruler and a foundation of order. When the Dragon God's fall brought them the Heavenly Tribulation, the threat of human Soul Masters, and the threat of other Soul Beasts, the impact on the Heavenly Sun Dragons—of which there were more than five thousand at the time—was relatively small. From the moment they were born, the Soul Beasts in Dragon Valley Forest were kept firmly under the local Dragons' control. Some became food, while those over a hundred thousand years old were gathered up and made into subordinates.
The Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beasts in Star Dou Forest and on the other continent followed the law of the jungle, hunting one another. It was only under the threat of humans that they reluctantly banded together.
Things were different in Dragon Valley Forest. For thousands of years, the strongest Soul Beasts there had always been the Dragons. Before Huo Yuhao was born, the Heavenly Tribulation had wiped out every Dragon powerhouse over five hundred thousand years old, and the reigning Dragon King had been struck down as well. The True Dragon who was second strongest would immediately take the Dragon King's place, keeping the succession stable.
And thanks to the Light Dragon King's active involvement, every generation of Dragon Kings knew the truth behind the Dragon God's fall and deliberately maintained order among the Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beasts. They did so to build up their strength, hoping that one day, under the leadership of a new Dragon powerhouse who could survive the Heavenly Tribulation and reach a million years, the Dragon Race would return to its former glory.
These were the best of times.
All kinds of Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beasts, Dragons, and Elves lived peacefully together in cities and villages. They got along well and shared dinner.
They were also the worst of times.
The roar and clamor of steam engines wouldn't wait for the Elves to adapt at their own pace. They opened up vast, uninhabited regions in the north of the Zheer Continent, waiting for the lucky Elves to uncover the treasures buried underground.
Later generations of Elf writers called the steam-engine-dominated era the Age of Coal and Iron.
To maximize the number of children born to Elf families, the kingdom's government built uniform houses specifically for its lower-class Elf commoners, who could live in them for free. This gave every city in the kingdom the same monotonous appearance.
These standard houses were two stories high, with two rectangular floors designed to make the most of every inch of space.
Just inside the front door on the first floor, the kitchen with its windows was on the left, while a tiny windowless bathroom with a washbasin was on the right. A few steps down the hall, the stairs to the second floor were on the right, and the living room was on the left, with space for meals and for the whole family to sit together.
Upstairs, apart from the hallway, doors, and railing, there was nothing but white walls. Some Elf families painted them to make them less plain, and the better-off ones hung pictures. On the right side of the hallway, in the section covering the stairs, there were two rooms: the smallest bedroom and a bathroom with a shower. On the left side were three more rooms. One had no windows, while the other two bedrooms, one large and one small, each had a window for light and ventilation.
No Elf complained about the layout. After working eleven hours, the Elves trudged home, exhausted, and found their door numbers. The moment they stepped into their two-story, detached homes, all their weariness faded away.
Just after six in the morning, the Elves ate white bread, hopped on their bicycles, and hurried off to work. They ate lunch near their factories, then came home around half past seven in the evening. Dinner was the liveliest time of day for the whole family.
Compared with the eleven-hour workday of Elf men, Elf women worked one or two hours less. They spent that time picking up the children and preparing dinner for their husbands.
Thanks to the free housing provided by the government, cheap cloth made from wool produced in the factories, and affordable food—each Elf had access to well over a thousand kilograms of grain a year—even commoners with modest wages had plenty left over at the end of each year.
The biggest expenses in an ordinary Elf's life were actually water bills, replacing Soul Tool lights, children's tuition, and the coal needed for the household stove. (Note: Rus Wang had forcibly dragged the Elves into the First Industrial Revolution. Soul Tool technology was still underdeveloped, and the devices were poor-quality and short-lived, becoming useless after just a few months.)
Building the infrastructure required for the age of electricity was too expensive and labor-intensive for Rus Wang and the Elf Kingdom, so they took a simple, direct approach and used Soul Tools instead. This let the Elves make full use of their advantage: after the age of twelve, every Elf had Soul Power.
So even though there were no streetlamps along the roads, every household could still be brightly lit at night.
After six days of work, the Elves got a full day off on the seventh. That was also the liveliest day of the week in every city. Families of Elf commoners filled the football stadiums, buying tickets to watch the football matches in person—the real thing, not just the players on their Soul Tool radios.
The birth of a child was good news for Elf parents. For the first two years of the child's life, the Elf mother stayed home all year, drawing a salary while caring for the child. The government paid for it. During those two years, the father didn't have to choke down white bread in the morning, either. He could have breakfast prepared by his wife before leaving for work.
When the child turned three, Elf mothers brought them to the factory daycare, where they spent five years, from age three to six. The factory was required to run the daycare, with half the expenses paid by the factory and the other half by the government. Elves from the Grey Feather Division dropped by now and then to give the factory owners a little surprise.
From six to twelve, during the crucial years when their personalities took shape, Elf children had to attend government-run preschools. Attendance was compulsory, tuition-free, and funded by the government. This shaped the kind of people the children would become when they awakened their Soul Power at twelve. Even in the 198th Year of Levant, when the government had no money whatsoever to shoulder this expense, Rus Wang still paid out of his own pocket, giving the government gold mined from the Folded Ear Continent to fund free preschool education. (Preschoolers had to learn elementary-school material.)
After that, from ages thirteen to fifteen, came the government's final stage of universal education: three years of compulsory schooling. Only the top five percent of Elf children by exam ranking qualified to continue their studies without paying tuition—that is, to attend junior high. (The three years of elementary school here covered junior-high material.)
The other Elf children could continue on to junior high if their families had enough money to cover the costs. Those whose families couldn't afford it had to start a work-study job or find another way forward. (The Elf Kingdom had never accumulated much wealth to begin with, and work-study students were a perfect way for factory owners to save on wages, so they were very popular with them.)
Even the Elf children who advanced to junior high had no easy time of it. They faced rigorous assessments as part of their elite education, which were meant to prevent too many educational resources from going to waste. Any subject they failed in a monthly exam counted against their perfect score on the high school entrance exam, which they sat for at age twenty-one.
This eliminated another sixty percent of the Elves, but the government didn't discard those who were cut. They were transferred to vocational schools, where they spent eight years: studying in the mornings and training at factories in the afternoons. They graduated at twenty-nine, ready to enter society as highly sought-after technicians.
Those who made it into high school studied for fourteen years. Elf students with no black marks against them were eligible to take the civil service exam if they chose to enter society after graduation. Those selected to continue on to university after the college entrance exams received special attention.
Ten years later, the Elves who had met the graduation requirements and reached adulthood at forty-five could officially enter the civil service, join research teams led by professors in various fields, be recruited into the military, or enter the Grey Feather Division's secret training program.
"Oh!"
Once again, a coffee shop in Ravenna that sold coffee for one copper coin was packed with seated Elves. They were marveling at something an inventor had created.
The One Copper Coffee Shop was a brand founded by Lingyi, Rus Wang's wife, the Azure Abyss Holy Dragon. Its purpose was to give the Elves, who worked eleven-hour shifts and had only half an hour for lunch, cheap coffee to perk them up. Like the beef-pie and hot-dog shops that thrived in cities everywhere, it existed to serve Elf workers.
Now, Elf workers crowded into the café and stared curiously at a projector that could display a ten-second black-and-white clip on a screen. It wasn't all that different from the birth of film in Rus Wang's previous life.
Unlike the steam engines Rus Wang had forced on the Elves during the First Industrial Revolution, this Soul Tool projector, powered by Soul Power and built around a Core Array, was something the Elves had come up with themselves.
As time passed, this way of showing films in coffee shops gradually became more professional.
Along with film, the Elf Kingdom as a whole continued to develop. After forcing the Elves into the Steam Age, Rus Wang realized he had made a mistake. He left them to develop on their own. After nearly thirty years of upheaval brought by steam engines and Soul Tools, the Elves were finally beginning to adapt, and society was slowly correcting itself and returning to a more natural pace of development.
Another decade passed. It was the 280th Year of Levant, the 360th Year of Intermission, and the fortieth year of the steam engine's impact. Toriya, once a little Dragonkin girl who loved stuffing her face with charcoal and giving her parents trouble, had grown up.
Toriya had successfully awakened her Soul Power at twelve. In front of her parents, her grandfather Rus Wang, her grandmother Thalassa, and all her other elders, she displayed an astonishing ability. Though she currently had only Innate Full Soul Power at level ten, Toriya thought she could freely switch between three forms: pure Elf, mixed-blood Dragonkin, and True Dragon.
In front of her parents and elders, she also used several attack skills belonging to the Seer Elf Iyou. She had completely overcome the Elves' lack of Soul Skills, the Dragon Race and Soul Beasts needing a hundred thousand years to reach maturity, and the Dragon Race's late shapeshifting. She was a true Little Monster.
"A Dragonkin Elf granddaughter with the bloodlines of the Seer Elf, the Dragon Race, and the Zheer Elf. She seems a little too well-rounded."
Rus Wang had to admit he'd never seen anything like it.
Even the Light Dragon King, who had initially insisted it was absolutely impossible, fell silent for a long time after watching the recordings on the Dragon Clan Recording Stone Rus Wang had brought, which showed Toriya switching between her three forms. In the end, she could only comment mildly, "With abilities like that, I suppose mixing the Dragon Race with the Elves isn't out of the question."
"Auntie!"
Toriya occasionally flew alongside her mother, Elena, while in her True Dragon Form. When they reached the Southern Coniferous Forest to visit her father and grandfather at work, she happened to spot her second aunt, Iyuda. Toriya immediately switched to her Elf form and threw herself into Iyuda's arms. Her second aunt had lived for more than eighty thousand years.
"Toriya? Elena, too? It's been so long. Are you here to see Father and Big Brother?"
"Yeah. They've been busy for years over something called the Dragon Ascension Pillar. In recent years, they've only written home once every six months. I came to see what it was all about."
Elena took a basket from her storage Soul Tool. It was full of the meat pies Barus liked. She sent them to him every month, though she didn't know if he remembered to eat them. He was always so absorbed in researching something that he forgot to sleep and eat.
Meanwhile, in a valley in the heart of the Southern Coniferous Forest, Rus Wang and his eldest son, Barus, were conducting the final tests on a Dragon Ascension Pillar forged from rare metals.
"Son, are you sure you want to put my blood into the Dragon Ascension Pillar for the test?"
"Yes, Father. I tested your blood against my teacher the Light Dragon King's blood. Your platelets either assimilated hers or devoured them. It was just like how you overwhelmed my second sister's blood with yours, since her body was more like your current form. So I want to verify whether the Dragon Ascension Pillar works better when your blood is used as its core material than when it uses the blood of one of the Nine Great Dragon Kings."
Barus held a test tube containing the blood of Blade Ruse King and began pouring it into the Dragon Ascension Pillar...
[Paradox System: Decision—New Dragon Race, implemented]
Before you continue