Lying Low and Developing

--Not water, this chapter mainly explains the readers' questions. If needed, there might be another update tonight--

A heads-up: Three-Sugar is still eyeing Douluo Planet. At the very least, Rus Wang must grow into the Lord of Blades form before the God Realm is hit by the space-time turbulence, otherwise, he cannot make a move. During this period, the Elves and sentient Soul Beasts must face humans who hold a ten-fold, or even several-fold, advantage in numbers, and who have been encroaching upon the Zheer Continent for nearly eight thousand years.

Without the system's protection mechanism, the dragons, Soul Beasts, and over 8 million Elves on the Folded Ear Continent would now have to face the humans of Huo Yuhao's era—a population that had already reached 6.2 billion on the Douluo Continent and had continued to grow for another 350 years.

I will post a full map of Douluo Planet that I made so you can understand why Rus Wang and the Light Dragon King always say that the Douluo Continent poses such a great threat to the Zheer Continent. I originally intended to hide it and reveal it later.

Unlike the Douling Empire and Star Luo Empire, which are completely separated by the ocean ten thousand years later, there are numerous archipelagos between the Zheer Continent and the Douluo Continent that can serve as stepping stones.

These archipelagos are currently sealed by the system and no one can enter, except for the Light Dragon King, who can overlook Douluo Planet using secret techniques.

When the system's protection mechanism for the Zheer Continent disappears, the system's blockade on these archipelagos will also vanish. The Sun Moon Empire and the Elf Kingdom will engage in fierce combat here due to their needs for territorial expansion and national defense.

Because we have a god's-eye view, it doesn't feel difficult. But for the protagonist's side, he must wait until the Elf Kingdom under his rule has unified the entire Zheer Continent and he has evolved into the Lord of Blades Rus Wang. Only then can he take on Three-Sugar, burdened by the Silver Dragon King and Di Tian, dragging along Elves he forced into an industrial revolution but who have a fragile foundation and no primitive accumulation, less than two thousand dragons, and Soul Beasts that only gained intelligence ten thousand years ago. If Three-Sugar cheats and enters the fray early during this period, the protagonist's side is doomed. Therefore, the pressure on the protagonist's side remains immense until he becomes the Lord of Blades Rus Wang.

Additionally, regarding the issue of 100,000-year Soul Beasts, I will clarify here: only the 100,000-year Soul Beasts in the Dragon Valley Forest can coexist harmoniously with each other.

Before the fall of the Dragon God, the Dragon Valley Forest on Douluo Planet was the residence of the Light Dragon King's bloodline and the Heavenly Sun Dragon tribe, possessing a foundation of dominance and order. When the Dragon God fell, the resulting heavenly tribulation, human Soul Masters, and other Soul Beasts had a relatively small impact on the Heavenly Sun Dragons, who numbered over five thousand at the time. From the moment they were born, the Soul Beasts inside the Dragon Valley Forest were kept in line by the local dragons; those meant to be food were treated as food, and those over 100,000 years old were taken in as subordinates.

The 100,000-year Soul Beasts in the Star Dou Forest and on the other continent maintain a law of the jungle, preying on each other and only huddling together out of necessity under the threat of humans.

The situation in the Dragon Valley Forest is special; the strongest Soul Beasts have been the dragon race for tens of thousands of years. Before Huo Yuhao was born, before all dragon powerhouses over 500,000 years old were wiped out by the heavenly tribulation, if the current Dragon King was struck dead by the tribulation, the second-strongest True Dragon would immediately take over the position of Dragon King, ensuring a stable succession.

Furthermore, because of the Light Dragon King's activity, every generation of Dragon King knows the truth about the Dragon God's fall and deliberately maintains order among the 100,000-year Soul Beasts. This is to accumulate strength so that one day, led by a new dragon powerhouse capable of surviving the heavenly tribulation and reaching the million-year level, they can lead the dragon race back to its peak.

This is the best of times.

Various 100,000-year Soul Beasts, dragons, and Elves coexist peacefully in cities and villages, getting along harmoniously and sharing dinner together.

This is also the worst of times.

The roar and rumble of steam engines will not wait for the Elves to slowly adapt; they are opening up vast, uninhabited areas in the north of the Zheer Continent, waiting for fated Elves to unearth the treasures buried deep underground.

Later Elf writers would call this era dominated by steam engines the Age of Coal and Iron.

To maximize the efficiency of Elf families having more children, the kingdom's government of this era specifically built standardized houses for low-level Elf civilians to live in for free, which created a uniform landscape across all the kingdom's cities.

This is a standard house that utilizes two rectangular spaces with a height of 2.4 meters to the extreme.

On the first floor, to the left of the entrance, is a kitchen with natural light, and to the right is a small bathroom without natural light for washing. A few steps from the porch, to the right is the staircase leading to the second floor, and to the left is the living room, which includes space for dining and the family sitting together.

Walking up the stairs to the second floor, besides the hallway, doors, and railings, there are snow-white walls. Some Elf families paint the walls to make them less monotonous, while the wealthier ones add some paintings. To the right of the hallway, which covers the staircase area, are two spaces. One is the smallest bedroom, and the other is a bathroom with bathing functions. To the left of the hallway are three rooms, one of which has no natural light, while the other two, one large and one small, both have windows for light and ventilation.

No Elf would choose to complain about this room layout. When Elves who have worked for 11 hours drag their weary steps back to their two-story detached home by identifying their door number, all the toil at this moment dissipates.

When Elves eat white bread at 6 o'clock in the morning and rush out to work on their bicycles, lunch is finished near the factory, and after the Elves return home around 7:30 in the evening, the dinner time of the day is the liveliest time for the family.

Compared to the 11-hour workday of male Elves, female Elves have a relatively shorter workday by 1 to 2 hours, which is the time they use to pick up children for their husbands and prepare dinner.

Thanks to the housing being provided free of charge by the government, the cheap cloth brought by factory-produced wool textiles, and the cheap prices brought by the Elf per capita grain possession of over 1,000 kilograms, Elf civilians have ample savings every year even with low wages.

The biggest expenses in the lives of Elf civilians are actually water bills, the replacement of Soul Guidance Devices, children's tuition, and the coal needed for household stoves. (Note: Elves were forced into the First Industrial Revolution by Rus Wang; Soul Guidance Device development is still immature, and their quality and lifespan are poor, turning into waste after a few months.)

The infrastructure level required for the electrical age was too high, and Rus Wang and the Elf Kingdom had neither the money nor the manpower to handle it, so they kept it simple and crude, directly using Soul Guidance Devices as substitutes, which allowed the advantage of Elves having Soul Power after the age of 12 to be brought into play.

This meant that although there were no street lamps in the cities, every household could still be brightly lit in the dark of night.

After working six days a week, the Elves would welcome a full day of rest on the seventh day. This time each week is also the liveliest time in every city; football stadiums would be filled with Elf civilian families who bought tickets to see the most authentic football matches between the football players heard on the Soul Guidance radios.

The birth of an Elf child is a good thing for Elf parents, because in the first two years of an Elf child's life, the Elf mother receives a full year's salary at home to take care of the child, and this money is provided by the government. The father can also avoid gnawing on that white bread in the mornings during these two years, eating the breakfast his wife made before heading out.

When the child is 3 years old, Elf mothers take the child to the factory's daycare center, where the Elf child will spend five years from age 3 to 6. This daycare center must be run by the factory, with half the expenses covered by the factory and half by the government. Elves from the Grey Feather Division would visit here from time to time to give the factory owners a little surprise.

From 6 to 12 years old, which is the important formative period for Elf children, they need to go to public preschool kindergartens to learn. This is mandatory, requires no tuition, and is still funded by the government. This concerns what kind of personality an Elf child will have when they awaken their Soul Power at the age of 12. Even when the government had absolutely no funds to bear this burden in the 198th Year of Levant, Rus Wang still paid out of his own pocket, giving the government the gold mined from the Zheer Continent's gold mines to open free preschool education. (Kindergarten teaches elementary school knowledge.)

The subsequent 13 to 15 years is the government's final mass education expenditure, three years of compulsory education. Only Elf children who rank in the top five percent in exams are eligible to continue their studies without tuition, which is middle school. (The 3 years of elementary school here teach middle school knowledge.)

The remaining Elf children, if their families have sufficient funds to afford the schooling expenses, can attend middle school to continue their studies. If the family has no money, they must begin their life as factory workers or seek other ways out. (Because the Elf Kingdom never had much primitive wealth accumulation, factory work naturally became an excellent target for factories to save on salary expenses, and it was deeply loved by factory owners.)

Those Elf children who advance to middle school will not have it easy either; they will be subject to strict assessments for elite education to ensure that excessive educational resources are not wasted. Any subject failed in any monthly exam will become a deduction from the full score of the high school entrance exam, and they will face the real high school entrance exam when they are 21.

This will screen out 60% of the Elves, but the government will not abandon these screened-out Elves; it will have them transferred to technical colleges. These Elf students will spend 8 years there, studying at school in the morning and interning at factories in the afternoon, advancing to become technical workers. They will graduate and be released into society at the age of 29, becoming the most sought-after technical personnel.

Those who successfully enter high school will also undergo 14 years of study. During this period, Elf students with no misconduct are eligible to take the civil service exam after graduating from high school if they choose to enter society. And after the college entrance exam selection, those Elves who can continue to university will receive special attention.

10 years later, having met the graduation requirements and being 45-year-old adults, the Elves can officially enter the civil service system, research groups of professors in various fields, military selection, or enter the training list of the secret Grey Feather Division.

"Wow!"

In Ravenna's 1-copper-coin coffee shop, it was once again crowded with seated Elves, who were amazed by what an inventor had created.

The 1-copper-coin coffee shop is a brand founded by Rus Wang's wife, the Azure Abyss Holy Dragon Lingyi, with the goal of allowing Elves who work for a full 11 hours with only a half-hour break at noon to drink cheap coffee to boost their flagging spirits. Like the beef pie shops and hot dog shops that sell well in every city, it was born specifically to serve Elf workers.

And as it is now, the Elf workers stay in the coffee shop, staring with curious eyes at a projector that can project a dozen seconds of black-and-white images on a screen, which is actually not much different from the birth of movies in Rus Wang's previous life.

However, unlike Rus Wang forcing the Elves into the First Industrial Revolution, this Soul Guidance projector, which uses a core magic array and is driven by Soul Power, is actually something the Elves tinkered with themselves.

As time slowly fermented, this mode of staying in a coffee shop to watch movies gradually became more professional.

Developing alongside the movies was the entire Elf Kingdom. After Rus Wang forced the Elves into the steam age, he realized his mistake. He then left it to the Elves to develop autonomously, and after experiencing nearly 30 years of the entire impact brought by steam engines and Soul Guidance Devices, the Elves finally began to slowly adapt, and society was self-adjusting back to the development speed it should have.

Another ten years later, the 280th Year of Levant, the 360th Year of Intermission, the 40th year under the impact of the steam engine. Toriya, the little dragon-born girl who used to love hugging charcoal and eating it, causing trouble for her parents, has already grown up.

At the age of 12, Toriya successfully awakened her Soul Power. Under the watchful eyes of her parents, her grandfather Blade Ruse King, her grandmother Thalassa, and a host of other elders, she displayed terrifying abilities. Although she currently possessed only an innate full Soul Power of rank 10, Toriya realized she could freely switch between three forms: pure Elf, half-blood Dragonkin, and True Dragon.

Under the gaze of her parents and elders, she utilized several attack skills belonging to the Seer Elf Iyou. It could be said that she had completely compensated for the disadvantages of Elves lacking soul skills and the Dragon Clan's requirement for 100,000-year cultivation and late transformation, much like Soul Beasts; she was truly a little monster.

"A granddaughter who is a Dragonkin Elf with the fused bloodlines of a Seer Elf, a Dragon, and a Zheer Elf—she seems a bit too omnipotent."

Blade Ruse King remarked that he had truly never seen such a situation before.

Even the Light Dragon King, who had initially insisted that this was absolutely impossible, fell into a long silence after observing the Dragon Clan Recording Stone brought by Blade Ruse King, which documented Toriya switching between her three forms. In the end, he could only offer a faint evaluation: "With such excellent abilities, the idea of crossbreeding Dragons and Elves is not entirely off the table."

"Little Aunt!"

Toriya, who had been flying alongside her mother Elena in her True Dragon form from time to time, arrived at the Southern Coniferous Forest to find her father and grandfather working there. Upon reaching their destination, she happened to see her second aunt Iyuda and immediately switched back to her Elf form, pouncing into the arms of the 80,000-year-old Iyuda.

"Toriya? And Elena? It's been a long time. Are you here to see Father and Big Brother?"

"Yes, they've been busy for several years over something called the Dragon Ascension Pillar. In recent years, they've only been writing home once every six months, so we're here to see what exactly is going on."

Elena took a basket out of the Soul Guidance Device she was carrying. Inside were the pies that Barus loved to eat. She sent them to him every month, though she didn't know if Barus, who often forgot to eat or sleep while researching something, remembered to actually consume them.

On the other side, in a valley within the core area of the Southern Coniferous Forest, Blade Ruse King and his eldest son Barus were conducting final tests on a Dragon Ascension Pillar forged from rare metals.

"Son, are you sure you want to use my blood in the Dragon Ascension Pillar for the test?"

"Yes, Father. I tested your blood against the blood of my teacher, the Light Dragon King, and discovered that your platelets either assimilated or devoured the teacher's. It is exactly the same as how my second sister, who is physically closer to your current form, crushes my own bloodline. Therefore, I intend to verify whether the enhancement effect of the Dragon Ascension Pillar is superior when using your blood as the core material compared to that of one of the Nine Great Dragon Kings."

Barus held the test tube containing the blood of Blade Ruse King and began adding it into the Dragon Ascension Pillar...

Paradox System: Decision · New Dragon Clan, implemented.