[Advance notice: Douluo had an interesting phenomenon: a shapeshifting grass and a human, a shapeshifting rabbit and a half-grass, half-human, and even their descendants could have children with the Silver Dragon King. They completely disregarded reproductive isolation. To make this plausible, this book's setting is that when Soul Beasts reached a hundred thousand years and took human form, their genes changed as well, allowing them to reproduce with any species without reproductive isolation.]
Back when Rus Wang learned that his wife, Thalassa, had laid five eggs for him, both Rus Wang, who was becoming a father for the first time in either his past or present life, and the Female Water Dragon had been extraordinarily excited. Rus Wang was thrilled that he was about to have a happy family, while Thalassa was delighted to become a mother for the first time and give birth to so many children.
Among the Dragon Race today, it was a major event whenever a pure-blooded male and female dragon had more than one egg after mating. The male dragons, who normally thought of nothing but territory, strength, and reproduction, would set those things aside for a while and stay with the females who had laid multiple eggs, helping care for the hatchlings for a year or two before leaving. (As the advance notice explained, Soul Beasts with Dragon Race bloodlines that were under a hundred thousand years old, as well as degenerated members of the Dragon Race, couldn't speak the Dragon Race's language and were reproductively incompatible with them. In the eyes of the Dragon Race, they didn't count as dragons. Even after breaking through the hundred-thousand-year mark and learning to communicate through human language, they still couldn't be considered members of the Dragon Race. Since Rus Wang had already mated with the Female Water Dragon, who was then over ninety thousand years old, and fathered children with her, Xingyue and the other female dragons naturally assumed that Rus Wang was a fellow dragon from Folded Ear Continent, of a kind they'd never seen before.)
At first, Thalassa had assumed Rus Wang would spend more time with her because she had laid so many eggs. But his decision to stay with her for years without seeking out other females broke with the usual behavior of male dragons. He'd thoroughly learned human and Elf ideas about family, to the point of being almost fanatical, and chose to stay by her side.
From Thalassa's perspective, Rus Wang's behavior was a terrible mistake for the entire Dragon Race on Folded Ear Continent, which still had only ten adult dragons—and only one male. But as an individual, she was delighted. No female dragon would turn down a male who stayed with her even after helping care for their hatchlings.
After all five eggs hatched, Rus Wang gave his three sons the surname Ba and his two daughters the surname Yi. The eldest son was called Barus, the second child, a daughter, was called Iyuda, the third child, also a daughter, was called Ilian, and the fourth and fifth children, both sons, were called Bakus and Bazel. While the children were growing up, Rus Wang couldn't tell whether his friend Osuen had done too good a job raising them or whether he'd been too lax. Either way, the kids got along well with the Elves who treated them kindly.
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But getting along well and causing mischief were two very different things. Take the present moment, for example. It was the fortieth year of the Levant calendar. While Osuen was away at a city council meeting, Rus Wang's eldest son, Barus, had once again sneaked off to find Osuen's second daughter, Elena, who was just twenty-six years old (her physical development was equivalent to that of a human child under nine). The two lively children had gone to play at the waterfall in the core of Nanshan Rainforest, perhaps having innocently evaded the watchful eye of their guardian, Liana.
Little did they know that, at a second-floor window in the courtyard, Liana had already narrowed her eyes and picked up a Soul Tool Rus Wang had given her. She began calling him.
In truth, Rus Wang supported the development of Soul Tools. After all, human Soul Masters, who made up only a small fraction of the human population, had dared to introduce these things to society as a whole. There was no reason for Rus Wang not to use them among the Elves of Folded Ear Continent, all of whom could possess Soul Power by the time they turned twelve.
He still couldn't understand how the humans of the Douluo World had managed, in developing Soul Tools, to go from manned aircraft in Huo Yuhao's timeline to finally building airplanes in Legend of the Dragon King—ten thousand years later.
It was already the fortieth year. There were still one thousand nine hundred and sixty years until the protective barrier disappeared. Ten years wasn't very long compared to the Elves' average lifespan of more than three hundred years, especially when they ate well, dressed warmly, and kept a regular schedule. But after living through it, ten years still felt long enough to change an Elf's way of life.
So, after checking the system panel and confirming that Elf culture had largely moved beyond being dull, with literacy reaching at least twenty-five percent of the population, Rus Wang began gradually sharing information about Innate Soul Power, Soul Beasts, human Soul Masters, and Soul Tools with Elves he trusted.
When Evans, Osuen, and Light learned that the Hundred-Year Soul Beasts that sometimes ran out of Nanshan Rainforest to wreak havoc on villages and towns belonged to the same category as Rus Wang—Soul Beasts, in the phylum Chordata, class Mammalia, order Carnivora, only diverging at the family level—they were merely a little surprised.
While Rus Wang was wondering why they'd reacted so mildly, Osuen spoke up.
"Your Majesty, you remain our protector and our faith. We've experienced firsthand how sincerely you've helped us escape hardship and ignorance. That has nothing to do with whether you and the Queen are Soul Beasts."
Evans even asked this question.
"By the way, Your Majesty, your children have been able to get along with ours since they were little. Why can't those Hundred-Year Soul Beasts do the same?"
Rus Wang didn't know what to say. He couldn't exactly reveal that he was actually a Seer Elf, and his children were half-Soul Beast, half-Seer Elf, so they'd developed intelligence faster than Soul Beasts, could he?
But the most hard-line of them all was Prime Minister Light, whose term Rus Wang had insisted on extending. He showed the true colors of a nation-first idealist.
"Your Majesty, humans—most of whom don't even live a hundred years—dare to hunt your kind to extinction and dissect them for research. There's no reason they wouldn't turn their attention to us Elves, whose lives generally exceed three hundred years. I believe we should take advantage of the fact that every Elf has Soul Power and that Soul Beasts can live for ten thousand years without dying if their cultivation is high enough. We must defend Folded Ear Continent and prevent humans, who already occupy three continents, from coming to lay claim to it in the future. After that, we should vigorously develop Soul Tools while also keeping up our basic advances in physics and chemistry. And..."
Light went on to say much more, but he and Rus Wang were in agreement on one key point. Soul Masters, whose strength depended on their Innate Soul Power, shouldn't be introduced to ordinary Elves yet. At the very least, they should wait until all the Elves who'd lived in the tribal era had passed away before gradually spreading that knowledge. For now, Soul Tools and Soul Master cultivation should be limited to a very small number of high-ranking officials.
Otherwise, the Elf Kingdom would immediately descend into the sort of chaos seen in Sea Tiger and Martial God 300, where the strong believed they had the right to bully the weak. Not only would Evans and Light, along with the other old Elves who were working hard to build the kingdom and determined not to return to the tribal era where might made right, be driven to a heart attack, but Rus Wang would have to take Xingyue and the others out to carry out another large-scale, indiscriminate massacre.
Meanwhile, Barus, unaware that his father Rus Wang was about to come after him, flew to the waterfall in the core of Nanshan Rainforest with Elena, who was as lively as an excitable puppy. The waterfall's drop was like that of Niagara Falls in Rus Wang's previous world. For his children's safety, Rus Wang had cleared the rocks beneath it and leveled the lakebed, creating a vast, flat basin with a depth of twenty meters. It had since become the favorite daily playground of Barus and his four siblings.
Thanks to Rus Wang's teaching, the five siblings knew why their mother, Thalassa, had spent less and less time with them in recent years. Before she decided they were mature enough and drove them out of her territory, they needed to spend as much time as possible with their father, who was still willing to stay with them, and learn all kinds of survival skills.
This time, Barus had managed to gather with his four younger siblings at the waterfall, so he treasured the increasingly rare days they could all spend together. Thinking of his Elf friend, he decided to bring her along to play, too.
His father had repeatedly pinned him beneath a boulder and spanked him in front of Aunt Xingyue and the others because he kept taking Elena, the child of his Elf friend, into Nanshan Rainforest. But Barus was stubborn and wouldn't change his ways. He believed that, somehow, he and Elena had formed a bond—and together they would accomplish something so remarkable that even his father would be amazed!
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