The moment New Lingdou City's walls were breached, everyone in the Dou Ling Empire understood that the Dou Ling Empire had reached a crisis of life and death.
The military preparations the Dou Ling Empire had made over the past year seemed like a joke. Its defenses were as fragile as paper, not worth mentioning before the enemy, and were torn apart with ease.
In this year of arms racing, the Sun Moon Empire had been building Soul Tools, while the Three Great Empires had been expanding their armies and training high-level soul masters.
The Dou Ling Empire's legions had not expanded by much. Instead, the strength of the soul masters from the major families and sects had all risen a notch.
That was because many of the Dou Ling Empire's resources had been carved up by the major families and sects.
Moreover, at some unknown point, special secret arts had appeared on the continent that allowed soul masters to rapidly increase their strength after paying a certain price.
Those secret arts were all quite wild.
As long as the resources were sufficient, a Soul Saint rising one rank in a month was considered slow.
The secret arts had already circulated across the Douluo Continent for some time. There were quite a few versions, all of them capable of rapidly increasing strength.
As for where the secret arts had come from, opinions varied. In any case, starting from a certain day, the secret arts had suddenly spread across the continent.
But could secret arts used to force a soul master's strength to maturity really be anything good?
Those secret arts that had spread were just like Evil Warding Swordplay, carrying an enormous price.
The problem was, if you did not train in them, but your enemy did, could you just