Merciful Gatling Bodhisattva

At Qian Duoduo's guidance, Grey Wolf picked up the Tungsten Steel Engraving Knife and began carving the most basic Energy-Gathering Array into a piece of scrap.

Though this was his first time trying it, Grey Wolf made astonishingly fast progress. He went from fumbling at first to steadily growing proficient, and the depth and curve of each stroke quickly became uniform.

Qian Duoduo stared in amazement, praising Grey Wolf as a once-in-ten-thousand-years genius. Ordinary apprentices needed hundreds or thousands of practice attempts to achieve the results Grey Wolf had managed on his very first try.

While Grey Wolf learned to engrave arrays, Feng Tianyu used the flames of the Soul Guidance Furnace to soften another piece of Whale Rubber.

Feng Tianyu ate the Whale Rubber. Its energy spread through his body, sending his blood and qi surging. His amber eyes turned scarlet once more, and he panted heavily as sweat poured from his cheeks down his neck.

This was already his second time eating Whale Rubber. It no longer improved him nearly as much as before, but it still wasn't enough to let him fully control his awareness.

With his blood and qi surging, Feng Tianyu grabbed a hammer and began pounding away at a rough blank of Soul Guidance Metal.

Panting heavily, he poured all the seemingly inexhaustible strength surging through his body into the rough blank of Soul Guidance Metal.

Feng Tianyu wasn't just swinging wildly. With the experience he'd gained the previous day, each blow was measured and methodical. He didn't rely on just his arms, shoulders, and back; his whole body contributed, his bones and muscles resonating together, his muscles contracting and relaxing in a steady rhythm.

His body was like a machine with its spring wound tight. Each strike gathered the strength of his entire body. This was the instinct Feng Tianyu had gradually etched into his bones and blood under Qian Duoduo's guidance the day before.

Outsiders might not be able to learn Disorder Splitting Wind Hammer, but a blacksmith of Qian Duoduo's Divine Craftsman caliber, with decades of experience at the forge, could still work out a hammer technique with its own exceptional qualities.

Having learned the hammering techniques Qian Duoduo had spent decades honing, and with inexhaustible strength surging through his body, Feng Tianyu's technique improved rapidly. Sparks flew as his hammer struck the rough blank of Soul Guidance Metal, blasting out impurities. A streak of iron-gray metallic luster emerged from within it.

The boy and the wolf were both making rapid progress in their respective fields!

Over the next ten days, Feng Tianyu and Grey Wolf lived like ascetics. Every morning, they went to the Soul Guidance Department: one hammered metal, while the other engraved arrays. In the afternoon, they returned to cultivate their Soul Power, practicing until late into the night. They only slept when they were too exhausted to go on, letting their strength recover.

Feng Tianyu had finished all his Whale Rubber. Ten pieces, each over 3,000 years old, had made his body resistant to Whale Rubber and raised his physical strength to its current limit.

Feng Tianyu still looked slender, but his muscles were sharply defined, brimming with the power of a ferocious tiger.

Qian Duoduo personally tested Feng Tianyu's physical strength and found that it surpassed that of most Soul Elders. He could bear a 2,000-year Soul Ring without any trouble.

That was partly thanks to the Whale Rubber and partly to the training he'd gotten from hammering metal!

To keep training his body, Feng Tianyu used the hammering technique he'd begun to master to forge himself an Iron Vest out of the Soul Guidance Metal he'd worked.

The Iron Vest didn't look very large. It only covered his chest and back, but it weighed over a hundred pounds.

Feng Tianyu now wore the Iron Vest every day while working at the forge. By the end of a day's hammering, he could push his body to its limit every time.

Fortunately, Feng Tianyu ate well. Every day, he had nutritious meals prepared from the flesh of Soul Beasts over a hundred years old, or his six-year-old body would have been utterly drained.

As for Grey Wolf, under Qian Duoduo's guidance, he'd already learned hundreds of Soul Guidance Arrays. Though he'd only engraved them into scrap, the depth and curve of each line were now so precise that Qian Duoduo had approved his work.

Amazed by Grey Wolf's progress, Qian Duoduo finally gave him the go-ahead to engrave Soul Guidance Arrays directly into Soul Guidance Metal.

The Soul Guidance Metal Grey Wolf used had been hammered out by Feng Tianyu.

With the metal in hand, Grey Wolf wore a confident grin. He'd practiced on scraps hundreds, even thousands of times, and was already completely sure of himself.

The Tungsten Steel Engraving Knife in his paw flashed across the Soul Guidance Metal, swift and fluid as a dragon or serpent in motion. One winding line after another appeared on its surface, each stroke flawless in depth and shape, as if the patterns had formed naturally.

They didn't look carved at all. They looked as though they'd grown naturally in the Soul Guidance Metal.

Qian Duoduo held his breath, not daring to make a sound, his eyes shining with excitement.

A genius!

Grey Wolf had been born to create Soul Tools!

To some extent, it wouldn't be wrong to call Grey Wolf a god-tier Martial Soul.

He'd studied for only ten days, yet he could surpass Soul Engineers who'd studied for one, two, even three years. His intelligence and practical skill were simply terrifying.

In less than fifteen minutes, Grey Wolf put down his Engraving Knife.

"It's done!"

Then he poured Soul Power into the shuttle-shaped piece of Soul Guidance Metal, now covered in Soul Guidance Arrays. A faint glow appeared as Soul Power flowed through the arrays, compressing and gathering.

At the sight, Qian Duoduo's voice trembled with excitement.

"Ten days! He became a Level 1 Soul Engineer in just ten days! Grey Wolf, I, Qian Duoduo, declare you the greatest Soul Engineer genius on the continent!"

"Not in the Heaven Dou Empire, the Dou Ling Empire, or the Star Luo Empire—and not even in the Sun Moon Empire—could anyone become a Level 1 Soul Engineer faster than you!"

Grey Wolf grinned broadly, his eyes brimming with pride.

"What can't this great king make!"

"Just watch this great king make the inner and outer casings for this Soul Guidance Ray Gun too!"

With that, Grey Wolf ran over to the machine tools. He picked up a large piece of Soul Guidance Metal and began cutting, drilling, grinding, and carrying out the other steps. Before long, he'd made a pile of gun parts.

Grey Wolf assembled the parts with the Core Array, and a Level 1 Soul Guidance Ray Gun appeared in his hands.

He raised the Soul Guidance Ray Gun and took aim.

Qian Duoduo hurriedly said, "This is a workshop. There's no room to test it here. If you want to see how powerful the Soul Guidance Ray Gun is, why don't we go to the testing area?"

Grey Wolf didn't seem interested. He casually tossed the Soul Guidance Ray Gun to Qian Duoduo.

"This kind of Soul Guidance Ray Gun compresses Soul Power to fire a beam. A Soul Master can only use it five to ten times at most before exhausting all their Soul Power, and its power is nothing special. It's not even as good as this great king's Wind Blade Array."

"A useless piece of junk!"

"That Fixed Soul Tool you told this great king about last time—that was a little interesting. But this great king thinks it could be improved."

Qian Duoduo caught the Soul Guidance Ray Gun. He wanted to warn Grey Wolf not to get ahead of himself. Becoming a Level 1 Soul Engineer in ten days and creating a Level 1 Soul Tool, the Soul Guidance Ray Gun, was already a world-shaking achievement.

To think he could master Fixed Soul Tools in such a short time and improve them, too, was pure fantasy.

In the end, though, Qian Duoduo said nothing. It would do Grey Wolf good to take a few knocks and learn from failure. A little humbling might even be good for him, before his tail reached the sky.

And yet!

Just twenty days later, a brand-new "Fixed Soul Tool," improved by Grey Wolf, appeared in Qian Duoduo's workshop.

Qian Duoduo looked at the strange launcher with six barrels. Even as a Titled Douluo with Rank 94 Soul Power, he couldn't help feeling a chill rise in his heart. It was like looking at a peerless weapon of mass destruction!

Qian Duoduo couldn't tell what it was, but Feng Tianyu recognized it!

Merciful Gatling Bodhisattva!

Beside the Gatling Launcher, Grey Wolf was wielding a small hammer, pounding bullets onto a belt. Each bullet was about the thickness of an adult's thumb and roughly ten centimeters long.

These bullets!

After Grey Wolf's modifications, they had no gunpowder or primer inside. Instead, he'd engraved them with Explosion Arrays and Combustion Arrays.

All it took was a negligible trace of Soul Power to activate the Combustion Array. It then triggered the Explosion Array, generating a large volume of high-temperature, high-pressure gas inside the sealed chamber. The gas propelled the bullet forward into the barrel, where the rifling made it spin and accelerate, stabilizing its trajectory.

Those country bumpkins on Douluo Continent used compressed Soul Power in Fixed Launchers to propel Fixed Soul Cannon Shells.

Though this method was already fairly energy-efficient, it still consumed a considerable amount of Soul Power.

But Grey Wolf had improved the design by combining it with firearm technology. Using Combustion Arrays and Explosion Arrays in place of primers and gunpowder, he could propel bullets with high-temperature, high-pressure gas, trading a negligible trace of Soul Power for terrifying destructive power.

And Grey Wolf hadn't even engraved additional Soul Guidance Arrays onto the bullet tips yet. If he did so in the future, he could make them even more powerful.

Once the bullets were loaded onto the belt, they would head to the testing area shortly to try out the weapon...