Lin Qing

"Dou Force, Third Duan!"

Beside the Testing Magic Stone Stele, a middle-aged man looked at the information displayed on the stone with some excitement, announcing it in a shocked tone:

"Xiao Yan, Dou Force, Third Duan! Low-tier!"

Looking at the five shining characters on the Testing Magic Stone Stele, the young child on the platform held his head high, a slightly smug smile curling the corners of his lips, and the hands he had previously clenched tightly relaxed as well.

Following the middle-aged man's words, the crowd in the plaza instantly exploded like water droplets falling into a pan of hot oil.

Dou Force, Third Duan? Did I read that right? The Third Young Master is only five and a half years old now, right?

Yes! You didn't read it wrong! The uncle beside the testing stone tablet just said it himself, it shouldn't be wrong!

Doesn't that mean our Xiao Clan will have one more Grand Dou Master in the future?

Be bold! Young Master Xiao Yan will definitely become a Dou Spirit expert in the future!

With Young Master Xiao Yan's talent being so strong, coupled with the engagement arranged by the old patriarch, the future patriarch of our Xiao Clan will definitely be Young Master Xiao Yan! Under his leadership, our Xiao Clan will definitely flourish day by day! The day our Xiao Clan returns to the Jia Ma Sacred City is not far away!

Young Master Xiao Yan is the number one genius of our Xiao Clan!

No, Young Master Xiao Yan should be the number one genius in Wutan City in a hundred years!

Listening to the flattering and praising words coming from all around, the child, who stood in place like a proud peacock, raised his head even higher, the corners of his mouth splitting almost to his ears; he was simply harder to suppress than a piece of heavy artillery!

This is the Xiao Yan who shouted: Thirty years east of the river, thirty years west of the river, do not bully a young man into poverty! The current Xiao Yan probably can't imagine that he will become a Dou Emperor in the future! Hun Tiandi couldn't imagine either that his millennium-long grand plan would be destroyed in the hands of a brat a thousand years younger than him!

Looking at the proud child, Lin Qing felt some internal emotion.

As the Xiao Clan, one of the Three Major Families of Wutan City, a second-tier city in the Jia Ma Empire, the number of clansmen plus affiliates was naturally not small.

However, not everyone liked to suck up to geniuses.

Lin Qing, standing behind the crowd, did not go up to join in the bustle. Having transmigrated to the Dou Qi Continent for six years, he had already seen Xiao Yan many times.

Every time this child king Xiao Yan led a group of kids to play, he never went forward. Instead, he hid in a corner alone to read books; after all, this was a strange and real world, and only by understanding a little more could he suffer a little less in the future.

For him to go and play with a bunch of kids, he truly couldn't do it. (Xiao Yan was an adult transmigrator, the original work stated this; regarding money, women, Tu Dou also said later that he was a takeout delivery worker.)

After all, he had no mind to accompany kids playing house.

This also made him a bit unsociable, especially after he started cultivating; apart from eating, sleeping, reading, and cultivating, he didn't care about anything else.

Xiao Yan's personality hadn't been tempered yet and was somewhat abrasive. In the first two years after he was born, he even often kept a cold face toward Xiao Zhan and his two older brothers, though it had gotten slightly better now.

Although he had the soul of an adult, he was still no different from a child, and even liked to throw tantrums by relying on his patriarch father's affection.

Even after experiencing three years in the valley, his temperament remained like that of a youth. To put it nicely: proud, loyal, hot-blooded, and carrying a hint of unorthodoxy; on the whole, like a chivalrous hero. To put it unnicely: loyal, but letting loyalty override reason, and his moral compass somewhat crooked.

Those three years only made him understand human warmth and coldness better, without masking his sharpness much too heavily.

As fellow transmigrators toward Xiao Yan, this future Flame Emperor, while he felt no disgust, he couldn't bring himself to suck up to him. Furthermore, Xiao Yan's kindness varied from person to person; his parents and brothers had spent so much time to move him and make him accept them, and he couldn't even reach Hai Bodong's level, let alone achieve what Xiao Zhan and Xiao Xun'er had. At most, Lin Qing regarded Xiao Yan as an acquaintance he knew, or a transaction target he could scam a few times.

Neither did he want countrymen meeting countrymen, eyes welling with tears, because he had been scammed by countrymen many times.

He would have to be crazy to go and recognize Xiao Yan. Regarding such exposure of his transmigration, the fewer people who knew the secret, the better.

In addition, as for the ring on Xiao Yan's neck, he had no thoughts about it; after all, he didn't know when Yao Chen would wake up, and absorbing Dou Qi to revive the soul was merely Yao Chen's test for Xiao Yan.

As for why he transmigrated? Naturally, it was the Great Luck Driver rushing his year-end performance quotas.

Then, the moment he transmigrated, he became an orphan. His father Lin Tang was the Xiao Clan's son-in-law, and his mother Xiao Yue was Xiao Zhan's younger sister. When he was two years old, they were killed by mountain bandits during a clan mission, after which the Xiao Clan dispatched two Grand Dou Masters to unite with the City Lord's Manor to wipe out the mountain bandits, avenging his parents and more than ten other Xiao Clan disciples.

Before transmigration, Lin Qing was also an orphan. His parents died when he was in elementary school. Relying on the money left by his parents, he went through normal schooling until graduating from university, then entered a foreign-funded enterprise and drew a decent salary.

Fortunately, the Xiao Clan was quite decent toward orphans, raising them all to adulthood and even giving them money every month. If their talent was decent, they could enter the Xiao Clan to work; if their talent didn't make the cut, they could go to the industries underneath.

Because his parents' status was relatively high—he was the patriarch's nephew—he even had a courtyard of his own and a maid who usually came to take care of him. He had chosen the courtyard himself, located on the edge of the core area of the clan; with nobody next door, it was quite quiet. Xiao Zhan told him that as long as he reached the Seventh Duan of Dou Force before his coming-of-age ceremony, he could enter the Xiao Clan to work, and if he didn't reach it, it didn't matter, as he would arrange a good errand for him.

Overall, even though the Great Elder and the patriarch of the Xiao Clan were engaged in internal strife, the clan still possessed a very strong sense of human warmth and was quite united externally. As for the Misty Cloud Sect, they probably would be powerless against them as well.

Feeling his own strength at the Ninth Duan of Dou Force, and thinking of Cao Ying being an alchemist at age 7 in the original work, along with Xiao Yan's female disciple later becoming a Dou King under 17, Lin Qing felt somewhat lost. His current cultivation speed was entirely propped up by the Ancestral Stone and the Foundation Establishment Spiritual Liquid rewarded by the system; otherwise, he should only have been a tiny bit stronger than Xiao Yan, and without fortuitous encounters, he might have stopped at the Dou Ancestor realm.

Some people open hacks and still might not surpass others in a short time! However, being able to break through to a Fighter around seven years old!

Thinking of hacks, the corners of Lin Qing's mouth couldn't help rising, and his thoughts drifted back two years.

At that time, he had just turned four. Because he hadn't had any golden finger for a long time, he begged Butler Mo to teach him cultivation, and then he successfully entered Stage One Dou Might within a month.

Then, with a ding, his system arrived:

[Ding! System loading successful!...]

[Ding! System activation successful!]

[Ding! System task released. After becoming a cultivator, you face the following choices:]

[1: Conceal cultivation, reward: Alchemist talent. Note: Infuses a trace of wood attribute into the host's original pure fire attribute Dou Qi.]

[2: Leave Wutan City for three days, reward: Heavenly Poison Body. Note: Heavenly Poison Body, Myriad Poison Body, can absorb all poisons, cultivation speed is like the Calamity Poison Body, but will not go out of control. The only side effect is the inability to leave descendants.]

[3: Expose cultivation, reward: 1 million gold coins.]

He immediately chose option one at the time. This was the golden finger he had been looking forward to for four years.

There were many reasons for choosing option one. In this era, weapon refiners existed, but the inheritances were hard to find, and he didn't know if high-tier inheritances even existed.

Moreover, in this Dou Qi Continent where formation arrays were incomplete, talismans were unmanifested, and which had already entered the Latter Age of Law, choosing a profession that was known, unique, and had a complete inheritance was very necessary.

Because option two was unacceptable to him, and money was far inferior to option one. Being an alchemist was the most noble profession in the Dou Qi Continent, and hiding his cultivation to slowly display his strength was also what he desired.

Without choosing one, he wouldn't be able to acquire many of the fortuitous encounters in his memories later on.

"System, introduce your functions."