This Is Called Science!

At the border of the Heaven Dou Empire, on the far edge of Fasinuo Province, stood a small town called Tack Town.

The air here carried the sharp stink of rust all year round, along with the acrid reek left behind by burning cheap coal.

Both sides of the street were lined with ramshackle mud-brick houses and crude little smithies.

The people who lived here were among the lowest commoners on the entire Douluo Continent. Born without Soul Power, they had Martial Souls that were either hoes and sickles or simply weeds.

All their lives, they could only scrape together a living forging crude farm tools for nobles in the big cities and low-ranking Soul Masters. Sallow and gaunt, they waited numbly for death.

Lin Fan wore coarse hemp clothes and a bamboo hat, hiding every trace of the imposing air he had once carried as an honorary elder of Spirit Hall.

He stood at the end of the muddy street.

Taking in the miserable sight around him, Lin Fan felt not a shred of pity or sorrow. Beneath his hat, his eyes gleamed like a starving wolf spotting a slab of meat.

"Coal ore, iron veins, and cheap, absolutely loyal low-level labor... This place is a little run-down, but it's the perfect spawn point for a sandbox game!"

Lin Fan was whistling wildly in his head. As a construction fanatic who had played Minecraft to the bone, he knew the routine of "building an industrial empire from scratch with his own two hands" all too well.

On the high-level map that was Spirit City, max-level heavyweights watched from every corner. There was no room to develop.

But out here in the back of beyond, he had found a construction paradise where he could do as he pleased!

He strode to a corner of town and spent nearly all the Gold Soul Coins he had left to take over a smithy whose furnace had half collapsed.

Then he walked to the roadside and pointed at three skin-and-bones boys fighting a stray dog over half a moldy loaf of black bread.

"You three, work for me from now on! I'll feed and house you, and teach you to forge iron."

The three boys looked up, their faces numb and frightened.

One of them, A Mu, had a wooden stick for a Martial Soul. He was the tallest and seemed the bravest. He held half a branch across his chest in a defensive stance.

Another, Little Nail, had a rusty iron nail for a Martial Soul. He rarely spoke, but his eyes were sharp. He was quietly peering beneath the brim of Lin Fan's hat, trying to see what the newcomer looked like.

The last could not even summon a Martial Soul. His name was Stone, and he was the smallest and thinnest of the three. He was also the most stubborn: the more people told him he could not do something, the harder he gritted his teeth and tried.

In a place like the Douluo Continent, people like them were considered worthless. They were not even fit to carry the shoes of those Soul Master lords.

"Sir... We don't have Soul Power. We can't work those high-grade bellows or forge good iron..." A Mu, their leader, spoke timidly, terrified Lin Fan would reject them once he heard.

"Who the hell said forging iron required Soul Power?"

Lin Fan scoffed and hauled them out of the mud. "Starting today, forget all that bullshit in your heads about Soul Masters being above everyone else! What I'm going to teach you is called science!"

Over the next half month, that ramshackle smithy became the most mysterious place in Tack Town. No one was allowed inside.

On the Firmament, Lin Fan's near-manic daily efforts to build up this slum were recorded in meticulous detail.

Lin Fan had no use for the primitive methods of Douluo Continent's blacksmiths, who relied on little more than swinging a hammer.

He took the three ordinary boys to a limestone cave outside town and scraped up a thick layer of bat droppings to refine saltpeter. Then they went to a poisonous swamp by a volcanic crater to collect pungent yellow powder—sulfur—before making fine charcoal from willow wood.

In the smithy's yard, Lin Fan rebuilt the furnace from mud and firebricks into a strangely shaped tower. It was, in fact, a prototype of a modern blast furnace.

"Cough, cough, cough..."

Thick smoke billowed around him. His face black with coal dust, Lin Fan held a towel over his nose and mouth while rapidly writing a string of strange symbols on a flat black board, symbols ordinary people could not begin to understand.

[2KNO3+S+3C→K2S+N2↑+3CO2↑]

"Keep your eyes wide open and watch!"

Pointing at the physics and chemistry formulas on the board, Lin Fan addressed the three ordinary boys before him. They looked utterly lost but listened intently. "Soul Power has never been the only kind of energy in this world!"

"Soul Power, put simply, is a kind of high-energy particle floating everywhere! What we're going to do now is extract the chemical energy hidden in nature!"

Lin Fan scooped up a handful of the gray-black grains of gunpowder they had just refined. "Pack this powder tightly into a sturdy metal tube, and the instant it ignites, its volume expands thousands of times over, producing gas at terrifying pressure!"

"That pressure drives the metal projectile in front of it out faster than your eyes can follow! Mass times velocity squared, divided by two—that's kinetic energy! If it moves fast enough, even a ball of solid iron can punch through a Soul Saint's protective aura!"

The three boys listened with their mouths hanging open. They had no idea what "kinetic energy" or "expansion" meant.

But as they looked into Lin Fan's blazing eyes, this utterly different theory set alight the humiliation and resentment they had carried for more than a decade!

"Open the furnace! Pour the molds!"

At Lin Fan's command, the gate at the bottom of the blast furnace opened, and molten iron flowed down a clay channel.

Lin Fan used no Soul Power. Relying entirely on his memories of mechanical engineering from his previous life, a simple water-powered forging hammer, and a painstaking quenching process, he hammered out one piece of crude iron after another.

The furnace exploded several times. They failed more times than they could count.

Finally, late on the fifteenth night...

They had a rough iron tube about three feet long, made by forge-welding a rolled sheet. Sandpaper and oil had left the inside passably smooth. A faint weld seam still ran along the barrel, but after three pressure tests, it could withstand the gunpowder's chamber pressure.

Beside it lay a steel bullet with a lead core, pointed tip, and rounded base.

Ordinary hands had made every piece of it without using the slightest bit of Soul Power!

Lin Fan's hands were covered in blisters. He poured the crude gunpowder into the bottom of the steel tube and tamped it down, then pushed in the bullet they had just made.

He raised the battered Matchlock, whose stock was nothing more than a scrap of wood, and aimed at a ten-centimeter-thick bluestone slab set in the corner of the yard for testing.

"Cover your ears!"

The three boys quickly clapped their hands over their ears, their eyes fixed on Lin Fan.

Lin Fan pulled the makeshift firing lever.

"BANG—!!!"

A terrifying crack, like thunder striking dry ground, tore through Tack Town's quiet night sky!

A dazzling tongue of flame burst from the plain iron tube, and the sharp smell of gunpowder filled the yard.

At the very instant the deafening shot rang out, the bluestone slab in the corner—a slab even a level-twenty Soul Grandmaster would have to strain to crack—blew open at its center with a fist-sized hole!

The lead bullet punched through the slab and buried itself deep in the earthen wall behind it. Chips of stone and dust flew everywhere, rattling against the surrounding fence.