The Nobles Would Have Your Head If They Saw This

The gunsmoke cleared.

The three ordinary boys lowered their hands in a daze. They stared at the great hole blasted through the bluestone slab by a lump of iron, then at the iron tube in Lin Fan's hand, still trailing blue smoke. All three dropped to their knees.

No Soul Power. No Soul Rings.

All he had used was dirt, foul-smelling stones, and a piece of iron.

And somehow... they had gained the power to kill a Soul Master in a single shot!

"God... this is the power of a god..." A Niu's hands shook as he grabbed a fistful of dirt.

"God, my ass!"

Lin Fan blew the smoke from the muzzle and tossed the crude musket in front of them. "This is called science! Starting today, we get the assembly line running!"

He turned to go back inside and draw more plans.

But as he turned, he caught sight of the shattered bluestone slab in the corner of the yard.

The bullet hole was unmistakable, with cracks radiating from its edges.

Lin Fan stopped.

If this thing hit a Soul Master...

He cut the thought off as soon as it surfaced.

"Tch. Why am I thinking about that? It's just a game." He muttered under his breath, shook his head, and walked into the house.

The three boys never noticed his brief change in expression. They were still gathered around the musket, their eyes burning with a light that had never been there before.

Inside the Firmament, Lin Fan merely thought he had unlocked the Age of Firearms on the technology tree and taken his first step toward mass production.

In the real world, that single gunshot had sent everyone into a frenzy!

The shot had done more than shatter the granite inside the Firmament. It had blown apart the iron law of "Soul Masters above all" that had ruled the Douluo Continent for tens of thousands of years!

Heaven Dou Empire, Imperial City Square.

Hundreds of thousands of commoners stood watching the Firmament.

When they saw that frail boy, who could not even summon a Martial Soul, cause such destruction simply by holding an iron tube, every one of them forgot to breathe.

Then came a roar so wild it seemed ready to lift the sky!

"Did you see that?! That thing doesn't need Soul Power at all!"

"Sulfur! Saltpeter! Charcoal! The Firmament Saint Master wrote the whole recipe on the blackboard! He didn't hide it from us!"

"We're not useless! If we make those things called guns, even noble flesh won't stop an iron bullet!"

The Core Flame had been sown, just like that.

To those desperate ordinary people, that simple chemical formula was an oracle more precious than a Hundred Thousand Year Soul Bone!

In smithies across every corner of the Douluo Continent, the forge fires burned all night!

Heaven Dou Empire, Nuoding City, inside an ordinary smithy.

Wang Manchui was fifty-seven and had spent his whole life working iron.

His Martial Soul was a hammer, but his Innate Soul Power was only level one. He had never broken through level ten or obtained a single Soul Ring. The proudest moment of his life had been forging a batch of refined-iron desks and chairs for Nuoding City's Soul Master Academy.

Now he crouched on the ground, copying the lines of symbols Lin Fan had written on the blackboard in the Firmament. With a stick of charcoal, he traced them stroke by stroke along the inside of his own doorstep.

"Saltpeter... sulfur... willow charcoal..."

He murmured each word as he copied, his eyes reddening. "So fire can be used like this... So even without Soul Power, you can make an iron tube unleash that much force..."

His hand shook the whole time, but he copied every mark with painstaking care.

"Dad, stop copying! If the noble lords see that, they'll have your head!" His son stamped his feet beside him in panic.

Wang Manchui looked up at his son with an expression the boy had never seen before. "Son, I've worked iron my whole life. Today's the first time I've felt I wasn't useless."

He lowered his head and kept copying.

Outside the window, the Firmament's golden light fell across his graying hair, like a tiny cluster of sparks burning in the night.

The Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Sect.

Crash!

Ning Fengzhi's favorite bone-china teacup fell from his hand and shattered on the floor.

The leader of the world's foremost support sect, a man who had always kept his composure even if Mount Tai collapsed before him, had gone pale.

"Sect Master..."

Sword Douluo Chen Xin's voice was dry. "The projectile from that iron tube was... too fast! It punched straight through a bluestone slab ten centimeters thick. If several thousand of those tubes were aimed at us at once, even I'd be riddled with holes unless I activated my Martial Soul Avatar first."

"And the most frightening part isn't its power..."

Ning Fengzhi's eyes filled with desperate fear. "It's that there's no barrier to using it! That monster Yu Xiaogang made inside the Firmament... it has no barrier at all! A six-year-old child could pull that trigger and kill a Soul Master who'd trained for ten years!"

"He isn't making weapons. He's... slaying gods! He wants to drag every Soul Master in the world down from their altar and grind them into the mud!"

The imperial palace of the Star Luo Empire.

Dai Yutian drew the sword at his waist and cleaved the table before him in two. His eyes were bloodshot, like a mad lion driven to the end of the road.

"Madman! Yu Xiaogang is a complete madman! He actually wants to teach that forbidden art to those dirt-farming peasants!"

"Send out the order! Seal off every sulfur and saltpeter mine in the empire immediately! Any commoner found hiding those materials is to be killed without mercy! Any blacksmith who dares forge seamless iron tubes in secret—execute all nine generations of his family!!!"

Dai Yutian's roar echoed through the palace, yet he felt utterly powerless!

There was no stopping it!

The Firmament had made all that knowledge public. The seeds called "science" and "Equality" had already taken root deep in the minds of hundreds of millions of ordinary people.

The old era's funeral dirge had begun to sound quietly with that crisp gunshot in Tack Town.

Holy Soul Village, the smithy at the village entrance.

Six-year-old Tang San crouched beside the forge, his little face flushed by the heat.

Before him lay a long, thin iron tube, freshly forged and still covered in burrs. It was all he had managed to produce after three days of grinding.

"Not even close..."

Tang San gripped the rough tube. Reflected in his Purple Demon Eye was the musket Lin Fan held inside the Firmament.

He had grown up surrounded by Hidden Weapons.

The Tang Sect's greatest pride lay in its mechanical Hidden Weapons, which took decades of hard practice to master.

He had always believed the pinnacle of Tang Sect Hidden Weapons was the limit of what ordinary people could wield against the strong.

But the man inside the Firmament had used one iron tube and a pinch of black powder to blow the pride of his entire Tang Sect to pieces.

"If... I adjust the gunpowder ratio, use better steel for the barrel, and give the bullet a spiral pattern..." Tang San murmured.

He stood, grabbed a piece of charcoal nearby, and began sketching rapidly on the ground.

"Tang Sect Hidden Weapons might yet become Tang Sect firearms."