Kill Every Peasant Who Dares Learn from Yu Xiaogang

Night hung low, and the stars and moon were dim.

Across Douluo Continent, an undercurrent gripped the entire world.

The golden words about the "gunpowder formula" had vanished from the Firmament, but they were etched deep into the minds of billions of commoners and lowly blacksmiths across the continent.

In the Heaven Dou Empire's Fasinuo Province, at a private iron-ore camp owned by a viscount.

Crack!

A heavy leather whip studded with barbs lashed a frail slave across the back, tearing away a chunk of flesh.

"Worthless wretch! Move faster! If you don't meet your quota tonight, your whole family goes into the Soul Beast pen on the back mountain to feed the wolves!" shouted a burly overseer who gave off a faint ripple of Soul Power.

The shadow of a White Wolf Martial Soul appeared behind him.

He was a level-twenty-three Soul Grandmaster. In this mine, he was a petty emperor who could decide whether these commoners lived or died.

The old slave collapsed into the mud, his whole body convulsing with pain.

His son was called Gou'er. He was only fourteen.

When the boy saw his father struck, his eyes went red. He threw himself forward and shielded his father with his own body.

"Oh? You dare glare at me?"

The overseer sneered. After using Martial Soul Possession, he extended his sharp wolf claws and slashed viciously at the boy's head, the claws whistling through the air. "Trash without Soul Power. Keeping you alive is a waste of the empire's grain. Die!"

At that deadly moment, a crazed look flashed across Gou'er's coal-smeared face.

Trembling, he pulled something heavy from his clothes, wrapped in several layers of rag.

It was the crude iron tube he had secretly hammered and rolled from stolen scrap iron deep in the mine over the past few nights.

Crooked hammer marks still covered it, and its rough inner wall could cut a hand. But he had worked it back and forth with ore sand and oil countless times. It would do.

He had packed the tube with black powder made from bat droppings and sulfur according to the "divine revelation from the Firmament," along with a fistful of rusty iron grit.

"Die, my lord Soul Master!"

Without a second thought, Gou'er pressed the crude iron tube against the overseer's chest. With a shaking finger, he pulled hard on its makeshift firing spring.

Click—

The flint scraped.

Boom!

A terrifying blast exploded through the pitch-black mine!

Dazzling fire and thick gun smoke erupted from the mouth of the tube!

Against the high-pressure iron grit driven by the gunpowder blast, the overseer's Soul Grandmaster-level defenses might as well have been made of paper!

Splat—bang!

Flesh and blood flew everywhere!

A bowl-sized hole blew through the overseer's chest. The force pulverized his organs and bones, spraying dark red remains across the ground behind him.

He never even got to scream. His mangled body flew backward and slammed into the rock wall. His eyes remained open in death.

More than a hundred slaves stared blankly at the Soul Grandmaster's corpse, then at the iron tube in Gou'er's hand, still trailing wisps of blue smoke. Each of them felt their blood surge backward through their veins.

A common boy with barely any strength and no Martial Soul.

All he had used was an iron tube and a handful of black powder made from things found in the dirt.

And he had killed a level-twenty-three Soul Grandmaster!

"The Firmament Saint Master... didn't lie to us..."

Gou'er stared at his hands in a daze. Then he threw back his head and roared at the sky, "We don't need Soul Power! We can kill Soul Masters too!!!"

"Kill them!!!"

That roar was a spark falling into a pile of dry kindling.

The slaves throughout the mine went wild. They smashed their shackles, seized the mining picks at hand, and stormed the overseers' camp.

And this was only the beginning.

Gou'er's gunshot was like a stone cast into a stagnant pond.

But its ripples spread faster than anyone had imagined.

Over the next dozen days, the blacksmith's apprentices who had copied the formula from Wang Manchui's doorstep in Nuoding City, the miners who had secretly memorized the chemical formula on the Firmament late at night, and the low-ranking Soul Masters who treated every word Lin Fan said as divine revelation—they all did the same thing in their own corners of the world.

They made guns!

Some failed and blew their own hands apart!

Some succeeded but lacked the courage to pull the trigger!

And some could never turn back after the moment they pulled it.

Whatever the case, gunshots began to ring out here and there across the continent.

Compared with the sound of a Soul Master's Soul Skills, those gunshots were pitifully small.

Yet each shot made the soul of an old era tremble.

That night, the same gunshots and booms rang out one after another in the slums of the Two Great Empires, in remote black markets, and on oppressed farms!

Those first gunshots tore a hole that could never be mended in the Soul Masters' tens of thousands of years of rule over Douluo Continent!

The news flew like a winged nightmare. Within half a day, it had reached the desks of the Two Great Empires' imperial capitals and the major sects.

In the council hall of the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Sect.

Ning Fengzhi looked at the bloodstained urgent report in his hand. It stated plainly that thousands of incidents in which "commoners rose up and killed Soul Masters" had occurred across the empire the previous night.

"Sect Master..."

Even Sword Douluo Chen Xin, usually so decisive in battle, sounded shaken. "An ordinary blacksmith secretly forged the crudest iron tube and filled it with sulfur powder found everywhere. And within ten paces, it blew a Soul Grandmaster's body apart..."

"It's terrifying... truly terrifying!"

Bone Douluo Gu Rong looked just as incredulous. "Our Soul Master World spends years of resources raising a single Soul Elder. But that madman in the Firmament gave a commoner the power to kill a Soul Elder in... just the few days it takes to forge an iron tube?!"

"He wasn't teaching knowledge at all..."

Ning Fengzhi closed his eyes. "That Yu Xiaogang in the Firmament has placed a blade capable of overturning all Douluo Continent and slaughtering every Soul Master into the hands of every peasant! This is class war! This is a blow meant to wipe out the bloodlines of the Upper Three Sects and the Two Great Empires!"

The same fear spread like a plague through the palaces of Heaven Dou and the Star Luo Empire.

Faced with a world-ending threat that could topple imperial rule, the Two Great Empires acted in unprecedented accord.

Xue Ye and the Star Luo Emperor, Dai Yutian—two rulers who had fought each other tooth and nail—issued the bloodiest decrees in Douluo history to the entire continent: the Continental Sulfur Ban and the Iron Seizure Order!

"From this moment on, whether in city or countryside, anyone who secretly keeps sulfur or saltpeter dies! Anyone who forges a seamless iron tube in secret shall have ten generations of their clan executed! Confiscate every iron implement in civilian hands, even kitchen knives and farming tools. The empire will control them all!"

"Send out the Royal Knight Corps! Send out the Guardian Sects! Search every home for me! Better to kill ten thousand by mistake than let one escape! Kill every peasant who dares look at the Firmament and learn rebellion from Yu Xiaogang! Kill them all!!!"