Battles Erupt on Every Front

Boom—rumble!

In the Firmament's time and space, at the far end of the wasteland outside Tack Town, the earth shook as though a magnitude-ten earthquake had struck.

A phantom of a giant, two-headed stone ape, thirty meters tall and covered from head to toe in thick, dark-yellow rock armor, tore through the morning mist.

Seven Soul Rings pulsed wildly beneath the behemoth's feet.

A level-seventy-one defense-type Soul Saint. Martial Soul Avatar—Earth Two-Headed Ape!

Behind the mountain-like monster, dozens of Soul Emperors and Soul Kings with their Martial Souls unleashed bore down on Tack Town's defenses.

"You ants without a shred of Soul Power dare challenge the might of Spirit Hall?!" The Soul Saint's roar rang through the skies.

"Today, I'll grind Tack Town and all you wretched commoners into meat paste!"

The giant stone ape raised a fist like a meteorite. With a terrifying shriek that tore through the air, it prepared to smash the crude trenches ahead and the ordinary people inside them with a single blow.

But far behind the defensive line...

Lin Fan stood beside a high-pressure rifled mortar that had only just been assembled overnight, his plain clothes stained with coal ash.

From somewhere, he had found a tobacco roll. He lit it against a piece of still-warm steel slag nearby and took a deep drag.

"Phew—"

A gray-white ring of smoke drifted slowly from his mouth.

Lin Fan looked up. In eyes that had gone seven days and nights without sleep, there was no fear—only the exhilaration of a player facing an elite boss at the end of a level.

"A level-seventy-one defense-type Soul Saint? Your Martial Soul Avatar's your big move, huh? Looks impressive, doesn't it?"

"My cannon was made to hit you!"

He flicked the tobacco roll into the muddy water, yanked the oilcloth off the barrel, and gave the first firing order of a new era:

"Gun position one, high-explosive armor-piercing shell ready—fire!"

Click!

The gunner slammed down the firing pin.

BOOM!

A terrifying blast, one that had no place in this age of cold steel and Soul Power, exploded across Tack Town's position with enough force to seem to tear the sky apart!

Forged from special steel tempered with rare ores through seven days and nights of frantic labor, the barrel did not warp in the slightest under the twin pressures of black powder and the solidified Soul Power primer.

The precise spiral rifling inside the barrel gave the shell tremendous spin.

The armor-piercing shell, made entirely of steel and packed with powerful explosives, burst from the muzzle with an ear-splitting shriek. It drew a black line through the air that the naked eye could barely follow!

Three times the speed of sound!

For the first time in the ten-thousand-year history of Douluo Continent, a weapon had broken the sound barrier!

At such a terrifying speed, crossing several kilometers took less than the blink of an eye.

On the horizon, the Soul Saint's sneer had not even fully spread across his face.

The instant his Martial Soul Avatar met the 105-millimeter armor-piercing shell, it was like paper pierced by a steel needle. It failed to slow the shell at all and shredded into fragments across the sky!

Splurt—BOOM!

Driven by terrifying kinetic energy, the armor-piercing shell punched through the thirty-meter stone ape phantom and buried itself in the Soul Saint's chest. Then its delayed fuse triggered, and it exploded inside his chest!

How could flesh and blood withstand a point-blank blast from more than ten pounds of high explosives?

There was no scream. No last words.

The level-seventy-one Soul Saint who had seemed invincible a moment earlier lost his entire upper body in the explosion. His ruined lower half flew back over twenty meters, its severed edge charred black and trailing wisps of smoke!

Shattered bone and flesh mingled with scraps of organs, raining down in a bloody storm that struck the Soul Emperors and Soul Kings behind him full in the face.

The earth trembled. Smoke filled the air.

The strongest extermination force Spirit Hall had sent had not even reached Tack Town's barricades before an ordinary man's cannon blast wiped out its commander, leaving no body to bury!

"M-monsters!"

The Soul Emperors and Soul Kings, who normally looked down on everyone, touched the warm scraps of their leader's flesh on their faces. Their resolve shattered.

They shrieked like pigs at slaughter, scrambled around, and began a desperate rout across the wasteland.

Above the Firmament, the image of a Soul Saint blasted into a bloody mist by an ordinary man's cannon was projected into every corner of the real world.

That shot had not only destroyed Spirit Hall's elites within the Firmament. It had also struck deep into the minds of the great powers facing off in reality!

Above the real Tack Town...

Chrysanthemum Douluo Yue Guan, Ghost Douluo Gui Mei, Sword Douluo Chen Xin, and Yu Yuanzhen, the Blue Lightning Tyrant Dragon Sect's master transformed into lightning, had been on the brink of battle a moment ago. Now they hung rigid in midair, as though a binding spell had caught them all at once.

Cold sweat streamed down the foreheads of these Titled Douluo who stood at the summit of the continent.

That had been a Soul Saint!

A Soul Saint with a defense-type Martial Soul Avatar unleashed!

Yet before that steel cylinder called a "cannon," he had been more fragile than a fly swatted dead?!

He had not even had the chance to resist with the slightest pulse of Soul Power before he was erased?!

Chen Xin's white robes, proud as snow and frost, trembled faintly in the night wind.

He gazed at the Seven Kill Sword that had accompanied him all his life, the sword renowned for the greatest attack power under heaven. For the first time, doubt flared in his ever-sharp eyes.

"Could my sword... cut down a Hidden Weapon moving that fast?" Chen Xin murmured.

"If that demon made a hundred, a thousand of those tubes, and aimed them all at me... could I truly survive, even at level ninety-six?"

Faith crumbled, spreading like a plague through the hearts of every high-level Soul Master across the continent.

Before the Soul Masters of the real world could recover from their fear, another upheaval erupted beneath the real Tack Town!

Hummm!

With Lin Fan's cannon shot securing a crushing victory within the Firmament, the phantom of the giant steel Blast Furnace that had risen from the bottom of the pit dug by the three thousand Heaven Dou Dragon Soul Guards finally became solid in the real world.

Metal flashed beneath the lightning. The towering beast that heralded an industrial revolution had descended into reality!

More than that, over a dozen blueprints and gunpowder formulas Lin Fan had casually drawn within the Firmament materialized beside the Blast Furnace!

"Take it!"

High above, greed swallowed the fear in Chrysanthemum Douluo Yue Guan's eyes.

He shrieked, his level-ninety-five Soul Power erupting. "The cannon is mine! The blueprints belong to Spirit Hall too! Anyone who dares fight Spirit Hall for them—dies!"

Golden Singular Velvet Sky Chrysanthemums filled the air with deadly force and hurtled straight toward the Blast Furnace at the bottom of the pit.

"Not a chance! This is Heaven Dou Empire territory!"

The transmission Soul Tool at the Dragon Soul Guards commander's waist suddenly lit up. Xue Ye's roar burst from it, making the eardrums of several nearby knights ache:

"Dragon Soul Guards! Charge down there! Guard that Blast Furnace with your lives if you must! Sword Douluo, stop Yue Guan!"

"Roar!"

Yu Yuanzhen transformed into a lightning dragon and dove without hesitation.

They had gone mad!

The continent's strongest fighters had fallen into a frenzied clash over a steel relic an ordinary man had made with his own hands amid these ruins of reality!

Reality's retribution came far more brutally than they had imagined.

A level-fifty-five Soul King from Spirit Hall relied on the blinding speed of his agility-type Martial Soul to become the first to rush into the real Tack Town position, turning into a blur as he tried to snatch the scattered blueprints.

His military boot came down on a patch of dirt that looked utterly ordinary.

Click.

A faint sound of a mechanism springing sounded from beneath the dirt, startlingly clear in the rainy night.

It was the ultimate killing trap born of the worlds' overlap: a pressure-triggered black-powder landmine Lin Fan had ordered his troops to bury along the front of the position overnight within the Firmament, to stop enemy infantry from charging through!

Buried within the Firmament, the deadly fruit had appeared in the matching soil of reality!

The Soul King froze and looked down.

BOOM!

A terrifying blast erupted, loud enough to shatter eardrums—a sound the ordinary people and Soul Masters of the real world had never heard before!

Fire surged skyward from the muddy ground. Dozens of pounds of black powder and hundreds upon hundreds of packed steel balls bloomed at close range like a deadly red lotus, engulfing the arrogant Soul King.

He did not even manage a scream before the explosion blew him into a rain of blood!

A huge cloud of smoke rose into the air. The violent shock wave hurled several charging Heaven Dou Dragon Soul Guards dozens of meters away, the cracking of their bones plainly audible.

Before the pit in the real Tack Town, the sudden, terrifying explosion knocked everyone off their feet and brought their advance to an abrupt halt.

The smoke within the Firmament had not yet cleared, and already a landmine had thundered in the real world.