The Smoke Clears, and Yu Xiaogang's Soul Is Searched

In the real world, Fasinuo Province, the ruins of Tack Town.

The cold downpour still fell in torrents, but it could not wash the acrid smell of gunpowder from the air.

The body of Spirit Hall's level-fifty-five Soul King was nowhere to be found.

He had become a shower of blood. His lingering Soul Power hissed through the distorted air, as though mourning a manner of death never seen before.

Up in the air.

Moments ago, Chrysanthemum Douluo Yue Guan had shouted, "Anyone who tries to take this from Spirit Hall dies!" and charged toward the crater in a streak of golden light. Now he looked as though someone had pressed pause.

He hung motionless in midair, the hand he had reached out to seize the blueprints hovering less than half a meter above the scorched earth, trembling uncontrollably.

Drip.

A bead of cold sweat slid down Yue Guan's heavily powdered cheek.

"No Soul Power..."

Yue Guan's shrill voice rose completely out of pitch. "I couldn't sense the slightest fluctuation of Soul Power in that explosion! Metal shards, flames... What in the world was that?!"

Behind him, Ghost Douluo, shrouded in black mist, had also stopped. The ghostly flames of his eyes flickered wildly beneath his hood.

On the other side, Sword Douluo Chen Xin and Yu Yuanzhen of the Blue Lightning Tyrant Dragon Sect, who had been ready to intercept him at the cost of their lives, stared at the seemingly peaceful patch of earth at the bottom of the crater as if Medusa had turned them to stone.

The same hair-raising conclusion flashed through every Titled Douluo's mind:

That demon in the Firmament had buried the forbidden weapons he called "land mines" along the front of his position to stop Spirit Hall's army from charging...

The ground beneath the real Tack Town perfectly mirrored the Blast Furnace and blueprints shown in the Firmament...

So beneath this real patch of mud, where the two worlds overlapped, how many more of those "iron lumps" were buried—things that could tear a Soul King apart in an instant and even gravely wound a Soul Emperor or Soul Saint?!

Ten? A hundred? Or... ten thousand?!

Three thousand fully armed Royal Dragon Soul Guards, imperial elites who had once swept across the battlefields of the Douluo Continent, looked at the soft earth below with more despair in their eyes than they would have shown before a Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beast.

They were Titled Douluo, yet a single Hidden Weapon fashioned by an ordinary man had frightened them so badly that they dared not take another step!

That was the absolute terror of an attack from an entirely different level!

Yet the scene within the Firmament was nothing like the real world, where every rustle of wind and cry of a crane seemed to herald danger.

Inside the Firmament.

The smoke outside Tack Town was slowly clearing.

At the front of the position, the headless corpse of a Soul Saint and the scattered remains of Soul Emperors silently proclaimed a glorious victory in this battle of mortals slaying gods.

Two hundred mortal youths lay in the trenches, their faces blackened with smoke and spattered with blood.

But the reverence they had once felt for gods was gone from their eyes. In its place burned the exhilaration of breaking the shackles of rank and grasping the truth!

"We won..."

Stone gripped the hot Flintlock in his hands as tears burst from his eyes. "Long live the Sage! Long live the truth!"

"Long live!!!"

Deafening cheers erupted from the trenches. The two hundred mortals gazed at the man on the platform as though welcoming a god.

Lin Fan stood with one foot on the lingering spirit of a Soul Emperor's corpse, watching the system notification, [Great Victory! Perfect Defense!], flood his view. Far from overjoyed, he frowned deeply, his voice full of insufferable disdain.

"Won, my ass. That casualty ratio and efficiency were painful to look at."

Lin Fan pulled open the breech of the high-pressure rifled mortar that had just scored its first kill. He looked into its smoke-filled chamber and spat.

"Muzzle-loading cannons are too clumsy, and loading them takes forever! If we run into an agility-type Soul Saint or a Titled Douluo who can teleport, and that first shot misses, they'll get close enough to carve us all up!"

The more Lin Fan thought about it, the more backward this game's tech tree seemed. The lousy game insisted he make everything by hand, then sent him into battle with weapons that had obvious flaws. It was one hell of a gamble!

"And this Black Powder! There's so much smoke it looks like a damn fire scene. Fire one shot and the whole battlefield starts breathing secondhand smoke. We can't see a thing, so how are we supposed to aim a second volley?"

Lin Fan had no idea what a terrifying psychological earthquake his outrageously Versailles-style complaints were causing in the real world.

He turned coldly toward the fervent-eyed youths in the trenches and threw a bucket of cold water over their excitement:

"Shut the hell up! What's there to cheer about? We beat a few expendable grunts!"

Lin Fan's voice boomed through the Firmament.

"We may have won this battle, but Spirit Hall's real core forces haven't even appeared! Soul Douluo, Titled Douluo—those monsters that can fly through the sky could descend at any moment! How will you stop them with these fire pokers and Black Powder that leaves you blind?"

"Next, we rebuild the army! No more workshop production. We're moving to full-scale industrial assembly lines!"

Lin Fan rapidly sketched a precise mechanical blueprint on the blackboard behind him:

"We're replacing every weapon with a breech-loading bolt-action rifle! Get rid of Black Powder completely. Go into the mountains and purify sulfuric acid and nitric acid for me. I'm going to make Smokeless Powder!"

"We'll build breech-loading rifled steel cannons and fit them with hydraulic recoil mechanisms! I want our rate of fire increased tenfold! Our firepower increased tenfold!"

Standing atop the platform, Lin Fan pointed toward the vast land in the distance and made a vow that shook everyone to the core:

"We will turn this wasteland into a place where no extraordinary Soul Master can survive!!!"

Lin Fan's declaration of an arms upgrade within the Firmament struck like the pendulum of Death's clock, swinging again and again.

Bolt-action rifles? Smokeless Powder? Breech-loading rifled steel cannons? A place where no extraordinary Soul Master could survive?!

The people of the real world could not understand those tongue-twisting technical terms. But when Lin Fan complained that smoothbore cannons were too weak and demanded ten times their killing power, they felt a despair that threatened to destroy heaven and earth!

In the Imperial City, inside the imperial study.

Xue Ye slammed the Soul Tool used for communication onto his desk.

"Retreat! Order the Royal Dragon Soul Guard to fall back ten li and seal off Tack Town! No one is to set foot in that mud!"

His voice echoed through the empty study.

From the Soul Tool came the Royal Dragon Soul Guard commander's broken reply, mixed with wind, rain, and the terrified cries of soldiers.

Xue Ye cut the connection before the commander could finish.

"To the prison."

He rose, sweeping a candlestick off the desk with his robes.

A Soul Douluo guard waiting outside had not even reacted before Xue Ye strode out of the study.

"Your Majesty, the rain is heavy out there—"

"Take the fastest route. Now!"

Half an hour later.

Deep within the Heaven Dou Empire's Royal Death Prison.

Xue Ye rushed into the torture chamber, bringing cold rain and the smell of gunpowder with him.

Bound to the rack, the real Yu Xiaogang rolled his eyes back, drool running from the corner of his mouth. He muttered witlessly, "Boom... blown to death... all blown to death... I'm Grandmaster... Grandmaster is me..."

The look in Xue Ye's eyes had turned utterly deranged.

He grabbed Yu Xiaogang by the hair and hauled his bloody, mangled face close.

"Your Majesty, his mind has completely collapsed, and his Sea of Consciousness is fragile. If we forcibly search his soul, his brain may die on the spot, leaving him in a vegetative state..." Several mental-type Soul Douluo summoned in haste looked troubled as they quietly tried to dissuade him.

"I don't care anymore!!!"

Xue Ye turned toward them, his voice carrying an emperor's final madness in the face of his empire's destruction. "Are you blind?! That devil called Yu Xiaogang in the Firmament is about to make a forbidden weapon that can wipe out the entire Soul Master World! He's going to kill us all!"

"I must know what else his counterpart in this world has hidden in his head! Are those so-called blueprints and chemical equations in there too?!"

Xue Ye flung Yu Xiaogang to the floor and issued the cruelest possible final order:

"Search! Search his soul at once! Search every inch! Even if you churn his brain into a pot of mush, even if you doom him for all eternity, you will dig that knowledge out for me!!!"

The mental-type Soul Douluo exchanged glances, a ruthless gleam flashing in their eyes.

Faced with an apocalyptic crisis that threatened to topple the gods from their altars, any talk of humanity or mercy was laughable.

"Forgive us."

The eight Soul Rings of the leading Soul Douluo erupted with power.

A vast, violent surge of mental Soul Power stabbed brutally into the depths of the real Yu Xiaogang's already ravaged Sea of Consciousness!

"Aaaaaah----------!!!!!!!"

A scream no human should have been able to make pierced the thick walls of the Royal Death Prison and echoed mournfully over the Heaven Dou Imperial City!

Yu Xiaogang convulsed wildly on the floor. His bones cracked under the strain, his eyes bulged with pain, and blood gushed from his every orifice.

And at that very moment.

The image in the Firmament suddenly changed.

For the first time, the Firmament system had switched its view to the real world: the pitch-dark corridor of the Royal Death Prison, torchlight dancing on damp stone walls, and Xue Ye standing at the torture chamber door.

Across the continent, everyone watched with bated breath.

They did not know what Xue Ye intended to do, but on the emperor's face, they all saw something more frightening than fear.

Everyone waited.

They waited for this cruel, ultimate soul search to strip away the last scrap hiding the truth about the real Yu Xiaogang.

Did the man known as "Grandmaster" have some heaven-defying divine art hidden in his mind, something that could stand against the Firmament?!