The Mosin-Nagant Is Here

In the Firmament world, deep within the Ten Thousand Mountains on the edge of Fasinuo Province.

This place had been completely transformed into a military-industrial base called "Thunder."

Between the deep ravines, the roars of Soul Beasts and the cries of birds could no longer be heard.

Day and night, dull metallic blows rumbled like thunder, rising and falling one after another.

Hundreds of earthen kilns and Blast Furnaces belched rolling smoke into the gray sky, dragging these primeval mountains by force into a new era of heavy-industry pollution and the brutal beauty of steel.

Inside the base's central assembly workshop.

Clang!

Lin Fan stood bare-chested, black, sticky machine oil and sweat coating his body.

His once-proportioned muscles had grown sharply defined as stone under the strain of continuous, grueling labor.

Gripping a heavy special-steel wrench, he gritted his teeth and wrenched the final hex bolt, as big as an infant's fist, tight onto a complex steel machine.

"Whew..."

Lin Fan dropped the wrench and wiped the sweat from his face with the dirty towel around his neck.

He raised his head. An irrepressible fervor danced in his bloodshot eyes as he gazed at the machine into which he had poured everything he had.

This was no longer a crude hydraulic forging press at the mercy of the weather and the flow of water.

This was a hand-built high-pressure steam engine, complete with cast cylinders—a machine that defied everything Douluo Continent knew!

"Coal and water reserves ready! Pressure gauge reading normal!" several soot-faced boys shouted nearby, their voices tight with the nerves of witnessing an unknown miracle.

"Light it! Pull the valve!" Lin Fan rasped, yanking down the thick steel control lever.

BOOM—!!!

Deep inside the silent steel beast, a terrifying roar erupted like a furious dragon awakening!

Coal blazed inside the boiler, turning pure water into violently expanding high-pressure steam!

WOOOOOO—!!!

A piercing, soaring whistle rang out, long enough to tear this age of cold weapons apart, while billowing white steam blasted from the towering exhaust pipe!

Chug! Chug! Chug!

Driven by the tremendous force of the steam, the enormous steel connecting rods began to pump back and forth, heavy and powerful.

Thick crankshafts turned, and countless gears, large and small, meshed precisely beneath their coating of machine oil.

Bearings spun furiously, unleashing a deafening mechanical roar!

For the first time in Douluo Continent's ten-thousand-year history, a true engine of power thundered to life in mortal hands!

[Core power source detected!]

[Industrial Revolution completion: 20% (early Steam Age).]

[Prerequisites for mechanized assembly lines met!]

At the crisp system chimes in his mind, Lin Fan spread his arms, felt the hot steam wash over him, and threw back his head in wild laughter.

"Hahahahaha! We've got a power source! I finally climbed this damn tech tree!"

Lin Fan turned and kicked an empty iron bucket beside him, then roared at the commoner recruits stunned by the steam engine: "Quit standing around, damn it! Hook every hydraulic forging press and lathe up to the steam-driven shafts! Dump tons of Coking Coal and Hematite into the Blast Furnaces!"

"We're starting round-the-clock mechanized production! Build an army! Crank up that output like hell!!!"

With the steam engine's unending, ferocious power behind him, Lin Fan built Douluo Continent's first standardized arms assembly line at the base at a terrifying pace.

In the gunpowder purification workshop to the west, pungent chemical fumes filled the air.

No Soul Power was needed, only precise proportions and distillation.

Batch after batch of bright yellow solid powder (Picric Acid, a precursor to TNT) was carefully scraped from filtration tanks and packed into specially made moisture-proof wooden crates.

The first form of Smokeless Powder had been born!

In the heavy metallurgy workshop to the east, another blood-stirring scene unfolded.

Hisssss—

Driven by the steam engine's tremendous torque, more than a dozen special-steel lathes ran at high speed day and night.

High-pressure-resistant steel tubes were clamped into chucks. Sprayed with coolant, sharp high-carbon-steel cutting heads bored into the barrels, carving beautiful spiral rifling!

A day later.

Lin Fan stood at the finished-product inspection bench and picked up a weapon fresh off the assembly line.

This gun was no cumbersome-to-load Smoothbore Flintlock with a crudely made stock.

It had a long, straight rifled barrel, a streamlined body polished from walnut, and a precision cylindrical bolt that gleamed with metal.

It was the perfect industrial prototype of a standard rear-loading bolt-action rifle—the Mosin-Nagant!

Lin Fan stroked the smooth stock and gripped the metal bolt with his right hand.

Click!

With a sharp twist of his wrist, Lin Fan lifted the bolt and pulled it cleanly back!

A gleaming brass cartridge, stamped in one piece and fitted with a sensitive primer, slid crisply into the chamber.

He pushed forward and locked it down.

That rapid series of metallic clicks rang out clear amid the workshop's mechanical thunder—the finest heavy-industry ASMR in the world!

Lin Fan raised the rifle and, without taking careful aim, pulled the trigger at a huge slab of granite on a cliff a thousand meters away.

BANG—!!!

No billowing black smoke obscured his sight. Only a tiny burst of orange-red flame flashed at the muzzle!

Propelled by Smokeless Powder's tremendous force, the pointed, full-metal-jacket bullet spun wildly along the barrel's rifling and tore out of the muzzle with a shrill shockwave!

Its muzzle velocity was more than ten times that of the old smoothbore gun!

BOOM!

A thousand meters away, a crater half a meter deep exploded into the hard granite wall, spiderweb cracks spreading all around it!

Stone fragments sprayed in every direction like bullets!

Lin Fan lowered the rifle, which still gave off a faint smell of gunpowder.

"Now that's what standard equipment should look like..."

He held the Mosin-Nagant high and issued an iron-blooded military order destined for Douluo history to the dark mass of commoner recruits behind him, whose eyes had gone utterly wild:

"Reequip the entire army! Retire every muzzle-loading firearm!"

"From today on, the weapons in your hands are five-shot bolt-action rifles! Pull the trigger, and even those supposedly invincible Soul Emperors and Soul Saints will turn into honeycombs a thousand meters away!"

"Lathe crews, don't stop! Once you've finished the rifle barrels, switch to larger cutting heads and start turning barrels for breech-loading rifled howitzers!"

Lin Fan's voice rang through the mountains over the steam engine's roar: "I'll build a fortress of steel and gunpowder in this wasteland that even the gods won't be able to breach!!!"

And yet.

As the industrial miracle Lin Fan had worked himself to the bone creating for his "defense game" crossed the bounds of time and space and appeared in the real world.

All of Douluo Continent trembled in a night of terror that reached into its very soul.

Spirit City, within the most sacred and inviolable Worship Hall.

The Angel God Statue stood enshrined here, in the place on Douluo Continent closest to the Divine Realm.

Yet at that moment, Qian Daoliu—the Great Enshrined, a Level 99 Limit Douluo hailed as one of Douluo Continent's three peerless powerhouses—rose from where he had sat cross-legged with his eyes closed before the Angel God Statue!

Hum—!

As his emotions surged, a terrifying force powerful enough to rend space burst from his body, whipping his platinum robe with its gold trim into a furious flutter.

After a century of trials, this peerless powerhouse had never wavered, not even before Tang Chen at his peak. Yet now, his commanding face had gone pale as never before.

He stared at the steam engine belching white vapor, at the gears meshing furiously, at the rows of cold bolt-action rifles that mortals were turning out in batches on an assembly line almost with their eyes closed—rifles capable of shattering granite from a thousand meters away.

"That isn't a Soul Tool..."

"Soul Tools need Soul Power to inscribe a Core Array, and Soul Power to drive it! Even the deadliest weapons left by the ancients cannot function without a Soul Master. But that thing in the Firmament..."

"It's another kind of power, entirely separate from the Soul Master system! A power governed by rules with no upper limit!"

"No Martial Soul Awakening, no decade after decade of grueling meditation!"

"As long as there's iron beneath the ground, coal in the mountains, and one of those iron contraptions called a lathe... those mortal insects, worth less than Soul Beasts, can turn out weapons that kill Soul Masters in endless batches!"

"Is this the wildfire Yu Xiaogang lit in that world?!"

Qian Daoliu looked back at the Angel God Statue radiating sacred light. For the first time, deep despair filled his eyes.

"That man... isn't overthrowing the Two Great Empires. He's digging out the very foundations of our gods!!!"

If mortals gained control of industrial machines that could reproduce destructive power without any gift from the gods, who under heaven would still fear the Soul Masters towering above them?

Who would still worship those elusive deities?!

At the same time.

At the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Sect, inside the sect master's hall.

Ning Fengzhi collapsed into the broad sect master's chair as though all the strength had been drained from him.

He watched the mountain base in the Firmament take on the looming shape of a "heavy-industry steel beast," and a chill spread through his entire body.

"Assembly lines... production in batches..."

Ning Fengzhi gave a bleak smile, one more painful than tears.

"Uncle Jian, Uncle Gu! Our Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Sect spent countless Gold Soul Coins and decades training just a few thousand direct Soul Masters. The Heaven Dou Empire poured the strength of the entire nation into maintaining a Dragon Soul Guard of thirty thousand."

"But look..."

Ning Fengzhi pointed at the rifled rifles pouring endlessly off the assembly line in the Firmament, his voice edged with the madness of a man whose faith had collapsed.

"That lunatic can make over a thousand firearms in one day, each capable of easily piercing the defenses of a Soul Grandmaster or even a Soul Elder!"

"Before his industrial machines, the Soul Master legions we painstakingly raised, our noble class, the foundations of our sect... they're as fragile as a bubble from a bygone age, ready to burst at a touch!"

Inside the Heaven Dou Imperial Palace and in a hall of the Star Luo Empire.

Xue Ye and Dai Yutian, two bitter enemies, made exactly the same movement in different realms.

They slumped on their thrones, faces haggard, watching the bloodthirsty-eyed commoner recruits in the Firmament armed with Mosin-Nagants, watching the breech-loading howitzer barrels that had already been rifled and were about to be assembled.

A chill ten thousand times more terrifying than facing an army of a million surged straight to their heads.