Holy Soul Village Has No Secrets-Print Ten Thousand Copies of the Secret Arts!

Firmament timeline, Holy Soul Village, a ramshackle straw hut on the hill behind the blacksmith's forge.

The morning mist had yet to lift, carrying the damp chill of the mountain woods.

Having just finished loading into this body, Lin Fan looked down at its young, scrawny frame. It was only six years old and had suffered years of malnutrition. The corners of his mouth twitched hard.

A row of system messages, glowing with sacred golden light, hovered before his eyes:

[Ding! Second instance loaded successfully!]

[Current role: Young Tang San!]

[Main objective of the second instance: Play Tang San's image as a righteous saint to the utmost! Reach a 100% perfect positive public image to clear the instance!]

[Current portrayal score: 0%.]

"Play a saint? You want me to turn Tang San into a flawless saint?!"

Lin Fan sat on a cold stone and rolled his eyes. His inner keyboard warrior promptly launched into a furious rant.

"Is there something seriously wrong with whoever designed this garbage single-player game? Do they have any idea what Tang San was like in the original story?"

"In his previous life at the Bashu Tang Sect, he stole the highest inner-sect secret arts. When they forced him to jump off a cliff, he dressed it up as a declaration of principle. Then what? He came to the Douluo Continent, founded his own Tang Sect, and treated the things he'd stolen as his lifeblood and his sect's greatest treasures! He guarded against thieves in one life and hoarded everything for himself in the next. Double standards and hypocrisy were carved into his bones!"

The more Lin Fan thought about it, the sicker he felt. He raised his middle finger at the empty air.

"He talked endlessly about justice and morality, then pocketed every Immortal Herb in the Ice and Fire Yin Yang Well without leaving so much as a leaf for the continent! He claimed to act for all humanity, but after becoming a god, he treated the continent's destiny like his family's backyard. To keep a divine beast of fortune on a leash, he'd even scheme against his own daughter and torment his son-in-law like a dog!"

"And the system wants me to play that purely self-serving, bloodsucking hypocrite as a genuine saint no one can find fault with?"

"Fine! If the system wants a saint, if clearing this stage means maxing out a selfless public image, then today I'll teach that fool from the original story what it means to care for all under heaven and put others before yourself!"

"He likes keeping everything to himself? I'll share absolutely everything!"

"He treats the Mysterious Heaven Treasure Record like no one else is allowed to touch it? I'll strip him bare from the start!"

With his mind made up, Lin Fan did not follow the original story and trudge up the mountain to practice the Mysterious Heaven Skill at sunrise.

Instead, he turned back into the tattered hut and dug out a rusty carving knife and several flat scraps of wood.

In a backward village with no modern printing press, Lin Fan drew on his memories from his previous life and an extraordinary measure of persistence to begin carving printing blocks by hand!

"Scritch! Scritch! Scritch!"

The knife flew across the wood.

The Mysterious Heaven Skill's inner cultivation method and diagrams of energy flowing through the Eight Extraordinary Meridians!

The techniques of exerting force and footwork positions of Ghost Shadow Perplexing Track!

The secrets of guiding energy with Controlling Crane Capturing Dragon!

The cultivation methods of the Purple Demon Eye and Mysterious Jade Hand!

Lin Fan even included the plans for the basic mechanical Hidden Weapons in Tang San's head, carving every last detail into the boards!

An entire night passed.

The punishing work drained the strength from this frail six-year-old body.

Lin Fan coughed violently, blood seeping from the corner of his mouth, even as he feverishly brushed cheap ink onto the boards and pressed them against coarse yellow paper.

Black ink smeared his face, but his eyes shone with manic excitement.

"Print! Print like hell! I'll do ten thousand copies tonight! Tomorrow night, I'll find a paper mill and print a million!"

At daybreak the next morning, dawn broke over the village.

Six-year-old Lin Fan carried a bamboo basket packed to bursting and taller than him by half a head. His steps wavered, but he walked resolutely to the entrance of Holy Soul Village.

"Well, Little San, where are you off to so early?" Old Jack, the village chief, asked with concern. Leaning on his cane, he eyed Lin Fan's ink-blackened face and heavy load.

Lin Fan stopped and raised his young face.

He arranged his features into the perfect, utterly selfless smile of a saint descended from heaven.

"Grandpa Jack." Lin Fan took a rough booklet, still fragrant with fresh ink, from his basket and respectfully offered it with both hands.

"A divine grandfather taught me these supreme secret arts in a dream! Take this Ghost Shadow Perplexing Track movement technique and the breathing method of the Mysterious Heaven Skill and practice them. They'll strengthen your body, and your legs should move much more easily!"

Old Jack froze. He stared at the booklet's diagrams of meridian pathways, his face full of disbelief. "This... this is a treasure. And you're just giving it to your grandpa?"

"Of course." Lin Fan smiled like a pure white lotus. "The Heavenly Dao is selfless, and knowledge should belong to all humanity! Grandpa Jack, if anyone else in the village wants a copy, send them to me. I have plenty!"

With that, Lin Fan left the dumbstruck Old Jack behind and went door to door, handing out booklets like mad.

"Uncle, take this! Controlling Crane Capturing Dragon is great for hauling bricks and working the fields. Everyone gets to learn it!"

"Auntie Wang, this Purple Demon Eye is for you. You'll never have trouble seeing your stitches again!"

"Er Gouzi, take these Hidden Weapon plans. If anyone bullies you, forge what's in the drawings and shoot the bastard!"

In less than half an hour, everyone in Holy Soul Village, from eighty-year-old elders to sniffling three-year-olds, held a copy of the Tang Sect's highest secret arts!

Just as Lin Fan stuffed the last set of plans under the old yellow dog at the village entrance to serve as a cushion, the system's crisp mechanical voice rang through his mind like heavenly music:

[Host's behavior detected as utterly selfless! You have broken through the selfish barrier of hoarding knowledge!]

[Your actions perfectly embody a saint's principles! Saint portrayal score has surged to 15%!]

"Hahahahaha!"

Lin Fan laughed wildly to himself, beaming from ear to ear.

"This fucking portrayal game is giving points away! That idiot Tang San in the original story guarded a few lousy books like treasure. He couldn't even exploit a scoring mechanic this simple. What a complete fool!"

"Once I get to Nuoding City, I'll find a few big merchant associations to sponsor me and hire a hundred hot-air balloons to drop these manuals across the whole continent. I'll max out the portrayal score and clear the game in minutes!"

Lin Fan was having the time of his life inside the Firmament, convinced he had found a way to speedrun a single-player game by fighting magic with magic.

He had no idea.

At the very instant he handed the Tang Sect Secret Arts to ordinary villagers as freely as cabbages, holding nothing back—

Beyond the Firmament, time had leaped ten thousand years into the future, where an earth-shattering earthquake of faith had erupted!

Rumble—!!!

The real world beyond the Firmament.

The Douluo Continent's timeline had now advanced a full ten thousand years—to the era of the Peerless Tang Sect!

In this age, Spirit Hall had long since turned to dust.

The Tang Sect and Shrek Academy stood like two immovable mountains that had endured for ages. Between them, they held a stranglehold on all the Douluo Continent's resources, every route to education, and every path up the social ladder!

An ordinary person wanted a better life?

A low-ranking Soul Master wanted an advanced cultivation method?

Unless you knelt like a dog at Shrek Academy's gates, unless you signed away your freedom to join the Tang Sect, you could not even touch the threshold of higher knowledge!

Ten thousand years of class oppression had made this age over a hundred times heavier and crueler than the old one!

Yet in the suffocating darkness of this world ten thousand years later—

The boundless, blood-red Firmament suddenly burst with ten thousand rays of sacred, pure-white light!

Across its vast expanse, it projected the stunning sight of young Lin Fan carrying his basket through Holy Soul Village and giving away the secret arts, leaving no corner of the scene unseen!

As though to match Lin Fan's generosity, the Firmament even magnified the cheaply printed copies of the Mysterious Heaven Treasure Record countless times across the sky!

The intricate meridian routes for inner cultivation, the techniques for exerting force, the Hidden Weapon designs—all hung clearly above the heads of the continent's tens of billions of living beings, like heavenly scriptures descending to earth!

The Star Luo Empire, the Sun Moon Empire, the Dou Ling Empire, the Heaven Dou Empire.

In countless slums and black markets across the continent, low-ranking Soul Masters who had spent their lives stuck at the lower levels for want of a core cultivation method stood alongside beggars and common folk.

The instant they saw those lines of text and diagrams in the Firmament, hundreds of millions of people at the bottom felt their scalps prickle. Even their breathing stopped!

"This... this is..."

In a slum on the outskirts of the Star Luo Empire's capital, a one-armed old man who had been trapped at the rank of Soul Grandmaster for forty years because he lacked a cultivation method stared fixedly at the sky.

His whole body shook as if struck by lightning, and tears streamed down his weathered face.

"The Mysterious Heaven Skill... Ghost Shadow Perplexing Track... These are the legendary secret arts only those admitted into the Tang Sect's inner circle can learn—and only after swearing a deadly oath of loyalty!!!"

"That person in the Firmament... is he really the legendary, noble, selfless ancestor Tang San, the First Generation Sea God?!"

"When he was a child, he... he gave away his sect's lifeblood for free to a lame village chief?! To every ordinary person in the village?!"

Shock, upheaval, and the fury of having been deceived for ten thousand years brewed in the hearts of those living ten thousand years later!

If the First Generation Sea God had truly been so selfless, if the secret arts had belonged to all humanity from the beginning—

Then what sort of filthy profiteering organization was the Tang Sect of today, which lorded over everyone, used the Mysterious Heaven Treasure Record to monopolize knowledge, and treated them like weeds?!

And the statue of the Sea God that had stood in Shrek Academy's square for ten thousand years—did it represent a god who saved all living beings, or a selfish bloodsucker?!

At that very moment!

Above the Divine Realm, the sea of clouds churned violently!

Within the lofty Sea God Temple—

Clad in a magnificent blue robe and holding the Golden Trident, the Sea God and Asura God, the god-king who held Dual Godhood—Tang San himself—sat upon the throne that symbolized supreme power in the Divine Realm.

For ten thousand years, he had fished in the mortal world, keeping the Douluo Continent's destiny firmly in his grasp.

He had woven the Tang Sect Secret Arts he left in the lower realm into an unbreakable chain of power and privilege.

Only peerless talents who submitted to him and joined his lineage could receive a scrap of opportunity from his hand. Thus he ensured the Tang Sect's prosperity for generations and an unending stream of faith for the Divine Realm.

But now!

In the Firmament, a heretic wearing his childhood face smiled with a selflessness that made him sick. Before the entire continent, the boy tossed away the trump cards Tang San took such pride in, handing them out for free as though they were worthless cabbages!

"You bastard!!!"

Tang San's face turned livid in an instant!

Veins bulged across his forehead, and unprecedented terror blazed in his divine eyes!

"What is he doing?! Has he gone mad?!"

"If he makes the Mysterious Heaven Treasure Record public, who will still revere the Tang Sect?! Who will beg Shrek for scraps?! He's destroying the foundation I've built over ten thousand years! He's smashing the monument to my rule over the mortal world!!!"

Tang San roared in fury. The Golden Trident in his hand erupted with blue divine light powerful enough to destroy heaven and earth. He tried to wield his power as a god-king, descend by force, and erase the Firmament.

But nothing happened!

The Firmament existed on a plane that a false god-king like him could never reach!

Meanwhile, in the mortal realm—

Inside Shrek Academy sat the elders of the Sea God Pavilion and the leaders of the present-day Tang Sect.

These beneficiaries of the system had always looked down their noses at everyone else and held a monopoly on the continent's voice. Now they looked from the Firmament to the secret manuals in their hands—manuals they would teach only after extracting contracts with unequal terms.

Cold sweat soaked their luxurious robes!

"It's over... It's all over..." Sea God Pavilion Master Tang Sanshisan's face went ashen. He collapsed onto the floor.

He knew that by tomorrow morning, billions of people across the continent would be able to recite the Mysterious Heaven Skill backward!

The "gift" the Tang Sect claimed to bestow had been exposed for the cover it was. The "true saint Tang San" in the Firmament had torn it away until not even a scrap remained!

Crack—!!!

In that brief half hour—

The stark contrast between Lin Fan's absolute, genuine selflessness in the Firmament and ten thousand years of false virtue and ruthless monopolies in the real world had done its work!

Across the continent, the faith ordinary people placed in the Tang Sect and the Sea God began an irreversible collapse!

The backlash of faith and karmic retribution struck the very heart of the Divine Realm!

Above the Divine Realm—

Before Tang San had even recovered from his rage, the towering throne beneath him, which had enjoyed ten thousand years of worship from the mortal world, let out a shrill, mournful cry!

A black crack spread from the throne's base with a piercing sound!

The Sea God's godhead had cracked!

The ultimate reckoning for a hypocrite had begun the moment the secret arts were made public. That blow to the heart sounded the fiercest charge against the lofty Divine Realm!