As she spoke, Lingxiao raised her hand and swept it across the air before her.
"Humm-!"
The Soul Tool components around her automatically separated and reassembled, and a dozen miniature parts flew out from her forearm.
They joined, interlocked, and unfolded in midair.
In the blink of an eye, they formed a palm-sized Soul Guidance Control Panel that hovered before her hand, its deep-blue light circuits flowing beneath her fingertips.
She gently lifted her delicate fingers and rested them on the panel.
Then she pressed a button.
"Beep-!"
At that very instant, ten thousand miles away, a mechanical roar suddenly erupted from the very top of the Soul Guidance Temple!
The glazed dome atop the temple opened layer by layer, like unfurling lotus petals, and a massive black launching device slowly rose from the heart of the temple.
It was a black needle a thousand feet long, its body covered in fixed-installation patterns. Its tip pointed straight toward the heavens, gleaming with a metallic sheen in the sunlight!
At the needle's base, deep-blue energy began to gather, compress, and surge.
"HUMM!!"
A laser condensed to its utmost limit shot from the needle's tip, tore through the sky, and pierced straight into the Nine Heavens!
On the Douluo Continent.
Countless Soul Masters looked up at the scene, bewildered at first, before breaking into cold snorts.
Smoke and mirrors.
A big needle fired a beam into the sky. And then what?
This thing didn't even have a target.
Who could it hit?
Or were they planning to find us with it?
A fool's dream!
They certainly had a knack for bluffing the uninitiated!
Yu Xiaogang sneered even harder.
Lights and needles again!
Were the people of the Holy Spirit Continent planning to scare the people of the Douluo Continent to death with special effects?
He shook his head, and the last trace of panic he had just suppressed vanished completely.
Sure enough, it was all empty show.
But then.
In the next second.
The image on the Heavenly Screen abruptly changed!
Everyone on the Douluo Continent felt their vision suddenly go black.
What followed was an all-encompassing darkness, so profound it was suffocating.
Within that darkness, countless stars hung like shattered diamonds, while enormous planets rotated silently, radiating a cold, dim glow.
There was no up or down, no near or far.
Boundless, deathly still, vast.
The entire Douluo Continent froze before the sight.
Where... was this?!
Above the sky?!
Above the sky... actually looked like this?!
Before anyone could recover from the shock.
An angular object slowly appeared before everyone's eyes within the image.
It had a square main body with an extended wing panel on either side, and deep-blue rune circuits covered its entire surface. It remained there silently, following some kind of trajectory!
Its shape actually resembled an "eye" suspended high above the heavens.
The Soul Guidance Celestial Eye!!
Immediately afterward, the laser fired from the Soul Guidance Temple crossed an unimaginable distance and struck it with pinpoint accuracy!
"Beep-"
The light faded.
That "eye" abruptly awakened, and the wing panels on either side unfolded layer by layer.
A circular array on its main body began to rotate slowly.
Countless hair-fine detection runes rippled outward in every direction.
The scan had begun.
And its target was the very planet they inhabited!
The image on the Heavenly Screen flickered slightly, then returned to the Holy Spirit Continent.
On the Douluo Continent.
Every single Soul Master was utterly dumbfounded.
[Bibi Dong: Wh... what is that thing?]
[Yu Yuanzhen: I don't know! I thought that laser was aimed at us. Who would have thought it was actually fired at that strange thing?!]
[Ning Fengzhi: It looks so advanced... Could it be a Soul Tool too? But if it isn't meant to attack us, what is it for?]
Just as everyone was struggling in vain to make sense of it.
The High Priestess of Sea God Island slowly spoke.
[Bo Saixi: Everyone... have you considered one possibility? Could that thing be meant to find us?]
The moment she said that, all the scrolling comments on the Heavenly Screen stalled.
Find... them?
But in the next instant, a familiar voice rang out and slapped that unease aside.
[Yu Xiaogang: Hahahaha, High Priestess, you're giving them far too much credit!]
[Yu Xiaogang: Don't be ridiculous! The Douluo Continent is hidden in the boundless ocean. Even divine sense could surely detect it easily, but this thing is so far away-can it really find us just by shining a light and scanning?]
[Yu Xiaogang: How is that thing supposed to find us? Don't make your big brother Xiaogang laugh!]
Over on the Holy Spirit Continent.
Watching Yu Xiaogang's smug demeanor on the Heavenly Screen, Ao Che's eyes suddenly seethed.
"I really want to tear his mouth apart right now!"
"When the time comes, don't you dare fight me for him!"
Beside him, Jun Mowen glanced at him and spoke calmly.
"Killing someone like that would only dirty my hands."
"You can have him. I won't fight you for him."
"Rather than a barking dog, what I want to see now..."
"...is just how powerful the gods of the other continents really are."
Lingxiao merely glanced at the scrolling comments, her fingertips resting on the edge of the panel as the faintest smile curved her lips.
Yu Xiaogang, you'll find out soon enough!
Don't use your ignorance as a yardstick for the Holy Spirit Continent's Soul Tool technology.
As she considered this, the Soul Guidance Control Panel before her suddenly flashed.
A new image appeared.
On a detection map resembling a starry sky, countless dots of varying sizes lit up in dense clusters!
Each dot marked a locked-on concentration of life energy!
Lingxiao smiled faintly and tapped with her finger.
"Found you, little mice!"
She enlarged one of the moderately large dots, zooming in step by step.
Blurry outlines gradually became clear within the image.
And the instant the outlines of those buildings emerged, every Soul Master on the Douluo Continent was dumbstruck.
Wait...
Why did these buildings look so familiar?!
Though blurred, those towering halls and that familiar layout were unmistakable.
One was Spirit Hall, majestic as a divine realm!
One was the Clear Sky Sect, perched upon a mountain peak!
And another was the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Sect!
Dead silence.
An all-encompassing, deathly silence.
Only after an unknown length of time did trembling comments begin drifting across the screen.
[Ghost Douluo: Wait, guys... we didn't even show our footsteps, and they just... just found us?]
[Bo Saixi: Even divine sense isn't this heaven-defying...]
[Bibi Dong: How... how is this possible? Soul Tools can be used like this too?]
[Bibi Dong: Aren't the Soul Tools in your hands only used for attacks? They actually... actually have this kind of function too?!]
[Yu Xiaogang: Impossible! Absolutely impossible! I... I...]
For a moment, the entire Douluo Continent found it impossible to accept.
Only moments ago, they had just come to accept how terrifying Soul Tools were as a means of attack.
And that had merely been the tip of the iceberg.
But now, the Heavenly Screen told them.
Beneath that tip of the iceberg lay yet another deep ocean!
Soul Tools could not only attack, but also detect, lock on, and thoroughly map the entire Douluo Continent, no matter how far away or unknown its location!
It was not that they were unwilling to believe it.
They did not dare believe it!
It was simply too inconceivable!
They could not possibly accept it all at once!
Before you continue