Although he had twin martial souls, that could not explain the boy's extraordinary nature. He had to be hiding some secret!
In the Soul Master World, beast martial souls directly affected the physique, giving their wielders an advantage over soul masters of the same level. Artifact martial souls did little to strengthen the body, but as soul power levels rose and their offensive power and support effects improved, their wielders often became stronger than soul masters of the same level.
Simply put, beast martial souls held the advantage early on, while artifact martial souls shone later. This boy possessed both. He could be called invincible, without a single weakness.
"Where am I?"
After an unknown amount of time, the boy finally opened his eyes, woke from his daze, and looked around.
"Welcome to the Douluo Continent," Qian Renxue said in a clear, mature woman's voice.
At that cue, memories long thought dead surged up and engulfed the boy.
In the beginning, the Creator God had split into five, becoming the Five Great God Kings of the Divine Realm: Evil, Goodness, Asura, Destruction, and Life.
The boy was none other than the God of Destruction. He had enjoyed the exalted rank of God King and stood as one of the supreme rulers of the Divine Realm. He could have lived in wealth and comfort, worshipped by all the gods, but everything changed after a man named Tang San ascended.
The Divine Realm was bound by countless restrictions and could barely accommodate the Five Great God Kings. Many deities wanted to advance further, only to be rejected by the Divine Realm Core because its capacity was insufficient. The God of Destruction-he himself-had wanted to change that, but Tang San had repeatedly vetoed him.
Tang San's reasons sounded lofty and righteous: divine positions were weighty treasures of the Divine Realm and could not be bestowed lightly. To demonstrate his ironclad impartiality, he had even ignored his own brother. Ma Hongjun failed to inherit the position of the First-Level Fire God and obtained only the second-level divine position of Phoenix God. With no available place in the Divine Realm, his wife, Bai Chenxiang, could not follow him and had grown old alone on the Douluo Continent.
Xiao Zi had swallowed his nonsense. Moved by that display of righteousness, he did not bring up expanding the Divine Realm again for a long time. Yet ten thousand years passed, and gods had all but vanished from the many planes. Not a single god had emerged from the Douluo Continent, the very place from which Tang San had ascended.
Xiao Zi was an aspect of the Creator God. His inherently transcendent status meant he rarely interacted with others and was poor with words. But even the dullest person should have figured things out after ten thousand years. Once he realized something was wrong, he confronted Tang San face-to-face.
This time, Tang San offered a different reason. According to his predictions, a great calamity was about to strike the Divine Realm, making expansion inappropriate. Xiao Zi had not wanted to endure it any longer, but his wife, the Life God King, sided with Tang San and intervened to stop him.
The Goddess of Life was also a part of the Creator God, and the two had been husband and wife for hundreds of thousands of years. Out of absolute trust in his wife, Xiao Zi endured it again, and again, and again.
Another ten thousand years passed this way. During that time, one god did ascend from the Douluo Continent-Tang San's son-in-law, Huo Yuhao. According to other deities, this new god had originally been meant to inherit his father-in-law's divine position of Asura God. For some reason, however, he became the God of Emotion instead, dropping from God King to First-Level Main God.
It was said that his dear father-in-law had also placed a restriction on his own daughter, Tang Wutong. Whenever his son-in-law touched her, it automatically struck back, battering Huo Yuhao until his nose was swollen and his face bruised. The gods jokingly called it the Chastity Lock.
This time, Xiao Zi refused to endure it. Leading the Seven Original Sin Gods under his command, he brazenly launched a coup, imprisoned Tang San, and seized the key to the Divine Realm Core.
Just as success was within reach, Zhou Weiqing, the First-Level God of Demolition, suddenly switched sides, disrupting Xiao Zi's plans and forcing every deity under his command onto the defensive.
Stabbed in the back by his subordinate, Xiao Zi struggled to fend off blows from every direction. To make matters worse, rain poured through an already leaking roof: Space-Time Turbulence arrived at that very moment, plunging the Divine Realm into a tremendous crisis. While the gods each harbored their own ulterior motives, only Xiao Zi and his wife, the Life God King Xiao Lu, joined forces to withstand it. They turned themselves into divine power seeds and were forced to begin cultivating anew.
With the two God Kings gone in succession, the Golden Dragon King seized the opportunity to break free of his seal in the Divine Forbidden Land. Tang San showed no surprise at the sight of him. Instead, he was ecstatic. After joining forces with the other two God Kings to kill him, Tang San merged the Golden Dragon King's Divine Core into his son Tang Wulin's body...
At that moment, Xiao Zi understood everything, but it was already too late. Divine power seeds had no strength to contend with a God King. He could only watch helplessly as Tang San handed the divine positions of Destruction and Life to his son, Tang Wulin, and his daughter-in-law, Gu Yuena, while he and Xiao Lu were forever denied rebirth!
Filled with profound resentment and an unwillingness to accept his fate, Xiao Zi wandered through the universe until he strayed into spatial turbulence, crossed into Swallowed Star, and met Luo Feng. Only then did things change.
By then, Luo Feng was already a Void True God, the Progenitor of Earth, and invincible within the Universe Ocean. Faced with Xiao Zi's lone wisp of a soul, he could have ignored him and let him scatter on the wind. Yet after discovering that remnant soul and using divine power to learn of his past, he asked only one question-
"Are you willing to join Earth and become a citizen of Huaxia Country?"
"Yes."
Perhaps he had spent too long as a lonely, wandering ghost and wanted to be a person again. Xiao Zi agreed.
The rewards were generous. Luo Feng used Reverse Time and Space, a skill available only to supreme powerhouses, to resurrect Xiao Zi, asking for nothing in return and imposing no price. His only requirement was... to remember his identity as an Earthling.
Xiao Zi found this unbelievable. Having just suffered Tang San's schemes and witnessed the most treacherous depths of the human heart, he could not believe anyone could be an exception.
To test him-or rather, to seek confirmation-Xiao Zi took the initiative to ask to return to the Douluo Continent.
Luo Feng, jokingly dubbed the bully of the universe by outsiders, did not hesitate. As though joining Earth made everyone loving brothers, he readily agreed to the request.
There was one slight difference: Xiao Zi did not return to the past. Instead, he arrived ten thousand years after the Battle of the Two Gods, descending from the heavens in a special form.
"If you want to take everything back, you can only rely on yourself!" Luo Feng told him.
They were neither kin nor old acquaintances, yet Luo Feng had first reversed time and space to resurrect him, then sent him back to the Douluo Continent. Xiao Zi was merely poor with words, not an ungrateful man. He engraved everything Luo Feng had done for him in his heart and already regarded him as something of a master.
The reason he was only something of a master was that Luo Feng had refused the role. He did not want Xiao Zi carrying a heavy burden and told him to find his own path.
Before leaving, Luo Feng used divine power to separate out a wisp of his aura and gifted Xiao Zi some of his supreme treasures, transforming them into martial souls, soul bones, and treasures according to the laws of the Douluo World. Some of them, however, were too high in rank. To prevent the plane from collapsing, Luo Feng placed layer upon layer of seals on them, which could only be unlocked once Xiao Zi was strong enough.
"I'll come to find you again, so you can face the trials of Swallowed Star." Those were Luo Feng's final words.
Gazing at the star-studded night sky, Xiao Zi could no longer see any trace of what had happened, as though the phenomenon that had torn open the heavens had never existed. But only he knew that, with his arrival, this world had already become vastly different.
Returning to the present, Xiao Zi opened his palm and looked at his second martial soul, the Destruction Scepter.
It was a super divine artifact, the only weapon that had accompanied him for hundreds of thousands of years. It carried countless memories, but...
"Why does it have a golden halo?"