"But after that, the Heaven Dou Empire never gained an advantage again. The Star Luo Empire soon mastered smelting technology as well, and its imperial family had always been tightly united, with a powerful military. Heaven Dou, by contrast, was a loose collection of factions. Unless the empire faced destruction, the major sects would never intervene. They even advocated having the imperial family spend a little money to satisfy Star Luo's demands, lest war devastate people's livelihoods and interfere with their ability to harvest money from the masses like chives."
"Successive Star Luo Emperors understood this very well. They would generally plunder a little, give Heaven Dou a scare, then squeeze some money out of them before leaving. You could say they certainly knew when to take a hint."
"Even though everyone agreed that Heaven Dou was weaker than Star Luo, and a yearly supply of resources the Star Luo Empire lacked would have been enough to satisfy the Star Luo Emperor, with the threat of the Upper Three Sects keeping Star Luo from going too far, the people on both sides could have lived peaceful lives. Yet successive Heaven Dou Emperors refused to let themselves be carved up at another's whim for the sake of their pride. They squandered vast amounts of manpower and resources on a meaningless war of attrition against Star Luo, one in which they could never gain a decisive advantage. The powerful soul masters never intervened; they merely sent low-level soul masters and armies of ordinary people to slaughter one another."
"This meaningless war began a hundred years after that great war and continued for nine hundred years. The borderlands on both sides became a thousand-mile stretch of scorched earth. Ordinary people were forcibly conscripted as laborers, while soul masters were swept along onto battlefields that all but guaranteed their deaths. Meanwhile, the nobles kept eating and drinking to their hearts' content. One Heaven Dou Prince's casino even openly took bets on the number of casualties each side would suffer every day. In my opinion, even the chaotic Dark Age could hardly have been much worse."
Leng Xiyue tried to picture such a scene and immediately shuddered. A prince, the emperor's own brother, had actually treated soldiers fighting on the front lines as tools for amusement or profit. How tragic was that?
In any other world, riots would probably have erupted everywhere long before, but the Douluo Continent was different. The nobility always held the greatest power and commanded the most experts. Even a massive uprising of ten thousand people could be suppressed by just a few Titled Douluos or one or two hundred Soul Saints. The Star Luo Imperial Family's methods of rule were much the same. Over time, people gradually grew accustomed to it: rather than die in a futile revolt and drag their families down with them, dying on the battlefield would at least earn their families a few silver coins in compensation.
That was probably precisely why such a rotten system had survived for two thousand years. Soul masters clearly possessed powers that made things far more convenient, yet civilization across Douluo had not advanced in the slightest and had even gone backward. Even the rule that "war greatly accelerates advances in weaponry and technology" had completely failed here. Two thousand years ago, they relied on cavalry charges. They still relied on cavalry charges now. Even when the Sun Moon Continent invaded thousands of years later, their tactics remained stuck at cavalry charges. Leng Xiyue did not even feel like mocking it anymore.
"So, since you said this meaningless war lasted nine hundred years, something must have burst onto the scene and broken the deadlock. I'm guessing it was Spirit Hall, right?"
"Exactly." Wang Yan nodded. Although his tone had been rather lighthearted as he told the story, as any normal person would, he could not help feeling grief. Now that Spirit Hall had come up, however, he finally smiled from the heart. "Everyone could see the empires' incompetence, but the ruling class was so powerful that even the occasional Titled Douluo or Peak Douluo who emerged from the lower classes could not change the balance of power on the continent. Many people with consciences who refused to wallow in the same mire as the empires were willing to make enemies of them to uphold the justice in their hearts. Those who were weaker would assassinate the leaders of the imperial Recruitment Corps, or fight bandits and local tyrants to protect ordinary people suffering under the double burden of exploitation by criminal forces and the empires."
"The experts among them risked their lives to assassinate nobles openly. That prince, for instance, was stabbed to death in the street by an unnamed heroine who had become a Soul Douluo at just thirty. Afterward, that extraordinary genius, whose future should have been boundlessly bright, paid with her own life as well."
"The empire did everything it could to conceal such incidents, but it could not stop the flames of hope from spreading. Countless people set up memorial tablets for her in their homes. As a result, although no written record of her deed survived, it has been passed down to this day as a truth acknowledged by successive Supreme Pontiffs, becoming a legend that any resident of Spirit City could tell you."
"Making an enemy of the empire generally did not end well. Once someone was declared wanted, specialized units would be sent to hunt them down. Some people had done nothing but kill local tyrants, yet they were still executed on charges of disturbing the peace."
"Although ordinary people had grown somewhat numb from the torment of this cruel world, they still knew who truly cared about them. So they spread the stories of these deeds, while capable champions of justice banded together of their own accord. They found a soul beast forest that the two great empires rarely entered and built a cemetery on the mountain rising at its center, making it a monument to their resistance. Every year, countless champions came to pay their respects to those who had sacrificed themselves for the same cause before them, then set out without a backward glance on the road of resistance against the empires, a road from which there was no return."
"When they appeared again, they had become gravestones upon that land. Some were fortunate enough to leave their names behind, but far more had nameless graves. Only the deeds carved into their headstones proved what fearless warriors they had been."
"Although this unceasing resistance caused trouble for the empires, it posed no threat to their rule. Thus, the two great empires continued their meaningless war, until, a hundred years after that prince's assassination, the arrival of those three changed everything."
"Most young, hot-blooded soul masters died fighting the empires, but some understood that shaking imperial rule required immense strength. Among them was a woman who earned the favor of the Angel God. After enduring hardships beyond anything we can imagine, she attained demigod rank and became the strongest person in the world."
"She understood that simply disposing of the empires through force would solve nothing. Without the empires, and without the support of the clans, she could never unite the entire continent on her own. The criminal forces were tangled together in a complex web, difficult to eradicate completely. The slightest misstep could plunge everything back into the Dark Age of thousands of years before. So she climbed the Sacred Mountain revered by the resistance, settled there, and kept searching for a way to save the continent."
"There, she met two like-minded companions. They were brothers, both level 98 Super Douluos. Although they had a plan, their strength had not yet reached the pinnacle, leaving them unable to stand against the empires' Peerless Douluos. They felt they should have met much sooner. With their concerns over strength removed, a plan soon took shape."
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