As Su Xian fumbled for the play button on the tablet and pressed it, the awe-inspiring film of the cosmos continued.
But the images that followed no longer delivered mere visual impact. Instead, cold, hard data mercilessly crushed these natives' understanding of the world.
"As you just saw, the planet we live on is less than a speck of dust in the universe."
Sitting cross-legged, Su Xian began his science lesson in a calm voice. "To give you a more concrete sense of it, I'll share a few figures. Our planet has a surface area of about 510 million square kilometers. Sounds huge, right?"
The group of "village children" and "villagers" squatting below nodded.
For people who had never even traveled the length and breadth of the Douluo Continent, 510 million square kilometers was indeed an unimaginable, astronomical figure.
"But!" Su Xian changed tack. "Take the sun nearest to us, for example. Its volume could hold a full 1.3 million of our planets!"
Squatting at the very back of the crowd in a battered straw hat, Yan Shaozhe felt as though a hundred thousand Fixed Soul Cannon Shells had exploded inside his head at once.
As the owner of the Bright Phoenix Martial Soul, Yan Shaozhe had spent his entire life playing with fire.
He prided himself on his Ultimate Fire, which could burn the heavens and boil the seas even against a Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beast. It was nature's purest destructive force!
Yet now... this blind man was telling him that the sun hanging in the sky every day, which they never spared a second glance, could actually hold 1.3 million Douluo Stars?!
Yan Shaozhe stared blankly at his palms, slightly roughened by years of cultivating fire-attribute Soul Power.
Before 1.3 million Douluo Stars, what did his Bright Phoenix amount to?
It probably could not even compare to the heat released by striking a match!
An intense sense of inferiority swept through the Super Douluo's entire body.
Yet Su Xian continued.
"Now, let's talk about the speed of light."
Su Xian raised one finger. "Light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second. In other words, in the time it takes you to blink, light can circle our planet seven and a half times!"
"Wooo..."
Just as Su Xian finished speaking, a faint whimper came from outside the cabin, sounding somewhere between a dog's howl and a person's sobs.
"What's going on outside?" Su Xian tilted his head in puzzlement.
"N-nothing! The stray dogs at the village entrance are in heat and biting each other!" Mu En hurriedly wiped away his cold sweat and raised his voice to brush it off.
In reality, however, the Agility Attack Department Soul Saint lying in the grass at the village entrance, tasked with imitating a dog, was clutching weeds in both hands as tears streamed down his face, mingling with muddy water.
He was crying, grieving and utterly despairing.
He was a dignified Seven-Ring Soul Sage who, in pursuit of ultimate speed, sprinted beneath a waterfall every day while carrying several thousand jin of weight.
Even if he burned his Soul Rings and risked his life, he could manage only a few hundred meters per second at most.
Yet now, that blind man was telling him that a ray of light in nature could travel 300,000 kilometers in a single second?!
Seven and a half laps around the planet in the blink of an eye?!
What the fuck kind of monstrosity was that?!
Before such mighty power, his title of "the Agility Attack Department's greatest genius" was nothing but an outright joke!
"But even at that speed, it still takes eight minutes to reach us from the sun! And to fly out of the Milky Way Galaxy, even light would need a full hundred thousand years!"
Su Xian's voice gradually deepened. "And in the observable universe, there are two trillion galaxies like the Milky Way Galaxy."
Inside the cabin, no one could make a sound anymore.
Qian Duoduo, Xian Lin'er, Mu En, and the other elders exchanged glances, each seeing the same horror in the others' eyes.
Two trillion Milky Way Galaxies...
Then what about the "Divine Realm" they had always revered like a god?
If the universe truly was so vast and boundless, where exactly was that legendary Divine Realm that held power over life and death on Douluo Star?
On a cosmic scale of tens of billions of light-years, what did Sea God Tang San, whom Shrek had worshipped for ten thousand years, amount to?
Probably not even a slightly larger bacterium!
And their Shrek Academy had actually spent ten thousand years feeling smug over competing for a palm-sized patch of territory on this planet that was less than a speck of dust, all while proclaiming themselves the continent's guardians and the greatest power under heaven.
Compared with the scale of the universe, Shrek... no, the entire Douluo Continent was merely a deep, narrow, dried-up well.
And they were a bunch of toads sitting at its bottom, believing they held the entire sky in their embrace!
Just as everyone from Shrek sank into an abyssal "existential crisis," Su Xian fumbled with the tablet and turned it off.
He felt he had laid enough groundwork.
It was time to serve the "chicken soup for the soul" he had so carefully simmered, enough to change the entire lives of these mountain children!
"Children, fellow villagers! After watching all that, you might feel that we humans are insignificant-so insignificant it drives you to despair."
Sitting cross-legged, Su Xian wore a face radiant with the humanistic spirit of modern civilization. "But let me tell you: it is precisely because we are short-lived, precisely because we are insignificant, that human civilization is so great!"
"The universe has existed for over ten billion years, while our human civilization has only a few thousand years behind it! Yet in those few thousand years, we have used our brains and science to build spacecraft and turn our exploring gaze toward the sea of stars!"
"That is the power of knowledge! That is the power of science!"
Growing more excited as he spoke, Su Xian waved both hands in the air and launched into a passionate "leave the mountains" speech on an entirely different wavelength. "The same goes for you! Though you were born in remote, impoverished Daliang Mountain, where all you can see is barren land and backward mountains, I hope you will never bow your heads to this fate of poverty!"
"Don't think that just because you were born in Niulai Village, this is all your life can ever be!"
"Take you, Sister Cuihua. You're so pretty-are you really willing to spend your whole life tightening screws on an electronics factory assembly line in the county town? Working yourself to death every day for a fixed wage of three thousand a month, then casually marrying some factory guy who doesn't like bathing? Are you willing to settle for that?!"
Ma Xiaotao: "..."
Though she had absolutely no idea what level of torture an "electronics factory" or "tightening screws" represented, the anguish on Su Xian's face told her that this was an enormous insult to her.
But she dared not voice her anger and could only shrink her neck back in frustration.
"And Brother Dazhu! You're so strong and sturdy-are you really willing to spend your whole life with your face to the yellow earth and your back to the sky, digging those few mu of potato fields in these mountains?! If a mudslide strikes someday, you'll even lose your marriage savings!"
Dai Yueheng: "..."
The dignified eldest legitimate son of the Star Luo Empire's White Tiger Duke's Mansion, whose family possessed hundreds of thousands of troops and countless fertile fields, had now been branded a potato-digging bachelor who might go bankrupt at any moment. The corners of Dai Yueheng's mouth twitched wildly.
"And above all, don't be like the village's older generation, trapped in their old ways with heads full of feudal dross!"
Habitually dragging out his negative example again, Su Xian harshly criticized him. "Whatever you do, don't imitate that old fossil Yan Shaozhe from Shrek! People like him are mantises standing before the wheels of history. Sooner or later, the flood of industrialization will grind them to dust!"
At the back of the crowd, Yan Shaozhe had already gone numb.
He no longer even had the strength to get angry. He merely stared blankly at the ceiling, feeling that the world might as well be destroyed.
"So! Children!"
Su Xian's voice rose to its highest pitch as he passionately delivered his final uplifting message. "Study scientific knowledge hard! Don't resign yourselves to fate! Leave these mountains! Go to the city, go to the provincial capital, get into a good university, and see the vast world outside!"
"Even if you can't become scientists who build atomic bombs, you can at least take control of your own destinies! Use science to change your impoverished lives and conquer a sea of stars of your very own!"
"As a volunteer teacher, that is my only hope for you! Don't squander your youth or let your efforts go to waste! Children, do you understand?!"
With his blood burning hot, Su Xian downed this whole bowl of inspirational chicken soup in one go, delivering a speech that could have moved stones to tears.
He drew a deep breath, a gratified smile on his face, and waited for thunderous applause and the children's tearful declarations of resolve.
One second.
Two seconds.
Five seconds passed.
Inside the cabin, apart from a little electrical static left over from Qian Duoduo's earlier adjustments to the sound system, there was utter silence.
No applause, no declarations, not even a single agreeing "We understand."
It made one wonder whether someone had collectively pressed the mute button on the entire village.
The smile on Su Xian's face gradually stiffened.
He scratched his head, sinking into profound self-doubt.
Could it be... that I made it too complicated?
These mountain children have never even been to the provincial capital. Could they simply not understand the metaphor of a "sea of stars"?
Fair enough. This really was playing the lute to a cow.
Yet Su Xian had no idea that these "villagers" were silent not because they had failed to understand!
First, there was the "poverty" they could not relate to at all.
Ma Xiaotao, Dai Yueheng, Bei Bei, Xu Sanshi, squatting up front... pick any one of them, and the wealth of the family behind them could buy half a province!
They had been born in the very heart of Rome and raised steeped in ten-thousand-year heavenly treasures. How the fuck would they know what a "fate of poverty" was?
What did "tightening screws in an electronics factory" even mean?!
This chicken soup served across class lines had left these top-tier second- and third-generation scions completely bewildered.
What shocked them most was the heaven-defying ambition revealed in Su Xian's words!
Sitting on his little folding stool, Mu En watched the blindfolded Su Xian, lost in thought.
So, in that world called "Huaxia"...
The humans there had no Soul Power capable of destroying heaven and earth, no Martial Souls that could soar through the skies and burrow beneath the ground. Their bodies were so frail that they could not even defeat a ten-year Wind Baboon.
Yet... with mortal bodies and that wisdom called "science," they had long since turned their conquering gaze toward the sea of stars billions of light-years away!
And what about Shrek?
Possessing cultivation that reached the heavens, they nevertheless tore at one another in the mire until their heads were bloodied, all for a palm-sized Douluo Continent, for a little illusory legitimacy and a handful of resources.
And every day, they still stood high above others, imagining themselves the center of the world.
Compared with that breadth of spirit-"though only a speck of dust in the universe, we dare raise our voices to it"-
Shrek's ten thousand years of glory was laughable to the extreme!
Mu En slowly closed his eyes. He finally understood why Su Xian had said that even if Shrek was not nuked flat by Fixed Soul Cannon Shells, it was still destined to be swept away by the tide of history.
Because, from the very beginning.
Their journey led to the sea of stars.
While Shrek was nothing but a bunch of frogs at the bottom of a well, squabbling over mud!
Before you continue