Behind the Sea God Pavilion, the artificial rain maintained in shifts continued to fall without end. In pursuit of realism, even the early autumn wind had been simulated to be bitterly cold.
In that cold rain and bleak wind, Bei Bei and Xu Sanshi stood in tattered burlap clothes, shivering.
"Bei Bei, I... I think I'm going to catch a cold." Xu Sanshi wiped the muddy water off his face, his teeth chattering.
As a prodigy with a top-tier defensive martial soul like the Xuanming Turtle Shell Shield, he normally would not have considered this little wind and rain worthy of even scratching an itch.
But the deadly part was that, before dumping them there, Dean Yan Shaozhe had used his Super Douluo soul power to place restrictions inside them, sealing their soul power in the deepest reaches of their dantians. Now they could not even mobilize it. They were effectively just two ordinary people with slightly stronger constitutions.
Although Bei Bei was usually refined and easygoing, his lips had turned purple from the cold as well. He glared at Xu Sanshi and warned him in a low voice, "Shut up! Have you forgotten what Dean Yan said? If we dare give the game away, Mu En will break our legs himself!"
At the mention of Mu En, Xu Sanshi shrank back in fright and lost all his temper.
Even now, neither of them understood just what sort of living King of Hell inhabited this back mountain, someone who could actually make the Sea God Pavilion Master and the dean of the Martial Soul Department personally play along with this village game of house.
Creak-
The wooden cabin's door opened.
Mu En stood hunched in the doorway, looking every inch a weather-beaten old village chief from deep in the mountains. In a thick rural accent, he called, "A Bei, A Shi, come inside and meet Teacher Su."
The two exchanged a glance, hurriedly put on meek expressions, and walked inside.
The room was dim, with only a single wooden bed.
A young man sat on the bed, his eyes wrapped in gauze.
Hearing their footsteps, Su Xian beckoned and said gently, "You must be A Bei and A Shi, right? Come stand here in front of your teacher."
Bei Bei and Xu Sanshi did not dare delay and hurried over.
Su Xian reached out and felt them over.
That brief examination secretly startled him.
Though they were dressed in rags, these two children had well-proportioned frames and firm, strong muscles. They definitely had good foundations for farmwork.
But why were they trembling so badly?
"Your bones are good, but you're still a little frail. Look how the cold has these children shaking." Su Xian sighed, picturing malnourished mountain children in his mind as his sense of responsibility as a volunteer teacher surged.
Little did he know that they were trembling because of Mu En's earlier calm yet oppressive gaze.
"All right, since you're here for lessons, let's start with a placement test to see how well you've grasped basic general knowledge."
Su Xian cleared his throat and tossed out a classic introductory question. "A Bei, A Shi, let me ask you about a very simple natural phenomenon: when an apple ripens, why does it fall to the ground instead of flying into the sky?"
At those words, Bei Bei's and Xu Sanshi's minds began racing, though they had been playing pitiful only moments before.
For soul masters, reaching higher ranks meant not only cultivating soul power but also comprehending the laws of heaven and earth.
This mysterious senior in the cabin was clearly using a seemingly simple question to test their understanding of the world's origins!
Bei Bei took a deep breath. Certain that the question concealed some profound mystery, he answered cautiously, "T-Teacher! I believe it's because deep within the earth lies an enormous magnetic field of earth-attribute soul power. This field exerts an irresistible gravitational pull on the apple, drawing it back to the ground."
Hearing that, Xu Sanshi inwardly cursed Bei Bei for being so cunning, approaching it from the angle of an attribute-based magnetic field.
Unwilling to be outdone, he hurriedly added, "Teacher, I think there's another reason! Once the apple fully ripens, its vitality begins to drain away. It can no longer resist the pressure of the laws of heaven and earth, so it can only fall and return to dust!"
Standing to the side, Mu En nodded slightly.
Although these two boys' answers were immature, they had already begun touching upon the laws of soul power magnetic fields and the withering of life. They truly deserved their place among the outer court's finest prodigies.
After listening, however, Su Xian pressed a hand to his forehead in anguish.
"It's over. It's all over!" Su Xian let out a long sigh.
"These mountain children barely attended school to begin with, and then they somehow got their hands on a few lousy cultivation novels and read themselves out of their minds! Earth-attribute magnetic fields? Laws of heaven and earth? What does any of that have to do with anything?"
Bei Bei and Xu Sanshi froze. So did Mu En.
What? Had they taken the wrong direction in their comprehension?
Su Xian waved his hand sternly and corrected them. "Forget every cultivation-novel setting in your heads! Those are all made up! Today, I'm going to teach you a subject that can truly explain the laws governing everything in the universe-basic physics!"
Basic physics?
Mu En's ears pricked up.
Could this be the name of the cultivation method practiced by this mighty being from another world?
Regardless of whether they understood, Su Xian began his lecture. "For our first lesson, remember Newton's Third Law. Its central principle is this-forces are mutual!"
"When you strike someone with ten jin of force, your own fist simultaneously experiences ten jin of reaction force. So, in a collision of sheer strength, how you dissipate, redirect, and exploit that reaction force is the key to deciding victory."
Yet to Xu Sanshi's ears, that plain statement sounded entirely different!
Forces are mutual?
Dissipate, redirect, and exploit reaction force?!
Xu Sanshi's breathing grew incredibly heavy.
He possessed the Xuanming Turtle Shell Shield. The essence of the defensive path passed down through the Xuanming Sect for a thousand years was Xuanming Shock-reflecting an enemy's attack at the instant of defense.
But the secret manuals left behind by generations of Xuanming Sect ancestors were obscure and difficult to understand. He had been stuck at this bottleneck for a long time.
And now, with a single plainly worded Newton's Third Law, this blind senior had laid bare the fundamental essence of the Xuanming Sect's thousand-year-old path!
The blood throughout Xu Sanshi's body boiled, and the Black Tortoise bloodline within him faintly roared. He closed his eyes on the spot and sank into meditation.
Although Su Xian could not see, he sensed that the room had grown quiet and nodded in satisfaction. "Good, it seems you're listening very carefully! Let's move on to the second lesson."
"That was a law of force. What I'm going to teach you now is a fundamental truth of the universe-the Law of Conservation of Energy."
Su Xian's voice echoed through the crude wooden cabin, carrying the rationality of modern science. "Energy can neither be created from nothing nor vanish into nothing. It can only change from one form to another, or transfer from one object to another. Throughout this process of conversion, the total amount of energy remains unchanged."
The Law of Conservation of Energy? Neither created from nothing nor vanishing into nothing?
Mu En's heart of cultivation shook violently at that moment.
He had spent his entire life studying the two diametrically opposed attributes of light and darkness.
He had always believed that light and darkness annihilated and canceled each other out.
But today, this statement about energy conservation had overturned two hundred years of his understanding of cultivation!
He had once thought that his Martial Soul Fusion Skill with Long Xiaoyao forcibly overcame their attributes' mutual rejection because their strengths complemented each other.
But if energy merely transformed rather than disappeared, then light and dark soul power should not reject one another at all. Instead, through some particular form, they could merge and transform perfectly!
And that was not all: soul masters absorbing the vital energy of heaven and earth to cultivate, soul rings transferring from soul beasts to soul masters, the celestial phenomena triggered when Titled Douluos condensed soul cores...
Every last one of these things actually fell within the bounds of this law, expressed in merely a few dozen words!
Mu En began trembling slightly all over.
He finally understood why this young man could scoff at Shrek's ten-thousand-year-old martial soul system, and why he dared predict that soul tools would dominate the future.
From which supreme plane had this god-tier cultivation method called "science" been passed down?!
Su Xian's mouth and throat had grown dry from lecturing, and he was about to ask for some water.
Then Mu En stammered, "T-Teacher Su... these bones of mine may be old, but I, too, yearn for this great path of physics. Might I ask... what exactly is the next cultivation maxim after this conservation of energy?"
Su Xian was amused by the studious old village chief.
These days, elderly mountain village chiefs not only enjoyed webnovel gossip but were also this interested in middle-school physics?
Sure enough, the nation's call for universal compulsory education had boundless appeal.
"All right, all right, Uncle Mu En (Mu En's alias was A Lu Mu En), don't rush. Physics is an enormous field. We'll take it slowly. Next, let me tell you about the Second Law of Thermodynamics..."
Inside this shabby wooden cabin, an absurd lesson pitting a middle-school physics textbook against a fantasy world was proceeding in full swing.
At that same moment.
The Star Luo Empire's border, the Ming Dou Mountain Range.
Above the endless precipitous peaks, no sun appeared. Instead, a colossal creature descended like a true god.
It was a Bright Phoenix with a wingspan exceeding a hundred meters.
It dyed half the sky a brilliant crimson-gold, while terrifying Super Douluo pressure crashed down upon a hidden valley below.
Inside a cave deep within the valley.
The Evil Soul Master leader known as the Death Messenger, who had been planning how to capture a few civilians to refine into walking corpses, spat out a large mouthful of blood and looked skyward in terror.
"W-What level of powerhouse is this?! I'm just a mere Soul King! How could I have provoked someone so mighty?!"
In the sky, Yan Shaozhe's eyes blazed with fury.
The pent-up humiliation he had suffered behind the Sea God Pavilion had finally found an outlet.
Yan Shaozhe looked down at the Evil Soul Master, who could not even release his martial soul beneath that pressure.
"You're that Death Messenger who likes using Corpse Explosion, aren't you?"
Yan Shaozhe slowly raised his right hand. Behind him, the Bright Phoenix that blotted out the sky and sun raised its head as well.
"Today, I'll see how many bones you beast can leave to explode in this sea of fire!"
Yan Shaozhe wasted no words whatsoever, nor did he display any of that arrogance about "leaving him for the students to train against."
Filled with seething anger, he slammed his palm straight down.
A golden pillar of fire more than thirty meters in diameter pierced the entire valley, carrying heat that could burn everything to ash.
It took only a single breath.
That band of Evil Soul Masters, who would originally have caused one death and left another person crippled at Shrek Academy in the future, vanished into nothingness beneath the attack, along with the cave where they hid.
Yan Shaozhe withdrew his martial soul. Looking at the enormous crater below, he snorted coldly. "Let's see you blow things up now! Let's see you make me look like a complete idiot in front of Mr. Su again!"
A gust of wind swept past. It was as though nothing had happened in the Ming Dou Mountain Range-except that one mountaintop was missing.
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