The next day.
Bathed in the early morning sunlight, Lin Qian awoke from his unwavering cultivation routine.
"Morning, senior sister!"
Hu Liena was listless today and showed little enthusiasm for her junior brother's greeting, responding with a nod.
"Your Highness the Holy Son, do you have any thoughts about your Soul Ring?"
In Douluo, strength and status reigned supreme, so Ghost Douluo planned to help Lin Qian acquire his Soul Ring first.
Hearing this, Hu Liena perked up too. "Junior brother, which Soul Ring will this be for you?"
Lin Qian said calmly, "My first Soul Ring."
Your first? That means you're still a bare-bones Soul Master!
Hu Liena completely lost her composure. A Soul Master without a single Soul Ring had defeated a Soul Saint with one punch yesterday. How terrifying was that strength?
At this thought, her newly kindled competitive spirit flickered out, and she withdrew into herself again.
Lin Qian did not know what she was thinking, nor did he particularly care. Besides acquiring a Soul Ring, he had come to Star Dou Great Forest to retrieve his Soul Bones.
Having lived in Star Dou Great Forest for several years, he could not possibly have gone without eating or drinking. Occasionally, he had hunted some game to improve his meals.
Back then, he had not known this was the Douluo Continent, where slain Soul Beasts had a chance of dropping Soul Bones. Looking at those multicolored bones, his instincts had told him they were poisonous, so he had not used them to make soup.
Now that he knew their uses, he naturally had to retrieve them. Come to think of it, there were quite a few top-grade Soul Bones among them. Borrowing these flowers to offer to Buddha would be nice too.
Ghost Douluo said, "Star Dou Great Forest is full of Ferocious Beasts. Stay behind me and don't wander off..."
Before he could finish, the Soul Beasts caught sight of them and scattered with shrieks, as though they had seen a ghost.
Across a thousand mountains, birds vanished from flight; along ten thousand paths, no human trace remained.
A gust of wind blew past, revealing the bewildered expressions of Ghost Douluo and the others.
All the Soul Beasts have run away. What's left to hunt? We might as well head home!
"Ghost Elder, it looks like there won't be any Soul Beasts around for a while. Why don't you come home with me first so I can pick up a few things?"
Ghost Douluo gave him a discreet glance, knowing that the Soul Beasts' unusual behavior just now was most likely because of this Holy Son.
Bibi Dong was his boss, so as Spirit Hall's future heir, Lin Qian was half a boss too.
Perhaps he and Chrysanthemum Douluo were not as strong as Spirit Hall's other Titled Douluo, but their ability to read expressions and sail smoothly between all sides was utterly unrivaled, leaving the entire continent in the dust.
So when his future boss gave an order, Ghost Douluo responded without hesitation, "As you command!"
Star Dou Great Forest lay at the southernmost end of the Heaven Dou Empire. One of humanity's ten forbidden zones, it gathered the continent's fiercest Soul Beasts. Its area equaled that of the Balak Kingdom, and its interior terrain was complex.
According to Spirit Hall's latest intelligence, this forest contained at least two hundred-thousand-year Ferocious Beasts, dwelling in its innermost region-the Lake of Life. A Titled Douluo had once stumbled into it and fought one of the Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beasts, the Titan Giant Ape, to a draw.
Afterward, the continent lost all news of them, and no one dared set foot there again.
As someone who had transmigrated, however, Lin Qian knew this information was incomplete.
For instance, the Hundred-Thousand-Year Soul Beasts, the Sky Azure Bull Python and the Titan Giant Ape, lived only on the surface of the Lake of Life. Even deeper, on the lake bed, dwelled more colossal creatures.
Every one of them had hundreds of thousands of years of cultivation, and the strongest had even reached the God King level, tied to the Divine Realm's deepest secrets.
By joining forces with them, overturning Douluo-and even taking on the deities the world considered impossibly lofty-would be no problem.
Of course, for Lin Qian as he was now, all this was wishful peach-picking. Soul Douluo-level strength ranked high in the mortal world, but in the Divine Realm, he would not even count as a shrimp.
After all, in the original story, after Bibi Dong became a god, she had faced Limit Douluo Tang Hao's Clear Sky Hammer with Nine Rings Detonated Together and, with merely a casual wave, shattered the Great Sumeru Hammer, the mortal world's strongest strike.
A newly ascended god was already this formidable. Who knew how monstrous those old hands up above, who had ascended millions upon millions of years ago, might be!
Even with Immortal Arts at his disposal, he was still not strong enough to shake the Douluo Continent, let alone the Divine Realm.
"Your Highness the Holy Son, are we nearly at your home?"
The three of them had left the hotel and headed deeper from the forest's fringes. By the time they reached the outer ring, Ghost Douluo was already getting cold feet and dared not proceed farther.
Without Chrysanthemum Douluo present, he, a mere ordinary level ninety-five Titled Douluo, could barely ensure his own safety, much less look after the two burdens behind him.
Two might not have been entirely accurate. After all, this had once been Lin Qian's home, so Hu Liena was actually the only novice here.
Hu "Deadweight" Liena: Oh, thank you so much!
"Ghost Elder, we're not there yet. Let's go a little farther in."
His home was in the Mixed Zone, not far from the Lake of Life in the Core Circle. All along the way, Lin Qian had been pondering how to obtain the Sky Dream Ice Silkworm. Getting past Da Ming and Er Ming on the surface would be easy; the difficulty lay in sneaking underwater and rescuing that worm.
In the original story, the Sky Dream Ice Silkworm had nearly been sucked dry by the Silver Dragon King and would have kicked the bucket without finding a new host. Only then had Huo Yuhao, that god-tier bargain hunter, stumbled into tremendous luck and obtained his first Million-Year Soul Ring.
The problem was that Douluo II was still a long way off. If he followed the plot, wouldn't he have to wait an entire ten thousand years for nothing?
"Watch out! Enemy attack!"
Just as Lin Qian was racking his brains, Ghost Douluo shouted.
As soon as his voice fell, a little fox emerged from the forest-not Hu Liena.
Lin Qian had frightened away every animal along their route. Only when it appeared did the three finally find their first Soul Beast.
"One, two, three... it's a Three-Tailed Enchanting Fox! Wonderful! This Soul Beast has three thousand years of cultivation. It's just right for your third Soul Ring, Nana!"
Unlike other Soul Beasts, fox-type Soul Beasts grew an additional tail at each corresponding hundred-year, thousand-year, and ten-thousand-year interval.
The legendary highest-ranked hundred-thousand-year Nine-Tailed Heavenly Fox had nine tails. Whenever it encountered danger, it could sever a tail to escape, gaining nine extra lives out of thin air.
The same applied to this three-thousand-year Three-Tailed Enchanting Fox, except that it was too young to regenerate or anything of the sort.
Because Hu Liena followed the extreme flow approach, determined to put all her attribute points into charm, it seemed particularly suitable.
However, according to Grandmaster Yu Xiaogang's theory, a Soul Master's first Soul Ring had an age limit of four hundred and twenty-three years, the second seven hundred and sixty-four years, and the third one thousand seven hundred and sixty years. This Enchanting Fox exceeded that by a full one thousand two hundred and forty years. Would the energy it contained make someone's body burst and kill them?
As someone who knew how things turned out, Lin Qian naturally knew this theory was wrong. Soul Masters differed in Martial Soul quality, physical constitution, and spiritual power. Yu Xiaogang was simply mistaking a part for the whole.
But Ghost Douluo and Hu Liena did not know that!
While the two were agonizing over it, the Three-Tailed Enchanting Fox saw Lin Qian, shuddered, and immediately performed Sacrifice!
Watching the purple Soul Ring slowly rise, Ghost Douluo was overjoyed. "Nana, come absorb it!"
Lin Qian said, "Wait!"