Douluo Continent. Heaven Dou City.
The streets were quiet in the way that cities go quiet when everyone has gone somewhere else at once — not empty exactly, but stripped of the usual ambient noise and motion, the vendors and foot traffic and ordinary business of a living city all relocated to some single magnetic point.
"Brother, why is Heaven Dou City so deserted?" Long Kui's voice surfaced in Xiao Se's mind, curious and slightly puzzled. "There's barely anyone on the streets."
"Probably a competition of some kind," Xiao Se said, thinking it through. He cast back through his memory of the original story, cross-referencing ages and timelines. His little kitten was fourteen now, which placed this squarely in the window of the Continental Advanced Soul Master Academy Elite Competition. "Similar to the Alchemist Conference they hold in the Jia Ma Empire capital."
"That would explain it — there's a massive crowd gathered to the southwest," Long Kui confirmed.
"Let's go and see. Xue'er is the Crown Prince of the Heaven Dou Empire — for an event of this scale, she'll almost certainly be there." He unfolded his Evil God Wings, caught the air, and banked toward the source of the crowd noise without further discussion.
The opening ceremony of the All-Continent Advanced Soul Master Academy Elite Competition, Heaven Dou Empire Division, was many things simultaneously. It was the grandest recurring event in the Soul Master world of the Douluo Continent. It was a festival that pulled not just Soul Masters but royalty, nobility, merchants, and ordinary citizens from across the empire into the same space. It was, for the residents of Heaven Dou City and the towns that surrounded it, the calendar event against which everything else was measured.
Tickets for the opening ceremony had sold out over a month in advance.
The Heaven Dou Grand Arena had been renovated for the occasion — expanded seating, improved sight-lines, the kind of construction project that only happens when the organizing body believes it has underestimated demand the previous time. Every seat was occupied. The noise that came from the stands was the specific sound of tens of thousands of people who have been waiting a long time for something to start and are very much ready for it to start.
The participating academy teams entered one by one, each wearing the distinctive uniform of their school. The procession had a certain formal dignity to it — crisp colors, straight lines, the careful presentation of institutions that had spent weeks preparing their first impressions.
And then Shrek Academy appeared.
The Shrek team's uniforms were, objectively speaking, an achievement. Not of fashion. Not of taste. The achievement was in having created something that managed to be simultaneously garish, bilious, and covered in small printed advertisements across the chest and back, in a shade of green that strongly suggested the designer had been working from a description of the color rather than direct visual reference.
The effect on the crowd was immediate.
The effect on the students wearing the uniforms was, if anything, more immediate. Every member of the Shrek team had developed an intense interest in the middle distance. Heads angled slightly downward, shoulders drawn in, the collective posture of people who have made peace with a situation they cannot change but have not yet made peace with being recognized in it.
The whispers from the stands began before they had finished entering.
"What academy is that? Did they crawl out of a drainage ditch?"
"The two heavyset ones at the front and the ordinary-looking one — I know those three. Dai Mubai, Ma Hongjun, Tang San. The Shrek Three Musketeers, they call them. Word is that when those three got drunk, they didn't just fight each other with — well, bayonets — they actually dragged in that famous 'theoretically invincible' Master Yu Xiaogang from the Soul Master academic world."
"Master." The word came back dripping with skepticism. "That fraud? His so-called Ten Core Theories of Martial Souls are either common knowledge dressed up in new clothes, borrowed from other people's work, or flatly incorrect. If you want to call him a master of bayonet fighting, especially the kind involving his own students, I might not argue. But Soul Master theory? No."
"Keep your voice down — they're Soul Masters. Maybe they've developed some kind of powerful Martial Soul Fusion Technique."
"Right, right. A Martial Soul Fusion Technique. For bayonet fighting."
(T/N: The joke running through the crowd refers to a scandalous incident involving the three students and their teacher that has apparently become well-known gossip throughout Heaven Dou City, with "bayonet fighting" being a running euphemism for what was witnessed. The exact nature of the incident is left to implication throughout the original text.)
In the Shrek Academy rest area, the consequences of whatever had happened were fully visible. Dai Mubai's face was moving through a cycle of pale-to-red-to-pale with the consistency of a man who cannot decide whether he is more ashamed or more angry. Tang San had settled into a kind of contained rigidity, jaw set, eyes fixed on a point that contained no other humans. Ma Hongjun had simply given up making eye contact with the world in general.
Yu Xiaogang, sitting slightly apart from the students, had withdrawn into himself in the manner of a man who has been told his reputation is the talk of the city and has decided that the interior of his own mind is more hospitable.
"Xiaogang." Flander appeared beside him and patted his shoulder with the hearty confidence of a man delivering comfort while visibly suppressing laughter. "Don't let it bother you. Once these children start winning, everyone in these stands will have nothing to say." He managed to keep his face mostly neutral. Mostly. The corners of his mouth were doing something involuntary. Liu Erlong, seated on his other side, was not trying nearly as hard, her shoulders shaking faintly with the effort of containing something.
"You're right," Yu Xiaogang said, pressing the words out with the mechanical determination of someone who has decided that agreement is the correct response and is implementing it regardless of his feelings. A smile appeared on his face, assembled carefully from available materials. It looked like a smile in the way that a drawing of a smile looks like a smile. "Once Tang San and the others win, it will all be settled."
He believed this. He had to believe this. Tang San was his student — the student who had made him reconsider everything he thought he understood about limited martial souls, the student who had rebuilt his purpose as a teacher from the ground up. When Tang San and the others won this competition, the story would change. He would stop being the man known for theoretical plagiarism and drunken impropriety, and become the teacher of champions.
This was the plan. He was committed to the plan.
In the front row of the VIP section, a small, perfectly calibrated conflict was unfolding with the comfortable familiarity of a ritual.
Platinum Bishop Salas of the Spirit Hall, Sect Master Ning Fengzhi of the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile School, and Emperor Xue Ye of the Heaven Dou Empire occupied adjacent seats in the kind of arrangement that someone with a dark sense of humor had almost certainly designed deliberately. Behind them sat Qian Renxue — currently wearing the face of Heaven Dou's Crown Prince Xue Qinghe with practiced, absolute conviction — and Prince Xue Xing, who occupied his seat with the self-importance of a man who has never once considered that other people's assessment of him might differ from his own.
"Sect Master Ning." Salas's voice carried the particular warmth of someone who has identified an irritation point and is approaching it at leisure. "I hear your daughter has been attending Shrek Academy. I hope you're not concerned — sending a young girl of her standing into that environment."
"Shrek Academy has exceptional faculty," Ning Fengzhi replied, his tone even and pleasant in the way of someone who has had this conversation many times and has prepared his responses well in advance. "Dean Flander and Vice Dean Liu Erlong are both veterans of the Golden Iron Triangle. Two accomplished Soul Masters of considerable power. I find nothing to object to."
His actual reasons for keeping Ning Rongrong at Shrek Academy were more layered than this. The girl's temperament needed tempering — years of being the treasured daughter of the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile School had produced a spoiled streak that genuine hardship would address more effectively than anything her father could arrange at home. And beyond that, Tang San was worth observing carefully. The suspicion that Tang San was not entirely what he appeared to be — that the soul inhabiting that young body had arrived there through means that bore investigation — was not something Ning Fengzhi had set aside.
What he had not fully anticipated was Ning Rongrong's gifts as a chronicler.
His daughter, it turned out, had an instinct for gathering information and an even stronger instinct for sharing it. The complete institutional history of Shrek Academy's various indiscretions — Oscar's orientation experience as a new student courtesy of Dai Mubai, the brothel-adjacent origins of Ma Hongjun and Dai Mubai's social habits, the bayonet incident involving Tang San and Dai Mubai and Ma Hongjun and, inexplicably, their teacher — had spread from Ning Rongrong outward through Heaven Dou City's social networks with remarkable efficiency. Ning Fengzhi had received the full report from multiple independent sources before his daughter had thought to mention it herself.
He was not, in reflection, certain the decision to keep her at Shrek Academy had been correct.
"Faculty, yes — I'll grant you that much." Salas's smile didn't waver. "Flander and Liu Erlong, capable enough. But among the rest of them—" He let the pause do its work. "A theory master whose theories are borrowed or incorrect, who has taken to practicing late-night physical activities with his students. Students whose conduct in Heaven Dou City has been thoroughly documented by this point." He tilted his head with the solicitous concern of a man who is enjoying this very much. "I simply wonder whether a young woman of Sect Master Ning's daughter's — particular delicacy — is well-served by such associations."
"I appreciate the concern," Ning Fengzhi said, in a tone that communicated the opposite. "It isn't necessary."
He had, in fact, taken steps. A discreet arrangement with Flander and Liu Erlong. Ning Rongrong had been relocated — quietly, without fuss — to Liu Erlong's residence in the forest outside the city, a rather more controlled environment. Ning Fengzhi had slept better since.
"Merely looking out for an old acquaintance's interests," Salas said pleasantly, and dropped the subject with the satisfaction of someone who has made their point.
The opening ceremony concluded with the expected speeches — Emperor Xue Ye, Ning Fengzhi, and Salas each offering their respective addresses to the assembled crowd, striking the formal notes that tradition required — and then, with the atmosphere of an entire city exhaling at once, the preliminary rounds began.
As the original story had played out, Shrek Academy's first match was against the second-string team of Heaven Dou Royal Academy.
Shrek's lineup: Tang San at the point, with Dai Mubai, Ma Hongjun, Tailong, Jiang Zhu, Jing Ling, and Huang Yuan completing the roster. One Soul Master, six Soul Venerables.
Tang San had, in the end, reached Soul Master rank — level forty, achieved through two years of relentless, grinding cultivation that had left very little room for anything else. The spur had been Xiao Se. Watching what genuine, stratospheric power looked like — up close, unambiguously — had produced in Tang San a specific kind of clarity that all his previous motivation hadn't quite managed: a recognition that the gap between where he was and where he needed to be was not the kind of gap that closed on its own. He had set aside his research into hidden weapons. He had sat with the Xuan Tian Gong and meditated. He had, for two years, done almost nothing else.
The result was level forty. Soul Master.
The cost was the immortal herb — gone, inaccessible — and with it the Eight Spider Lances of the fourth spirit ring. That particular future was closed to him now. He would find another path, as he always had, but the path he had mapped from the beginning was no longer available.
Dai Mubai had fared differently. The evil fire that came with his martial soul grew in proportion to his soul power, and managing it consumed resources that might otherwise have gone into advancement. Two years had taken him from level thirty-three to level thirty-five — real progress, earned progress, but the kind that made the throne of the Star Luo Empire feel further away rather than closer. He had not given up. He was, however, recalibrating.
Ma Hongjun had, after the incident that was now apparently the most famous story in Heaven Dou City, created significant physical distance between himself and both Dai Mubai and Tang San. The distance had, counterintuitively, produced better results. Working largely on his own, and without the immortal herb, he had reached level thirty-five — passing Dai Mubai, a fact he had not yet decided what to do with.
(End of Chapter)
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