A sharp crack of thunder split the air, close enough to feel in your teeth.
Dark clouds boiled overhead, turning the sky above the Evil Demon Forest a sickly, bruised purple. Jiang Shengyu's eyes snapped open, but his vision was... wrong. He blinked, trying to clear it, but the feeling only got worse. It was as if he was hallucinating.
How could he even describe it? It wasn't double vision. It was like his sight had been split right down the middle, with two different scenes forced together, their edges overlapping. One half of his vision was looking at muddy ground and some ferns. The other half was... also looking at muddy ground and ferns, but from a slightly different angle.
This feeling of another viewpoint being forcibly squeezed into his brain wasn't just unpleasant; it was nauseating.
"This..."
Jiang Shengyu instinctively spoke, but what came out made him freeze. He heard two childish voices, one male and one female, speak the exact same word at the exact same time.
He froze for a solid second, then whipped his head to one side, searching for the girl. There was no one there. But in the other half of his vision, he was suddenly looking at the back of a small boy.
Okay, what the hell?
Jiang Shengyu quickly looked behind him. The boy vanished from his sight, only to be replaced by the back of a small girl in the previously empty half of his vision.
"No... way?"
Again, both voices spoke at once, this time full of disbelief.
He had to test this. He pushed himself up from the mud, and the figure in one half of his vision also stood up, mirroring his movements exactly.
After a brief, dizzying wave of panic, Jiang Shengyu finally understood what was happening. He had split? His body had split, but his soul and consciousness were still one?
One soul, two bodies?
No matter how insane it sounded, all the evidence pointed to this single, impossible explanation.
It took a few agonizing minutes of mental gymnastics—like trying to rub his stomach and pat his head with two different brains—but Jiang Shengyu finally managed to get a basic handle on multitasking. He controlled the two halves of his body to turn and face each other.
Two childish, grime-covered, and very similar faces appeared in both halves of his vision.
Aside from the boy's short, shaggy hair and the girl's long, tangled mess, they looked almost identical.
Jiang Shengyu let out a sigh of relief, which again came out in that bizarre dual-voice. "Well, at least both halves look pretty good." But at the same time, a new wave of depression hit him. "So... am I a man who looks feminine, or a woman who looks masculine?"
He shook both heads at the same time, trying to clear the thought. "Doesn't matter. Freaking out about that isn't going to help."
Okay. Priorities. The most pressing matter was figuring out where he was and why he'd become... this. At the same time, he couldn't let anyone find out about his anomaly. If anyone discovered he was one mind in two bodies, he wasn't a person anymore. He was a specimen. He'd end up on a dissection table in some creepy lab, and that would be a huge loss.
"Alright. From now on, we present ourselves as siblings." He firmed his resolve. "The older brother will be called Jiang Shengyu, and the younger sister will be called Jiang Qingtong."
Listening to the perfectly synchronized male and female voices, he muttered to himself, "I really need to practice multitasking, or I'm going to be exposed the second I try to talk to someone."
Neither Jiang Shengyu nor Jiang Qingtong, in their panicked state, noticed the flicker of movement in the dense undergrowth nearby. A green, unicorn-like Spirit Beast was staring intently at them. It took one cautious step, then another, sniffing the air. Then, it lunged.
The Green-Patterned Unicorn exploded from the bushes, appearing first in Jiang Shengyu's field of vision.
"Look out!" he screamed, the dual-voice cracking.
He made Jiang Qingtong's body dive to the side, a desperate roll in the mud. But the Green-Patterned Unicorn was impossibly fast. It pivoted, instantly appearing behind her. Its sharp horn plunged straight through her back and out of her chest.
Intense, white-hot pain instantly flooded their shared nerves. It wasn't just that one body was hurt; it felt like he had been impaled. The shock was so overwhelming that both Jiang Qingtong's and Jiang Shengyu's bodies stiffened up, paralyzed.
The Green-Patterned Unicorn ripped its horn free from Jiang Qingtong's body. Taking advantage of Jiang Shengyu's inability to move, it charged again and pierced his chest, truly stringing the two of them together like cheap candied haws.
He instantly fell unconscious.
The Green-Patterned Unicorn shook its head, flinging the two small bodies off its horn. They thudded wetly onto the forest floor. Just as it was about to approach and devour its meal, a sharp whistling sound cut through the air, rapidly getting closer.
Hearing this, the beast didn't hesitate. It abandoned the feast before it, turned, and fled back into the forest.
Moments after the Green-Patterned Unicorn fled, two people flew down from a distance and landed beside Jiang Shengyu and Jiang Qingtong. They were Kong Deming and his disciple, Xuan Ziwen, who just happened to be in the Evil Demon Forest conducting a spirit tool experiment.
"Teacher, they're..." Xuan Ziwen, a younger man, looked at the two children lying in a growing pool of blood, then at the middle-aged man beside him.
Kong Deming's spirit power enveloped their bodies, and he quickly ascertained the situation. He shook his head and said to his student, "Ziwen, their hearts are already shattered. Even if a healing-type Titled Douluo were here right now, they couldn't be saved."
Xuan Ziwen frowned deeply and murmured, "How can there be two children so young out here? Looking at their age, they should have just awakened their Spirit. Could they have come to hunt for a spirit ring?"
"To come to the Evil Demon Forest to hunt for a spirit ring right after awakening?" Kong Deming stroked his chin. "There's only one explanation: innate full spirit power."
He looked at Jiang Shengyu and Jiang Qingtong, sighing, "If it truly is innate full spirit power, what a pity. Our Sun Moon Empire's people are always suppressed by the three Empires in terms of Spirit Master talent; powerful Spirits are still just too rare."
A powerful Soul Engineer, Kong Deming firmly believed, must also be a powerful Spirit Master.
If he himself could just enter the Super Douluo realm, he believed he could definitely become the legendary Tenth-Rank Soul Engineer, instead of being stuck at the Ninth-Rank, unable to complete his ultimate spirit tool.
Thinking of this, Kong Deming looked up at the darkening sky again and said to Ziwen, "Ziwen, it's getting late. The spirit tool test is not yet complete. Let's go."
Xuan Ziwen said to Kong Deming, "Teacher, I want to bury them. We can't just leave them here to be devoured by Spirit Beasts, can we?"
Kong Deming knew his disciple's compassionate character. He nodded slightly and said, "Very well."
Just as Xuan Ziwen finished digging a shallow pit and was about to place the siblings into it, a brilliant, silver-white light radiated from their bodies.
"Teacher, look!" Xuan Ziwen exclaimed, scrambling back.
Kong Deming frowned and came to Xuan Ziwen's side, watching the changes happening to Jiang Shengyu and Jiang Qingtong.
The silver-white light was like countless shimmering threads, drawn from their bodies. The threads converged in the air between them, weaving together to form a sharp, beautiful crescent moon. In the center of the crescent moon, a multi-layered, mirrored crystal lotus flower floated in mid-air.
Then, the crescent moon and the lotus flower separated. The moon drifted down and fell onto Jiang Shengyu, while the lotus landed on Jiang Qingtong.
After the crescent moon and the lotus flower landed on them, two deep, rich purple spirit rings slowly appeared, pulsating rhythmically around each of them.
"Purple! A thousand-year spirit ring!"
Xuan Ziwen was utterly astonished. "That's... that's impossible! Never mind Spirit Masters of the Sun Moon Empire, even among the other three Empires, not many people could attach a thousand-year level spirit ring as their first spirit ring!"
Moreover, spirit rings are produced by Spirit Beasts.
But where was the Spirit Beast?
Xuan Ziwen looked around, but no Spirit Beast corpse had appeared. So where did their two spirit rings come from?
After a few breaths, the penetrating wounds on their chests had completely healed. The flesh knitted itself back together, leaving no trace except for the stained soil and clothes; even scars were gone.
The spirit rings and the new Spirits retracted into their bodies, but the two remained unconscious.
"This method of Spirit and spirit ring attachment is... unprecedented!" Kong Deming quickly made his decision. "Ziwen, today's spirit tool experiment is postponed. Take them back to Mingdu (Capital City)!"
One soul, two bodies is just an idea I had. If you're not used to it, you can think of Jiang Shengyu and Jiang Qingtong as two separate people.
THROW POWERSTONES FOR SUPPORT