Volume 2, Chapter 70: The Five-Year Grind
Leaving a piece of my mind behind on the Douluo Planet turned out to be one of the smarter things I had done in a long time.
While my true self sat in the Phoenix God Star dealing with the fact that five of my wives were pregnant at the same time, the clone body I left behind kept living as Professor Lakas. I adjusted a pair of dark bamboo sunglasses on the bridge of my nose and leaned back against a thick tree trunk near the academy training fields. My hands stayed buried in my pockets. To the students, I was still the same lazy teacher who talked slow and never seemed to worry about anything. Why should I? I already knew exactly how strong I was.
Down here, though, five days in the God Realm meant five full years of hard work for the kids. Those years started under a heavy sky and never really lightened up.
Year One:
The first year felt like a parade of tired old gods looking for replacements.
One after another, the veteran gods from my realm came down to the mortal world. They were worn out, ready to step back, and the growing threat in the North gave them the perfect reason to hand their positions over.
Rong Nianbing went straight for Huo Yuhao. The God of Emotion didn't make a big entrance. He simply appeared in Yuhao's dorm room one night, still smelling faintly of garlic and vinegar from whatever he had been cooking, and dropped the Nine Divine Trials into the boy's lap without much ceremony.
Ma Hongjun came next in a flash of red sparks and passed his fire to Ma Xiaotao. His wife, Bai Chenxiang, looked over the younger generation and chose Jiang Nannan for the Goddess of Speed seat. Ning Rongrong handed the Nine Colored God position to Ning Tian, who had recently taken over the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Sect.
The Body Hall finally received its due as well. Long Aotian received the Strength God position — the same divine core I had taken from Tai Long ten thousand years earlier. I personally designed his trials to push his body to the absolute limit. His fiancée, Wei Na, received the Goddess of Wisdom position that I created from scratch. I even made a brand-new Sword God position for Ji Juechen. The man spent every waking hour staring at a piece of sharp metal anyway; he earned the promotion.
The funniest hand-off belonged to Oscar.
As decreed by the God Council, Oscar chose Ju Zi. She already had twin martial souls — an Orange, a rare food-type soul, and the Tiger-Slaying Blade, a massive knife that looked more like a giant meat cleaver than a proper weapon. When Rong Nianbing saw her chopping vegetables with that oversized blade, his eyes lit up. He told Oscar she was perfect. Whenever he wasn't testing Yuhao, Rong Nianbing spent his afternoons teaching Ju Zi how to balance wood smoke and salt the right way.
The older generation found new purpose too. Ye Xishui took her place as High Arbitrator of the Twilight Hall in the mortal world, but Qian Renxue also chose her for the newly created Twilight Goddess seat. Her job was to use her dark phoenix power to clean the western territories of lingering rot. At the same time, Qian Renxue created an entirely new position — the Goddess of Dawn — and chose Ye Guyi for it. The proud Leaf of the Angel, with her pure light and stubborn sense of duty, was the perfect fit for a seat meant to push back the darkness at the start of every day. Zhu Zhuqing recreated the old God of Darkness seat and gave it directly to Long Xiaoyao.
For Mu En, I personally built the Talisman God position. The old dean spent his days in his wheelchair under the white trees, teaching younger students how to draw Baybayin markings. He traced the letter "ᜎ" into the air over and over, letting the clean light settle across the grass. He smiled more that year than he had in the previous three centuries.
Yuhao spent most of that first year running patrols along the border. During one of those runs he found a strange chunk of Living Gold. With Electrolux's help he purified the raw life force and forced it into his forehead. The gift fused with the All-Seeing Library I had already given him, turning his third eye into a living lens. When he opened it, the world lost its color. He could see the friction between a bird's wings and the wind, and the tiny cracks running through the iron bones of the Forged Husks.
By the end of the first year that new insight pushed his soul power past the Level 80 bottleneck. Thanks to his Soul Spirits he didn't get stuck. He slid straight through and landed at Level 82.
•••
Year Two:
In the second year the younger inheritors finally went out on their own. The older masters stayed behind to guard the borders, leaving the kids to walk straight into the Yin-Yang Qiankun Love-Querying Valley.
It was an old and bitter place. The original Love Goddess had died there after her lover broke her heart, and the leftover energy had turned sour. When Yuhao and Qiu'er stepped into the cave, the valley didn't throw monsters at them. It demanded absolute honesty.
They stood hand in hand under the red light that turned their skin the color of rust and spoke their feelings out loud. The corrupted spirit of the valley hated happy endings. It dragged them into a split-world illusion.
To my clone body sitting outside the valley eating a wild melon, only two days passed. Inside their minds, it lasted ten years.
Yuhao woke up in a grey, empty city. He spent those ten simulated years searching every alley, every broken house, and every frozen mountain for Qiu'er. His knees grew stiff in the illusion. His hair felt heavier every morning. The same hollow ache sat in his chest from the moment he opened his eyes. On the other side of that grey wall, Qiu'er lived through the exact same cold exile.
They didn't feel ordinary sadness. They felt something deeper — a quiet, grinding weight that the original God of Emotion had never written down. The old god only knew seven emotions. In that grey dark, Yuhao created the eighth: 思念 — deep, bone-deep longing.
When their combined willpower finally shattered the illusion, they woke up on the cold stone floor of the cave, covered in sweat. Yuhao didn't check his pulse. He just lunged forward and pulled Qiu'er against him, burying his face in her shoulder.
She was crying, fingers gripping his coat hard enough to tear the fabric. "I'm not human," she said, voice raw. "I'm the Three-Eyed Golden Lion. I carry the luck of the forest. I lied to you."
"I don't care," Yuhao whispered, holding her tight. "I don't care if you're a beast or a stone. Don't leave me in that grey place again."
That heavy ache cleared the trial. The Eighth Emotion settled into his core, and his soul power climbed to Level 87.
•••
Year Three:
The third year began with Yuhao finally deciding he had waited long enough.
He had been sitting above Level 80 for nearly three years, packing soul power into his meridians and letting his first soul core mature. Most people waited until Level 90 before attempting a second core. Doing it earlier usually ended with a ruptured chest. The other inheritors gathered in the academy courtyard to watch, faces tight with worry. Xiaotao chewed her lip. Jiang Nannan kept her hands clasped together.
Yuhao sat in the center of the grass. He opened his Eye of Life and used the All-Seeing Library to map every point of friction inside his own body. He compressed the absolute cold of the Extreme North into his chest and forced the stored soul power to spin in opposite directions.
The air temperature dropped forty degrees in three seconds. Frost coated the stone benches. Yuhao's hands never shook. He guided the energy into the exact crack he could see with his third eye and locked it into place.
An Ice Soul Core. Perfect. Clean. No mistakes.
The other students stood with their mouths open. I leaned against a pillar behind them, sliding my bamboo sunglasses down my nose.
"What are you all staring at?" I asked, voice lazy. "He's just doing his homework. If you spent less time watching him and more time running laps, maybe your fire wouldn't look so small, Xiaotao."
Xiaotao turned red and stomped off to train harder. The rest followed, suddenly much more motivated.
Later that year the northern coast came under attack. A Level 100 Abyssal creature made of rotting coral and black grease hit the Mermaid Clan. The young gods rushed to the shore, but their weapons weren't enough.
Yuhao didn't hesitate. He used his new core to call for help from the upper realm.
The sea turned into a solid sheet of blue glass. A massive projection of Bo Saixi — the true Sea God I had revived after her sacrifice ten thousand years ago — appeared in the clouds. With one wave of her hand she pinned the Level 100 monster to the seabed under a pillar of light.
The Mermaid Princess still lay dying on the ice, her silver scales turning grey. Yuhao knelt in the freezing slush, opened his spiritual sea, and pulled her soul inside, saving her by making her an intelligent Soul Spirit.
By the time the salt dried on his coat he had broken another bottleneck and reached Level 91 — a true Titled Douluo.
•••
Year Four:
The fourth year was mostly mud, logs, heavy metal, and hard labor.
Ju Zi took her place as the future Empress of the Sun Moon Empire and combined their advanced tools with the defensive circles of the Phoenix Hall. Together they built the Iron Wall — a three-hundred-mile line of stone fortifications, heavy artillery, and forward Mecha hangars across the northern border. She used her Food God knowledge to feed the army and clear the black poison from the soldiers' lungs with her divine oranges.
The Mechas became the backbone of the daily fighting.
Tall, three-story frames of reinforced alloy and crystal plating marched out in rotating shifts. Some were built for pure firepower, carrying twin soul cannons on their shoulders. Others were close-combat models with heavy vibrating blades and shield arms thick enough to stop a charging Abyssal beast. The pilots, most of them young Federation soul masters who had trained under the new system, lived inside those machines for days at a time. The constant low hum of their engines became the background noise of the entire front line.
The Holy Ghost Church and the Abyss never gave them a quiet week.
Grey-skinned cultists would try to slip through the gaps at night, planting wilted grass seeds that tried to drain the life from the soil. When that failed, waves of Abyssal creatures — skinless hounds, multi-armed crawlers, and the occasional towering Gatekeeper — would slam into the wall under the cover of thick black fog. The Mechas met them head-on. Cannon fire lit up the night in bright orange streaks. Vibrating blades carved through black glass and rotting flesh. When a Mecha went down, recovery teams dragged the wreckage back while the next unit stepped forward to fill the hole.
It was ugly, exhausting work. The pilots came back covered in oil, blood, and the bitter ash that the Abyssal creatures left behind. But the wall held.
Then the Great Star Dou Forest opened its borders.
Led by Di Tian and the other Fierce Beasts from the Lake of Life, the soul beasts marched out in large numbers. They didn't come to fight the humans. They came to stand beside them. Seeing the Abyss and Chen Feng's Holy Ghost Cult trying to hollow out the world, the beasts understood they shared the same dirt.
In front of the entire army at the Iron Wall, Di Tian knelt. The great black dragon lowered his head, and the rest of the Fierce Beasts followed. They openly declared their allegiance to me, the Phoenix God, and to my wife Gu Yuena, the Dragon God. With the soul beasts holding the flanks and the human Mecha divisions holding the center, the defense line finally became something solid.
Meanwhile Chen Feng spent the year hunting his own Abyssal Lords, splitting them open and swallowing their dark cores to force his own breakthrough. By winter the northern sky had turned completely black.
Yuhao spent most of that year in the trenches and inside the forward command bunkers, growing leaner as he cleared three more divine trials. He reached Level 96 — Hyper Douluo.
•••
Year Five:
The fifth year arrived without warning.
One by one the younger generation finished their trials and hit Level 99. Yuhao sat on the cold stone of the northernmost tower and used his Flawless Insight to forge his third soul core — the Space Soul Core.
With Mind, Ice, and Space all spinning inside him, he passed his final trial. Rong Nianbing stepped down, and Yuhao officially became the new First-Class God of Emotion.
I didn't want my students walking into a real war looking half-finished. From the upper realm, my true self and the other God Kings sent down a massive wave of divine power — a true heavenly baptism. Golden light washed over the young inheritors, forging their proper divine rings and locking them into their stations, ranking them from newly born Third-Class all the way up to full Second and First-Class Gods in a single moment.
The sky didn't care about the celebration.
The black clouds in the North finally split open with a sound like wet parchment tearing. Huge Level 120 Abyssal monsters began pouring through the cracks. From the center of that black tear, Chen Feng stepped out.
He looked completely empty — a walking void. He had become the God King of Nihility.
He didn't come alone. Right beside him the clouds boiled and a massive crimson silhouette appeared. The Crimson Mother of the Abyss World stepped into the light, her eyes burning with matching power. She was a God King now too. Chen Feng had used his own system and the stolen cores of the Abyssal Lords to feed her, helping her break through the ceiling alongside him.
Two God Kings stood at the head of a dead army, looking down at our wall.
I stood at the top of the main defense tower, dark bamboo sunglasses reflecting the black sky. My hands were still in my pockets, but the lazy smile was gone.
"Well, kids," I said, voice carrying across the entire wind-swept wall. "The five years are over. Two God Kings against a bunch of rookies. Sounds like a fair fight."
End of Volume 2, Chapter 70