Seeing the Grand Elder appear in the private room, Chen Yi hurriedly wiped his mouth and walked up to him.
"Follow me." The Grand Elder's voice was not loud but carried an undeniable authority. As soon as he spoke, he flicked his wide sleeve, and a gentle yet powerfully pulling force enveloped Chen Yi. The next second, their figures melted into the air, suddenly disappearing from the room.
When they reappeared, they were in a scenic area outside the city with mountains and clear waters. Chen Yi suppressed the discomfort in his stomach and looked at the Grand Elder, who had his back turned, about to speak.
The next moment, a purple object was placed in front of Chen Yi by the Grand Elder.
"This is that Thunder Spirit, with over two thousand three hundred years of cultivation. Not bad."
Chen Yi focused and saw that it was a creature with a disproportionately small head, eye sockets sunken into black holes with only faint electric sparks flickering weakly inside. Its body was withered and clinging to the skeleton, like a skeleton where the thin, paper-like spirit body would shatter at a touch.
"This is a Thunder Spirit?!" Chen Yi was shocked. Thunder Spirits were spirits born from heaven and earth; even if nothing else, their appearance was top-tier. The Snow Empress, one of the Three Heavenly Kings of the Extreme North, was like that, one of the beauty ceilings in the entire Douluo series.
But the Thunder Spirit before him looked like a skeleton wrapped in cheap hide, utterly devoid of aesthetics.
The Grand Elder didn't hide much and explained what the Rich Family had done to this Thunder Spirit.
Listening to the Grand Elder's account, Chen Yi fell silent, finally asking quietly:
"Doesn't the Spirit Hall or Heaven Dou Empire care?"
The answer was naturally no. The Grand Elder just said coldly, "It's just one Thunder Spirit. Even if the Spirit Hall knew, they wouldn't act against a noble crucial to a kingdom for this. After all, they didn't commit mass slaughter; at most, it's a personal moral failing, not a major error."
"The Heaven Dou royal family is even less likely; their own backsides aren't clean. Xiao Yi, remember this: some things weigh only four ounces off the scale, but on it, even a thousand pounds can't hold. No force's rise is ever clean; all are accompanied by unknown filth and dirt."
Chen Yi remained silent. He was no saint and knew the dark jungle law was the essence of every world. Survival of the fittest was an unchanging rule in advanced societies or primitive tribes; killing itself wasn't wrong.
But he accepted killing, not torturing. The Rich Family's actions were no different from degenerates, just like the scum from his previous life. Years of education had drawn a bottom line in his heart: slaughtering livestock or hunting soul beasts was for survival; but abusing a complete life was something he absolutely couldn't accept.
From the moment he stepped into Douluo Continent, Chen Yi knew the depictions in novels from his previous life were just the tip of the iceberg. Take the two great empires' explicit bans on slave trading, yet in Heaven Dou City's largest auction house, cat-eared girls were openly displayed on the shelves without any disguise.
Note that martial soul mutations like cat girls or leopard girls, though different in appearance, meant thick bloodlines and outstanding talent. From what Chen Yi knew, those with such mutations never had innate soul power below level seven. What did that mean? Even Zhu Zhuqing was only innate level seven.
In other words, once grown, these people would at least be Soul Sage-level powerhouses, pillars in any force, precious combat power for the two great empires. Yet even so, the royal family chose to turn a blind eye, even secretly participating.
This was with explicit bans and Spirit Hall pressure. Without those constraints, Chen Yi dared not imagine how chaotic Douluo Continent's order would be.
Like those self-proclaimed beacon nations in his previous life, the world knew their hypocrisy, but when that island's list was exposed, it still shocked the world. As the Grand Elder said, some things weigh nothing off the scale, but on it, a thousand pounds can't hold.
The Grand Elder raised his hand and patted Chen Yi's shoulder, his tone heavy: "I know you might find it hard to accept, but I must tell you, in the future, you'll see even worse things."
From years of interaction, he knew Chen Yi well. This kid acted like he commanded the world, treating it as a plaything, but in his eyes, Chen Yi was just talking strategy on paper. If he had to do the dirty work himself, he absolutely couldn't. Because in Chen Yi's heart, there was an uncrossable bottom line: reverence for life.
He couldn't say if Chen Yi's was a innate saint's heart or just naivety, but he knew this bottom line would lead Chen Yi to stop killing with killing in the future. Douluo Continent was a man-eating world; if Chen Yi reached the pinnacle, he'd have to clean the world's filth. But to clean filth, one must first be in it to see its form. What he needed to do now was shatter Chen Yi's illusions of a beautiful world and make him face the truth.
Chen Yi took a deep breath and slowly said, "I'm not unable to accept it; I just think there should still be some difference between humans and beasts."
As a world with transcendent powers, slavery on Douluo Continent might be understandable, but its biggest problem was that the transcendent powers weren't strong enough to completely ignore mundane order. Thus, sect powerhouses feared the two great empires, forming a pattern where "kingdoms rule the world, sects attach to survive," rather than sects unifying the continent.
Thus, Douluo Continent presented this ridiculous scene: a feudal state framework while adhering to the fantasy world's power supreme law, the two systems twisted together in a sickly deformity.
Chen Yi looked at the distant mountains and sneered lowly, "Heh, what a ridiculous deformity."
Clearly intimidated by the numbers of ordinary people and mundane order, they built a civilized society, yet engaged in acts no different from barbarians. This ridiculous behavior was itself a deep-seated pathology.
Chen Yi took a deep breath, his fingertip twitching as a cold-gleaming dagger emerged from his soul tool. He slowly squatted down, meeting the Thunder Spirit's eyes, his gaze indifferent without a ripple, falling straight into the sunken black holes.
Seeing that calm pair of eyes and glimpsing the dagger, a faint light suddenly lit in the Thunder Spirit's dead eye sockets—not fear, but a longing mixed with expectation, like a dying person seeing the last ray of light.
"Puff."
The faint sound of a blade entering flesh rang out. The faint light in the Thunder Spirit's eye sockets suddenly brightened, looking at Chen Yi with gratitude, then slowly closed with complete liberation.
The next second, a solid purple soul ring slowly rose from its withered spirit body, encircled by faint thunder light.
"I never dared hope this world could be like before, but at least... it should resemble a normal society."
Chen Yi murmured softly in his heart, then without hesitation, sat cross-legged, condensing a strand of soul power at his fingertip, gently pulling the purple soul ring toward his body.