Douluo: Emerald Poison Emperor

Chapter 30: Douluo: Emerald Poison Emperor [30]



Humiliation! Utter humiliation! Absolute disgrace!

Poison-attribute soul masters naturally have a high resistance to toxins. However, unless the poison and soul power gap is vast, complete immunity to poison is rare. The kind of total disregard for toxins that Chen Ming displayed was something Dugu Yan had only ever witnessed in her grandfather, Dugu Bo.

After walking through her poisonous mist, Chen Ming deliberately turned back and walked back and forth in front of Dugu Yan, as if mocking her. Only then did he continue moving forward.

Seeing this, Dugu Yan abandoned any pretense of meditating. She leaped up from the ground, her legs transforming into a snake-like tail that swayed swiftly as she approached Chen Ming. Stretching out her hand, she tried to touch his body. But just as her fingers were about to make contact, Chen Ming's tail swatted her hand away.

"Are we that close? Getting all handsy? If you keep this up, I'm going to report you for harassment!"

"You know what I mean!"

Although flustered and irritated, Dugu Yan, still a proper young lady, hesitated at Chen Ming's words and refrained from further touching. Instead, she circled around him, reaching out to probe the poisonous mist surrounding him.

"How strange. The Emerald Scorpion doesn't typically use poison mist to conceal itself or attack. But your mist is of such high quality…"

"If this trait came from the soul ring absorbed from a soul beast… but no, your martial soul is the Emerald Scorpion King. What kind of soul ring could have such a drastic effect on your martial soul? Your first soul ring is a hundred-year one, and the second is a thousand-year one. Could it be the second soul ring…?"

"Still, that doesn't seem right…"

Dugu Yan looked utterly perplexed as if faced with an unsolvable math problem. No matter how hard she thought, the answers eluded her.

Everything about Chen Ming seemed vaguely familiar, like something her grandfather had once taught her. But upon closer examination, it all felt utterly foreign.

She began to question herself. After studying under her grandfather—the famous Poison Douluo—for so many years, had she learned nothing?

Why couldn't she understand anything about this two-ring Soul Grandmaster standing before her? Even her most prized toxins were rendered completely ineffective.

Could it be that her grandfather had been comforting her all along, and her talent was mediocre? Was her intelligence lacking as well?

"No way. Absolutely impossible!"

Dugu Yan trailed behind Chen Ming like an obsessed fan, her eyes fixated on his every move. Occasionally, she bent down to examine the spots where he had walked, and at times, even leaned close to his poisonous mist to take deep breaths. Her actions bordered on bizarre, enough to make anyone want to call the authorities.

Even Chen Ming, who initially intended to tease Dugu Yan to build rapport and eventually gain access to Dugu Bo's treasured immortal herbs, found himself unnerved by her behavior.

"Men and women shouldn't touch so casually," Chen Ming remarked sternly, taking a few quick steps forward and turning to face her.

"Hmph…" Realizing how odd her actions must have seemed, Dugu Yan's face flushed slightly. She huffed, turned away from Chen Ming, and avoided his gaze, finding a spot to sit and meditate.

Chen Ming shrugged, wandered the mimicry environment for a while, and finally settled on a suitable location to begin his cultivation.

The spot Dugu Yan chose wasn't far from Chen Ming and was particularly advantageous for poison-attribute soul masters.

Initially, Dugu Yan struggled to focus, her mind cluttered with emotions. After much effort, she managed to clear some of the noise from her thoughts and began to enter a meditative state. But just as she found her rhythm, she suddenly felt a strange, oppressive aura.

The sense of oppression wasn't particularly severe—more like the feeling of a tight sweater pressing against one's chest in winter. However, it was enough to disrupt Dugu Yan's rhythm, forcing her to stop her cultivation in irritation. She opened her eyes to glare at Chen Ming.

As Chen Ming cultivated, his Emerald Scorpion King martial soul became active, exuding a natural pressure. Although it hadn't yet reached a true sovereign level, the Emerald Scorpion King was inherently a powerful poison martial soul. It not only exerted dominance over ordinary scorpion-type soul beasts and soul masters but also imposed significant pressure on other poison-attribute soul masters.

While Dugu Bo's martial soul, the Jade Phosphor Serpent Emperor, was indeed at its peak, it had only evolved to that level when he coincidentally broke through to the Title Douluo rank. Back when he fathered Dugu Yan's parent, his martial soul was merely at the Serpent King level, far from the Serpent Emperor.

Dugu Yan's father had decent talent but a relatively low soul power level when Dugu Yan was born. His martial soul was only close to the Serpent King level. By the time it passed to Dugu Yan, her martial soul was simply a stronger Jade Phosphor Serpent, still below the Serpent King and far from the Serpent Emperor.

Although Dugu Yan had grown accustomed to the aura of a superior due to being around Dugu Bo, Chen Ming was not Dugu Bo. His martial soul was fundamentally different from her grandfather's Jade Phosphor Serpent Emperor, making it difficult for her to adapt to the unfamiliar pressure.

She wanted to move further away but felt that doing so would make her seem afraid of Chen Ming. At the same time, she disliked the noisy distractions outside the cave. Frustrated and idle, she pulled out a notebook her grandfather had given her and began reading it in the dim light of the cavern.

Opening the section describing the Jade Phosphor Five Poisons, particularly the Jade Phosphor Scorpion, Dugu Yan compared the descriptions to Chen Ming's martial soul. She also flipped through illustrations of top-tier poison-attribute soul beasts, trying to deduce which beast Chen Ming had absorbed a soul ring from to gain such unique traits.

However, her focus didn't last long. She eventually gave up and decided to wait until her grandfather returned in a few days to ask him directly.

Out of sheer stubbornness, Dugu Yan resumed cultivation despite the oppressive aura emanating from Chen Ming. Driven by both the pressure from his unconscious aura and her unwillingness to admit defeat, she entered a deeper and more effective meditative state than usual.

As she delved further into meditation, Dugu Yan began to sense something unusual. The poison-attribute soul power in the cavern, typically indifferent to her presence, seemed to actively gravitate toward Chen Ming, forming a soul power vortex centered around him.

To Dugu Yan's knowledge, this was highly unusual. While high-level soul masters could create similar phenomena, it was generally due to an extremely fast absorption rate that caused soul power to converge around them.

But Chen Ming's absorption speed, though fast, wasn't so exaggerated. Rather than him actively drawing in soul power, it felt as though the soul power itself sought him out, yearning to be absorbed.

Within this soul power vortex around Chen Ming, even Dugu Yan's cultivation speed increased by 10 to 20 percent—an astonishing improvement. Not even cultivating beside her grandfather, Dugu Bo, had yielded such results.

Unbeknownst to her, her body subconsciously leaned toward Chen Ming, instinctively pursuing more of the soul power being drawn in. However, because the distance between them was still significant, this shift wasn't immediately noticeable.


Tip: You can use left, right, A and D keyboard keys to browse between chapters.