"Innate soul power level 6!"
Amid the stunned, incredulous stares of everyone around him, a young boy revealed an innate soul power far surpassing the rest.
This boy was none other than Jin.
Jin had been reborn into the world of Douluo Dalu. He realized this was the Douluo world because everyone around him possessed martial souls, and he kept hearing mentions of the Spirit Hall.
From then on, he began training and strengthening his body from a very young age.
Although Jin was just an average fan who hadn't followed or read the original Douluo novels closely, he had still come across quite a few Douluo fanfictions. That gave him the insight that physical conditioning and nutrition could influence one's innate soul power to some degree.
In the Douluo world, the higher the innate soul power, the faster the cultivation speed—and it also noticeably boosted the martial soul's overall strength, even if the difference wasn't always dramatic.
For example, compare a Blue Silver Grass martial soul with innate soul power level 1 versus level 3: even if both reach rank 10, the level-3 version's Blue Silver Grass is usually superior.
Knowing this, Jin trained far harder than his peers and sought out every possible way to nourish his body.
To be honest, Jin wasn't completely certain whether this approach would actually raise his innate soul power—after all, it was just knowledge pieced together from old fanfics, and in this world there was no way to measure innate soul power before the awakening ceremony.
Because of that uncertainty, Jin felt discouraged many times over those six years, wondering if all his effort had been in vain. But the moment he saw "level 6 innate soul power," relief and excitement washed over him—his hard work hadn't been wasted!
"(Level 6 innate soul power! That's pretty solid—better than 80% of apprentice spirit masters out there!)"
"(So the six years of training really paid off, and those fanfic ideas were actually valid!)"
"(Think about it—if physical training and nutrition had zero effect on innate soul power, then why did Huo Yuhao only have level 1? His martial soul is Spirit Eyes plus brain—a top-tier body martial soul, second only to full-body ones.)"
"(That proves Huo Yuhao's childhood malnutrition and bullying weakened his body so badly that it couldn't awaken the innate soul power his martial soul deserved.)"
"(My situation is much better. Even though my martial soul is considered low-grade, level-6 innate soul power is more than enough to reach high-level spirit master status—and that's without counting all the knowledge I brought from my previous world!)"
The more Jin thought about it, the more he realized just how fortunate he was to start with such a strong foundation.
Moreover, his martial soul wasn't complete trash or unusable. It was simply viewed as low-grade by most people in Douluo, and the abilities shown in the original plot were underwhelming.
But Jin was convinced this martial soul still had tremendous potential!
His martial soul was the Soft Boned Rabbit—the exact same one as Xiao Wu, the female lead from the first part of Douluo!
To ordinary people in this world, the Soft Boned Rabbit was just a low-level spirit beast hunted by regular soul masters. Its only notable traits were speed and soft, flexible body.
But anyone familiar with Douluo knows the Soft Boned Rabbit actually possesses far more abilities!
Charm! Teleportation! Paragon Golden Body! Gravity Control! Nullity!
The early spirit skills aren't that remarkable, but the last three are the real game-changers.
Paragon Golden Body is an insanely overpowered defensive skill—granting temporary invincibility where no attack below God-level can harm the user.
Gravity Control lets the user manipulate gravity—one of the four fundamental forces of the universe. While not overwhelmingly strong at first, its potential is enormous.
Nullity turns the body into an ethereal state, granting 100% evasion against physical attacks and 80% against mental ones.
From any angle, even a single one of these three skills would make a martial soul top-tier. Yet all three belong to the same martial soul!
Still, even with these skills, characters who possessed this martial soul in the story often ended up as mere sandbags for enemies to pound on. Even Jin didn't know what to say about that.
But those examples didn't matter much to him—because he had zero intention of picking spirit rings randomly like those characters did!
In Jin's view, the main reason Xiao Wu and Jiang Nannan ended up underperforming was that most of their skills leaned toward escape and mobility. Forcing an escape-focused fighter into close-range brawls against opponents who specialized in melee was basically asking for trouble. No wonder the martial soul looked weak in the original plot.
As long as Jin chose high-quality, synergistic spirit rings, that problem wouldn't exist.
Besides, this was a real world—not a game. Everyone could obtain up to nine spirit rings, but some people could even create their own self-created soul skills.
And since this was fundamentally a xianxia-style world, no matter how strong or weak a skill seemed, everything ultimately came down to soul power level.
A higher-level soul master could crush a lower-level one with ease. Someone at a lower level would need several times the effort, plus excellent ring choices, just to barely compete with someone only one level above.
So in Jin's eyes, as long as the spirit rings weren't completely mismatched garbage, this martial soul could still be elevated to greatness.
On top of that, power levels in the first part of the story weren't that exaggerated. Even a God couldn't easily destroy city walls, had to flee from mortal armies, and could even be killed by hidden weapons.
Compared to later arcs with god-killing weapons on the scale of nuclear bombs from his old world, the "gods" in part one were far less invincible.
While that limited ceiling might seem disappointing, for Jin it was actually great news.
Becoming a god here wasn't impossibly hard, and even if he couldn't reach that level through cultivation alone, he could still use Earth knowledge to make gunpowder and craft weapons capable of killing those so-called gods.
In other words—even if pure cultivation hit a wall, Jin still had means to fight back against god-level threats.