Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

The units inside the chests of the seven crystal suits emanated starry crimson brilliance that pierced into Li Yao eyes through the Grand Illusionary Land like countless rubies.

Cold sweat was popping up on his forehead.

If there were no Exos inside, such magical equipment was not a crystal suit, but a human-shaped beast puppet. They were also known as ’spiritual puppets’.

Spiritual puppets were once a piece of popular magical equipment. They were tireless and fearless, and they could fight in extremely harsh environments, which made them the perfect weapons for a war.

However, spiritual puppets were commanded by crystal processors. However advanced crystal processors were, they were dead objects after all and could only carry out orders rigidly despite their immense computational ability.

There were too many variables in a battlefield. Even the crystal processors with the best performance could not replace the brain of a human.

Besides, the crystal processors whose computational abilities met the needs of a battlefield were often extremely large and expensive. They were also hundreds of times more vulnerable than a brain and easy to be damaged. It was impossible to apply them to spiritual puppets.

Therefore, it was determined that spiritual puppets could not replace crystal suits and Exos soon after they were invented, and such tools were gradually forsaken.

However, the spiritual puppets produced by the Grand Illusionary Group seemed to be different from what Li Yao had imagined.

Although their movements were still rigid, their choice and implementation of tactics were quite smart, as if an invisible brain was commanding them!

Xiao Xuance’s calm voice came over again. ”Now, allow me to introduce to you the ’Grand Illusionary Soldier Project’.

”I believe everybody has noticed that the Grand Illusionary Soldier is a spiritual puppet that is smarter, more agile, and more responsive to changes!

”In the past, the biggest shortcoming of spiritual puppets was that the normal crystal processors with average performance could not simulate the thought processes of human brains during combat. Those that could simulate more than 30% of the reactions were all large and expensive mainframe crystal processors. They could not be installed in the puppets, whose bodies were too small, and their price was too high!

”It’s true that life is priceless. But the resources and cost to build spiritual puppets installed with a mainframe crystal processor could be used to train twenty Exos and equip them with MP crystal suits.

”It was never cheap to produce spiritual puppets.

”Therefore, spiritual puppets were gradually replaced by beast puppets, which were cheaper and had a better price-performance ratio. It would take as many resources to train five Exos and produce twenty beast puppets as it would to build three to five spiritual puppets, but the combat ability of the former was ten timers higher than that of the latter!

”The Grand Illusionary Soldier, on the other hand, adopted an entirely different designing principle.

”What is installed inside the chest of each Grand Illusionary Soldier is ’Empyrean Sun-V’ crystal processor, which is cheap yet efficient.

”I believe that many refiners here know that it is a popular crystal processor which is applied to many low-end crystal suits. Its computational ability is not very high, at least not high enough to support the crystal suit to perform such complicated tactical movements.

”And this is the key to the ’Grand Illusionary Soldier Project’.

”Inside every Grand Illusionary Soldier, other than an ’Empyrean Sun V’ crystal processor, a special rune array to receive telepathic thoughts has also been installed. Through the reception array, all the Grand Illusionary Soldiers are connected to the ’virtual star brain’!

”One Grand Illusionary Soldier is naturally far from enough to be called a piece of planetary-level magical equipment.

”However, if we gather all the resources of the Flying Star Sector and produce tens of thousands of Grand Illusionary Soldiers, they will constitute a ’Grand Illusionary Legion’ after they are connected to the virtual star brain. It will be a piece of out-and-out planetary level, if not stellar-level, magical equipment, whose influence will radiate to every corner of the Flying Star Sector!”

Li Yao, Xue Yuanxin and Huangpu Bo looked at each other in confusion. ”Virtual star brain?”

In the Grand Illusionary Land, the valley dispersed into butterflies and disappeared.

Xiao Xuance’s image showed up again.

His background seemed to be a vast universe where countless stars were swirling, colliding and finally condensing into a shining gold super brain!

Every star seemed to be a brain cell, and the rivers of stars that were made of countless congregating stars were the circuits inside the brain. The collision between stars was producing sparks of wisdom!

The camera pushed forward and magnified the brain that was made of countless stars. Some of the stars jumped out and were dissected into hundreds of pictures.

Every picture was a battle of Exos fighting in the Grand Illusionary Land!

”The Spiritual Nexus that connects the entire Flying Star Sector has been built for more than a thousand years, and virtual platforms such as the Crystal Suit World have been successfully established for hundreds of years, too,” Xiao Xuance said.

”Over hundreds of years, countless Exos left immensurable data with their wisdom and experience after they fought in the virtual platforms via the Grand Illusionary Land.

”In the one minute just now, yes, in only one minute, 16,072 virtual battles took place in the Grand Illusionary Land, some of which were the summit confrontations between super experts!

”It is safe to say that all the possible situations in a real-life battlefield have happened before in the virtual battlefields!

”My fellow Cultivators and dear users of the Grand Illusionary Land, I’m afraid that you haven’t realized the value of the combat data that was accumulated in the Grand Illusionary Land.

”The so-called ’virtual star brain’ is a piece of magical equipment invented by a genius of the Grand Illusionary Group who specializes in crystal processors. What is stored inside the virtual star brain is the valuable combat data filtered from the countless battles in the Grand Illusionary Land over the past hundreds of years.

”All the Grand Illusionary Soldiers are connected to the star brain through the Spiritual Nexus. When they are in a battlefield, they will select the most suitable move from the star brain according to the actual situation.

”The moves have all been performed by real Exos in the Grand Illusionary Land before. They are calculated by real human brains!

”The Grand Illusionary Soldiers to be produced in such a way, although still incomparable to the real Exos, are far stronger than traditional spiritual puppets!

”More importantly, the cost to produce them is very cheap. Common crystal suits can also be modified into them easily. Tireless and fearless, they will patrol, guard, and fight all year long in any place as long as it is covered in the Spiritual Nexus.

”Everyone, both Immortal Cultivators and space pirates are not very strong, and they will never fight a head-on battle against the main force of Cultivators. They will only look for our weakness and harass us in these places.

”As I said just now, our real enemy is the boundless universe!

”It is not unusual for our Core Formation Stage Cultivators or even Nascent Soul Stages to travel in exhaustion from one remote space zone to another in order to deal with the emergencies. But their opponents might only be several space pirates in the Building Foundation Stage!

”If we deploy a large number of Grand Illusionary Soldiers in every space zone—”

Xiao Xuance waved his hand. The picture in the Grand Illusionary Land suddenly changed into various crystal warships that had been modified to accommodate countless Grand Illusionary Soldiers. The Grand Illusionary Soldiers were all sitting cross-legged in the maintenance rune arrays like statues, wreathed in green.

Suddenly, a space town in front of the crystal warship sent out alarms of incoming space pirates!

The green glow of the maintenance rune arrays immediately disappeared. The six circular crystal cameras on the heads of the Grand Illusionary Soldiers were all beaming in red, while they stood up from the rune arrays simultaneously and lunged at the space town in groups.

”Even if the Grand Illusionary Soldiers cannot destroy the space pirates, they can significantly diminish the activity zone of space pirates and stall them during their assault so that other Cultivation sects can gather their main forces to surround and annihilate the space pirates!

”Flexibility is everything for space pirates. Without flexibility, even the strongest space pirates will be fish in a water tank that have nowhere to run to!

”If thousands of Grand Illusionary Soldiers are patrolling on every sailing route of every space zone one day, it’s impossible for space pirates, Immortal Cultivators, demon beasts, unknown species in space, or extraterrestrial devils to sabotage our peace and prosperity!

”This is the future of the Flying Star Sector. The best future!”

Taking a long breath, Li Yao collapsed to his seat helplessly.

He was somewhat convinced by Xue Xuance.

But he did feel a little bit weird. A gloomy thought suddenly occurred to him,

If the Grand Illusionary Legions are deployed in every space zone, what will the Exos do?

Huangpu Bo mumbled, ”It seems that the tale about the ’Star Child’ is true.”

Li Yao was dazed. ”What is Star Child?”

Huangpu Bo explained, ”In the past decades, there has been a rumor in the circle of refiners that Xiao Xuance has a foster son who is both a natural-born retard and an unparalleled genius!”

Li Yao was confused. ”Retard? Genius?”

Huangpu Bo said, ”It is said that his foster son is very unintelligent in daily life. He is perhaps almost a hundred years old, and yet he still acts like a seven-year-old.

”However, such a retard, on the other hand, is an unparalleled genius in regard to Spiritual Nexus and an out-and-out expert in crystal processors. When it comes to the Spiritual Nexus and crystal processors, he immediately seems to be possessed by a god or a devil!

”It seems that all his wisdom was dedicated to the Spiritual Nexus and the crystal processors, and he did not have redundant brain cells to work on his daily life!

”Inside the Grand Illusionary Group, Xiao Xuance’s foster son has been called ’Star Child’. It is said that he was the supervisor of a large, confidential project.

”I thought that it was pure nonsense. How can a retard whose intelligence equals to a seven-year-old manage a large project?

”But if the ’virtual star brain’ is a real thing, it was mostly likely invented by the Star Child!”