Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

Li Yao wiped the sweat off his forehead and kept reading.

Yan Xinjian had unhurriedly implemented his great plan of possession step by step.

As time went by, Yan Xinjian’s secret art of possession had become more and more sharp and brutal, and the Dream Breaking Arts were gradually perfected, too. Except for the brain storm that everybody had to experience when they were between the fourth level and the fifth level, it was indeed a powerful super technique.

The data had reached around a hundred years ago. But the training journal came to an abrupt halt.

When new chapters appeared, it was already more than half a year later.

The first new chapter had only two words.

“Mice! Mice!”

The second chapter did not appear until three months later. There was only one inexplicable paragraph in it.

“There are no other solutions. This is the last resort. Thankfully, I have many mice.”

Li Yao swallowed and read through all the remaining log patiently in the next hour.

Although he had been prepared, he was still dumbfounded when he learned everything that happened later.

He glanced at the squeaking mice around him. The mice had all learned of his toughness and did not dare get too close to him.

The red mice were gritting their teeth in clattering noises. They glared at him with their tails straightened like spears.

The green mice were rolling their eyes nonstop. There was no telling what kind of schemes they were concocting.

The blue mice had deep eyes. They stared at him pitifully and told in silence the desperation that had echoed for five hundred years.

Li Yao sighed and suddenly felt truly sympathetic for Yan Xinjian.

No matter what crimes he had committed years ago, his ending seemed a bit too miserable.

Li Yao imported Yan Xinjian’s training log into his mini crystal processor. Then, he brought the log to the meditation chamber at the bottom of the training room.

Li Yao took a deep breath and entered the deep meditative state amid the prolonged humming sounds.

The information that he had collected just now was all glittering inside his brain. The general picture of everything and the portrait of Yan Xinjian’s life gradually took shape.

…

Five hundred years ago, Yan Xinjian used to be most famous genius in training of the Flying Star Sector.

He was born in a middle-class family and revealed his talents when he was very young. He was carefully educated by the six sects of Heavenly Saints City and advanced into the Nascent Soul Stage when he was only a hundred years old. During the battles to eliminate space pirates, he made a lot of contributions and was promoted to the vice commander of the coalition fleet of the six sects of Heavenly Saints City. He was responsible for the safety of Heavenly Saints City and the core area of the Flying Star Sector.

At that time, Yan Xinjian’s rise was an out-and-out miracle. Many civilians considered him to be their role model.

However, his rise ended there, because his supervisor was also a rarely-seen genius in training. The two of them were of similar ages and Cultivation, but their backgrounds were vastly different. His supervisor was born in a noble family with parents who were both celebrities of the Flying Star Sector.

If things went on like that, his supervisor could live another two hundred years with his Cultivation. The ‘vice’ in Yan Xinjian’s title would never be taken away.

It was not hard to guess how depressing it must have been for Yan Xinjian, the super genius who had been used to leading the vanguard and making the call in everything, to work as the deputy of somebody else for hundreds of years!

A long time later, Yan Xinjian, who had lost his mind by then, left a lot of criticism about his supervisor in his training log. Jealousy, depression, hatred, fury… All the feelings were written between the lines.

In Yan Xinjian’s opinion, his Cultivation, capability, and charisma were all better than his supervisor’s, and the sole reason why his supervisor was commanding the coalition fleet of the six sects of Heavenly Saints City was the man’s background!

Envy could tie up a person like a viper. Even the expert in the Nascent Soul Stage could not free himself from it after decades.

Then, one day, Yan Xinjian received a detailed map of the underground fortress of Spider Den, as well as part of the permissions that were known as ‘Spider Key’, by accident.

It was the duty of the coalition fleet of the six sects of Heavenly Saints City to deal with the space pirates. Naturally, Yan Xinjian knew everything about Spider Den. He was aware that a lot of secret treasures of the Star Ocean Imperium were probably hidden inside the underground fortress.

If I can get those treasures, my Cultivation will definitely reach a higher level. I will be able to surpass the noble families and even dominate the entire Flying Star Sector!

Li Yao did not know if Yan Xinjian really thought that way. However, it was not a solo task to hunt for treasures on Spider Den. He needed strong support.

Besides, he was now the mortal enemy of the space pirates. Not to mention Spider Den, if he so much as drew close to the Spider Den Space Zone, countless space pirates would have blown him out of the sky without any hesitation.

Moreover, how was he going to explain everything to the other Cultivators? When the message was out, he would not be able to own all the treasures.

Therefore…

After a painful, prolonged hesitation, he killed his own wife, Yun Suoyu, and slew the entire family of his supervisor!

Did his wife really cheat on him?

From the context, Li Yao felt that she did not.

Otherwise, Yan Xinjian would not have felt so guilty, to such a degree that he could not let it go after decades.

Yan Xinjian was merely devoured by the constantly expanding greed in the bottom of his heart. He did such an insane, inhuman thing only because he needed a justifiable reason to desert Heavenly Saints City and sneak into Spider Den!

He made it!

After he defected to Spider Den, because of the murders he committed, most of the space pirates did not doubt him.

But at that time, he was still alone and did not have the power to conduct large-scale searches.

Therefore, he managed to incite the Cultivators to wage a war on the space pirates. Then, with his advantage as the previous vice commander of the coalition fleet of the six sects of Heavenly Saints City, he was granted temporary leadership by many pirate gangs because he was familiar with the enemy.

For an unparalleled expert such as Yan Xinjian, there was no way that he would relinquish the leadership after getting it ‘temporarily’.

In the decades that followed, he defeated the Cultivators, purged Spider Den, and seized absolute power. Finally, he achieved his purpose and excavated the underground fortress on a large scale.

Yan Xinjian knew that the secret treasures would raise a storm of blood should they appear on the ground. Not only would all the space pirates be fighting for them, it was also very likely that the Cultivators would come back again.

Therefore, Yan Xinjian simply built a secret training room deep below the ground and shifted the training facilities and precious resources of the Star Ocean Imperium, as well as the treasures he looted in space, into the place!

When all the arrangements were completed, he killed all the insiders and set up multiple traps. Then, he left some bait before he entered the secret training room, preparing to break into the Divinity Transformation Stage.

It was a perfect plan.

Yan Xinjian calculated everything, including the possibility of an apocalypse.

But he missed out one thing, which was his heart.

He did not expect that his wife whom he had killed decades ago would show up again right in front of him when he was breaking into the Divinity Transformation Stage from the peak of the Nascent Soul Stage.

Yan Xinjian’s mind was disturbed. He was mentally deranged and heavily wounded. After a few days in a critical condition, he died. The only thing that remained was his soul.

Thankfully, he had been prepared for such a scenario and could continue his training as a spectral Cultivator in the artificial bodies.

However, the speed of his training was much lower than when he was alive.

Just like that, he continued training for a hundred years below the ground, hoping to restore his capability.

The high-intensity training was very damaging for the artificial bodies. He had to switch to a new artificial body every few days.

Gradually, all the artificial bodies in storage were seriously worn. He had to repair and maintain them on his own and reused the old artificial bodies.

Then, an accident happened.

When Yan Xinjian entered the secret training room, in order to experiment on new techniques, he had brought a few mice.

After hundreds of years, there were already hundreds of mice.

With Yan Xinjian’s Cultivation, even though he had become a spectral Cultivator, it was not likely that he overlooked the beasts.

Li Yao estimated that he was too lonely below the ground and simply kept the mice as pets, except that he controlled the total number of them.

But it was not within Yan Xinjian’s expectation that some mice escaped his attention and broke the crucial components on an artificial body.

The damage was very inconspicuous. Yan Xinjian was not a refiner and did not notice it during the maintenance.

When he did high-intensity training with said artificial body, a serious accident happened.

The outcome was quite miserable. Yan Xinjian’s soul was split apart and could not sustain the basic form of a spectral Cultivator. He had to possess something immediately, or he would be gone forever!

The objects of possession had to be a living creature.

Yan Xinjian went through all the trouble and developed such a sordid skill named the Dream Breaking Arts, but there was no time for him to wait for a human being on the ground to arrive.

Right now, the only living creatures inside the secret training room were… the mice!

It was not difficult to take over the mice’s bodies. A mouse’s brain was simple in structure and had barely any soul power. There would be barely any resistance.

However, since the brains of the mice were too simple, they could not accommodate Yan Xinjian’s soul, which was tremendous in size.

It was like stuffing an elephant into a rat hole. The mission was simply impossible.

Yan Xinjian was truly a genius of training. Before his soul entire dispersed, he came up with a solution. He dissected his enormous soul into hundreds of parts with a secret art, each of which took over the body of one mouse!

From the ancient times to this day, ‘possession’ had always been a dangerous endeavor. One moment of carelessness, and the host might devour the intruder’s soul instead, just like Ou Yezi, who tried to take over Li Yao’s body before.

Splitting one’s soul into hundreds of parts each possessing a mouse was an insane attempt that nobody had ever even thought of before.

Nobody knew what the consequences would be.

But Yan Xinjian had no other choice.

Therefore, he said, “I have a lot of mice.”

How crazy, desperate, and ironic his final words were!

…

The hundreds of mice I saw were indeed Yan Xinjian. Inside every mouse’s brain is part of Yan Xinjian’s remaining soul!

Yan Xinjian had made it. His life continued in hundreds of mice in such a weird way.

But he had failed, too, because he did not know any techniques for the training of animals.