Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

“What is this? A new virus?”

The star child had never expected that five bugs would crawl out of his soul at the crucial moment. Moreover, they seemed to be absorbing his computational ability in a weird way!

The star child was greatly shocked. He could only turn around and focus tremendous computational ability on the five star spirits.

But the star spirits were not simply viruses. They were attacking the computational rune arrays and the processing chips of the star brain. When the body was gone, there would be nowhere that a soul could place itself in. They had grabbed the star child’s neck!

Besides, now that most of his computation ability had been summoned to deal with the five star spirits, the star child was no longer able to suppress Li Yao and all the other Cultivators.

Shua! Shua! Shua!

After flashes of sabers and swords, countless tentacles were broken off and burnt into ash.

Li Yao and his companions broke out of the siege again!

“Impossible!”

The star child watched black venom spurting out of the broken tentacles, unable to do anything about it. He was shivering unnaturally like a seriously deformed heart.

Because of the continuous gnawing of the five gold silkworms, his soul could not be kept stable any longer. The hundreds of tentacles all got out of his control and straightened up. The blood mouths that looked like flowers at the front end of the tentacles were all writhing in pain.

The fangs broke off, the thorns disappeared, the sucking discs dried up, and the black aura vanished. The dented skin became smooth again. The front ends of the tentacles turned from bloody mouths into baby faces!

The babies were all crying. They struggled to get away from the tentacles and fled like small tadpoles with long tails.

As the tentacles broke off and fled, the soul of the star child withered and shrank, with wrinkles all over the surface. Giant holes were even appearing in many places, as if he were a rotten jellyfish.

“They are the souls of the babies that were forced into his soul!”

Li Yao quickly realized what was happening.

“The star child was refined by combining the soul of a high-level Immortal Cultivator and those of hundreds of babies.

“In the past, when the soul of the Immortal Cultivator was powerful enough, he could suppress the souls of the hundreds of babies and drive them at his own will.

“But now that his soul power is declining, he is no longer able to control the souls of the innocent babies!

“This is our best chance!” Li Yao roared.

The wings on his back extended like two burning suns until they were almost ten thousand meters away!

Then, the two wings of flames tied him up and turned him into an enormous drill of flames, which darted at the core of the star child’s soul brutally!

“Don’t you see? You’ve been abandoned by the future of mankind!

“Go to hell with your imperium!”

All of Li Yao’s soul power was condensed into the drill and pierced through the star child’s body!

BOOM! CRACK!

In that moment, deafening thunders were echoing in every corner of the mind palace. Lightning was splitting apart the entire universe. The illusions of the deities and the devils were burnt into ash!

The mind palace was like a tower of sand faced with an overwhelming tsunami. It was sliding to the inevitable doom amid the earsplitting sound of tides!

“Ahhh!” the star child cried miserably. Without the nourishment of the souls of hundreds of babies, he appeared extremely old like the dried bones in a tomb or a zombie that had died centuries ago. In the radiating sunlight, he turned into streaks of black smoke, dispersing, vaporizing, and disintegrating!

“Just wait for it!” Pitiful screams came over from the black smoke that was dashing everywhere like a headless chicken. “I’ve sent 70% of the coordinates of the Flying Star Sector to the imperium. The imperium will find you sooner or later!

“Even though the coordinates are incomplete, the best you can do is survive another two hundred years!

“In two hundred years, the expedition army of the imperium will come to this place and conquer both the Flying Star Sector and the Heaven’s Origin Sector!

“You have nowhere to run. You are doomed!”

Li Yao’s soul was reshaped into a human again. The thousands of golden feathers turned into dozens of tornadoes and slashed the running black smoke. He said, “Let your imperium bring it on. We will show them the real future of mankind ourselves!”

In the surging flames of spiritual energy, the black smoke was fading.

However, hundreds of streams of black smoke darted to Li Yao at a lightning-like speed and condensed behind him!

At this moment, the star child retracted all of his tentacles. There was only a giant, round body left. It was more like a combination of a jellyfish and a sea urchin than an octopus.

He wriggled crazily and giggled. “Die with me, Li Yao! Even if I cannot destroy all the Cultivators, I can at least turn you into a moron!”

“Not good!”

The six Nascent Soul Stage Cultivators and the five star spirits all lost their cool, knowing that the star child was going to detonate his soul and perish together with Li Yao in his final bout of madness.

They all charged at Li Yao and the star child unhesitatingly without caring about their own lives.

But it was too late!

Hardly had they moved when the star child suddenly expanded into a black light ball that consumed Li Yao’s soul like a black sun after a series of miserable laughter!

The immense blast even blew the souls of the six Nascent Soul Stage Cultivators and the five star spirits thousands of kilometers away. They failed to stabilize themselves for a long time.

At the same time, the mind palace completely collapsed. Everybody was forced back to reality and into their own bodies.

The six Nascent Soul Stage Cultivators regained control over their bodies, only to discover that the phantom of the brain in midair was dispersing and flying high above the ‘shaft’ like burning butterflies.

But Li Yao was falling down, his head toward the ground.

Since their souls had just returned to their bodies, the six Nascent Soul Stage Cultivators were all stiff and could not help him. They could only watch Li Yao fall to the ground heavily.

“Li Yao!”

The five star spirits crawled out of the computational rune arrays and the processing chips, but they could not sense Li Yao’s spiritual waves at all. For a moment, they also lost their cool.

In the depths of Li Yao’s brain, most of the star child’s soul power was transformed into the purest damage, attacking Li Yao’s soul like a black tide.

Under the strike of the star child, in the deepest part of Li Yao’s brain, a dark, red, lozenge-shaped crystal shivered for a moment and then broke apart!

…

The battle of Heavenly Saints City was finally over.

After the star child detonated his own soul, the star brain was completely taken over by the five star spirits, which meant that all the Grand Illusionary Soldiers and Heavenly Phantom were on the Cultivators’ side now.

The Immortal Cultivators had been few in number in the Flying Star Sector in the first place. Without the Grand Illusionary Soldiers, they could not stir any further trouble.

Yan Chihuo, Wu Mayan, and all the Cultivators who were caught in hard battles were sitting on the ground exhaustedly as they read the message from Heavenly Phantom quietly.

“Cultivators of the Flying Star Sector, maybe you don’t know what exactly happened yet.

“Today, we have witnessed the greatest insurgency in the history of the Flying Star Sector. The Immortal Cultivators, led by Xiao Xuance, the CEO of the Grand Illusionary Group, launched a sudden assault to us!

“Right now, the situation is under our control. We will tell everything exactly as it happened.

“However, before we begin, we would like to introduce a Cultivator from another Sector to you.

“His name is Li Yao.

“‘Vulture’ Li Yao, from the Heaven’s Origin Sector!”

…

Li Yao woke up.

He seemed to have had a very, very long and weird dream.

In the dream, he became a Cultivator who dominated the universe. He even left the Heaven’s Origin Sector for another bizarre world where he spent many thrilling days. He made the most trustworthy friends and defeated the most ferocious enemies.

Although the dream was mottled and blurred now, the passionate feeling was still lingering in his heart.

Soaked in sweat, he breathed hard. It took him a long time before he finally recalled who and where he was.

“This is the magical equipment graveyard, Lake Rusty, Floating Spear City, Star Glory Federation, and the Heaven’s Origin Sector.

“I am just a regular scavenger.”

…

Three months after the battle of Heavenly Saints City, in a hospital affiliated with Flying Star University, inside a confidential ward, Li Yao was floating in the middle of bright green medication drugs. His eyes were half closed, and his breath was feeble. Even his eyeballs had not moved for a long time.

“Doctor, is there no sign of him waking up at all?”

Mo Xuan, Luo Xingzi, Si Koulie, and many other people stood before the med bay, their eyebrows furrowed.

“Not yet.”

An experienced doctor whose beard and hair were both white sighed and said, “Fellow Cultivator Li Yao saved the Flying Star Sector. We have summoned the best doctors and Meditation Healers of the Flying Star Sector and brainstormed ideas.

“But his situation is very weird.

“The brainwaves in 99% of his head are dead. Logically, it means that his soul has perished, and he has been trapped in the most serious vegetative state. Even if he does wake up one day, he will be mentally retarded.

“However, one percent of the area in the deepest part of his brain is still active.

“This particular area is guarded by a very weird barrier. The best ten Meditation Healers worked together and failed to crack it. We do not know what is inside at all.

“The good news is that his body maintains a very high vitality and absorbs the spiritual energy inside the medication drugs automatically.

“Right now, the only thing we can do is wait. If a miracle happens, he might wake up tomorrow. Or maybe, he will not wake up ever again.”

…

BOOM!

A mountain of garbage collapsed next to him. Countless pieces of magical equipment fell toward him like an avalanche. Li Yao moved and laughed in the tide of rubbish like the most agile monkey.

He was lucky enough to have found a navigation chip of reasonable quality today. His stomach would be fed for the next three days.

However, he had to get rid of Fatty Leung and his gang first!

The weird dream occasionally occurred to him late at night and made his heart itch. He felt that this was not the life he desired and that he was destined to do something greater!

However, in the day, he had to struggle for survival every second. There was no time to think about the future anymore.

A dream was just a dream!

Better face reality!

…

Six months after the battle of Heavenly Saints City, Wu Mayan and Xie Anan stood before the med bay.

Wu Mayan had grown into a tall, strong, and handsome young man. Xie Anan was no longer a little girl and much more mature, too.

The two of them stuck their face to the glass so hard that their noses became meatballs.

“Master, we knew that you are very awesome, but we didn’t know that you were so awesome!

“Just wake up soon. There are a lot of things that we have to work on together!”

…

“Beat him!”

“F*ck. You dared to steal the Wild Wolves Gang’s possessions? You must’ve lived long enough!”

“Beat him! Beat him hard and bury him alive in the garbage mountain!”

Li Yao was losing consciousness. His eyes were covered in blood, and he had lost all sense of pain, or rather, every single one of his senses.

His limbs were twisted at weird angles, and he was thrown to the bottom of a garbage mountain like a soft starfish.

Above his head, several muscular men detonated the garbage mountain with crystal bombs while they laughed hideously.

Huala!

The overwhelming garbage drowned him.

He could not breathe. He could not resist. He could only allow the darkness and the blood to swallow him.

He had lost the will to resist, too. A voice seemed to be mumbling right beside his ears, “Just give up. What are you struggling for? Why live such a miserable life?

“Just give it up. Just sleep comfortably…”

Li Yao smiled wretchedly. His eyes gradually closed.

“Hehe. This is the inevitable outcome for a scavenger like me, isn’t it?

“There’s no way out. Struggling among piles of garbage every day, hungry and wounded. Maybe death is indeed more comfortable.

“It’s too painful. It’s too dark. I’m never going to get out.

“There is no need to struggle. All my effort was in vain. The Vulture Plan has failed. Just give it up…

“Wait!”

When Li Yao fully closed his eyes while he was murmuring to himself, the two words ‘Vulture Plan’ pierced the tiny bit of brightness that had been sealed for a long time in the deepest part of his soul!