Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

“Now, let’s hear what Fellow Cultivator Si Koulie, who is the leader of the Star Fighters’ Alliance and the most renowned authority on starships in the three Sectors, has to say. He is also the general supervisor of the ‘Heavenly Road Plan’!

“The Heavenly Road Plan will be our first step to march into the universe!”

Professor Mo Xuan waved his hands and sat back down in his seat.

Si Koulie went to the podium with his head held high.

He was also Li Yao’s old acquaintance.

Back in the Flying Star Sector, he had once proposed the Ice God Project and competed with Xiao Xuance for the leadership of the future development.

At that time, he had been completely overwhelmed by Xiao Xuance and ended up being an anonymous character.

However, more than ten years later, while Xiao Xuance had already turned into a cluster of dust in the universe, Si Koulie had unleashed his vigor of life for a second time at the sunset of his life because he had the chance to devise the future where more Sectors were involved now!

The leader of the Star Fighters’ Alliance and the chief designer of Burning Prairie, the strongest warship of the three Sectors, was filled with intense confidence and hope. His back was even straighter than a teenager’s. His hair was black and glowing. There was not the slightest wrinkle on his face, and even the spots were so vague that they were barely visible. He seemed even younger than when Li Yao met him for the first time!

“Fellow Cultivators, it’s been so long!”

Si Koulie’s voice was as loud as a tolling bell, brimming with unquestionable decisiveness and soul-stirring passion. He did not say anything useless other than the courtesy at the beginning.

“After five years of development, we are now finally capable of marching into the universe to look for more Sectors!

“Sector is a word that many ordinary people and Cultivators often speak of. However, as for exactly what a ‘Sector’ is, the definitions can be quite fuzzy if not self-contradictory in many cases.

“It is well-known that the three-dimensional universe we are living in is an integral whole. There aren’t any concrete ‘walls’ that block or enshroud different worlds.

“The universe is integral, continuous, and inseparable. Assuming that there is a tortoise that can crawl and live in space but does not grow old, given enough time, it will be able to slowly ‘crawl’ from the Heaven’s Origin Sector to the Flying Star Sector, and then from the Flying Star Sector to the Blood Demon Sector. Nothing complicated need be involved at all.

“It’s a shame that nothing doesn’t grow old in the real world. Not only the individuals such as us, even our civilization only has limited time. Time is the most precious resource for us!

“What blocks two Sectors is not a visible, concrete wall but the most terrible obstacle to our knowledge—distance and time!

“Take the Heaven’s Origin Sector for example. The nearest galaxy to us is still five years away from us. Even if we were to set sail at the speed of light, it will take us five years before we arrive. Not to mention that our technology is far from enough to support the speed of light yet!

“That galaxy, in the meantime, is just a random galaxy with barely any spiritual energy and absolutely no lives!

“There are too many such galaxies in the universe, 99.99% of which have no signs of spiritual energy or life. Without resources and Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures, they are not qualified to be defined as a ‘Sector’ and can be called ‘wastelands’ at best. They are of zero value for our development at all!

“It is impossible for us to reach a prosperous galaxy that has enough spiritual energy to nurture all creatures from the Heaven’s Origin Sector through regular approaches right now, because it can be more than a thousand lightyears away from us. So, it is safe to say that we are two different ‘Sectors’!

“Therefore, on many occasions, a Sector is in fact not a vast concept. On the contrary, it is extremely narrow and strict. Sometimes, its range is smaller than a galaxy!

“The galaxy of the Heaven’s Origin Sector is approximately fifty billion kilometers in diameter, but only the five billion square kilometers at the core boasts sufficient spiritual energy and a habitable environment.

“Therefore, we may say that, although the galaxy that our Sector is in is fifty billion kilometers in diameter, the diameter of the Heaven’s Origin Sector is only five billion kilometers, which is only one tenth of the former!

“Worlds with multiple space zones such as the Flying Star Sector are the weirdos in the universe. Yet, the Flying Star Sector is not a collection of dozens of galaxies but a collection of the spaces in the dozens of galaxies with the most abundant spiritual energy that are connected through wormholes.”

Behind Si Koulie, a vintage and simple painting appeared.

It was a kind, sacred, motherly goddess who was spraying dew onto the ground with a willow branch.

Sprayed by the willow branch, the dews scattered into transparent, shining pearls on the ground.

It was a depiction of the myth where Nuwa created human beings.

In the myth, Nuwa was molding mud into human beings in the beginning, but she felt that the efficiency was too low while she was working. Therefore, she simply dipped a willow branch into the mud and water and sprayed it out, filling everywhere within her reach with thousands of living souls.

“Myths often contain our ancestors’ profound understanding about the universe and the objects in it. They can provide enlightenment for us even today,” Si Koulie said peacefully. “Let’s look at the mud and dew that was sprayed out. If we consider the ground as the entire universe and every dew as an independent Sector, we will be the tiny microorganisms living inside the dew.

“The ‘microorganisms’ are so feeble that we can only receive sufficient nutrition and resist the scourge of the sun and the sandstorm when we are inside the dew. If we leave the dew, we will be killed very soon.

“In the meantime, although no walls stand between the dew, they are simply too far away from each other. With a microorganism’s unbelievably short life, it is impossible for them to leave a dew droplet and crawl for several kilometers to another.

“This is the relationship between the Sector that our life is based on and the whole three-dimensional universe. If we only use regular cruising approaches, we are destined to be confined in the invisible and therefore unbreakable ‘cage of the speed of light’!

“Thankfully, above the three-dimensional universe, there are still wormholes between the three-dimensional universe and the four-dimensional universe, allowing us to shatter the void and reach another Sector directly through a higher dimension!”

The picture behind Si Koulie suddenly changed. Colorful threads of light extended out of every dew droplet, connecting all the dew like the tiniest rainbows!

Those rainbows were the symbols for the wormholes.

“The wormholes in the universe are limited, and the place that can support a space jump is limited, too. It is often where we set up the sailing routes in the universe! For a ‘blind jump’ without setting the coordinates, the sailing route is ninety-nine percent likely to be a suicidal action!

“Of all of us here, Fellow Cultivator Li is the only person who has ever tried a ‘blind jump’ and succeeded, but I believe that even he definitely wouldn’t want to have another try!”

Li Yao scratched his nose awkwardly.

Si Koulie was right. He would rather face Xiao Xuance, Bai Xinghe, Lu Zui, and Zhou Hengdao another hundred times than have a blind jump without fixed coordinates and sailing routes.

In a challenge with a formidable enemy such as Xiao Xuance, the failure would only mean a quick death. But if a blind jump failed, it was very possible that he would wind up in a desolate space without any resources or lives and wait to die slowly in the cold darkness.

There might not be a second soul in the billions of lightyears around him. Such a lonely and desperate way of death would crumble even the firmest belief.

“To march into the universe,” Si Koulie went on, “the most important thing is to find out and dredge the sailing routes, before we deploy powerful lighthouses—or rather, the star beacons—on the two ends of a sailing route. We can even assemble countless star beacons into a ‘space gate’ so that the large-scale fleets will be able to transport more easily.

“Fortunately, human beings are not the first civilization to explore the sea of stars. Before us, the Pangu civilization developed and mapped the three thousand Sectors on a large scale. Most of the usable wormholes have been discovered and built into sailing routes. A rather perfect teleportation network based on star beacons was set up, too, connecting the three thousand Sectors into a congruent whole!

“The space network still played an important role in the age of the ancient Cultivators forty thousand years ago, allowing the ancient people to transport easily among different Sectors through the sea of stars despite their underdeveloped technology.

“But unfortunately, after the civil war at the end of the age of the ancient Cultivators, the war between mankind and the demon race, and the rise and decline of the Star Ocean Imperium, the space transportation network has mostly been ruined.

“If you want to be rich, pave your road first. It is a common sense that even the village-level governments known.

“Ignoring the ancient Cultivators, in the thirty thousand years while demons reigned the sea of stars, and in the thousand years when the universe was governed by the Star Ocean Imperium, endeavors were both made to recover and increase the star beacons and the sailing sails. Although the wars rendered the endeavors futile in the end, a lot of debris and relics have still been left behind. Quite a few star beacons are even not broken but just in the hibernation state because they have run out of spiritual energy.

“Right now, with the heritage of the Star Ocean Imperium that we have excavated from Spider Den, the knowledge of the Imperium of True Human Beings brought by the Immortal Cultivators in their war base, and the legacy of the Pangu civilization on Kunlun, we have grasped tremendous information about ancient sailing routes and the secret techniques to craft star beacons and space gates of a higher level!

“To march into the grand universe, our first step will be to find and activate the sailing routes, repair the star beacons that the previous civilizations deployed, and expand them into space gates larger in scale!

“We have to build a great cause from scratch exactly like our earliest pioneers did. We will reconnect the dry and broken veins and nerves in the body of our civilization one by one again!

“This is exactly the significance of the ‘Heavenly Road Plan’!”

On the light beam behind Si Koulie, a lot of worlds were shining brilliantly. They were connected to each other tightly by colorful roads, constituting a splendid paradise in the universe.

Although they knew that it was simply artwork, Li Yao and Ding Lingdang were still deeply fascinated by such a glorious future.