Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

Boom!

Crack!

Li Yao had never seen such dreadful lightning, devastating gales, or crazy flooding before!

It was noon, yet the world was completely dark. The sullen clouds that could not have been more intense were wriggling nonstop and pressing down on the land, enveloping all creatures in the stomach of a monolithic beast leavening no escape!

The lightning was striking down like waterfalls. The bolts looked like dragons that had crawled out of the clouds and ghost hands that were reaching toward the ground, raising bluish fire on the earth!

The rain was much more than ‘pouring’. It was like another vast ocean in the sky was now running down because the sky was broken and was about to swallow the entire world!

The lightning was already appalling enough, but the fierce wind was even more appalling!

The fierce wind was the aftershock of the febrile typhoon. The spiritual energy inside that had nowhere to run to was savaging the land in blast. In the wind were the uprooted trees, the destroyed buildings, and the broken limbs of countless creatures. The wind was like a behemothic, invisible mincer that was mincing everything on the earth, leaving absolutely nothing behind!

Not just the ordinary people and the low-level Cultivators, even the experts in the Core Formation Stage and the Nascent Soul Stage did not dare ride their flying swords in such a thunderstorm.

If so, they would be the primary targets for the furious spiritual energy between the sky and the earth!

With the wind, the storm, and the lightning as the background, the flood in the Sorcerers’ River was on a rampage.

The Sorcerers’ River had undergone drastic changes compared to what Li Yao had seen four months earlier.

It should have been springtime. Many snowy mountains along Sorcerers’ River had thawed. The melted snow flowed down along the river, increasing the instant flow of the Sorcerers’ River by more than five years, leading to the unstoppable spring flood!

If the Sorcerers’ River, which spanned the entire Great Qian Dynasty, had been a sleeping dragon, then the ravenous dragon had fully woken up and was raging to claim sacrifices to fill its belly!

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The flood crests, each higher than the last, were crashing against the vulnerable dams on the two sides of the Sorcerers’ River. The defense rune arrays deployed in the heyday of the Great Qian Dynasty were releasing dim light. However, they had corroded and rusted after such a long time due to the lack of maintenance, and their defense ability was far worse than before!

If the dams were broken, the flood would be surging out. The Sorcerer’s River would even change its course altogether, leading to a large inundated area. The consequences could be dire!

That was the scene that Li Yao, Dan Fengzi, Yan Liren, and hundreds of empyreal swordsmen saw when they were on their way to the southeast to provide aid.

The flood, on the other hand, was not nearly the most dangerous thing at hand.

“Ho! Hoooooooo!”

Amid the surging tides raised by the flood, blood-freezing echoes would occasionally resound.

The flood destroyed not only the homes of the ordinary people and the Cultivators but also the valleys and forests in the basin of the Sorcerers’ River. A lot of ferocious animals that had been lurking in the forests were forced out!

Since the living environment of the animals had greatly changed, and the previous prey had been swept away by the flood, they could not help but look for new territory.

During their search, it was inevitable that they would have fierce conflicts with other ferocious animals and even the Cultivators!

“A lot of dragon-type animals are hiding inside the Sorcerers’ River. Be careful, everyone, and consider your safety your primary concern. Don’t do anything until we meet Master Righteous One and the fellow Cultivators from other sects!” Dan Fengzi roared desperately inside the storm.

Faced with the pugnacity of nature, there was not much that the Cultivators could do even though they often considered themselves brilliant. They could only watch the lightning, storm, wind, flood, and animals in the flood crashing against the feeble defense rune arrays on the dams time and time again.

“Leader, look over there!”

One of the empyreal swordsmen suddenly exclaimed and pointed at the flood. The tides of the flood were rising abruptly like a mountain soaring to the clouds.

When they looked carefully, they discovered a bright purple dragon-type animal that was almost a hundred meters long in the dirty flood. The front end of the animal even split into three hideous big heads. Each of the heads was packed with dense thorns that made them look like three gigantic iron thistles!

Pu! Pu! Pu!

The thorny dragon was quite weird. It opened its three bloody mouths and spat out three pearls the size of basins, which moved in the flood without meeting the least hindrance before they hit the dams brutally.

Boom!

A few defense rune arrays set up at the back of the dams exploded on the spot. The dams, which were already vulnerable enough, immediately revealed more than ten shocking cracks that were quickly spreading!

“What is this animal exactly? It looks like a Multi-Horned Bizarre Dragon, but why is it so large with three heads?”

“It has already accumulated three demon cores. Considering its enormous size, it must’ve been training deep inside the Sorcerers’ River for hundreds of years. It wouldn’t have surfaced had it not been for the once-in-a-hundred-years flood!”

“Horrible! Horrible! Another few crashes, and the dams will completely collapse. Let’s get out of here quickly!”

Faced with the ferocious animal that seemed to have travelled to the present day from the primeval era, the empyreal swordsmen were all petrified.

“Elder Spiritual Vulture!” Dan Fengzi’s face looked extremely awful, too. “I didn’t know that the natural disaster this time would be so tough. Just the flood of the Sorcerers’ River and the aftershock of the febrile typhoon alone are so powerful! I can’t imagine what the places that were in the paths of the febrile typhoons have possibly gone through!

“The dams are about to collapse. Let’s get out of here quickly. Should we get involved in the flood and have to fight against the lightning, storm, and flood, our souls will be shocked, and our Cultivation will plunge even if we are in the Core Formation Stage or the Nascent Soul Stage!”

Narrowing his eyes, Li Yao observed the shaking dams in front of him, but he was actually thinking about the farmlands and towns that he had seen when he passed the place for the first time on the flying sword.

This area of the Sorcerers’ River was the most prosperous land of the Great Qian Dynasty. Naturally, it was also the most populated place. The population in a town there was often larger than the population of a city in the southwest.

After the febrile typhoon landed, a lot of homeless victims had already fled westward along the Sorcerers’ River, further adding to the population of the towns and villages nearby.

If the dams collapsed, allowing the Sorcerers’ River to change course, it would spell the deaths of the thousands of homeless victims!

Li Yao could not wait and just watch such a tragedy.

However, with the temper and personality of Master Spiritual Vulture, he should not be a man who would fight for the ordinary people without considering anything.

Li Yao’s hesitation was misunderstood by Dan Fengzi, who frowned and said, “Elder Spiritual Vulture, are you planning to take the three extraordinary demon cores?

“You must not!

“This dragon-type animal is probably a mutation of a ‘Multi-Horned Bizarre Dragon’. Judging from the size, it has already trained inside the Sorcerers’ River for almost a thousand years. Chances are that it already existed before the Great Qian Dynasty was founded!

“Dragon-type animals are born with water. Right now, the surging flood has increased its ferocity. It is too risky to hunt it right now!

“If you are truly interested in the animal, we can always wait until it breaks the dams and escapes to the plateau. It will be much easier to be dealt with when it is stranded and the weather is better!”

Li Yao’s lips moved. He was of a mind to ask Dan Fengzi if the guy had ever considered the ordinary people living on the two sides of the Sorcerers’ River besides hunting the animal and taking the cores.

But he forced back the words before he said them out.

Dan Fengzi was talking so matter-of-factly as if he were considering Li Yao’s interests made him lost for words!

“Ho! Ho! Ho!”

Right then, the three-headed Multi-Horned Bizarre Dragon roared in the most deafening noise again. The three demon cores rushed out and, like three enormous magnets, attracted all the lightning nearby. Centered at the demon cores, three balls of lightning—one blue, one purple and one green—were formed!

Crack! Crack! Crack!

The balls of lightning expanded quickly in the wind and soon expanded to more than ten meters in diameter. The storm clouds around them were disintegrated into mist, which surrounded the lightning hazily, further adding to the invincibility and indestructibility of the balls of lightning!

Seeing that the three balls of lightning were about to crash into the dams, Li Yao was about to rush out to ‘slay the dragon and loot the demon cores’, his heart pounding faster than ever, when bold brilliance suddenly shot out of the dark clouds toward the multi-headed dragon overwhelmingly like burning golden arrows!

Chi! Chi! Chi! Chi!

Hundreds of arrows immediately hit the Multi-Horned Bizarre Dragon, riddling it with holes and making it bleed hard!

Because of the excruciating pain, the Multi-Horned Bizarre Dragon could only give up the dams and redirect the three balls of lightning toward the clouds!

Boom!

The balls of lightning tore apart the clouds and vanished into thin air. The only things left were three somewhat lackluster demon cores that were rotating in midair.

Above the broken clouds, a moon-white cassock, surrounded by a dim golden glow, was flapping in the wind, like a boat in the middle of a surging ocean.

Right above the cassock, a monk was standing.

He was possibly the most handsome man that Li Yao had ever seen.

It was not an exaggeration to say that he truly seemed to have been carved out of an entire piece of jade or marble, and nothing—even time, which could corrode everything—could detract from his handsomeness by one thousandth!

The only thing that slightly undermined his handsomeness was the vague bitterness that covered his face.

If one was to appreciate it carefully, the merciful bitterness actually brought his appearance to a whole new level, where one could not even feel jealous or inferior to him!

“Master Bitter Cicada of the Stupa Temple!” Dan Fengzi exclaimed in a low voice!