Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

Fei Qi gritted his teeth so hard that they were cracking. With intense hatred shooting out of his eyes, he said, “After having discovered that the scale of the strikes were extraordinary and the entire planet was about to be consumed, we immediately sent ‘medical teams’ from the Uranian Ring to heal them.”

Long Yangjun raised her hand. “Wait a moment. Heal them?”

“Yes. To treat their ‘strike complex’,” Fei Qi explained very solemnly. “In the knowledge of the Uranian Ring civilization, striking is defined as a highly-contagious mental disease, which is caused by the blend of the Earthly Brute’s nature of laziness and corruption, and the disobedience and desire of sabotage hidden deep inside their genes.

“It is a disease that only infects and attacks the Earthly Brute. The people of the Heavenly Light only hate that we don’t have enough time to work. We will never go on a strike.

“The explosive damage of the strike complex is very powerful. Once infected by such a disease, the previously hardworking, devoted members of the Earthly Brute become lunatics and monsters whose ravenousness cannot be satisfied, knowing nothing but destruction!

“Such a disease is infectious. In a large underground mine, as long as one miner contracts the ‘strike complex’, it often spreads out quickly after a very short amount of time. Ten, a hundred, a thousand… In a chain reaction, the number of infected grows exponentially!

“The strike complex not only seriously damages the Earthly Brute and turns the decent workers into useless cr*p—it also corrupts our entire civilization and destroys what we have established if it is left undealt with! Therefore, once discovered, the disease must be treated at once!”

“Is that so?” Long Yangjun asked. “How exactly do you treat this… strike complex?”

“The strike complex can be classified into different levels,” Fei Qi explained. “Generally speaking, ‘Happiness Serum’ of different intensities will be enough to heal them. However, if a patient is diagnosed by psychiatrists to possess a severe strike complex, they will be hopeless and can only be delivered to the hospitals at the forsaken mines in the deepest part below the earth for lifelong quarantine. Or, they can try routine, forced labor and see if there’s any chance to wake up the genes of diligence and devotion in their body so that they can be transformed from saboteurs and takers to someone useful to society and the whole civilization.

“Because the intensity of the latest strikes was unparalleled, we sent a medical team of a fairly large scale. Also, the situation was quite urgent. The strike complex was quickly spreading in the crowd. Our civilization was in peril, so we were forced to resort to some radical medical approaches.

“The idiotic members of the Earthly Brute did not know that we were rescuing them. They were resisting and even killing our ‘doctors’ while we were performing the mandatory therapy sessions!

“Just like that, the strikes turned into riots!

“We were not scared of the riots of the Earthly Brute before. Most of the magical equipment was under the control of the Heavenly Light. Also, the members of the Heavenly Light had been taught the most elegant and graceful battle techniques since they were born. How could the members of the Earthly Brute be a match for us with nothing but their bare hands and their physical strength?”

“Wait!” Heaven Battering King Qi Changsheng said solemnly. “Shouldn’t a lot of excavation magical equipment be involved during the exploitation of mother lodes? Vibration pickaxes, blast drills, crystal dynamites, and other large magical equipment can all serve as weapons. They can dig open even the hardest rocks. Can a person’s skull be harder than those rocks? How on earth could the members of the Heavenly Fiend be ‘barehanded’?”

“You might now know this, senior, but the Uranian Ring Planet was a military base of the Star Ocean Imperium ten thousand years ago,” Fei Qi explained. “The shallow mother lodes that were suitable for large-scale exploitation had all been drained with nothing left back then.

“Right now, if we want the minerals, we can only move down deeper underground.

“The environment there is harsh. The air is dirty, the tunnels are narrow and ragged, and there are all kinds of ferocious animals that can sabotage the large mining magical equipment. The minerals there are often lousy, full of impurities, and cannot be exploited on a large scale. They can only be dug out from the soil manually through labor.

“Therefore, in our underground mines, large mining magical equipment has never been used, and even the small mining magical equipment such as blast drills and vibration pickaxes are barely used.

“In most cases, the members of the Earthly Brute simply collect the resources with their hands and their brute force.

“Those members of the Earthly Brute have more brawn than brains in the first place. The scholars and doctors of the Heavenly Light have also spent thousands of years building up their bodies. Through the refinement and modification of various secret techniques, they have all been transformed into beings as tough as iron with infinite strength.

“We have also optimized and improved some fundamental Cultivation arts, such as the ‘Iron Body Arts’, ‘Copper Arm Arts’, ‘Eagle Claw Arts’, and so on. The members of the Earthly Brute are asked to practice them from a young age. As a result, their arms and palms undergo mutations and replace the mining magical equipment such as blast drills and vibration pickaxes. The excavation has a higher efficiency and is more adaptive. The cost is lower, too.

“After thousands of years of mining underground, their bodies have been getting stronger and stronger, and their hands are more and more powerful. Deep below the mother lodes, with the radiation of the crystals and the scourge of the ferocious animals, some highly dangerous rogues can emerge. They are often the carriers of the latent ‘strike complex’!

“If that was all, everything would’ve been under our control.

“How could the abnormal bodies and claws, resulting from the crude, beginner-level techniques such as ‘Iron Body Arts’ and ‘Copper Arm Arts’, be a match for our crystal suits and warships?

“Before, many large-scale outbreaks of the ‘strike complex’ and even the following insurgencies had been ‘cured’ by us easily.

“But we didn’t know that it was not a spontaneous riot this time—it was one fomented by the most dangerous she-devil from the Star Glory Federation!

“The she-devil Ding Lingdang had long snuck into the underground mines among the oblivious, gullible members of the Earthly Brute!

“She claimed to be bringing dignity and hope to the Earthly Brute. She instigated the desire to sabotage and destroy hidden deep inside the blood of the Earthly Brute with the bizarre theories that she had brought from the Star Glory Federation!

“What—what—what was even more horrendous was that she brought brand-new training techniques to the Earthly Brute. The techniques that did not require any magical equipment to trigger the maximal damage possible, the techniques that belonged to the ‘body fundamentalists’!”

Heiye Lan, who had been holding her breath listening just now, could not help but exclaim, “Body fundamentalists!”

Body fundamentalism was a concept generated after the modern Cultivation civilization was born. Meng Chixin, Qi Zhongdao, and other Cultivators from the Ancient Sages Sector did not know what ‘body fundamentalist’ meant exactly.

However, Heiye Lan, with her knowledge from the Imperium of True Human Beings, naturally knew the horror of such a type of Cultivator.

How terrifying the body fundamentalists, who were too proud to use any magical equipment or weapons and were bold enough to challenge any enemy with their bare hands and tough body, could be!

“Nobody foresaw that the Earthly Brute and the techniques of the body fundamentalists would fit so well!” Fei Qi said desperately. “The most petrifying, destructive power had already been hidden deep inside their blood after thousands of years of modifications and radiation. The only problem was that they did not know how to trigger it in the beginning.

“Ding Lingdang brought an entire system of the body fundamentalists’ training techniques and publicized them for free. After only a few years, they spread to every corner of the Uranian Ring Planet like wildfire!

“In just five years, more than a hundred thousand ‘body fundamentalists’ who mastered extraordinary battle skills and trained their hands into lethal weapons had emerged in the Earthly Brute!

“Those body fundamentalists established a resistance organization in secret, and Ding Lingdang was the leader of the organization. When we were ‘curing’ the riot, we did not expect the assault of thousands of body fundamentalists at all. They captured a hundred shuttles that were used to commute between the Uranian Ring and the ground, and they launched an attack on the Uranian Ring, the very symbol of our civilization!”

All the Nascent Soul Stage Cultivators and Divinity Transformation Stage Cultivators were listening attentively.

Heaven Battering King Qi Changsheng, who had spent his entire life slaying authorities and rebelling, was beaming with great interest. He slapped his thigh and said to everybody through a discrete technique, “Good one! What a she-devil Ding Lingdang is! This woman is tougher than most men!”

Li Yao swallowed and calmly asked, “Did Ding Lingdang succeed in assaulting the Uranian Ring with thousands of body fundamentalists?”

“Not in the beginning.” Fei Qi shook his head and said, “The Heavenly Light had lived on the Uranian Ring for thousands of years. It had been modified to the extent that it was impenetrable. Also, a lot of crystal suits and starships were stationed there. It was not something that a few thousand beginner-level body fundamentalists could take down. They occupied a certain section of the circular orbit for only ten days before they were driven away by our government!

“However, to this moment, we still failed to realize that Ding Lingdang was a federal Cultivator from a foreign land with ill intentions.

“There were a lot of rumors in the Earthly Brute, depicting her as a three-headed, six-armed almighty. Naturally, we would not believe such folly easily. We thought that she was also a member of the Earthly Brute, locally born and raised, except that she was lucky enough to find the legacy of the body fundamentalists below the earth!

“We also failed to realize that she had led thousands of body fundamentalists to attack the Uranian Ring not in order to completely occupy the Uranian Ring but to seize the enormous antenna arrays on the Uranian Ring so that she could send the precise coordinates of the Uranian Ring Sector to the Star Glory Federation and guide the way for the first fleet from the federation!

“When the riots on the ground were about to be completely ‘cured’, the first fleet from the federation appeared at the periphery of the Uranian Ring Sector out of everyone’s expectation. We—we were truly caught unprepared!

“The five-year war between the Star Glory Federation and the Uranian Ring Sector thus broke out!

“In terms of starships, the Uranian Ring was originally a super large dock of the Star Ocean Imperium. Our starship technology was reasonably good, too. Although we had yet to launch cross-Sector space voyages, we should’ve been more than capable of defending the homeland of the Uranian Ring Sector.

“However, our enemy was not just the fleet of the federation, which was jumping from the foreign land incessantly, but also the rioting and rebelling members of the Earthly Brute on the ground!

“The fleet of the federation bombarded from space, and all the minerals and resources on the ground to be shipped were sabotaged by the mobs. More and more mines were taken over and began transporting resources to the enemy instead. We were under attack from both inside and outside!

“Just like that, after five years of war, we finally couldn’t hold out any longer. The mobs of the Earthly Brute, those filthy, humble, stinky, and stupid miners, under the lead of Ding Lingdang and the support of the Star Glory Federation, completely took over the Uranian Ring, the symbol of the glory of our civilization!”