Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

“Mom!”

Before Xu Yulan was able to distinguish the difference between ‘Star Glory Federation’ and Imperium of True Human Beings, she had already been pushed out of the examination area in confusion. The next second, her daughter jumped on her, crying and laughing while holding her arms.

Her head was still not quite clear after just being unfrozen, but she did check her daughter from head to toe carefully and pinched her daughter’s round cheeks to make sure that her daughter was safe and sound. Finally, she took a long breath in relief.

Somehow, seeing that her daughter was laughing so carefreely, Xu Yulan felt that her nose was stuffed as if two sprouts were growing inside. She felt that she was somehow wronged.

“Yan Zi, how did you wake up earlier than me? How long were we asleep?”

Xu Yulan grabbed her daughter without letting go of her and looked around warily, as if the ecstatic crowd in front of her eyes were just a ridiculous mistake and the rigorous Immortal Cultivators would show up anytime to regroup them into a solemn army with iron sticks and electric whips again, snatching her daughter away from her and freezing her daughter again in the hibernation cabin.

Xu Yulan had every reason to be suspicious because there was a gap of multiple levels between her and her daughter. Her daughter should not have been unfrozen before her.

In the fleet of immigrants from the Imperium of True Human Beings, everybody was classified into different levels according to their value.

The Immortal Cultivators were naturally on the highest level. They were entitled to the fastest starships, the safest hibernation cabins, and the most abundant resources.

The hominoids had different ‘prices’. A ‘level-three pioneer’ like her counted as a very useful talent that was close to the sequence of specialists. Her rank was slightly higher, and she would be kept at the central part of the fleet. Should they encounter any danger, she would be one of the ‘important strategic resources’ that were only secondary to the Immortal Cultivators and still worth protecting.

Her daughter, Yan Jinzhi, did not have any special skills. It was only because she qualified as a level-three pioneer and her husband served in the warship as a servant to a Building Foundation Stage Immortal Cultivator that her daughter was given the right to escape from that hell.

Other than her parents, the only leverage that her daughter was her age. She was young and healthy and had a higher possibility of giving birth to strong offspring. Nothing more.

In the fleet of immigrants, her daughter belonged to one of the lowest ranks and had boarded a different starship from hers.

Should they be faced with insufficiency of resources or an incoming catastrophe, the starships at the periphery where her daughter was would be the first to be abandoned.

Even if new worlds that were worth being colonized were found, according to the standard procedure, the first to be unfrozen and released were the battle legions made of the Immortal Cultivators and their servants, the second were the construction teams that she was part of, and the young men and women who were ‘temporarily useless’ would not be set free until years later when the environment in the new world had been completely stabilized according to the total number of resources.

Her daughter turned out to have been unfrozen earlier than her, and she even appeared so happy. Together with the dream-like scene around her, Xu Yulan could not have been more perplexed.

Blinking hard, she finally found that her daughter was wearing a tiny Rising Dragon of the Nine Stars badge on the chest, too. There were also the words ‘Star Glory Federation’ beneath it, except that another bigger word was further below it—’Volunteer’.

“It’s been a hundred and seven years since we entered hibernation. We have cruised to the border of the explored universe. This is indeed a new world like we have never seen before!”

Yan Jinzhi held her chest high proudly and pointed at the Rising Dragon of the Nine Stars badge and the word ‘Volunteer’, saying lightheartedly like a little sparrow, “Mom, I was woken up two weeks ago. I am a volunteer in the fleet now to help those who are woken up later like you to figure out what happened and start a new life in the local country, the Star Glory Federation!”

“It’s been more than a hundred years…”

In a trance, Xu Yulan was caught in mixed feelings.

She had never tasted the feeling of a super-long hibernation before. It had never occurred to her that a hundred years would pass after she closed her eyes and opened them again. She could not help but wonder how her hometown, the Green Dragon Planet in the Wild Wolf Sector, was doing, how the Green Valley Fortress that she built up personally looked, and if the apple trees that had been burnt down in the war had grown again.

However, instead of reminiscing about the past, it was more important to plan for the future.

‘Volunteer’ was a new term for her. She had never seen such a glowing face on her daughter, either.

In her mind, her daughter was always a dutiful, if not meek, little girl who needed the protection of her hands that could drive the heavy magical equipment weighing a hundred tons.

Her daughter had only woken up two weeks earlier, but why did her daughter become so… so…

Xu Yulan thought for a while but failed to come up with an appropriate adjective because she had never seen such radiance on her daughter’s face or the face of any ‘hominoid’ before.

At this moment, the last few words that her daughter mentioned finally caught her attention.

So, there was a country at the edge of the cosmos named the Star Glory Federation. Then—

“The Star Glory Federation has surrendered to the Black Wind Fleet, and this place is now territory of the Imperium, right?”

Xu Yulan knew the style of the Immortal Cultivators very well. The outside probably had nothing but dilapidated buildings left, and she would have to spend the new few days clearing the debris.

Out of her expectations, her daughter shook her head quickly and said, “There was indeed a battle, but we failed. The Black Wind Fleet has surrendered!”

“Well…”

Xu Yulan’s mouth was half open, not knowing what to say.

Losing a battle was not a new experience for her.

Perhaps the high and mighty citizens of the Imperium living in the Empyreal Terminus Sector believed in the empty talk that the Imperium of True Human Beings was invincible. But for she who was born and raised at the border of the Imperium which the Imperium and the Covenant Alliance fought over repetitively, this was not the first time that she had heard news of failure.

After the goriest debacle more than a hundred years ago, they had even lost their entire hometown, the ‘Wild Wolf Sector’, and had to flee in a hurry with the Wild Wolf Fleet.

Before they escaped any further, they had been swallowed by the Black Wind Fleet in what was claimed to be an ‘internal reshuffle’ and listened to the order of the Black Wind King ever since.

Right now, even the Black Wind Fleet had been defeated and surrendered to a new superpower. Xu Yulan felt that her mind was in a mess, wondering what she belonged to exactly, the Wild Wolf Sector, the Black Wind Fleet, the Imperium, or the federation?

She had seen how terrible the people captured by the Covenant Alliance became after being modified in the ‘holy temple’, but the ‘Star Glory Federation’ did not give her such an impression.

After pondering for a long time, she held her daughter’s hand and asked hesitantly, “How is your father? Do you have any news about him?”

Yan Jinzhi nodded hard. “Yes. Dad is on this planet, but he and all the soldiers are in the ‘rebirth school’. They have to go to class and do labor activities. They are not allowed to go out without permission, but I’ve spoken to dad through video chat. He is fine and has not even lost a single hair!”

“Rebirth school?”

Having received high-level education on magical equipment for more than ten years, Xu Yulan was certainly not an ignorant housewife. She immediately realized what it was after brief consideration. “You mean a captive camp?”

“It’s not exactly a captive camp.” Yan Jinzhi hurried to explain. “Mom, rest assured. The starship that dad served on was somewhere else beyond the Star Glory Federation and did not participate in the war to attack the federation. I’ve asked around. It was a ‘battlefield uprising’, and they are different from captives.

“Also, dad is a hominoid. Right, we cannot say ‘hominoid’ here. As an ‘ordinary soldier’, he certainly should be treated differently from the Immortal Cultivators.

“According to the officials of the federation, the Star Glory Federation is a country of Cultivators that appreciates general equality of all people, whether or not their spiritual roots have awoken. All the ordinary soldiers in the Imperium of True Human Beings were ‘cannon fodder’ in the first place and people who were deceived and oppressed most. They will learn a lot of new ideas in the ‘rebirth school’ and spread the ideas throughout the entire Black Wind Fleet!

“Right now, when dad talked to me, he told me that his life in the ‘rebirth school’ is quite good. He’s learned knowledge that he’d never heard of before and considered questions that always escaped his attention. He said that even the Cultivators think very highly of him and will train him to be a teacher so that he could go to other ‘rebirth schools’ and tell more soldiers of the Imperium about the sufferings of our ancestors.”

“Cultivators…”

Naturally, Xu Yulan understood the meaning of the word. While the Imperium of True Human Beings considered the Alliance of the Holy Covenant their No. 1 enemy, the Star Ocean Republic established by the Cultivators was the Imperium’s antecedent after all. How could the current regime be justified without elaborating on the corruption of the former regime?

Therefore, in the education that Xu Yulan received, the Cultivators were described to be hypocritical, sanctimonious, shortsighted, idiotic, and selfish people who buried the future of the entire civilization just to satisfy their own sense of justice.

Xu Yulan had never considered if such a theory was correct.

The end of thinking was free choice. If one was unable to control their fate freely, what was the meaning of thinking?

But right now, a few rusted gears seemed to be rolling squeakily inside Xu Yulan’s head, giving her the urge to think and making her want to explain everything that she had experienced during the half hour after she woke up.

Licking her lips, Xu Yulan raised another question. “Where—Where are we exactly?”

“Boneyard!” her daughter replied. “The federation has prepared three settlements for us, namely the desert in the Water Crystal Sector, the primitive forest in the Forest Ocean Sector, and the wildness on Boneyard. We happened to be allotted to this place.

“This is a planet far away from the homeland of the federation. Although there is nothing here for now and we have to work from scratch, the gravity and temperature here are agreeable enough. We also have an atmosphere and the relics of ancient civilizations. So, it is a rather acceptable planet!

“Right, very soon, this place will no longer be called ‘Boneyard’, which is really an awful name. It will restore the name it had more than a hundred years ago, ‘Ultimacy’. We will even develop this place into the eighth or ninth Sector of the Star Glory Federation. It will be the Ultimacy Sector!”