Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

Under the cold starlight, above the orbit of the third planet that was not far away from the Martial Meritocrats Planet, a small space gate made of an array of eighty-eight star beacons in the form a rhombus was revolving slowly and emitting lackluster redness.

Centered at the space gate that looked like a bloody diamond, void ripples flooded out of the vacuum, and starships jumped to the Martial Meritocrats Sector like whales and giant squids that had just surfaced from the deep ocean.

The lightning trident emblem on the head of their starships looked even creepier under the illumination of the red light, suggesting that they were all from the Imperium of True Human Beings.

The Martial Meritocrats Sector was not a world that could sustain itself.

Because of years of experiments on advanced magical equipment and techniques, the only habitable planet in the region had been scarred and reduced to a mess, making it absolutely impossible to maintain a stable ecological system and a material and energy recycling system.

Although there were some experimental plantations in Manjusaka and the enormous Heavenly Rail, it was far from enough to meet the demand of all the Immortal Cultivators, sinners, and biological weapons.

Therefore, countless carriers shipped assets from every part of the Imperium to this place, transmitting the daily necessities to Manjusaka.

Perhaps because the ‘epic quest’ had been activated and a soul-stirring space battle would break out very soon, an even greater number of carriers were moving between the Martial Meritocrats Sector and the heartland of the Imperium during the recent couple of days. Perhaps some of the most advanced warships under the disguise of ‘carriages’ were hiding among them!

The carriers large and small from different worlds in a myriad of shapes and styles swarmed toward the ‘tentacles’ that Manjusaka extended into space. Each of the tentacles was an enormous space port.

But none of the carriers noticed that a crystal suit that was almost transparent was standing in the vacuum right next to them and observing them coldly, as if it had been completely melted into the dark space.

The almost transparent crystal suit was surrounded by a unique twisting field that blocked all scanning and detection. Even though a few alarm satellites of the Imperium just brushed past it, they failed to discover its existence.

Li Yao stared at the space gate for an hour and a half before he finally locked onto a target.

He did not want to sneak into Manjusaka directly because he did not know what defense measures the Immortal Cultivators had. Even his Cultivation of the Divinity Transformation Stage was not enough to break into a space fortress by brute force.

The carriers of the latest models that were large and elegantly designed, protected by luminous spiritual shields, were not his prey. After all, he was going to sneak aboard from space. It would be practically impossible for him to avoid their attention.

The old, ragged carrier that seemed to have just been scourged by a cosmic storm was his best target.

Making up his mind, Li Yao turned into an almost invisible ripple and moved at the carrier that had the logo of a black bear painted on its flank. Like a dry leaf or a dandelion, he landed on the rear of the target starship next to the spurts of the power rune arrays.

The temperature in the spurts area was well above five thousand degrees, mixed with all kinds of violent radiation and particles. Li Yao would not have been able to last a few minutes in the past, but he was now as comfortable as if he were drinking iced beverages in the cool breeze on a summer day.

Li Yao smiled and stuck his hands against the shell of the old carrier. His telepathic thoughts turned into waves, leaking and expanding into the engine compartment of the old carrier.

Closing his eyes, he moved his soul out of his body and flooded into the carrier along with the waves in his palm. Every tube and every crystal wire in the engine compartment was clearly displayed inside his brain before they were connected to each other quickly and established a perfectly accurate virtual model of the engine compartment.

Li Yao’s guess was correct. The unfortunate carrier had indeed encountered an unexpected cosmic storm soon after it left the mother port, which had seriously damaged the starship.

The evidence was the liquid metal fixers that had filled the gaps and holes everywhere on the shell of the starship.

Although such fixers boasted a lot of advantages, such as flexible forms and rapid consolidation when exposed to air or a vacuum, they could not maintain their solid form for long and therefore could only be used as temporary materials in emergencies.

Generally speaking, after a voyage, all the fixers would need to be cleaned after the damaged vehicle was pulled into a dock before they were replaced with legitimate materials whose durability was better.

The sea of stars was always treacherous. Nobody would dare joke with their lives. Therefore, the liquid metal fixers must have been spurted out recently.

Also, almost all the power units in the engine part were showing signs of being overloaded. Several power units were on the brink of collapse and would reach the tipping point at any moment.

It meant that the commander of the carrier had just performed very violent operations, say, competing against a cosmic storm and struggling to get away from its pull.

It was truly the most perfect prey.

Li Yao’s telepathic thoughts, like vipers in the vacuum, snuck into the most severely damaged and the most unstable power unit, where he focused his attention interfering with the circuits of spiritual energy that were already on the verge of short circuiting. In the meantime, he crushed dozens of sensors inside the power unit so that the crew members in the engine compartment would not notice anything wrong with the power unit on the operation interface of their crystal processors.

All the values on the operation interface were normal. In their ignorance, the crew members even thought that victory was close at hand after seeing Manjusaka not far away. They were all relaxed and put on a smile now that the heavy burden had been removed.

Right then…

Boom!

The power unit that Li Yao had messed with exploded. The high-energy fuel was spurted everywhere, leading to a series of explosions that even spread to the shell of the carrier. A devastating hole was formed, and scraps, fuel, and severed limbs of the crew members darted out like a spring.

“Damn it! Another explosion!”

“Put on the fire. Repair the damage immediately. Hurry up!”

“The f*cking cosmic storm!”

The entire carrier fell into chaos once more. The damage control team began their action in an orderly fashion. First of all, they prevented the fire and the fuel from further spreading with high-density antifire foam. Then, abundant liquid metal that looked like gel was sprayed onto the damaged parts, where it froze into a silver shell immediately. In the end, a large batch of fully-armed crew members moved toward the explosion area, cursing and complaining.

The level-seven carrier of the Imperium named ‘Black Bear’ seemed to have been haunted by bad luck ever since it encountered a cosmic storm soon after it set sail. Four minor explosions had already taken place. The members of the damage control team were already used to it.

None of them realized that a fiend a hundred times more dreadful than the explosion had already snuck into their starship under the cover of fire, smoke, and poisonous gas.

Leaning against the wall in a corner where fire and poisonous gas were surging, Li Yao did not even bother to look for a hideout.

On this ragged carrier, the best of the Immortal Cultivators were only in the Refinement Stage or the Building Foundation Stage, and those in the Core Formation Stage were few to none. It was almost impossible for them to discover Li Yao at his level.

After he snuck into the starship, the speed and efficiency of the expansion of his telepathic thoughts were further improved. He figured out the overall structure and the distribution of the passengers in the blink of an eye.

It was a rather shabby carrier even for the standard of the Star Glory Federation. In front of the engine compartment were four enormous warehouses. Below the warehouses were the asset and fuel areas. Further ahead, there was the rest area for the crew members and the bridge. Only from the bridge did Li Yao detect several auras that were rather impressive, but they did not pose any threat to Li Yao.

All that attracted his attention were the goods in the warehouses. They were not regular goods but about a thousand human beings, curled up inside hibernation cabins like babies, their faces in pain and their bodies twisted and covered in frost.

The hibernation cabins that they were using were also rusty and ragged, surrounded by thick, spiral tubes. They were even less developed than the cabins in which the Black Wind Fleet carried the immigrants and seemed more like narrow iron coffins.

The thousand iron coffins were placed on two sides of the warehouses neatly. Illuminated by the pale light, they gave out a creepy air of horror, as if the place was a weird cemetery in space.

Li Yao noticed that the warehouses had been scourged by the cosmic storm, too. Many tiny meteoroids had broken the defense of the carrier and pierced through almost a hundred hibernation cabins. The hibernators inside them were already deformed and lost their lives.

Every hibernation cabin was connected to a small crystal processor, on which a thin light beam was floating.

Li Yao submerged part of his telepathic thoughts into one of the crystal processors and read the information on the light beam curiously, only to discover a few rows of simple data.

“No. 11546, female, forty-four years old. Health: good. Guilty of instigation, insurgency, and jeopardy to national security.”

Then, there was her physical data, but not too many personal features were involved. They were only used to prove the health level of her body.

Dazed, Li Yao continued to sense the female inside the hibernation cabin whose hair had turned white with wrinkles all over her face even though she was only forty-four.

He could tell at first glance that the female’s spiritual root had not awoken. She was a standard ordinary person, or in the words of the Imperium of True Human Beings, a ‘hominoid’.

Li Yao could not understand how a hominoid whose spiritual root was not awakened could commit a crime that jeopardized the national security of the Imperium of True Human Beings.

The remaining hundreds of hibernation cabins were the same. Those sealed inside were mostly ordinary people whose spiritual roots had not awoken. Their genders and ages varied, but most of them were brawny young adults. Despite their impressive body figures, their tendons and joints were slightly twisted, which suggested that their bodies were not formed by working out but came from years of heavy work.

All of them had similar crimes: instigation, insurgency, and jeopardy to national security. They did not have names but only cold numbers.