Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

2250 The Fleet Blessed by Darkness

The twisted faces of the guards and the foams on their mouths made them seem to be enshrouded in queer and zealous flames, depriving them of their original sanity.

It also seemed that something new had been injected deep into their brains, allowing them to show the air that was entirely different from the common Immortal Cultivators of the Li family.

The manager of the No. 3 space gate pointed his mini storm bolter at the guards subconsciously and stammered, “What-What are you doing?”

Before he pulled the trigger, the weapons on a couple of crystal suits on his opposite side emanated weird brilliance at the same time, and the mystic rays that entailed powerful spiritual energy of the fire class hit his right hand that held the gun simultaneously.

The powerful spiritual energy of the fire class dashed into the mini storm bolter instantly and led to the loss of control and explosion of the ammunition, blowing the manager’s right hand and the arm below the elbow into magma.

“Ahhh!”

Looking at his flesh that was quickly melting and spraying to the floor like orange mud, the manager screamed in excruciating pain.

He was not a battle-type Immortal Cultivator in the first place. Under the agony and the pressure of almost thirty crystal suits, he completely lost the determination to resist and fell on one of his knees. Holding his right arm that had been completely melted into a blackened, broken bone, he sweated heavily in pain and cramped nonstop, almost passing out in shock.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

There were two guards in the control center at the beginning, but they seemed to be on different sides with the guards who trespassed without order. Hardly had they drawn their storm bolters, meaning to counterattack, when they were blown back by the enemy’s stormy attacks. The pieces of their crystal suits splashed nonstop, until they crashed into the control panel of the space gate and turned into two dazzling sparks.

All the navigators, coordinators, and operators were so scared that their faces lost all colors. The control center was not spacious at all, and they had nowhere to run to. Having no other choices, they could only raise their hands and surrender.

The leader of the guards, the only guy who was not wearing a crystal suit, walked to the front of the manager who was shuddering with a pale face, observing the man coldly from the high stance.

“How… How dare you—”

The manager of the space gate realized the enemy’s intention from his cold eyes, but he found everything that had just happened too absurd to believe. His question was more like deep confusion than to reprimand.

“Life and death, honor and disgrace, are none of our concerns right now. There is nothing we daren’t do!”

The leader of the guards drew the saber, raised it high, and roared. The aura of the saber cut in the manager’s left shoulder like a lightning and went all the way down to the right abdomen, chopping the manager into halves!

Because many organs were still connected to his head, the manager of the space gate did not die instantly. While the world swirled before him, he saw everything on the surveillance light beam.

He saw that the rebelled guards led a dozen mysterious persons that he had never met before into the center, replacing the previous coordinators and operators of the No. 3 space gate.

Those newcomers were all well-trained professionals. They navigated the jump of the unknown starships so smoothly that their efficiency was even higher than that of the previous staff of the No. 3 space gate.

Under their flawless operations, more and more unknown starships leaped out of the void. Their jump points were so immaculate that they were neither so close to each other that they would affect or even overlap each other nor so far away that the enemy would have an opportunity to attack them separately. With the most appropriate distance from each other, they were able to gather into the most solemn battle formation the moment they got rid of the aftermath of the space-time ripples!

At first, they were all the stealthy models in black camouflage that did not show any sign. They were like crocodiles that were covered in mud.

As more and more “crocodiles” crawled out and gradually formed an indestructible battle formation, more and more huge arsenal warships and behemothic mothership barged into the area without any hesitation, not covering their existence at all, like the killer whales weighing tens of thousands of tons jumping out of the surface of the ocean.

Before he fell into the infinite darkness, the last picture that the manager of the space gate saw was the crocodiles, swordfishes, sharks, and giant whales launching colorful streaks of brilliance at the local garrison of the world.

The dozens of brilliant streaks were even and long, just like his soul waves and cardiogram right now.

Then, his soul completely dispersed into the vast sea of stars, and he could feel nothing anymore.

…

The Divine Rain Fleet was as chaotic as the No. 3 space gate just now.

As one of the most resourceful worlds in the dominion of the Li family, the defense of the Divine Rain Sector was certainly an important focus in the Li family’s strategies.

The equipment and personnel configuration for the Divine Rain Fleet were among the best in the hundred fleets of the Imperium nationwide.

But the critical thing was that, in order to build up the defense of the capital, the Divine Rain Fleet had just dispatched one-third of the warships to reinforce the capital. The reinforcing warships brought away tremendous ammunition and fuel and resulted in a few insignificant flaws on the local defense system of the Divine Rain Sector that could be fixed within twenty-four hours.

Who could’ve thought that the rebellions would march out at such an awkward moment?

The strength of the Divine Rain Fleet had been diminished by at least a third, but the rebellions had gathered the elites of the dozens of smaller worlds at the periphery of the Imperium who were commanded by Lei Chenghu, the famous “God of War”!

Besides, a war was not a game of numbers, and the final victory could not be decided by the advantages listed on a piece of paper.

In the war between the Imperium and the Covenant Alliance over the past hundred years, in order to preserve their strength as much as possible, the four Kurfürst families often asked the bumpkins and the miscellaneous troops from the edge of the Imperium to lead the vanguard as cannon fodder. After the cannon fodder paid great sacrifices and crushed the tough enemy, their own troops would arrive and claim the fruits of victory easily.

Then, a paradox was inevitably raised.

A fleet could only be built through fighting, and a strong troop could only be whetted by blood. Since the cannon fodder had always led the charge, and they had never been tested by the real iron and fire themselves, the elites of the four Kurfürst families often had only the most advanced starships but not the determination of fighting or abundant battle experience. They were nothing but decorative vases.

In the meantime, of a hundred cannon-fodder fleets, ninety were perhaps crushed, crippled, or even collapsed to the point that their designations were canceled.

But there were always ten cannon-fodder fleets that were relatively lucky. They would hone their claws and horns with the enemy’s blades in the cruel, hellish battles, swallow the enemy’s bodies to build up their own flesh and bones, and grow into the most fiendish creatures from cannon fodder quietly!

Unfortunately, the Divine Rain Fleet was a typical example of the former, whereas the coalition fleet of the Third Battle Area of the expedition army, represented by the Astounding Thunder Fleet, was a quintessence of the latter.

The Divine Rain Fleet was equipped with the most advanced and powerful starships of the Imperium, but they had been stationed in the Divine Rain Sector for decades. In name, the heavy responsibility to defend the sailing routes and the jump points was on their shoulders. But was any space pirate, extraterrestrial devil, or rogue blind enough to come to the Li family’s heartland to be killed?

Aside from in the regular drills that were getting slacker and slacker, the starships, which had installed the most advanced cannons of the Imperium at the cost of tremendous money and resources, had never been stained with a single drop of blood.

In the meantime, the commanders of various levels of the Divine Rain Fleet were almost all the descendants of the Li family. Many of them had a high Cultivation. Even the captain of an insignificant cruiser might be at the peak of the Core Formation Stage.

But their high levels were often piled by infinite Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures and high-purity crystals. They had never been through real tests. However fierce the internal competitions within the family were, and however vivid the trial fields were, like the “Land of Sins”, could they be compared to the frontline of the war where the entire universe was burning and everybody’s blood was simmering?

The Astounding Thunder Fleet was exactly their opposite.

It was a fleet of destruction that was a living example of the Immortal Cultivators’ creed, “survival of the fittest”.

Every starship of the fleet had been surrounded by at least ten starships of the Covenant Alliance once, before they broke the enemy’s siege with broken bodies.

Every person on the starships knew clearly that they had nothing to count on except for their fists, teeth, and blades.

They did not break into the Building Foundation Stage, the Core Formation Stage or even the Nascent Soul Stage in the training bases of their families that had a whole set of facilities and a standing-by medical team, but on the rough battlefield where they ate the enemy’s flesh, drank their blood, and perhaps with the enemy’s saber stabbed in their chest.

Ninety-nine of every hundred Immortal Cultivators who used to join the fleet had died in the onerous, ruthless battlefield, but their haunting will and their ravenous desires had turned into dark blessings that went to the last survivor, allowing the last of them to crawl back from the door of hell to swallow the whole world again!

Such a Divine Rain Fleet watched such an Astounding Thunder Fleet show up aggressively in astonishment.

“Enemy incoming!”

“Enemy incoming!”

“Enemy incoming!”

Such meaningless talks were echoing on every starship of the Divine Rain Fleet. Mixed with the alarms of the surveillance magical equipment, they were even more disturbing.

The natural reaction of the flagship was to ask for reinforcements from other worlds and the capital. But all the external communication was under serious interferences, and all the distress calls were mired in the chaotic whirlpools. There was no telling if they were delivered to the outside world.

Lei Chenghu was too experienced to let the garrison of the Divine Rain Sector send out distress calls easily. The first batch of troops to jump to the place already included a lot of interferential starships.

Li Linghai had also compromised a lot of signal bases of the Divine Rain Sector earlier and asked Li Yao to forward the accurate coordinates of the bases to Lei Chenghu. So, the first wave of interferential attacks was highly effective. The communication between the Divine Rain Sector and the outside world was almost immediately cut off.

When the Divine Rain Fleet finally gathered into battle formation in a haste and charged at the Astounding Thunder Fleet, one-fourth of the Astounding Thunder Fleet had recovered from the surging space-time ripples, one-fourth were slowly passing the gap of the four-dimensional space, and the other half were still being teleported.

Even the dumbest commander knew that it was the best if not the only opportunity to annihilate the Astounding Thunder Fleet.

But at this moment, the dozens of streaks of brilliance that the manager of the No. 3 space gate saw earlier, after leaving exhaust flames almost a thousand kilometers long in the vast space, appeared before the Divine Rain Fleet like a small meteor shower!