Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

2255 Old Patriarch!

“Are you not ashamed to call your family?”

The angry old man who looked very similar to Li Linghai bellowed, his lips trembling hard, “What have you done?”

“According to the four Kurfürst families, I am already a dead person. Had it not been for the accidents, you would announce the death of the queen to the public in a few days, wouldn’t you?”

Li Linghai said with a smile, “What can a dead person, a haunting ghost, do? Nothing but revenge, of course. Don’t you agree, father?”

“You—”

Li Mingxuan, Li Linghai’s father, was more than infuriated. His eyes were almost condensed into coals that would cross the few Sectors between them and burn his daughter’s skin and soul into ashes. He gnashed his teeth and said, “To think that you still know that I’m your father! Do you have any idea how your actions will destroy everyone in our bloodline.”

“Of course I know you are my father, but do you still remember I am your daughter, father?”

Li Linghai said gloomily, “When my clone was attacked in the capital, you couldn’t have known that it was just a clone, and you must’ve thought that it was myself, didn’t you? What did you think back then? Just watch your daughter die without doing anything?”

Li Mingxuan was immediately lost for words, the wrinkles and muscles on his face cramping at the same time.

Last second, he seemed to be venting all his fury and hatred on his daughter, but next second, he lost all his momentum and hope and could only say in frustration, “Tell me what happened to Ah Feng? Why is there no message of him after the riot in the Martial Meritocrats Sector? Was… Was it done by you?”

“Father, do you know why you are still just an elder of the Li family after more than a hundred years and probably will forever be one for the rest of your life?”

Li Linghai chuckled. “Your biggest problem is your hopeless blindness. I wonder what you saw in Li Lingfeng who was as stupid as swine, and why you devoted so many resources to him!

“I reminded you again and again that the swine was not worth investing, and it would only waste the resources that our bloodline had accumulated through all the trouble for hundreds of years. There would be no comeback for us, and other brothers and sisters would be affected too.

“But you never listened to my advice. It’s great now. The battle to destroy the Cultivators in the Martial Meritocrats Sector was a debacle and a great joke streamed to the entire Imperium, mortifying the Li family and, in particular, your bloodline!

“Is such a swine qualified to stay on and continue to waste the resources of the family? Even if somebody did kill him, it would be a timely stop of losses for us. Why are you so bothered?”

“You… You… It was really you!”

Li Mingxuan’s eyes immediately turned purple, and his fingers that were pointing at Li Linghai were shivering too. “You have lost your mind. You have truly lost your mind!”

“Exactly. Since the moment you poisoned my clone, I have already been completely out of my mind.”

Li Linghai continued smiling. “Do not piss off a lunatic without a good reason, because lunatics do not care about the logic or the consequences of their actions.”

“I’m really regretful.”

Brutality beamed out of Li Mingxuan’s eyes, but he could only protest helplessly, “I shouldn’t have sent you into the palace. I shouldn’t have…”

“Then, just step aside and regret. You are as much swine and garbage as Li Lingfeng, and you do not deserve to waste my precious time.”

Li Linghai said casually, “I know that all the uncles and elders of the Li family are monitoring this route of communication right now and that the leader of the family must be behind you. Instead of wasting your time with me when you know you can’t make any decision, why don’t you ask the leader to talk to me in person?”

Narrowing his eyes hard, Li Mingxuan declared, one word after another, “It’s impossible! You are now the greatest traitor and enemy of the Li family for the unpardonable crimes you committed. You may have invaded the Divine Rain Sector because of luck, but so what? The elites of the family will soon march back to the Divine Rain Sector and cut you into pieces in honor of the rules of the family!”

“Is that so?”

Slightly frowning, Li Linghai covered her nose and sneezed softly. “Achiu!”

Li Mingxuan immediately changed his face, because Li Linghai sent a short video over when she sneezed.

The video was watched by the big shots of the branches of the Li family clearly.

In the video, a starship whose spiritual shield had run out and whose plate armor was riddled with holes was being obliterated by bombardments.

In only 0.1 seconds, before Li Linghai’s sneeze was over, the starship had been completely destroyed into glittering dust under thousands of brilliant pillars of light.

At one corner of the video was a hundred grids of smaller pictures. Inside each grid was a prisoner locked on the starship. All the prisoners were sweating hard in panic, their faces pale.

As the starship exploded, the prisoners were also swallowed by fire and vaporized into ivory nothingness before they had the chance to scream.

“I do not like your tone, father, so I have performed a minor punishment.”

Li Linghai said with a smile, “That starship of the Divine Rain Fleet seems to be loaded with the core descendants of the Li family who are all the bloodlines of the uncles and elders here. As to exactly whom their parents and siblings are, I really don’t have the time to distinguish it. Why don’t I send the detailed video over shortly, so that you can confirm it on my behalf, father?

“Listen, father, I do not want to see your stupid face or hear your unconstructive voice anymore.

“I have captured more than a hundred starships just like the one a moment ago. From now on, I will blow up one starship as well as everybody on board every minute, until the leader of the family is willing to come out and talk to me.

“If you make any meaningless sound, I will blow up one extra starship, until all the starships and all the captives are killed. Are we clear?”

Li Mingxuan almost went mad in fury. “You—”

Li Linghai put on a cruel smile and raised two fingers from her delicate, carefully-maintained hand. “Two. You have killed another two starships of descendants of the Li family. Please go on.

“It doesn’t matter to me. I am a dead person after all. What can a dead person possibly be interested in other than dragging more people to go to hell with her?”

Li Mingxuan was completely stunned.

Then, he was blurred by colorful bubbles.

When the bubbles dispersed again, the slightly obscure shadow on the light beam already turned into a hunched old man in black, with a mountain of wrinkles on his face that made him look like the janitor of the underworld.

Li Mingxuan was himself a white-haired old man, but the newcomer in black seemed five hundred years older than him. The guy was almost a breathing fossil whose ability to walk was questionable.

Even though he looked like a rock that might collapse at any moment, and even though his facial organs had been drowned by the wrinkles, when the glittering eyes deep inside the wrinkles were occasionally revealed, they would impose such a strong sense of threat that even the experts in the Nascent Soul Stage would chill and sweat hard, as if the shell that might be gone in the wind at any moment was hiding a soul that had swallowed innumerous monsters.

The old man was exactly Li Jiande, leader of the Li family, one of the four Kurfürsten of the Imperium of True Human Beings, and a dominator of the universe whose cough could shake dozens of planets!

Li Jiande was the oldest of the four Kurfürsten. He was even one generation older than Dongfang Wang, the current Prime Minister of the Imperium, and a hundred years ago, he had been the Prime Minister for thirty years.

When he was at his most powerful, he once controlled all the affairs in military, politics, and the royal family entirely on his own. The arrangement for Li Linghai to become the crown princess and even the queen was also his decision and done under his supervision.

In his prime days, he once entered the legendary “Divinity Branching State”. With the computational ability a hundred times more powerful than the super crystal processors, he handled everything related to the Li family neatly and expanded in every field on a large scale. He even led the Li family to challenge the Dongfang family, the most powerful family of all.

It was a pity that his ambitions were too huge, and the Li family’s comprehensive capability was notably lower than the Dongfang family’s. The result of the arduous calculations and competitions was that his soul and his life were too seriously exhausted, making him fall back to the peak of the Divinity Transformation Stage after staying in the Divinity Branching State for decades.

It was said that a lot of sequelae had been left because of the over-exhaustion of the brain. He had to sustain himself with the drugs extricated from the Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures, and he was no longer the charismatic man he used to be.

Even so, even though he had been away from politics for decades and did not have a place in the royal court, everybody knew that Li Jiande still had great influence in politics, economics, media, and many other fields. He was one of the four well-deserved “crownless kings”.

Although Li Jialing seemed old, if not dying, after a hundred years, and even if a gentle breeze might blow out his incomplete soul, nobody inside or outside the Li family had the courage to challenge his authority as long as his viper-like eyes were still glittering.

That was because everybody still remembered clearly how cunning, cruel, and terrifying “Silver Fox” Li Jiande was when he dealt with his enemy a hundred years ago!

Li Jiande, as the leader of the Li family and one of the four Kurfürsten, faced Li Linghai, queen of the Imperium.

The grandfather and the granddaughter stared at each other in silence.

“Your Grace.”

Eventually, it was Li Jiande who opened his mouth first. Taking a long breath, he finally said, “Forgive me for not being able to perform the full etiquette due to my old age and my diseases. Cough, cough. Cough, cough, cough, cough.”

He coughed hard, as if he were going to pass out.

Li Linghai smiled. “Grandfather, the queen has already died. Standing before you right now is just a common member of the Li family and your biological granddaughter. Why do you think etiquette is needed?”

“Is that so?”

Li Jiande waved his hands, and a muscular guard nearby immediately delivered a spittoon to him. The “Silver Fox” in the past coughed and caught his breath after a long time, before he finally went on, “Then, why is my beloved granddaughter here?”

“For the future of the Imperium and the future of the Li family!”

Li Linghai’s eyes shone, and her white hair moved automatically as she declared, “I’m here to realize grandfather’s lifelong wish to let the Li family defeat the Dongfang family and become the ‘First Family’ of the Imperium of True Human Beings!”