Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

When Zhao Zhenwu woke up again, his wife had already left. The small house was already cleaned up without any trace of her and their son at all.

Zhao Zhenwu sat on the bed in a daze for a long time. For some reason, he touched the pistol on his waist.

His medals and his saber had all been stolen, but nobody wanted his pistol that was a standard weapon for generals. Perhaps the gun was as worthless as the generals in the capital right now, was it?

Zhao Zhenwu took out the mini storm bolter and touched it carefully next to his thigh. The light reflected from the barrel somewhat boasted weird attraction, alluring him to open his mouth and put the gun into it…

Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!

Somebody knocked on the door.

Zhao Zhenwu shuddered and threw the pistol far away as if he had an electric shock. Calming himself down, he asked, “Who is it?”

“Old Zhao, it’s me.”

A familiar voice said sullenly from outside.

He opened his door, only to discover that it was He Peng, his fellow general in the Seminar of Generals.

When the Immortal Cultivators were absolutely confident about themselves, they would naturally compete with each other openly and in secret.

But when they were in a battlefield fighting on the same planet or even in the same trench, they sometimes could also become best friends.

It was especially so when they had all been heavily wounded and pushed into the fire pit that was the Seminar of Generals. There was nothing in them that could be taken advantage of anymore. So, their friendship was rather pure!

Immortal Cultivators were human beings too, and they could be quite loyal sometimes. This guy, He Peng, had similar experiences to Zhao Zhenwu. The two of them were good friends when they were still on the battlefield and now even closer comrades in the desperate situation.

Zhao Zhenwu was rather anxious to see He Peng, thinking that the man had learned the conflicts between him and his wife and came to offer consolation.

However, his good brother looked too devastated for that. Frowning, he asked, “What happened?”

He Peng sighed heavily and shook his head, “Zhou Lifu is dead. His death was quite miserable.”

“What?”

Zhao Zhenwu was greatly shocked.

Zhao Lifu was also their fellow in the Seminar of Generals. He was a notorious, brutal man at the peripheral worlds in the first quadrant since decades ago.

The man used to be a gladiator and had a high Cultivation. It was said that he had a glorious accomplishment of thirty-five consecutive victories. In his peak, he once reached the beginning level of the Nascent Soul Stage and was known as “Ghost Butcher”!

In the Seminar of Generals, Zhou Lifu was also a very famous student. The man was outspoken and had a lot of friends. He was more or less a central person of all the students.

It never occurred to Zhao Zhenwu that he would die so abruptly.

“Old Zhou was different from you and me. I am all by myself and do not have any concerns. You have a wife and a child, which is not very burdensome. But Old Zhou had five sons, and all of them had shown talents in training. They all needed abundant resources for their growth.”

He Peng walked into the room, sat down, and slapped his thigh. “As the saying goes, a half-grown boy can easily bankrupt his father. Now that five boys are waiting to be fed in his home, how could Old Zhou’s subsidies and allowances be enough?

“The future of the kids is certainly important. Having no choice, he could only go back to his previous business. He somehow reached out to an underground arena and went to the games again.

“Sigh. Did he think he was still the ‘Ghost Butcher’ decades ago? After so many years of battles, what could he butcher now? With the stimulation of drugs, he managed to win two games. Last night, he encountered a tough person. Attracted by the large sum of the prize and also under the promise that he would get the money even if he failed as long as he fought another round, he was beaten to death in the arena!

“Damn it. How majestic and daunting the ‘Bloody Butcher Legion’ he established with the eight hundred gladiators used to be! He was not killed by the Covenant Alliance after so many years of perilous battles, but he died such a worthless death in the capital!”

With mixed feelings, Zhao Zhenwu couldn’t help but feel truly sorry for the guy who had similar experiences to him.

“That’s not all of it—”

Wiping his eyes, He Peng said, “After the dead body was carried to the home, his wife immediately changed. She did not burst into tears or make a fuss but even thanked the staff of the arena. When everybody had left and it was almost dawn, she almost left the world together with the five sons and Old Zhou!”

“Ah?”

Zhao Zhenwu was greatly surprised, almost forgetting that he put a barrel into his own mouth a moment ago. “How could she be so silly? Were they saved?”

“Thankfully, one of their debtors went to kick their door before dawn and discovered them in time. They are all fine.”

He Peng said, “But even if they are saved for now, so what? The pillar of the family is gone, and the family will soon collapse. What are the five little guys going to do in the future? Are they going to stay as ‘hominoids’ because of the lack of resources?

“Right now, all the fellows in the Seminar of Generals are at Old Zhou’s. Old Zhou used to be a good friend for all of them when he was alive. We are discussing working together and taking care of his family after he is gone. If he did not live peacefully, he should at least rest in peace, right?”

“Exactly!”

Zhao Zhenwu declared, “Let’s go together. I don’t believe that so many generals are not enough to give a comrade a proper funeral!”

The two generals of the Imperium packed up and walked to Zhou Lifu’s cottage in the thirty-sixth district.

He Peng naturally noticed Zhao Zhenwu’s anomaly too, and he asked what was troubling him.

Too embarrassed to confess that his wife had eloped with somebody else, Zhao Zhenwu simply said that his familial saber was stolen.

The two of them walked forward gloomily and soon reached Zhou Lifu’s alley.

At this moment, the alley that was no more than three meters wide was already packed with the surplus generals.

The black, gray, and brown uniforms covered the ghost-like humans. The atmosphere was particularly solemn and depressing.

Deep inside the alley, some women seemed to be crying. Zhao Zhenwu was so upset that he somehow recalled his own wife again.

Shaking his head, he looked around and discovered fellows that he was familiar and unfamiliar with everywhere. Most of them were in as much destitution as he was. Somebody was sighing, some were gnashing their teeth, some were angry, some were whispering to one another, and some were nodding their heads at Zhao Zhenwu and He Peng, as if they had made some sort of secret pact.

Zhao Zhenwu and He Peng squeezed into the crowd. Suddenly, they heard some people roaring desperately apart from the cries, reciting what sounded like a poem or a suicide note. Vaguely, they heard the same shouting,

“The warriors killed in the battlefields, the wandering souls in the universe, open your eyes and watch the bloody noble families built on your bones!

“You are killed for nothing in the frontline, your family is starving in the rear, but the corrupted officials and the noble families are still living the most extravagant life with your flesh and blood!

“Who will pity you? Who will remember you? Who can protect your innocent family? Let the storm blow harder to cover your miserable cries!”

Clenching his fists, Zhao Zhenwu asked in a low voice, “Who wrote this?”

“No idea.”

He Peng shook his head. “A certain dour and gloomy general, perhaps. A lot of people are writing and singing these days. What else can we do?”

The two of them went through a lot of trouble to squeeze into the memorial hall, only to discover Zhou Lifu’s widow kneeling on the ground in white, stunned. The five little guys next to her were all somewhat overwhelmed. They were all bulging their eyes observing the “generals” around them, who were supposed to be awesome.

A female officer was comforting Zhou Lifu’s widow in a low voice. There was no telling what sorrow she triggered, but Zhou Lifu’s widow suddenly burst into tears again and cried, “I don’t want to die either. I want to live a good life too! But sister, how can we survive? And how can we live on?”

Her words were exactly everybody’s pain. After a long daze, the female officer cried together with the widow.

The cries spread out contagiously like a virus. The weirdest thing that had probably never happened in the history of the Imperium of True Human Beings took place. In the dilapidated alley, hundreds of Immortal Cultivators began to sob one after another as they recalled their own misfortunes.

In the atmosphere, even Zhao Zhenwu and He Peng shed a few sincere tears.

When everybody was weeping sadly, an officer in the crowd suddenly said aloud, “We are all honorable warriors of the Imperium. The Imperium is already corrupted to such an extent, yet we are doing nothing more than a few secret cries in this place?”

Since there were too many people, and the light was too dim, it couldn’t be told who exactly was speaking.

Somebody argued, “We have neither the men nor the guns. Most of us are heavily wounded and have lost most of our Cultivation. Even if we want to contribute to the Imperium, what can we do except to weep for it?”

The first officer said, “Even if we can do nothing but to cry, we should not cry here stealthily, because nobody will know even if we cry ourselves to death. If we are going to cry, we should go to the gate of the Council of Elders and cry openly and shockingly to make all the people of the Imperium know what happened to us!”

The second officer continued to argue, “Everybody knows that the capital is under curfew right now. The elite troops of the four Kurfürst families have surrounded the Council of Elders. We will be discovered, dispersed, and captured when we are a hundred kilometers away from the Council of Elders. How can we possibly cry ‘shockingly’?”

“Everybody—”

The first officer finally stood out to the top and spoke in fury, “Fellow Cultivators, brothers who have been through life and death together, the highest authorities are disposing of us to such a degree that we cannot hold it anymore! What happens to General Zhou today will happen to all of us tomorrow. Are we really going to wait and die without doing anything to fight back?

“Yes, we are utterly unarmed, and we do not intend to start a rebellion. But we have no livelihood right now and are mired in sheer destitution. Let’s rally to demonstrate to the highest authorities and express the will of the people. Do you not even have the guts to do that?

“The Council of Elders is heavily guarded. Naturally, we cannot go there. Then… Right, the Emperor’s Mausoleum. Let’s go to the Emperor’s Mausoleum and cry before Blackstar the Great, the ancestor of the Immortal Cultivators, as well as all the previous monarchs of the Imperium of True Human Beings. We will tell them how we are wronged and ask the soul of Blackstar the Great to make things right for us!”