Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

Li Yao stared closely at the blackened body again, but he still couldn’t tell whether it was poisoned or had been drained up by a certain extremely dominating art. He couldn’t help but frown. “Why do you say that it was intoxicated by a poison that was planted a long time ago?”

After a brief hesitation, Dongfang Wang said, “Everybody in the world knows that His Majesty is heisted by me, and that I am coercing other people into following me with the help of His Majesty’s authority. But if I say that His Majesty actually trusted me very much, and because he was concerned that somebody was going to murder him, he acted together with me to fool everyone, and he in fact came to my place to seek protection, would you believe me?”

“Wow. So, that is the truth. Of course I will believe it!”

Li Yao said, “As it turns out, Prime Minister Dongfang is truly selfless and devoted to the country. You are a loyal subject to His Majesty, as pure as a lotus flower!”

Dongfang Wang coughed and said, “Fine. That might be an exaggeration. But His Majesty and I were truly not entirely opposite. In many cases, the two of us had to cooperate. He needed to suppress the other three Kurfürst families with my power as well as the unstable factors within the court, including Li Linghai!”

Li Yao asked, “Was His Majesty dissatisfied about the queen?”

“Not dissatisfied, but intimidated!”

Dongfang Wang said, “His Majesty had the deepest fear for Li Linghai. According to him, in recent decades, especially after the outbreak of the Imperium’s counterattack, Li Linghai had been changing more and more significantly. Sometimes, she was completely like somebody else, one that creeped him out and made him barely able to stand on his feet.

“Not worrying that he might be laughed at, His Majesty said that he and Li Linghai hadn’t slept on the same bed for almost thirty years. He was even physically incapable as a man whenever he met Li Linghai. However, he was still as vigorous as before when he was with his other concubines, and it was not difficult for him to do it ten times a night.

“Also, His Majesty said that Li Linghai often wandered in the royal palace late at night stealthily. There was no telling what she was up to at all. His Majesty was of a mind to investigate, but Li Linghai sometimes just vanished into thin air.”

“Wait.”

Li Yao raised his hands and asked, “Vanished into thin air? What do you mean by that?”

“Nobody knew how Li Linghai did it. The royal palace was an important focus of the four Kurfürst families’ surveillance, with cameras and our spies everywhere. By logic, nobody should be able to sneak around inside the royal palace.”

Dongfang Wang said, “However, it is said that the royal palace of the Imperium of True Human Beings was established on the relic of the royal palace of the Star Ocean Imperium from ten thousand years ago. Although the world has changed significantly, it is possible that a lot of secrets are still buried below the ground.

“Years ago, when Blackstar the Great supervised the construction of the royal palace, he regarded the place as the last base of resistance for the Imperium of True Human Beings. Therefore, the underground part of the royal palace is very spacious, with abundant mazes, arsenals, and entrances to world fragments, connected by secret tunnels and teleportation arrays. There are also astonishing defense arrays and complicated traps that can stop the experts in the Nascent Soul Stage or even the Divinity Transformation Stage.

“It is said that Blackstar the Great summoned hundreds of thousands of Cultivators for the construction of the ‘underground palace’. Those Cultivators were mostly the war captives during the collapse of the Star Ocean Republic. Blackstar the Great promised that they would be pardoned as long as they built the ‘underground palace’, and that they could live a new life in the Imperium of True Human Beings as Immortal Cultivators.

“But out of their expectation, after the ‘underground palace’ was really established, Blackstar the Great simply killed the hundreds of thousands of Cultivators in the underground palace and transformed their unrested souls into extremely powerful defense arrays. Ever since then, hundreds of thousands of restless ghosts have been haunting the underground world of the royal palace, whose secrets are only known by the emperors of every generation. Then, after a few emperors died abruptly while they were on the throne, the secrets of the underground palace were known by none.

“The four Kurfürst families are naturally intrigued by the secrets of the underground palace too, but our four families have been checking and balancing each other. Nobody wants any other family to get the secrets ahead of themselves. Also, it was simply too difficult to excavate the entire underground palace. One moment of carelessness and the crust of the entire planet might experience drastic changes. The ecological equilibrium will be gone. The environment will be too harsh for the survival of mankind. Since the consequences are severe and the returns are few, the issue has been put on hold for a long time.

“According to Emperor Shenwu, Li Linghai seemed to have grasped a way to travel freely in the underground palace, which was highly suspicious. Naturally, I conducted investigations in secret. It was not until then that I discovered the traces of the ‘reformists’ and realized the tip of the iceberg of Li Linghai’s ambitions.

“But at that time, I still did not know that Li Linghai’s goal was so huge and her methods would be so seamless and brutal. I thought that she was just another woman who intended to bring disasters to the palace and the court, like many other women did in the past five hundred years.

“Therefore, I only made use of regular approaches and wanted her to ‘die of diseases’ in order to maintain the dignity of the Imperium, while I captured her in secret to interrogate her for the secrets of the underground palace.

“As for His Majesty, since he came to seek my protection, it would have certainly been impolite of me to turn him down when he walked into my trap voluntarily.

“I meant no harm to His Majesty. However, his head was overwhelmed by the victories in the Imperium’s counterattack, and he had grown too egoistic, with ambitions that he could not bear at all. As the prime minister of the Imperium, I was naturally obliged to teach him a lesson, calm him down, and make him realize the reality, in case he was taken advantage of by the malicious guys.

“However, the arrest operation targeting Li Linghai did not go well. What we caught was just a stand-in. The real Li Linghai had long escaped.

“Having no other choices, we could only poison the stand-in and plan to announce the demise of the queen, trying to lower the threat of Li Linghai to the minimum in such a way. But little did we know that we still underestimated her tremendously.

“His Majesty, on the other hand, had been well ever since he received my protection. But after the outbreaks of the ‘cannibal training incident’ and the ‘incident of the Blood Oath Alliance’, when I was most anxious and caught unprepared, all the liquids in his entire body were vaporized in only half an hour without any sign, reducing him into such conditions. Not even the slightest soul remained.

“At that time, several doctors and Meditation Healers were with His Majesty and performed first aid immediately. They injected a hundred dosages of medical drugs into His Majesty’s body, but none helped. There seemed to be a mini black hole inside His Majesty’s body that sucked him up!

“Not earlier, and not later, His Majesty died such an uncanny death right in the middle of my most troubled time. It was obvious that somebody set me up and wanted me to take the blame! It’s true that I can’t explain His Majesty’s death even if I have tongues all over my body. There’s nothing I can do except to wait to die now!

“Such carefully-arranged schemes and such vicious drugs couldn’t have been prepared by anybody other than Li Linghai, could they?”

“However—”

Li Yao asked, “Why did the queen do that? Why did she kill her sovereign and husband?”

“Perhaps it was because His Majesty knew too many of her secrets and was even considering abolishing the queen. Or perhaps it was simply because she wanted the four Kurfürst families and even the entire Imperium to fall into mayhem!”

Dongfang Wang said, “Like you said just now, as long as the Dongfang family gives away tremendous interests and welcomes Emperor Shenwu back, it will still be possible for the four Kurfürst families and the reformists to strike a balance, which is perhaps not what Li Linghai wants to see. What if her purpose is exactly to cast the Imperium into chaos?

“Emperor Shenwu had been on the throne for sixty years, which was a long time even among all the emperors of the Imperium. He was emperor for sixty years in peace naturally because the four Kurfürst families were all relatively satisfied with the current distribution of interests, and there was no need to replace him with somebody else.

“It was also for that reason, and because the focus of the Imperium in the past twenty years was war, that not even a crown prince had been nominated.

“Before, the four Kurfürst families were all thinking to postpone the nomination of the crown prince until the war was over. By then, the crown prince would be a condition in the deals regarding the distribution of the interests in the postwar reconstruction.

“But with the emergency right now, after the demise of the emperor, the four Kurfürst families and the reformists are immediately at loggerheads.

“For the reformists, your slogan is ‘Honor the Majesty and Settle the Rebellion’. Now, even His Majesty himself has been murdered by the rebellions. It is impossible for you to let go of the culprits, and you wouldn’t consider your cause accomplished until you annihilate the entire Dongfang family, right?

“For the Dongfang family, many secondary branches could’ve shown up and cleaned the mess. As long as my branch is sacrificed, it is possible to sustain the whole family. But everything is unknown now that such a terrible thing has happened. Chances are that all the remaining forces of the Dongfang family will jump out for a desperate counterattack!

“For the other three Kurfürst families, they naturally all have their candidates for the crown prince, and they will support the spokespersons of their interests.

“We are in the unprecedented changes in the history of the Imperium now. In both the frontline and the rear, the interests of all fields are being reshuffled. If one family’s puppet becomes the emperor, they will certainly hold great advantages and even replace the Dongfang family as ‘First Family’!

“Therefore, the competition for the new emperor will certainly be fierce!

“Li Linghai is so vicious that she certainly has other moves. With a few tricks, the three Kurfürst families will burst into a great fight against each other.”

Although the man was speaking in a hurry, he had recovered the computational ability of the prime minister of the Imperium while he analyzed the whole thing.

Li Yao sweated hard and felt that his heart was cold.

“I’m still baffled.”

Li Yao mumbled, “What can the queen benefit from the chaos of the Imperium?”

“I don’t know what Li Linghai can gain from the chaos.”

Gritting his teeth, Dongfang Wang struggled to say, “I only know that if the Imperium remained in peace and you passed the transition period of power without any disasters, Li Linghai would forever be an insignificant queen. As time went by, it would be less and less possible for her to stir any trouble. In the end, she would only perish like dust without any sound!

“Having done so many things through so much trouble, she would never want to perish like that. Never!”