Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

“Why are you looking at me in such a way?”

Li Yao was perplexed by Li Jialing’s eyes. “Why am I sensing intense ‘sympathy’ in your eyes? What’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

Li Jialing closed his eyes and said solemnly, “I just want Brother Yao to know that whatever path I eventually choose and whoever I will become, I will never forget that you are my… family. In my heart, you weigh even heavier than the queen. I consider you as my big brother sincerely, and I just hope that you are safe… well, and healthy, all the time.”

“Is that so?”

Sensing Li Jialing’s sincerity, Li Yao grinned. “I regard you as my little brother sincerely too. All in all, Little Brother, do not be enchanted by the she-devil Long Yangjun, and do not push yourself too hard when you have just encountered some minor darkness and difficulties. Let’s just focus on one thing at a time. Saving the world can be put aside for now. You can try to give a hand to whoever needs help first. That will be a good start. The bottom line is, Brother Yao is confident in you. I believe that you will perceive the essence of the Cultivators’ ideas one day and become an even better Cultivator than me!”

“Maybe.”

Li Jialing said, “I need to travel, observe, and think more before I choose my final path. Only in such a way can I rush on my path without looking back!”

While talking, the two of them had reached the deepest part of the town.

It was a rock wall hundreds of meters tall that was filled with caves, making it look like a honeycomb. Every cave was around five meters in diameter and blocked by fences made of vines. Oinks were echoing from inside.

The locals of the underground town were carrying abundant mosses, veins, and fungi, sometimes even broken minerals, into the caves. It could be easily told that their burdens were very heavy. Their bones and veins were all protruding, and they looked rather painful.

Very soon, the people inside the caves poured their mosses and vines. Then, they carried out buckets of stinky excrements. Their burdens were finally more or less relieved, and the pain on their faces was replaced by the usual numbness.

Li Yao and Li Jialing were both honorable guests of the place. The locals did not even dare to make eye contact with them, much less stopping them from entering the caves. They simply lowered their heads and passed by the strangers quickly.

The two of them entered a random cave and immediately saw dozens of rock worms that had been raised.

It was true that rock worms were more like fat piglets than worms, except that they were slightly narrower and longer. They could be three meters long and two meters in diameter, like oval meatballs.

It seemed more appropriate to call them “rock pigs” than to call them “rock worms”.

Li Yao did not know if the rock arms had any hooves or claws in the beginning, but he could not see any organ that could be used for movement right now. Perhaps they had all been blocked by the flaccid fat.

They were a species of animal with extremely low mobility, like the sloth. Crouching deep inside the cave like statues, they were not moving at all. Li Yao suspected that they could not find any food on their own at all.

The oinks turned out to be not their moans but the sound of breathing from the air hole on the top of their heads. Those silly and lazy animals were too sluggish to even moan.

The locals ground abundant mosses, vines, and fungi into pieces, mixed them with the minerals which had been pulverized, and tossed the food into the trough. Then, a few rock worms wriggled over unhurriedly. On their fat and eyeless head, a cross slit apart and spewed out thousands of white threads, tying up the food into balls and pulling it back into the cross. For them, that was the way to take in food.

While the rock worms were devouring food, the locals bypassed them and searched for their turquoise-colored feces inside the cave. They were cleaning every corner carefully without leaving any.

Some of the locals were scrubbing the rock worms hard with brushes that had a long handle. Li Yao thought at first that they were cleaning the rock worms before butchering them, but when he observed more carefully, he discovered that he was wrong. The locals were simply massaging the rock worms!

It could be easily seen that the rock worms were almost the only source of income for the residents of the 10,084th district. Their care for the rock worms couldn’t have been more meticulous.

Li Jialing told Li Yao that the rock worm was a type of excellent edible animal that had been genetically refined on a large scale in the Star Ocean Republic ten thousand years ago. The earliest researches could even be dated back to the Demon Beast Empire that was best at biochemical technologies.

The rock worms could absorb tens of thousands of roughest ingredients, including the minerals that contained tremendous microelements, and transform them into fat and proteins, providing the nutrition that was necessary for the survival of human beings in the harshest environment.

The rock worms were treasures from inside to outside. Because of certain genes of spiders and silkworms that were integrated into them, the threads with which they covered their food were also the best raw materials for the textile industry. Also, they would exuviate every year, and their ecdysis could also be made into light and warm leather coats.

Also, the feces of the rock worms were natural fertilizers that barely needed any purification. They could be applied to most plants, mushrooms, and mosses, allowing people to domesticate wild plants into crops with high yields.

It was safe to say that when human beings colonized in an unknown area, as long as they brought rock worms, they would be able to settle the critical problems of “clothes” and “food”. Such animals would also lay a solid foundation for the development of agriculture too.

However, because of the excessive genetic modifications on “polyphagia” and “usability”, the rock worms were growing fat and proteins all the same. As a result, their mobility and hunting abilities had been weakened to almost zero.

It was a life created in the laboratory. On the premise of its current characteristics, it could barely get used to the harsh life in the wilderness. Therefore, they could only stay in the pen and be raised by human beings.

When the underground shelters were devised in the Star Ocean Imperium ten thousand years ago, there was naturally a whole set of automatic feeding facilities that were extremely advanced and accurate, ensuring that the “meat factory” could output products incessantly, starting from the reproduction of the rock worms to the readily-edible meat that was sealed in the cans on the assembly lines. The whole process did not require much supervision of workers and breeders.

However, as time went by, the automatic feeding facilities in the past had long run out of energy and were gone for good, and the knowledge to culture the rock worms at the beginning was lost too. The locals of the underground world today could only raise them in the most primitive ways.

Since the rock worms could grow so much fat, they naturally had a huge appetite. Unable to find food on their own, they counted on the locals to collect mosses, vines, fungi, and minerals before grinding them and tossing the food into the trough. Such physical labor could be very tiresome. A couple of healthy adults must work for an entire day to keep only one rock worm fed.

Also, to ensure that the mosses, vines, and fungi grew in the underground world, the locals had to toss the feces of the rock worms into the crevices and tend to the various crops carefully. The underground world was not suitable for any crop in the first place. Even the tiniest cluster of mosses had only grown because of the irrigation of blood and sweat of the locals.

Because the real automatic feeding families were broken a long time ago, the rock worms were not adapted to the environment deep inside the cave. Therefore, somebody must rub their body day and night and force them to move and exercise. Otherwise, black spots would soon grow out of the rock worms, which meant that the flesh and blood inside had all necrotized and were no longer edible.

Those works took up 99% of the time of 99% of the locals. It was even safe to say that the entire 10,084th district was dependent on “rock worms”.

According to the numbers of the stalagmites, stalactites, and caves on the wall that he had seen just now, Li Yao quickly calculated the ratio of the rock worms to the residents here, only to discover that the rock worms seemed too many for the population of the 10,084th district. Even if the animals were all butchered for food, the residents wouldn’t be able to eat all of them. Wouldn’t their lives be much easier if they kept fewer rock worms?

But Li Jialing shook his head and told Li Yao that he did not know the whole story yet. Like Li Jialing said a moment ago, although the locals were keeping so many rock worms, they did not often have the privilege to have meat. It was not bad at all if they could cut a piece of meat into pieces and mixed it into their porridge.

Most of the rock worms, after exuviating three times and turning completely mature, would be carried to the upper towns, namely the four-digit towns numbered between 1,000 and 9,999, in exchange for precious energy, civil magical equipment, and weapons.

The residents of the 10,084th district were not completely ignorant barbarians after all. They still retained the basic language and culture. Some of their magical equipment and rune arrays were still functioning. They also craved to know what the worlds up above were like. Their resources and fuel had to be traded with rock worms. But as it happened, synthetic food prevailed in the upper worlds, and rock worms could not be sold at a good price. Even a couple of rock worms might not be enough to be traded for a standard magazine of bullets.

Even if they gritted their teeth and did not purchase any magical equipment or energy, there was at least one indispensable thing that they had to buy from the towns up above, which was the freshly compressed air as well as the components to repair the air circulation and filtering system.

In the towns tens of thousands of meters below the ground, despite the most enormous and effective ventilation system to introduce the fresh air from the surface of the planet all the time, it was still very suffocating and depressing, filled with all kinds of lethal gases.

If the wastes exhaled by human beings condensed too much, everybody was likely to be choked too.

Therefore, the underground residents could abandon all magical equipment, including the illumination rune arrays above their heads, to become ghosts in the darkness, but they could never abandon the air circulation and filtering system.

Once the air circulation and filtering system broke down, they also needed to release highly-compressed fresh air in time to buy themselves the precious time for maintenance.

A lack of air was even scarier than a lack of sunlight. It would really be a catastrophe.

It was exactly what the residents of the four-digit towns took advantage of. They pegged the relevant components and the compressed air at an extremely high price, and dozens of rock worms could only be exchanged for a tiny can of compressed air.

Therefore, what the residents of the 10,084th area farmed and herded every day was not just what they wore and ate but also the air that they could not live without for one minute!