Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

“A rat and a scumbag can also be useful under the right circumstances.”

Li Wuji continued to teach his adjutant who was also a half disciple for him. “Space pirates gather and disperse unpredictably, yet they can cause great sabotages. They are like annoying flies that hum next to your ears all day and can be a great distraction.

“If you try to hunt those rats and scumbags, you may not be able to catch all of them, but as long as they begin to resent you, they will jump out and seek revenge from you in the next ten years there is a chance.

“Think about it. If such people are recruited by the Business Alliance of Ten Thousand Sectors and the reformists, who invest tremendous resources to arm and upgrade them, what great trouble will they grow into?

“Therefore, the ‘National Protection Army’ we established is not expected to have a great performance. It will be worth it as long as they are not inclined to the Business Alliance of Ten Thousand Sectors and the reformists.

“Besides, those scoundrels are adept at certain things that the regular army is not good at or unable to do due to their identity. If we use them well, they can be an army that catches everyone unprepared in both the war between the four Kurfürst families and the reformists right now and the competition within the families for me and your father to rise to higher places!

“Trading their loyalty with the resources of the family is always a great bargain no matter how questionable the loyalty is.

“One more thing. It’s true that I think highly of this Bai guy. He seems different from regular space pirates. How is the investigation on his identity going?”

“There’s no result yet.”

The adjutant shook his head. “His identity is truly mysterious. I’ve searched the official file databases of dozens of Sectors, but none of them contain the information of such an expert. It’s almost like he jumped out of nowhere.

“Is that so? That’s quite understandable.”

Li Wuji said, “The peripheral worlds of the Imperium have always been messy and disordered. Even the strongest family of Immortal Cultivators may be demolished, with everybody killed, in the blink of an eye. Those who luckily survived will also escape further into the space without leaving any information, as if the family had never existed.

“However, I have studied many of his battle cases and found the hint of the regular army in his tactical style, which indicates that he is probably associated with the army. Perhaps his father was a serviceman? All in all, he is neither from the family of space pirates nor with the rebelling reformists, and he should naturally be on our side.

“Boss Bai can’t be his real name, and his hideous face right now must’ve been carefully devised too. But it doesn’t matter. Up until so far, I can’t find any reason why he would betray me. Standing on our side is his best choice. He can’t be crazy enough to piss off the reformists and the four families at the same time, can he? Hahahaha!”

“You do have a point, my lord.”

The adjutant said, “Whoever he was in the past, now that he has cooperated with us and razed the Blue Sky Market, he has declared war on the Business Alliance of Ten Thousand Sectors and the reformists, and he can only take our side to be my lord’s dog now!”

“Yes, that’s quite right, but I’m not putting a hundred percent trust in him either.”

Li Wuji said, “I’ve left a few spies in the twenty-nine pirate gangs that make up the ‘National Protection Army’. On the other hand, the half fleet that I entrusted to the Bai guy’s disposal will supervise him. Should he have any anomaly in the conquest of the Seven Seas Grand Market, the half fleet and the spies in the pirate gangs will teach him a good lesson about ‘loyalty’.

“My plan is absolutely flawless. What’s there to be worried about?”

The adjutant nodded his head and filled Li Wuji’s cup with hot water.

“Right—”

Sipping the hot tea, Li Wuji suddenly said, “How’s the intelligence work on the Cultivators going? The Cultivators have caused quite a fuss in the peripheral worlds of the Imperium. A lot of information has come from various channels. Even the Bai guy told me a lot just now. Even a minor trouble can be quite tricky when it happens at a critical moment.

“The Cultivators’ fleet attacked seven military warehouses in the Red Fat Space Zone and disappeared after plundering tremendous assets.”

The adjutant said, “We don’t know whether they are upgrading their warships with our military assets, preparing for another big job, or it is an even worse possibility—that they have truly been recruited by the Business Alliance of Ten Thousand Sectors.

“In my opinion, the regular Cultivators are not a big deal at all. Just a bunch of worthless mobsters. But that ‘Fist King’ Lei Zonglie is truly an extremely dangerous person, even more dangerous than this shameless Boss Bai.

“That’s right. ‘Fist King’ Lei Zonglie escaped from the Land of Sins of the Martial Meritocrats Sector. Getting to the bottom of it, wasn’t the dead man Li Lingfeng to be blamed for everything?”

Li Wuji said after a long sigh, “That pair of siblings is really interesting. The brother founded the Land of Sins and started the slaughter stream, only to broadcast the magnificent killing spree of the Cultivators to all the people of the Imperium. Not only was it a great humiliation for all the Immortal Cultivators, but he also let the crushed members of Starlight run loose. As a result, the tides of Cultivators have been breaking out nationwide in the past year. Even many Immortal Cultivators found their beliefs collapsed after watching the great collapse of ‘Manjusaka, the City in the Sky’.

“The sister, on the other hand, is even more ‘incredible’. She has changed from the queen of the Imperium to the leader of the reformists and the temporary archon of the Imperium, about to swallow her family back. The Li family has truly suffered a lot. Otherwise, it would’ve been unnecessary for us to recruit all those flies, bugs, and rats.

“Are those siblings the heaven’s punishment for the Li family?”

The topic was too sensitive. Even though Li Lingfeng had died and Li Linghai had rebelled, Li Wuji could comment on them, but his adjutant, as a junior, did not have the courage to. He simply chuckled in acknowledgment.

“Alright, just go now. Let the captain perform a space jump after sailing to the designated steady area. I’m going to take a nap. There will be no need to wake me up.”

Li Wuji adjusted his chair, transforming it from a hard seat to a soft gel-like bed, before he lied down.

His adjutant quietly cleaned up the tea utensils and left the room.

Since he was on his own flagship, Li Wuji relaxed quickly and forgot the discomfort he had when he was dealing with the space pirates. But when he was half asleep, he was dwelling in new annoyance again.

It was not exactly about the Cultivators.

Even though the Cultivators did have a leader like “Fist King” Lei Zonglie, they would be no trouble in front of the powerful Imperium even if they were ten times stronger.

His concerns were not even the reformists or the Covenant Alliance.

After all, the reformists were too shallow and short of soldiers. They might have seized the capital, but so what?

In the past hundred years, after the rise of the four Kurfürst families, the heart of the Imperium had been beating more and more slowly in the first place. The symbolic significance of the capital’s fall was much greater than the actual significance.

Of course, the Empyreal Terminus Sector where the capital was at was a unique convenient intersection of space jumps. Losing it would increase the trouble for the Kurfürst families to communicate or gather their fleets, but there was nothing too severe.

As for the Covenant Alliance, it had been crippled in the great expedition in the past two decades, and it was an even lesser problem.

What Li Wuji was worried about was still the internal relationship of the four families.

The four families were both friends and foes. Before every new emperor ascended to the throne, a storm of blood had always been raised regarding the choice of the new emperor.

Queen Li Linghai had been through such competitions in person. That was why she was bold enough to kill Emperor Shenwu atrociously. It hit the critical part of the four families.

It was exactly Li Linghai’s goal to let the four families fight over the choice of the new emperor, which was an open, undisguised scheme.

But Li Wuji discovered, to his sadness, that even though they knew it was a scheme, they had no choice except to bite each other hard.

If the four families could be united, the Covenant Alliance, the reformists, the space pirates, and the Cultivators would’ve been annihilated a long time ago, and today’s devastation would be spared!

Li Wuji thought in pitifulness, “It’s a shame that nobody is really selfless. People of the four families understand it too well!”

Such national concerns only hovered for one moment in his head.

When the idea that “nobody is really selfless” popped in his head, he began to focus all his attention on his future interests.

The twenty-nine pirate gangs had been recruited by him. If the battle of Seven Seas went well, even more space pirates would join him, which would be a force not to be underestimated. If he could grasp them in his hands…

The capital had been conquered by the reformists, and there were a lot of vacancies in the Council of Elders after the casualties. Everybody wanted to move one step higher, and he seemed to have a great shot…

While thinking, Li Wuji fell asleep.

The microchips in the soft bed, sensing the changes of his biophysical parameters, switched to the sleep protection mode automatically. The gel became softer and gradually enveloped him, which could soothe the discomfort in the space jump later.

Li Wuji had been through countless space jumps. Also, he had invested a huge amount of money on the modification of his personal chamber. The wall, the floor, and the ceiling had all been embedded with buffer and stabilization rune arrays. There would not be much shaking even during a space jump, and his thinking and his rest would not be disrupted.

However, soon after he just entered his dream, perhaps only several seconds, a deafening explosion, as if the whole world had been turned upside down, shocked him out of his soft bed of gels.

“This is—”

Li Wuji’s pupils constricted violently as he sensed fatal cracks on both the starship and himself. It seemed that an invisible, uncanny force was tearing apart the entire starship and all the crew members in the most brutal way, trying to rip them into four-dimensional fragments!