Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

“It’s not strange.”

Boss Bai deduced with a smile, “First of all, for the researchers in the laboratories on the Land of Sins, the odds of accidents or death were extremely high. What they created and tested were highly-unsteady new techniques, new magical equipment, and new drugs. The laboratories were exploding all the time. The news might get out of control. The experiment subjects being tested with new drugs might get on a killing spree. Also, the conspiracies among the researchers were not few either. What’s the big deal to kill a few people when they were fighting for research funding? Many academic leaders died uncanny deaths when they were about to make achievements.

“So, the crazy scholar that we talked about might’ve had an accident and got killed a long time ago. Soon after that, the studies on the spiritual puppets with the auto-learning and auto-upgrading abilities suffered major setbacks. The laboratories on the Land of Sins suffered heavy losses and could not go on anymore. They were not revived until Wuying Lan came to clean the mess a long time later.

“So to speak, the whole thing was buried with the death of the crazy scholar. Even Wuying Lan and Li Lingfeng did not know anything about it. It’s a very plausible possibility!”

The Fist King hesitated before asking, “But it was such a major discovery. Even though he was dead, did he not leave any last words or traces?”

“Wrong. We know the existence of the starship from the wizardly civilization in advance. That’s why the fragment is so important for us.”

Boss Bai shook his head and said, “But for that crazy scholar, it was possible that he did not crack the secrets of the fragment and was unaware of the wizardly civilization. He just wanted to perform a random test on the slightly weird fragment that he discovered.

“For him, the thing was very important, but not so important that he was still thinking about the fragment when he was about to die. The Immortal Cultivators are all selfish guys who do not care about the life and death of other people. Did the fragment still matter when he was about to die?”

The Fist King still shook his head. “Everything is just your hypothesis. If I had really gained a certain… gift from the wizardly civilization, I wouldn’t have struggled to survive for such a long time on the Land of Sins. I would have united the Land of Sins, marched to ‘Manjusaka, the City in the Sky’, hacked the crystal processors and the Spiritual Nexus there, established my own fleet, and roamed the sea of stars! Why did I have to wait to this day? If that were true, the Big Bai Pirate Gang wouldn’t get to play a role at all!”

“Hahahaha. It’s as expected of the ambitious Fist King. That’s exactly what I’m confused about. Your performance in the recent half a year is far from the past. If you were one tenth as capable as you are today, it wouldn’t have been a problem at all for you to turn the Martial Meritocrats Sector upside down. Then, were you keeping a low profile while you were preparing yourself because of the surveillance of ‘Manjusaka, the City in the Sky’, or was there more to the story?”

Boss Bai stepped forward and said, “I thought that you were playing meek to avoid attention. That’s why I decided to have a candid conversation with you. However, judging from your reaction, if your acting skills were not a hundred times better than mine, you really did not know anything about it, did you? In that case, something inside your brain might’ve been hibernating, sealed or growing in the past hundred years, and it was not unlocked by accident until recently.

“Hey, Fist King, have you encountered anything or anyone unusual in the past year? Well, fine, you don’t need to tell me. You indeed encountered an incredible monster—Li Yao, who also saved you.”

“He did not just save me; he also gave me a new life.”

The Fist King’s dull voice gradually became clear. “When the gigantic body ‘Great Iron City’ that I had used for a long time was completely destroyed, it was Li Yao who rescued the core units of my mainframe crystal processor and got a new body for me. As for what he did to my brain, I have no idea at all.”

“Ha!”

Boss Bai’s small eyes were glowing like fireworks. “In that case, everything makes sense now!”

“I am…’Gaoist—man in the shell’?”

The Fist King stared at his hands where metal colors were reflected and mumbled, “I don’t know. I truly don’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Boss Bai’s fancy short pants were waving crazily in the air in surging noises, but his casual voice was clearly audible in the tidal roars. “I’ll help you find the answer.”

He walked to the Fist King step by step. After every step, the hills of garbage in the forsaken port behind him would slightly get rid of the artificial gravity and drift to the midair.

The Fist King’s manmade eyes gleamed, and the ground where he was standing on had thousands of cracks. He spoke faster, “Boss Bai, do we have to fight? Even if I am associated with ‘Gaoist—man in the shell’, it is nothing but some broken data. I do not know the first thing about wizardly civilization. Also, didn’t you say that the wizardly civilization was destroyed a long time ago? Then, why do we have to fight?”

“Feelings can be gradually developed, and reasons can be found while we are fighting—as long as you want to.”

Licking his lips, Boss Bai looked at the Fist King passionately and tapped his temples with his finger. Then, he said, “Ah, I’ve got a perfect reason. Kill to keep the mouth shut.”

“Kill to keep the mouth shut?”

The Fist King said, “I don’t know anything at all. Why do you need to kill me to keep my mouth shut?”

“I am not the one who is doing the killing, but you are, because I have revealed such a great secret!”

Boss Bai grinned and bared his teeth that looked like those of a shark. “In order to protect myself and not to be killed by you, I can only attack you first. Isn’t that a plausible reason for us to fight?”

The Fist King was lost for words, not knowing how to respond after searching his entire database.

“Besides, do you really ‘know nothing’?”

Boss Bai’s eyes suddenly grew sharp and gloomy as he said, “My dear Fist King, with your computational ability, and having been in touch with so many tutors from the Big Bai Pirate Gang and even visited my flagship in person, you would be such a disappointment if you still couldn’t figure out who we are.”

The Fist King was silent for a moment before he replied, “I have guessed your identity, but it is not my business. After all, I’m not on the Immortal Cultivators’ side. Your identity is none of my concerns.”

“Oh?”

Boss Bai smiled warmly. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“You and Li Yao obviously have known each other for a long time, and both of you are in the Divinity Transformation Stage. Even a regular expert in the Divinity Transformation Stage can only be raised by an enormous force that is famous nationwide, let alone two, both with a Colossus. It is impossible that such a force is never heard of before!”

The Fist King said, “Your flagship may deceive common starship specialists with the modifications and disguises, but it cannot trick me. The style is obviously the opposite of the mainstream of the Imperium.

“Also, as a ferocious space pirate, you took in the Cultivators of Starlight without any hesitation, at the risk of becoming an enemy of all the Immortal Cultivators in the Imperium. It was utterly unreasonable, or at least not just because of ‘friendship’ and ‘compassion’.

“In conclusion, you must be from a certain powerful force outside of the Imperium, of course not the Alliance of the Holy Covenant, but a vigorous country of Cultivators.

“As for the reason why you came to the Imperium, you are here as a spy, special agent, or vanguard, aren’t you?”

“What a good guess.”

Boss Bai burst into laughter. “Look, don’t we have even more reasons to fight each other until one of us dies in order to keep our own secrets safe?”

“Wait!”

The Fist King said in a hurry, “I don’t care who you are at all. All I want to do is to carry out my survival and strengthening policies. I never intend to inform the authorities of the Imperium. Why do we have to fight at such a critical moment? Do you not know that a life-and-death battle will significantly lower our odds of survival, and we may die together? Isn’t survival the most important thing?”

“You are such a chatterbox.”

Boss Bai extended his little finger and picked his ear. “Fist King, if you truly want to be a human, let me tell you one thing—for a human, survival is never the most important thing. Never!”

Hardly had he concluded his sentence when Boss Bai laughed crazily and waved his hands, throwing the debris of starships weighing dozens of tons in the midair at the Fist King overwhelmingly.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The garbage hit where the Fist King was standing like burning shooting stars, but the Fist King was quick enough to jump to the sky by stepping on the remnants before he landed on Boss Bai’s back.

“Boss Bai, you’re out of your mind!”

The Fist King’s logic judgments could not capture or infer what Boss Bai was thinking at all.

“Wow!”

Boss Bai’s eyes almost popped out. “It’s such an obvious fact that Zuo Tianying and Li Wuji discovered a long time ago. You didn’t know it just now, did you?”

He slashed his hand out. As the spiritual energy surged out, countless tiny pieces were attached to Boss Bai’s arm into an extensible sharp blade more than ten meters long. It then split apart while it was spinning, covering the critical parts all over the Fist King’s body.

The Fist King moved in the storm of blades as agilely as a swallow that was hiding every raindrop. He was even able to activate his Cosmos Rings unhurriedly in the shadow of the blades and retrieved almost thirty spiritual puppets from there!

When the storm of blades died down, what stood before Boss Bai were thirty identical spiritual puppets. There was no telling which one of them was the real Fist King. Or maybe all of them were the Fist King!

“Such a meaningless battle will only have a lose-lose result. I do not want to fight at all.”

Surrounding Boss Bai, the thirty spiritual puppets let out the same indifferent and rational voice, but the rationality in the voice was fading. “But if you insist on a life-and-death battle, I have no choice but to satisfy you. At the very least, I will only lose, but you will die, Boss Bai!”