Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

“What?”

Aside from Xiaoming and Wenwen, everybody stood up. Boss Bai, the Fist King, and even Long Yangjun all bulged their eyes, both real ones and artificial ones, and stared at Li Yao. The muscles on their faces were tightened, and they couldn’t help but open their mouths in shock.

Boss Bai said in a hurry, “Where did you know ‘witchcraft’ from? What is the ‘witchcraft’ you know exactly?”

“About that…”

Li Yao had no idea why his heart was beating so fast. It was almost like a pile driver was bashing his chest nonstop. He could not control himself at all despite his Cultivation that was beyond the Divinity Transformation Stage.

In only a few seconds, the sweat on his forehead and his back had surged out like blood, wetting his facial organs and his clothes.

Billions of pieces were dancing crazily in the storm inside his brain, like petrels that were flying against the tempest. Every feather on every petrel was a different wizardly world that was imagined by the earthlings.

“If I say that I heard the word ‘witchcraft’ in my dreams, would you believe me?”

Looking at everyone, Li Yao scratched his head. “As for what the witchcraft that I saw in my dreams was like, it simply had too many appearances. It’s almost like—it’s almost like there were countless wizardly worlds. Some of the worlds had ‘wizardly webs’, and some had the uncanny things like ‘elements’. Also, in some of the worlds, only females could perform the witchcraft, and they must observe celibacy until they are thirty in order to increase the density of witchcraft inside their bodies and to improve the deftness of their fingers. After that, they can release fireballs and such easily… All in all, there was a plethora of them. I can’t tell them specifically right now. They were in my dreams after all. Most of the details were forgotten the moment I woke up.”

“There are countless wizardly worlds?”

Alarmed, Boss Bai and the Fist King looked at each other, before they stared at Li Yao at a loss for a long time. Then, Boss Bai suddenly laughed and shook his head. “It does make sense. I should have seen it coming. Too many historians have studied your rise, tracing you all the way back to your early years in Floating Spear City, but they can’t find the initial reason that made you strong at the beginning.

“The magical equipment graveyard was certainly not a place that any regular kid could survive.

“You… witnessed witchcraft in your dream? Then it all makes sense now!”

Holding his forehead, Li Yao tried to hold back the headache and the uncanny feeling of weakness. He frowned and said, “Boss Bai, Long Yangjun, Fist King, it hasn’t been an easy journey for us to meet again with all our subtle identities. In order for us to complete the whole puzzle together, I’ll not keep the information that can be told to you a secret. However, the dreams in my head are truly broken and obscure. They have to be connected with more clues. Why don’t you tell us what the ‘witchcraft’ you discovered was first?”

“Fine!”

Boss Bai agreed quickly. “There are not many secrets between us in the first place. Now that you are willing to be honest, I am certainly not a petty coward either. I’ll tell you everything I know as it is.

“If you know ‘witchcraft’, do you know ‘Gaoist’? It’s possibly a transliteration from the languages of the wizardly civilizations, something related to the soul or the mind.”

“Gaoist… Gaoist…?”

Li Yao mumbled it several times. Then, recalling English from Earth for some reason, he was naturally struck with a word, “GHOST!”

In the memories of Earth, Li Yao never had great grades, and English was not his mother tongue either, but “GHOST” was a relatively elementary word and was applied in various aspects, including being used to name a tool that could reinstall a computer system rapidly[1]. So, it did not take Li Yao much time to think of it.

Boss Bai and the Fist King looked at each other in bewilderment. Li Yao’s pronunciation was apparently more standard than Boss Bai’s “Gaoist”. At the very least, the intonation was much better, making it sound like a certain blurred spell.

Boss Bai’s face changed abruptly as he said, “How does the word spell? What does it mean?”

“It goes like this—”

Pondering for a moment, Li Yao extended his finger and wrote “GHOST” on the light beam. He then explained, “I may not know all of its meaning, but it mainly means ‘the spirit of a dead person that some people think they can feel or see in a place’. Right, a rather famous booting system was named after it too.”

“It’s… It’s really identical.”

Looking at the word on the light beam, Boss Bai put on an expression of disbelief again. It was not until a long daze that he finally said, “GHOST, fake, booting system? That’s right! Everything makes sense now! Fist King, show Li Yao that thing!”

The Fist King acknowledged and took out the chip that Boss Bai offered to him from the container on his chest. Tossing it to Li Yao, he said, “Take a look at it. Do you recognize the words on it?”

Li Yao picked up the chip, not knowing what they were up to. He was then rigidified when he touched it with his finger. After he looked at it, he exclaimed in shock, “What the heck!”

Boss Bai and the Fist King did not recognize the zigzagging calligraphy on the chip, but Li Yao could tell after the first glance that it seemed to be a combination of quite a few phonetic languages that were based on the alphabet!

At first look, it was rather similar to English, but it appeared more vintage and glamorous than it. It did not look like the language of any of the other superpowers in Europena either, but more like their ancient cousin—what was its name, Shatin? No, Latin!

Li Yao’s understanding of English was restricted to the most fundamental vocabulary, and he did not know the first thing about the languages of the other countries of Europena, much less the obsolete Latin was barely used by anyone. Also, the chip had almost been melted, and all the words on the surface had only the shallowest traces. It was impossible for him to know what the hybrid text expressed.

However, for a “Divinity Transformation Stage expert”, who had been living in a Cultivation civilization for more than a hundred years and who had been solely soaked and nourished in the Cultivation civilization, the shock after seeing what appeared to be English and Latin in his own, which felt like the world was collapsing and recombining before him, was beyond the description of any words.

It was no exaggeration to say that Li Yao was like a cricket that had been raised in a can all the time, and the “hall wall” that surrounded him suddenly collapsed one day, making him realize that there was a boundless world outside!

“This is… This is… This is—”

Li Yao’s face was now red and now blue, and his brain almost stopped functioning. Holding the chip, he felt that he was holding a cluster of sweltering magma. He wanted to let it go but couldn’t bear to lose it. He could barely breathe.

“Li Yao, are-are you okay?”

Observing him, Boss Bai asked concernedly. Fine, although Li Yao was usually a great troublemaker, he was now the sole lead for Boss Bai to march to the wizardly worlds. Naturally, Boss Bai had to ensure that Li Yao was safe and sound!

“I’m fine, it’s just—”

Taking a few deep breaths, Li Yao managed a smile with a pale face. “I’m just feeling weird to see ‘ABCD’ in such a world of Cultivation that is filled with eastern mysteriousness.

“Speaking of which, where did you get this, Boss Bai? And why did you ask the Fist King to keep it? Is it related to the Fist King too?”

Boss Bai looked at the Fist King.

The Fist King said in a dull voice, “Li Yao knows my identity. Or rather, he was the one who ‘enlightened’ me. Or in Boss Bai’s theory, it was he who activated a certain strength inside my body. Besides, he has shared his own uncanny dreams with us. According to my calculation, there is no need to keep any secret from him. It is impossible to keep any secret.”

“In that case, I’ll say it out.”

Boss Bai thought for a moment and offered all the information he knew, including how the Big Bai Pirate Gang met the debris of the wizardly civilization’s starship after jumping to the edge of the Martial Meritocrats Sector of the Imperium of True Human Beings, how he found a chip and inferred fuzzy information from it, and how he analyzed the Fist King’s identity later.

He stressed on the “Flood” that caused the destruction of thousands of civilizations including the wizardly civilizations, presenting all his speculations and deductions.

Li Yao and Long Yangjun were both stunned.

“Beyond the three thousand Sectors we are at, it is a desolate space that is almost infinitely vast, like a ubiquitous, impenetrable black wall. But beyond the black wall, there are still billions of worlds and billions of civilizations? The civilizations that run in completely different ways, like the wizardly civilizations that draw energy from the four-dimensional lives?

“The billions of brilliant civilizations, on the other hand, have been destroyed by a certain mysterious and powerful strength—the Flood?

“Nobody knows whether or not there are more survivors of the alien civilizations beyond the ‘black wall’, or if they have luckily, or unluckily, crossed the black wall and entered the Cultivation civilization like the wizardly civilization’s starship? And nobody knows where the Flood went after absorbing countless civilizations?

“Has the Flood died down? Or is it taking a nap after having a delicious meal? Or has it woken up from a prolonged digestion and is searching for the next batch of ‘food’ hungrily, food like mankind in the Cultivation world?”

The unimaginably horrible pictures flashed in Li Yao’s and Long Yangjun’s heads. They looked at each other in bewilderment and a bitter smile.

Li Yao finally understood why Boss Bai was utterly untouched when he was faced with such a shocking event as the “awakening of artificial intelligence”.

If the wizardly civilization as well as the other billions of extraterrestrial civilizations did exist, and the “Flood” that destroyed them was still out there, the threat of the awakened artificial intelligence was truly not a big deal.

“Li Yao, what we have right now is just such a tiny chip as well as ungrounded speculations.”

Boss Bai said solemnly, “I thought that both the wizardly civilization and the all-destroying Flood were still too distant from us for us to explore them yet, but your arrival has brought us new hope.

“I have already told you everything that I know. Can you recall more things?”

“I need to think about it. I need to think about it carefully.”

Closing his eyes, Li Yao wiped his nosebleed that was running out beyond his control, and he whispered in such a low voice that it sounded like dream talk, “Perhaps I need to have a good sleep and look for the answer in my dreams…”

Translator’s Note: As the translator mentioned before, translation can be difficult when metalanguage is involved. When reading the few recent chapters, please imagine that Li Yao and his companions are communicating in Chinese (or whatever Chinese is on the alternative Earth xD). The capitalized words such as GHOST are when they are actually speaking English.

[1] Note: GHOST, other than being the name of a famous open-source CMS, is also a solution to boot and reinstall your OS. It was quite a popular tool in China five to ten years ago but is not as frequently used today. Check “ghost boot” on google for more details.