Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

Inside the Gold Crystal Tower in reality, Li Yao’s slightly closed eyelids shivered, and he slowly opened his eyes. The whole dark night seemed to have been condensed inside.

There was still a hint of confusion on his face, as if he just had a long and profound dream. While rubbing his temples, he thought in a trance. He also scratched his skin so hard that red marks were left on it, as if he were trying to break his shell and reveal his brand-new self below.

Then, he saw Wuying Qi who was standing not far away from him.

Like a black mountain, Wuying Qi occupied his entire vision.

Li Yao’s eyebrows were furrowed. Two massive forces were having a fierce competition inside his heart.

His eyelids, lips, and fingers were all cramping crazily.

A moment later, with ambiguous noises echoing from the depths of his throat, he fell on one of his knees as a gesture of submission to Wuying Qi.

“Li Yao, this is exactly the effect of ‘enlightenment’. How about it? It does not affect your thinking ability and your free will, does it?”

Wuying Qi asked casually.

“… It doesn’t.”

Li Yao’s face flushed as he thought carefully for a moment and replied, “I am still a Cultivator who persists in the path of the Cultivators and loves my hometown. I still believe that the lives of so many people shouldn’t be sacrificed recklessly if there is a better option. However… however—

“However, we don’t have an option right now. While Your Majesty’s solution seems cruel, it is the ‘least bad’ and the ‘most effective’ plan with the highest odds of success.

“Therefore, ‘I am a Cultivator’ and ‘I support Your Majesty’ are not contradictory; in fact, they can only coexist. If I am a real Cultivator who cares about the maximal interests of mankind instead of my own hypocritical moral mysophobia, I should support Your Majesty! If I don’t support Your Majesty, I’ll be a sanctimonious false Cultivator, as much of a scumbag as the false Immortal Cultivators, if not even worse than them!

“Everything above is the conclusion that I’ve made through independent and rational thinking with a clear head. It is absolutely not controlled by any force or any kind of ‘evil brainwashing’. I have merely been… convinced by Your Majesty’s reason.”

The more Li Yao talked, the more determined and calm he appeared, as if he had truly dissected and analyzed his own brain.

“Hahahaha. It’s great to know that you can think in such a way, Li Yao!”

Wuying Qi laughed aloud. “Exactly, the so-called ‘brainwashing’ is just reasoning in a more advanced and effective way. Is it evil and terrifying at all?”

“If Your Majesty is going to perform massive enlightenment on the four families’ ace fleets so that they can understand the reasons too—”

Li Yao said solemnly, “I swear to god that I’ll definitely support Your Majesty with my everything!”

“Huh…”

Wuying Qi narrowed his eyes and looked at Li Yao. Then he suddenly found it odd and asked, “Why is your face red and perspiring?”

“Because I… am excited!”

Li Yao wiped the sweat on his neck and looked at it. He said, “Just now, Your Majesty showed me the future of the new Imperium and mankind. What a magnificent fleet, what a glorious civilization, and what happy people! After watching it, I feel so excited that it is impossible for me to calm myself down. I almost hate that I cannot time travel to the golden age in the future. Ah, Your Majesty! Ah, the Imperium! Ah…”

Li Yao suddenly kneeled on the ground and vomited so hard that his stomach acid was almost thrown out.

Wuying Qi was stunned. “Li Yao, what was that about?”

“I-I don’t know. I just feel that the world around me is shaking, and I cannot control myself.”

Li Yao looked at Wuying Qi and spurted out acidic fluids again, making quite a fuss. “It’s probably the information flooding into my head is too much for me to process. Does the technology of enlightenment have such side effects? I’ll have to ask for your advice, Your Majesty.”

Wuying Qi was silent.

The technology of enlightenment naturally had plenty of side effects. Not just the shock on the brain and nausea, even schizophrenia, madness, and brain explosion shouldn’t come as any surprise.

Also, Wuying Qi had sensed one thing or two about the powerfulness and weirdness of Li Yao’s soul too. Therefore, he could not foresee what kind of negative effects would be raised during the collision of souls.

Vomiting was a natural reaction to brain concussion. That should be the side effect with minimal influence, right?

“Please rest assured, Your Majesty, I’ll be fine. I’m getting used to the vomiting…”

His face pale, Li Yao held his stomach and said, “Let’s not care about such unimportant things. There are a lot of things, including the whole plan I had in mind and all the traps that I set up, that I would like to confess to Your Majesty frankly, but first of all, allow me to help Your Majesty to capture the other two rebels. I hope that Your Majesty gives them a chance to return from the lost journey so that they can enjoy… enjoy the unprecedented epiphany just like I did through your enlightenment!”

…

Li Jialing rushed crazily among the caves that looked like a maze. Holding back his beating heart that was ripping his chest apart, he did not dare to look back at the stormy barrage behind him. Suddenly, his left foot accidentally stepped into a gap and cracked. He was in such agony that his tears almost surged out. However, he did not dare to stay any longer but rolled into a branch that extended downward. It was not until he rolled into the darkness at the end and heard no sound from behind for a long time that he finally moaned in a low voice.

“Sister Long—”

He called Long Yangjun in a point-to-point communicator. “Where are you? I can’t hold on any longer. A whole crystal suit legion is after me!”

“I’m in the cave seven hundred meters to your left, but it’s very dangerous here. Don’t come close!”

Long Yangjun gnashed her teeth in the secret communication channel. “Wuying Qi has kept so many experts under his command. They are also fearless and determined to die with me the moment they meet me, entirely different from the cowards of the four families. I’m trapped here too!”

“I wonder what’s happening on Brother Yao’s side.”

Li Jialing squeezed rapidly-freezing gels and high-density bone stimulators on his ankle that was as swollen as a ball. While activating his spiritual energy to accelerate the healing of his bone, he said desperately, “Wuying Qi has entered the Gold Crystal Pyramid and spent hours with Brother Yao inside. What are they doing inside exactly? Would anything happen to Brother Yao?”

“Rest assured about that. Bad guys always outlive good guys. Your Brother Yao can’t die so easily!”

Long Yangjun grunted, as if she had been hit by the enemy brutally. “However, if the bad guy does not come to help us, we two good guys will certainly be outlived by him!”

While the two of them were talking, a thunderous explosion that sounded as if the core of the planet had collapsed echoed from the depths of the ground.

They thought that it was the explosion of a super crystal bomb, but the explosion lingered on like a surging tide and gradually approached them, becoming louder and louder and resulting in greater and greater quakes.

“An earthquake? A super-massive earthquake?”

Li Jialing and Long Yangjun who were several hundred meters away both changed their expressions greatly.

The tectonic structure in this area had been ripped apart and sabotaged by the Supreme Emperor and the Blood God again and again ten thousand years ago. Now, it was riddled with holes by Wuying Qi’s Imperial Guards again.

Such an intense earthquake immediately raised the collapse of tunnels and caves. The rocks weighing billions of tons fell from the sky and completely changed the terrain.

Even though most of the Imperial Guards had stayed in the safe area that was calculated in advance, some of them were still away from the safe area chasing after Li Jialing and Long Yangjun. They were large in number but weak. As a result, the falling rocks gave them quite a heavy blow.

Li Jialing and Long Yangjun were both experts above average and wouldn’t be trapped by the rocks for now. However, the drastic changes around as well as the incessant quakes each more intense than the last made the two of them look more awful than ever. They thought of a possibility at the same time.

The Gold Crystal Pyramid had been activated!

Li Yao couldn’t stop Wuying Qi’s plan after all. The supermassive brainwashing attempt conducted through the solar storm had begun!

Right then, a third voice—a calm voice that belonged to Li Yao—interjected in their secret communication channel.

“Where are you hiding?”

Li Yao asked.

“Brother Yao!”

Li Jialing was both surprised and delighted. “You’ve escaped! Where are you? What happened inside the Gold Crystal Pyramid?”

“There’s no time for any explanation. I’m here.”

Li Yao sent a pair of coordinates to them, which were not far away from them. “Let’s meet here, and I’ll tell you everything.”

“Okay!”

Not suspecting anything, Li Jialing immediately rushed toward Li Yao.

“Wait…”

Long Yangjun, however, grew skeptical. “Li Yao, did anything happen to you?”

“Not at all. I did have many problems a few hours ago, but I don’t have any of them right now. Trust me. I’ve found a solution. Although it is very risky and may result in many problems, it is certainly worth a try.”

Li Yao said, “You will understand it when you see me.”

“But…”

Long Yangjun was still hesitating.

Li Jialing, however, hopped to the coordinates given by Li Yao and searched for him in the dispersing smoke.

Very soon, he found a dark shadow in the smoke that was as dense as a fog.

“Brother Yao!”

Li Jialing strode forward and greeted him, not noticing anything wrong until he saw the black hair that was dancing crazily like tentacles on the back of the stranger’s head. However, there was already no time. It was his mother—no, some kind of dark existence that lurked inside his mother’s body and controlled her face. A face with a mysterious smile gradually surfaced from the mist.

It was Wuying Qi, Blackstar the Great.

Hiss—

The blood all over Li Jialing’s body as well his brain nerves was entirely frozen, and he gasped in desperation.

Long Yangjun’s shocked and furious shout was echoing in the communication channel too, mixed with the noises as she fought Li Yao. “Li Yao, you have betrayed us!”