Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

According to the operation plan, the entire exploration team was divided into two squads, one in the front and the other in the back. The first squad was to explore the space zone near ‘Ancient Thirteenth’. The strongest elites of the squad had been gathered. Naturally, Li Yao and Ding Lingdang were in the vanguard.

The closer they got to the No.13 satellite of the ancient star, the denser the stardust in the space was. The average diameter and mass of the dust were larger, too. They gradually changed from the size of sand to the size of fingernails and then to the size of fists and even skulls.

In the end, the dozens of starships of the first squad were surrounded by enormous meteoroids more than ten meters in diameter and hundreds of meters in diameter. Also, the meteoroids were flying at an extremely high speed and in random directions. They were like 108,000 headless flies.

“An unknown celestial body of extremely high mass must be nearby. It is only because of the attraction force that the meteoroids are flying in such disorder.

Li Yao mumbled to himself.

He was an expert in sailing in the sea of stars, especially the stone belts. He had experienced many similar adventures in the past, but he had never seen such a dangerous meteoroid belt. Other than the meteoroids, there were also countless invisible dusts and spiritual waves in the space that could interfere with the cells and even the soul of a human being. In Li Yao’s telepathic thoughts, it was like a giant swirl that was both colorful and thick.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The meteorites hit the spiritual shield of the starship brutally and broke into pieces. The colorful flames were gone in the blink of an eye like hideous ghosts. ‘Ancient Thirteen’ must’ve stored a lot of highly-interference, super-radiation elements that were thrown out during the collision of the two satellites and scattered in the vacuum. The Cultivators who came into contact with it all felt that their blood was boiling, and the spiritual energy inside their bodies was changing weirdly.

In the terminology of the ancient Cultivators, this place was a typical ‘fierce place’. The magnetic field of human beings had been jammed and suppressed to the minimum. It was definitely not a suitable place for combat. Therefore, they had to leave the place quickly in a state of high concentration.

Li Yao also wanted to quickly leave the vicinity of ‘Ancient Thirteen’, but

BAM!

A meteorite of high density and hardness had broken through the spiritual shield of his starship and hit the shell of the starship.

According to the picture captured by the crystal camera, the ‘meteorite’ was in the shape of a human being!

“Someone is outside!”

Li Yao’s pupils constricted violently. The hair all over his body stood up like spears.

In such a desolate place where few people ever set foot in, among the rushing meteoroids and cosmic dust, a man was floating and crashing into their starship?

Li Yao suddenly jumped up. Before his feet left the ground, his crystal suit had covered his toes.

Several other starships hit or scanned the human-shaped objects, too. For a moment, earsplitting alarms echoed in the entire exploration fleet.

However, the human-shaped objects did not take any further action. After they were blown away by the starships, they simply drifted away. Some of them were even blown into pieces by the strengthened plate armor and spiritual shields, but they showed no sign of aggression.

Li Yao was quick enough to catch a human-shaped object with the artificial arms on the shell of the starship before the enemy was blown away.

He went to the ‘disinfective recycling capsule’ in person to examine the mysterious humanoid object.

“Chi_”

After applying more than ten times the pressure, the atomized disinfectant sprayed out and washed away any viruses and bacteria that the mysterious humanoid object might have carried.

Li Yao approached carefully. He released his telepathic thoughts and a few remote puppets to investigate and discovered that it was a crystal suit. However, the person inside the crystal suit was already dead.

Since the crystal suit was made of super-hard alloys and special ceramics, its density and hardness were far higher than those of common meteoroids. Naturally, it was not something that a spiritual shield could crush easily, nor was it something that a meteoroid could break through easily.

However, as hard as the crystal suit was, and as tensile and absorbable as the mustard suit was, it was impossible to absorb the impact of the meteoroid.

If a meteorite weighing dozens of tons crashed into the crystal suit brutally, even if the crystal suit was not shattered, the immense impact would still shatter the bones of the Exo inside and turn his internal organs into a pool of blood.

Such was the case for the Exo.

Li Yao dissected the Exo’s crystal suit carefully. He collapsed like a snail that had lost its shell.

After making sure that his soul was gone and that he could not be more dead, Li Yao asked a professional doctor to dissect him and make sure that his brain and internal organs had been completely shattered, and that he suffered the corrosion of fatal radiation when the spiritual shield of his crystal suit collapsed. That was the cause of his death.

According to the corruption of his body and the withering speed of his cells, he had been killed seven to ten days ago. Judging from the standard of his crystal suit and the armbands and emblems on his mustard suit, it was not hard to guess the identity of the Exo who had died in the vacuum. He was a ‘soldier’ of the old Sanctuary Alliance and a soldier on one of the five supreme fortresses. In other words, he was Lu Qingchen’s subordinate.

There was more than one such body. Li Linghai, Boss Bai, and Long Yangjun’s starship had retrieved a lot of other bodies, too. The autopsy results were almost the same. All the soldiers of the five supreme fortresses had perished in this place seven to ten days ago.

It meant that Lu Qingchen had arrived in the Supreme Battle Fortress seven to ten days ago and located the entrance of the tomb precisely.

However, he seemed to have experienced a mutation and suffered a great loss.

The deeper they went into the ‘Ancient Thirteenth’, the more corpses they encountered from the five supreme fortresses. Not only were there intact corpses that were covered in crystal suits, there were also corpses that had been frozen into ice before they had the chance to put on their crystal suits. The dead bodies of the latter were extremely fragile and would be blown to smithereens by the spiritual shield. Li Yao felt sorry for them and sighed.

Other than the dead bodies, there were also a lot of debris of space shuttles and escape capsules, and even enormous scraps more than a hundred meters in diameter. According to Xiao Ming and Wen Wen, they were all components of the most important main structure of the five supreme fortresses. The number of the scraps was growing larger and larger, which was quite shocking.

“We are almost at our destination. Lu Qingchen’s team might show up at any moment. Be prepared for a Level 1 battle!” Li Linghai did not dare to be careless and issued an order.

Right then, almost all the starships detected the dense area of the meteoroids in front of them. A lot of metal reactions were detected, indicating that there might be one or several artificial celestial bodies.

The spiritual shields of all the starships were brighter than before. The auxiliary power units protruded out of the hollows around the shell of the starship. A large batch of space shuttles, crystal suits, and even Giant God Soldiers jumped out of the hangars one after another. The main guns had been charged with the maximum spiritual energy, too, ready to launch thunderous attacks at any moment. The people who had been engaged in a prolonged battle against the ‘ancient giant star’ not long ago were more united than ever, and their fighting will soared.

Under the cover of almost a hundred main guns, Li Yao and Ding Lingdang led a dozen Giant God Soldiers to investigate.

Deep inside the broken meteorite belt, the star fortress gradually revealed its hideous face, which looked like an enormous head. Its face was a combination of the features of human beings and the prehistoric species. There was no telling whether it was a human being, a god, or a devil. It was indeed ‘Fortress Thick Earth’, one of the five supreme fortresses!

However, the fortress at this moment was no longer as intimidating as when it was attacking Empyrean Terminus. There was no longer any brightness or brutality. It was like a dry skull.

Li Yao and Ding Lingdang exchanged a look in the video and saw the shock in each other’s eyes.

It was unlikely to be Lu Qingchen’s trick, because they did not detect any spiritual waves from the fortress, which proved that one of the most brutal star fortresses in the history of human civilization had been paralyzed or even wrecked.

It would take at least three to five days to restart such a super fortress and complete all the preparations.

After flying around the fortress, they soon found the ’cause of death’.

On the side of the fortress that faced ‘Ancient Thirteen’, there was a hole more than several kilometers long, and countless splits in the blast that extended outward. Almost all the materials, including the fuel and the crew members, were spurting out of the holes. There might have been serial explosions, too, which burnt the interior of the fortress into a black, empty shell.

“A giant meteoroid seems to be embedded deep inside the fortress. Maybe there is more than one.

Li Yao extended his telepathic thoughts and snuck into the fortress. After scanning for a while, he came to the conclusion that the meteoroid must’ve pierced through the spiritual shield and the shell of the fortress and cut into the core engine furnace as if it were tofu, triggering an irreparable explosion.

The dead bodies floating in the space nearby, the debris, and the scrap that had been burnt, were also telling the story of what had happened.

And this was far from the end.

Soon, they discovered the debris of a second star fortress nearby.

This time, it was ‘Fiery Castle’.

The Inferno Fortress, which had been burning like a star, was no longer able to release any light or heat. It was not even left with an intact body like the ‘Fortress of Earth’. Instead, it had been torn into more than a hundred giant pieces of debris, which were beating Xuan’er helplessly because of the attraction force of the ‘Ancient Thirteenth’ and the entrance of the tomb of the Supreme Emperor. Most of the crew members on board were vaporized the moment of the explosion or sprayed into the unknown, falling into an endless hell in the form of an ice block.

Although they were enemies, the two supreme fortresses that represented the best technology of mankind had been stomped and savaged by the might of nature. Everybody in the exploration fleet was rendered speechless.