Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

It was lying on the ground like a hill that had collapsed in an earthquake. The rise and fall of its stomach had not calmed down yet. Its red eyes were now covered in a layer of grey-brown haze. The scent of life was pouring out like a broken hourglass.

Li Yao slowly stood up from his hiding place and quietly walked to the front. He observed this untimely prehistoric ferocious beast… Perhaps even in death, it would not understand what had happened and why the surrounding world had become so “terrifying”.

Before it was completely dead, a lot of vines and creepers were already crawling on its body like hungry insects. The lumps on the surface of its body were shivering weirdly, too, like plump fruits. They exploded and flew out, producing clusters of bright purple and dark gold butterflies!

Butterflies flew into the sky. Gold and purple smoke rose up from the corpses of the prehistoric beasts.

Li Yao was dumbfounded by the scene and could not calm himself down for a long time. He extended his fingers subconsciously, trying to catch a butterfly that flew out of the dead body of a dinosaur. But he felt that his fingertips were numb, and his every cell was itching as if the gene strands deep inside his cells had been broken, minced, and reassembled. The scraps were embedded into different forms.

Li Yao felt that countless butterflies were hidden inside his fingers, too, which were about to explode and soar into the sky.

Moreover, his entire body seemed to be made of billions of butterflies and could collapse at any moment.

Li Yao was greatly shocked. He hurried to suppress the feeling with his spiritual energy and managed to stop it from spreading out.

“Is this… some kind of virus?”

“No, it’s not a virus. Rather, it’s a kind of special radiation. It’s a radiation that is rarely seen in nature and even in the entire universe. It can trigger the division, collapse, reorganization, and mutation of genes, allowing the vast majority of cells to break through their limits. In a short span of a few days, a few hours, or even a few minutes, they become completely unrecognizable. They can even combine the genes of different species and create all kinds of strange new species.

“No wonder the life in this world is growing and changing so crazily. It’s like the brakes have been lost. They are rushing forward and evolving toward the abyss of destruction!

“What should I call the special radiation

—’Light of Life’? Maybe it was the intense radiation that accelerated the growth of creatures and turned the tomb of the Supreme Emperor into a boundless forest in only several days. But the ‘acceleration’ is too fast.”

While Li Yao was deep in thought, he suddenly noticed a reflection from the corner of his eyes. It did not seem natural but more like the reflection of the plate armor.

Slightly dazed, Li Yao was overjoyed. He stepped over the rapidly decomposing body of the tyrannosaur and looked at what he thought was a giant rock. As he expected, under the cover of moss, vines, and creepers, he discovered a large plate armor of a starship. As it turned out, what was standing on his left side was not ‘Mountain Rock’ at all but the remains of a starship. The starship had crashed not long ago. It had been covered by all kinds of plants and fungi. There was not even a gap the size of the tip of a needle. Also, the interference of the magnetic field here was too intense for even the metal detectors to work. No wonder Li Yao did not notice it just now.

The tyrannosaur staggered close and crashed into the debris of the starship, denting the broken shell and wiping off a large part of the creep and moss before it was able to see the light of day again.

In his crystal suit, Li Yao waved the heated axe and the flaming saber and burnt all the weeds, vines, and creepers that covered the debris of the starship. Finally, it was revealed that the starship had been crushed into a heap.

Judging from the number and emblem on the two sides of the starship, the fast assault starship was named ‘Crystal Light’. It was Long Yangjun’s ride.

Its surface was covered in shocking, enormous tears, and its turret had been blown off. There were also traces of the blast that had collapsed inward. The damage was so severe that it seemed to have been savaged by an ancient star.

Li Yao found the constituents of the meteorite fragments in some of the giant cracks, but he found traces of blood and biological tissue in other cracks. It meant that ‘Crystal at the Speed of Light’ had not only been assaulted by the meteoroid shower while it was escaping from the lightning creatures but also engaged in a battle after it entered the tomb of the Supreme Emperor.

Besides, the latter battle was the main reason why it crashed in this place.

Were they giant reptiles similar to tyrannosaurs?

Li Yao shook his head. What a joke. If the strongest warship of the human civilization could not even deal with dinosaurs, what was the point of exploring the universe? Then, was it Lu Qingchen?

It did not seem to be the case, either. The damage to the shell of the starship did not seem to indicate that it had been attacked by a giant soldier. Instead, it seemed to be something more primitive, brutal, and furious. Shua! Shua! Shua! Shua!

On Li Yao’s retina, all the aggressive magical equipment inside his crystal suit and Cosmos Ring rolled down in the form of lists, making sure that every piece of magical equipment could be retrieved within 0.01 seconds and activated in the ‘Obliteration’ state.

“Long Yangjun? Long Yangjun?” Li Yao activated the communication system again, but there was still no response. He entered the starship carefully along a giant tear that almost cut ‘Crystal at the Speed of Light’ in half.

The interior of the starship was packed with all kinds of vines, moss, and creepers, as well as a lot of weirdly-shaped, colorful snakes, insects, and rats. One of the rodents looked like a hybrid of mice and sandworms. It had a circle of mouthparts that looked like a rock crusher and could spurt out corrosive acids. No metal could escape its biting. Such animals had gnawed on the debris of the starship and left nothing of value behind.

Thankfully, Li Yao did not find the crystal suits and bodies of the crew members, especially those of the important figures such as Long Yangjun.

It seemed that they had escaped before the starship crashed.

He hoped that Ding Lingdang’s starship was the same.

Although he did not have much hope, Li Yao still groped his way to the cockpit.

As it turned out, the mainframe crystal processor was beyond recognition, too. Nest after nest of super mice was crawling on it. Li Yao searched for a long time before he finally found a few memory chips with burnt surfaces.

Holding his breath, Li Yao tried his best to polish the lines of the storage chips with the super micro-grinding and engraving techniques.

After connecting them to his crystal processor and browsing through the garbage data for a long time, Li Yao took a long breath in relief and finally found a message from Long Yangjun.

Fortunately, it was a message for him.

Unfortunately, the memory chip was too corrupted to recover two thirds of the information. The remaining one third was mottled and intermittent.

“The legends… The legends are true. There is indeed a certain method to freeze time deep inside the tomb of the Supreme Emperor!” In the picture, Long Yangjun was in a trance and shouted, “Time and space are like a frozen river. This place has been frozen for too long. Right now, the ‘upstream’ is gradually thawed, and the ‘downstream’ is still blocked. It is like a flood that is unstoppable!

Li Yao did not understand what he meant. Time freeze? Time thaw? What kind of nonsense was that?

The critical explanation that followed was swallowed by the unrecoverable garbage. When the picture was clear again, Long Yangjun’s face was even weirder than before. The camera was shaking violently, too, with the sounds of cannon fire and fighting echoing far away.

“It is alive.”

There was no telling whether Long Yangjun was ‘mad’ or ‘excited’. She repeated mysteriously, “It is alive. It has woken up from the hundreds of thousands of years, no, billions of years of hibernation!”

What was the meaning of this?

Li Yao could not wait to punch the light beam into pieces.

Then, the picture changed and became even more blurred and gloomy. Long Yangjun was more anxious than ever. “Listen, Li Yao. We were all wrong. We were all wrong!

“About my hometown, the Ancient Sacred World, and the Nuwa Battleship and the Pangu Underground Palace that have been bothering me for half of my life… We have always believed that a cutting-edge biochemical research center is hidden inside the Pangu Underground Palace. It is a place where the Pangu Clan studies how to pass on their civilization, isn’t it? Meng Chixin and Wu Suiyun, two experts in the Divinity Transformation Stage, were attacked by the monsters inside the underground palace while they were exploring the Pangu Underground Palace. Their bodies of flesh and blood kept expanding, and they almost turned into the new Pangu Clan, didn’t they?

“Hehe. No. That’s not right at all. We have completely mistaken the purpose of this cutting-edge biochemical research institute!

“Do you remember how Meng Chixin and Wu Suiyun described how they felt when they were injected with the biochemical drugs by the monsters? They felt that their minds were melting and disintegrating, their emotions stripped away layer by layer. In the end, they were almost turned into killing machines!

“If this is the way that the Pangu Clan preserved their civilization, what can the biochemical drugs do even if they can produce countless killing machines that look like the Pangu Clan in hundreds of thousands of years? The Pangu Clan is not a natural-born homicidal maniac. They are ‘civilized people’ with a high level of rationality and socialism! Their purpose is to pass on their spirit, will, wisdom, and way of thinking. They are definitely not creating a bunch of ghosts that have nothing but skin and no soul. “No. What is being carried out in the underground palace of the Pangu Clan is not an ‘inheritance experiment’ at all, but an ‘experiment of destruction’. It is something that can destroy the primeval civilization. It is too dangerous and can only be tested in the Ancient Saint World, which is enshrouded in dark nebulae!

“Unfortunately, or rather, fortunately, the experiment of the Pangu Clan succeeded in the end. The terrible biochemical drugs or genetic viruses destroyed the Pangu Clan, the Nuwa Clan, and all the prehistoric species. Only human beings survived and opened a whole new page. “But right now, hehe, right now…”