Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

“Li Yao, look there! Look there!”

While Li Yao was immersed in the blue and resplendent heaven and earth, Zhang Daniu suddenly patted his shoulder and started shouting.

Li Yao narrowed his eyes and looked in the direction he was pointing at. He saw a pure white fish that was as translucent as jade jumping out of the water. It drew a beautiful arc on the surface of the ocean and dived into the water, waving its colorful tail.

“What is this?” Li Yao was dumbfounded.

Although he was not a marine biologist, he was very clear that it was impossible for such a beautiful fish to appear on Earth. This fish was at least five to six meters long, far longer than the average dolphin. It was simply a small-scale whale. But whether it was a dolphin or a whale, they were mainly black and white. There was absolutely no such pure white fish with seven-colored tail fins. This was simply a “spiritual beast” that only existed in the Immortal Realm!

On the surface of the sea where the fish were jumping and swimming, thousands of streaks of gold brightness were glittering. On a closer look, one could see that golden jellyfish were floating in the seawater. Their tentacles were waving and condensing into flames one moment and stars the next. They looked like a bunch of deities wandering in the universe!

“Is this still Earth?”

Li Yao was completely confused.

Not far in front of them, a lush island rose up from the bottom of the ocean like a giant boat that was ready to soar into the sky at any moment.

Near the island, several cone-shaped mountains were floating in midair almost a hundred meters high. Waterfalls were flowing down from the sky, creating glamorous rainbows under the sunlight.

“This is—this is an ‘Ark’!”

Li Yao looked at the scene that defied the common sense of physics and observed the shape of the island carefully. There were no other super tankers nearby. He suddenly realized something and exclaimed.

“That’s right.”

The grey mist lady said with a smile, “Everybody thinks that the ‘Ark’ is a gargantuan super tanker, including the Heaven’s Origin Sector and even the will of the planet. When a super tanker is sailing in the ocean, traces will always be left, including when it is being manufactured in the dock, when it is receiving supplies, and when it is registered to the country of the starship. All the intelligence will betray it.

“Therefore, over the past decades, the Heaven’s Origin Sector has spent a lot of manpower and resources searching for all the super tankers in the world, including the relatively large ten-thousand-ton cargo ships, trying to locate our headquarters, but to no avail.

“But you don’t know that the so-called ‘Ark’ is just a smoke grenade released by Red Pole to interfere with the investigation and lock-down of the Heaven’s Origin Sector and buy us more time for the ultimate battle. The real ‘Ark’ is exactly the island in front of you—”Ark Island!”

“I see!”

Li Yao was suddenly enlightened.

It was true that the super tankers could come and go freely at sea, but everything they needed for daily operations, from manufacturing to purchasing to maintenance, was too complicated and too eye-catching. With the support of the Heaven’s Origin Sector and the will of the earth, it was not difficult to locate and lock onto the thirty-thousand-ton cargo ships and the tankers produced by the major ship manufacturers on Earth.

Once it was locked onto, even the most solid and enormous ‘arky’ would be doomed.

However, an island was different.

An island of such a large scale could even produce its own water, making it completely self-sufficient. The energy, resources, and manpower that it could not provide could be provided by relatively small-scale ships. In this era, navigation technology was so advanced that even a fishing boat weighing a few hundred tons could be installed with a global satellite positioning system, allowing it to enter the depths of the ocean and work for a year and a half. No matter how formidable the Heaven’s Enlightenment Organization was, it was impossible to lock onto all the ocean-going ships in the world.

Li Yao was confused. “What is going on exactly? Are we still on Earth?”

“Of course, we are on Earth.

The grey mist lady was amused. “I merely drove into a space crevice.”

“Space folds?”

Li Yao was dazed. “What is that?”

“As an Easterner, you should be familiar with the concept, right?”

The grey mist lady said, “In the ancient Cultivation classics of the east, there is a saying that goes ‘a natural paradise’ and ‘a winding path leads to a secluded world’. It is said that the ancient people once entered a space crevice by accident and came to a mysterious space where time had been frozen for hundreds of years. After they returned, they wrote an article named ‘The Peach Blossom Spring’. Why don’t you consider the world in front of you a ‘Peach Blossom Spring’ too? Do you understand?”

Of course, Li Yao had read ‘The Peach Blossom Spring’, and he could understand what the grey mist lady meant.

Although the ‘Peach Blossom Spring’ could be interpreted as a remote, remote village that was far from the modern era, the author had gone back to look for it later. He had returned the way he came, but he could not find the location of the Peach Blossom Spring. It seemed to be a feature of a ‘paradise’ or a ‘space wrinkle’.

In the stories of supernatural powers, such mysterious spaces that were invisible to ordinary people had appeared multiple times, both in the ancient tales and in modern fantasy novels.

According to the common understanding of ‘Ark’ and ‘Apocalypse’, it was very likely that ‘Observers’ were the authors of the novels. The absurd stories they wrote more or less reflected part of reality. Therefore, it was reasonable that the ‘space folds’ existed.

“If you still don’t understand, you might as well imagine that there is an enormous ‘server’ behind the earth where we live, and the space folds are a small ‘private server’ that is secretly installed inside the server.

The grey mist lady said, “Maybe because of the logical errors and the overflow of data caused by multiple rebootes, or maybe because of the unswerving battles and breakthroughs of the previous generations of Prisonbreakers, they have finally made this Space Fold Camp what it looks like today. After Red Pole was taken over, it was further expanded and strengthened, forming the ‘Ark Island’ in front of you. This place is both our last secret base and our strongest battle fortress!”

“Server?”

Li Yao frowned. “I still don’t like the theory. It makes me feel that I’m not… real enough.”

“Like I said, there’s no need to dwell on such questions.

The grey mist lady smiled. “I believe in our world, too. The sky above our head and the earth below our feet are real. Our flesh, blood, and soul are real, too. This is definitely not a game in the virtual world.

“However, you have to admit that, if there is indeed a ‘four-dimensional life’ that is higher than us, and the ‘will of the earth’ is such a ‘four-dimensional life’, it is very likely that it will strike us across dimensions. For example, it will lock us in a prison of reincarnation and send us into one reincarnation after another, although we don’t know why it is doing that.

“From this point of view, the will of the earth, as a four-dimensional life form, looks at us earthlings living in the three-dimensional world in the same way that we look at the virtual figures in the computer games.

“How… annoying.”

Li Yao’s furrowed brows were still furrowed. “Truth or false, I don’t like the feeling of being manipulated. I don’t even like the feeling of being manipulated. I only like the feeling that somebody is looking down upon all living creatures from above.

“Then, let’s find a way to overthrow it.”

“This is the mission of the Hell Breakers,” the grey mist lady said casually. “Remove everything that is above us and let us—the six billion heroic spirits from Earth—stand at the peak of the three-dimensional, the four-dimensional, and even all the universes. There will be no existence that can interfere with our free will at all, much less restrict or manipulate it!

The grey mist lady’s words raised a sense of pride in Li Yao’s heart. He stopped dwelling on whether it was true or false. Pondering for a moment, he asked, “Is this place safe enough? A lot of traces of our rescue operation have been exposed. Will the Heaven’s Origin Sector follow us and attack us?”

“Rest assured.”

The grey mist lady smiled and said, “The most amazing thing about the folds of space is that it is not fixed at a certain coordinate in the depths of the ocean. Although you can see that this place is peaceful and that the ocean is boundless, in the ocean outside, the ‘wrinkled channel’ is moving irregularly in the vast and boundless Pacific Ocean. It took us several reincarnations to grasp the pattern of its movement. How can the Heaven’s Origin Sector see through the folded channel in just a few days?

“Unless the spies of the Heaven’s Origin Sector sneak into this place and transmit the information to the outside world without alarming anyone, it is impossible for us to be discovered within ten days to half a month. And ten days to half a month is enough for the Red Pole to complete the final preparations. This is also the reason why we have to thoroughly examine and test everyone who has entered the spatial folds. I’m sorry about those few days.”

The grey mist lady was someone who was cold on the outside but warm on the inside. She was still apologizing for the grievances that Li Yao had suffered over the past few days.

“It doesn’t matter. I didn’t know that the headquarters of the Ark Foundation was such a mysterious place, either. Now, I finally understand what Red Pole meant.”

Li Yao smiled. “Indeed. If I were sitting in such a secret base, I would run the most rigorous tests on the people entering and exiting the place. Chances are that I would be a hundred times more careful than him!”

His words made everyone on the deck laugh.

“Anyways, we are finally home!”

Sparda, the muscular man, took a deep breath and grinned. “Everything is settled now that I’m home!”

Although Li Yao had never been to the ‘home’ of the prison breakers, he felt more at ease after hearing the confidence in the grey mist lady’s words.

Right then, Lucky Star was getting closer and closer to the Ark Island. Dozens of large-scale facilities that looked like drilling rigs could be seen on the shallow sea near the island. Above them were towers made of steel that looked like antennas soaring into the sky.