Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

Although a hundred years of analysis and research had failed to find out the cause of the ‘uncontrollable heretics’, at the very least, the organization known as God’s Heart had perished together with Spirit Chu.

For a hundred years, it had been a key target for the leadership of the Star Glory Federation. If it showed any signs of recovery, they would immediately devote tremendous resources and the best troops to suppress and execute it.

Therefore, over the past hundred years, there had been almost a hundred small-scale heretical associations in the Sanctuary, but the Heart of God had never made a comeback until two to three years ago.

Starting from two to three years ago, the hundred years of peace had been broken. The gods would rise from the ashes and become even more cunning and secretive. Not only had they escaped the investigation and suppression of the Heresy Interrogation Bureau time and time again, there were even signs that dozens of different small Heresy Societies had been gathered together and turned into a riot. Maybe it was because the Sanctuary Alliance had lost dozens of Sectors in the counterattack of the Star Ocean Imperium. Even the civilization of the ‘quasi-beetle’ had dealt a heavy blow to the overall structure and caused internal strife, giving the Heresy Society an opportunity to take advantage of.

The leadership of the Star Glory Federation was in a hurry to finish off the revived Heart of God before the strategical war against the imperium began. But this time, they wasted two years and did not even know who the new leader of the Heart of God was.

Some people said that the new leader of the Heart of God was Chu Zhiling in the old days. She was not dead at all. She was merely ‘reborn’ a hundred years later under the tutelage of a real god.

It was also said that the new leader of the Heart of God was a descendant of Chu Ling, or even a ‘devil child’ who had run away secretly. It was because the ‘devil child project’ had made a mistake.

However, Li Yao could not find any evidence to support the two speculations in the confidential files of the ‘Devil’s Child Project’. Chu Zhiling, leader of the God’s Heart Association a hundred years ago, must’ve been killed without a trace. Before Li Yao’s sabotage, the ‘Devil’s Child Project’ had been flawless, too.

Having no other options, the ‘cleaner’ who was responsible for the investigation and the destruction of the Heart of God could only give the mysterious new leader a code name.

They called him ‘Puppet King’.

“A puppet king? How interesting.”

Li Yao mumbled to himself, “To be able to lurk inside the Star Glory Federation for at least two years and plan and incite a series of riots without being discovered by the members of the Star Glory Federation and still living a happy life in the darkness, this guy must be one of the top experts of the Pangu Universe. I wonder, what kind of existence is he exactly?”

“If you are conspiring with the ‘Puppet King’ to sabotage the Sanctuary Alliance, I have to remind you.

“The enemy of an enemy is not necessarily a friend,” the mental devil said. “Just like the federation’s enemy is the imperium and the imperium’s enemy is the Sanctuary Alliance, the Sanctuary Alliance will never be a friend of the federation.

“If the Spirit of Chu’s Guild of Heart a hundred years ago still carried the colors of innovation and progress and was an object of communication and cooperation, then the Guild of Heart a hundred years later has already been modified beyond recognition by the ‘Puppet King’. Its methods are even more secretive, despicable, and bloody. Look at the series of cases where the ‘Puppet King’ announced that the Guild of Heart would be coming back again. For purposes that are not worth mentioning to outsiders, the guy did not hesitate to eliminate all the people on the starship, be they workers, soldiers, or priests!

“Therefore, if you think that finding the ‘Puppet King’ in such a hurry will be enough to convince him to agree with your path and that we can fight against the Great Sage together comfortably, you are too naïve.

Shua! Shua! Shua! Shua!

Pictures that were too gory to look at passed by Li Yao’s soul.

They were all the damages that God’s Heart had caused in the past two years.

It was indeed as the mental devil had said. ‘Puppet King’ and ‘Chu Zhiyun’ were two ‘masters’ in completely different styles.

In order to highlight the existence of himself and the God’s Heart Association, the puppet king was never stingy with killing.

“This guy…”

Even though Li Yao forced himself to be cold-hearted and was used to the inhuman methods of the people of the Sanctuary, the gory and shocking scenes still triggered the unhappiness deep inside his soul.

If Master Zhi Shan’s inhumane slaughter was for the purpose of certain ‘experiments’ and ‘research’, then there was no telling why the ‘Puppet King’ created mountains of corpses and seas of blood.

Maybe, the Heart of God a hundred years ago was two completely different organizations, and the puppet king was merely pretending to be Chu Zhiling.

This was not an ally he could make.

But Li Yao still needed to find a ‘borrowing point’.

Pondering for a moment, his soul waves jumped up again.

“Arrange all the information you’ve collected about the ‘Devil Child Project’, the ‘Cleaners’, and the ‘Puppet King’ and look for the overlapping data.

Li Yao said to the mental devil, “Let’s see if there is any information that is closely related to the three of them!”

“…Good idea. Let’s give it a try.”

This time, the mental devil surprisingly did not refute Li Yao. Instead, it released its crimson soul waves to the maximum, from which countless runes and data flowed out.

Swoosh! Swoosh! Swoosh! Swoosh!

Endless data condensed into three enormous swirls that were spinning at a high speed while attracting each other. When they finally overlapped, the data that was almost identical to each other jumped out and flooded into Li Yao’s soul like tides.

A waterfall of information immediately appeared in Li Yao’s vision. He had also captured what he needed after a long search.

It was a 3D image of a woman in a military uniform.

Her face was emotionless, as if she was wearing a frost mask all the time. Even her eyes were black and white. There was not the slightest hint of emotion on her face, making it impossible to tell whether she was a real person or a spiritual puppet covered in a layer of bionic skin. The short purple hair that reached her ears was perhaps the only thing that highlighted her personality. Other than that, she was emitting an air of destruction that kept strangers away.

However, what interested Li Yao was not her temperament but her appearance.

“Isn’t this Chu Zhiyun?”

The woman created by the 3D image was almost identical to Chu Zhiyun, the beloved monitor of Tangka. Of course, she was more mature and athletic, like an enlarged monitor.

Along with the three-dimensional shadows, a lot of information about her identity and all the files that the mental devil had collected about her popped up.

Chu Zhixiao, the nineteenth Devil’s Child, sub-project of the Devil’s Child Project—Slaughter Goddess Project, Major of the God Bless Army, Cleaner, Yasha Squad.

One word after another appeared in Li Yao’s vision.

As it turned out, the woman named ‘Chu Zhixiao’ was really the biological sister of the class monitor. Like Zhou Xiuyun and Chu Zhiyun, she had the same mother, who was also known as ‘Chu Zhiling’. They were all devil children.

Chu Zhixiao was decades older than Chu Zhiyun. She was the nineteenth Devil’s Child, and Chu Zhiyun was the twenty-ninth. But it did not mean that her ‘model’ was lower than Chu Zhiyun’s. The two of them were born for two entirely different research fields.

On Tangka’s class monitor, Chu Zhiyun, the researchers had hoped that she could simulate everything about the spirit of Chu from the past. It would be best if she could become the clone of the spirit of Chu from her mindset to her habits.

But on the nineteenth Devil’s Child, the researchers had combined Chu Zhiling’s seed of life with the genes of the most loyal and strongest warriors of the Sanctuary, hoping to create a version of Chu Zhiling whose combat ability was maximized.

As ‘Saint Patrollers’, Chu Ling’s individual combat ability was extremely high in the first place. It was hard to imagine what kind of destructive monsters he would produce if he planted a lot of battle genes and activated and refined them in all kinds of insane ways.

Li Yao did not know why the lunatics of the ‘Devil’s Child Project had bred such a monster.

After racking his brain, there were only two possibilities.

Or, the researchers would like to know what a heretic whose strength and ability to bewitch would look like in the worst-case scenario. They would also need to draft corresponding anti-control plans according to the damage caused by the nineteenth Devil Child.

Or, the researchers were trying to see whether or not the genes of the most loyal and powerful warriors of the Star Glory Federation could suppress the potential uncontrollable factors in Chu Ling’s genes.

All in all, the ‘Goddess Slayer’ project was indeed the most dangerous of all the sub-projects of the Devil’s Child project.

As a result, after the nineteenth Devil’s Child tested the peak of his combat ability, starting from the twentieth Devil’s Child, he no longer demanded combat ability and even intentionally or unintentionally weakened the combat ability of the Devil’s Child.

Maybe, a terrible accident had happened in the past. Even though the researchers were prepared for it, the damage was still tremendous.

As for most of the nineteenth devil children, they were scrapped and destroyed not long after they ‘mature’ due to overloading strength and other reasons. Some of them even withered because they could not withstand the excessive strength when they were still in the embryonic state.

To this day, the nineteenth Devil’s Child was the only survivor.

It was Chu Zhixiao, the master of the three-dimensional shadow that was revolving slowly in Li Yao’s vision, a member of the Heresy Interrogation Bureau, an organization of cleaners, the captain of the ‘Yaksha Squad’, the ninth investigation squad, and the code name ‘Major’.

“Just like Chu Zhiyun, she grew up as a ‘Class Monitor’ in the Divine Light Academy. After her characteristics as a ‘Slaughter Goddess’ were gradually revealed, she was sent to the floating fortress for inhumane research. Almost all her companions died miserably during the research, or they lost control of their strength and burnt their brilliant vitality, turning into ash. She was the only survivor.

“His memories were erased time and time again, and he was subjected to crueler strengthening experiments time and time again, trying to stimulate the awakening of the primeval genes at a deeper level. In the end, he became an existence similar to the ultimate weapon.

“This time, after their memories were erased again, they conducted experiments on a large scale and were sent to the ‘God Bless Army’, the regular army of the Star Glory Federation. With the rank of ‘Major’, they were active in the battlefield of the counterattack of the imperium and caused a lot of trouble for the citizens of the imperium.

“After the counterattack of the Star Ocean Imperium, the two parties had nothing to fight. Therefore, they were summoned back from the frontline and purged of part of their memories. They were dismissed from the army and joined the Heresy Interrogation Bureau, where they became ‘cleaners’. They were also the captains of the infamous ‘Ninth Investigative Action Team’, which was responsible for investigating the cases of the Heart of God and the King of Puppets.

“Wait a minute. Isn’t Chu Zhixiao the daughter of the previous leader of the God’s Heart Association, Chu Zhiling? Isn’t he an experiment subject that could go out of control at any time? Using the daughter of the previous leader to investigate the leader of this generation? What is this? Fighting poison with poison? A new experiment?”

“Anyways… this woman’s life is truly rotten!”

Li Yao’s soul had never been so sharp before, like the crazily trembling sawteeth on a chainsword.

Was the woman named ‘Chu Zhixiao’ another form of ‘brain in a tank’?

The fate of mankind should not have been designed like that. It should not have been manipulated like a scarred puppet!.