Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

After a tiny cracking noise as if a few strings inside his brain broke off, Li Yao’s eyes were filled with blood, and the world was swirling around him, giving him a strong sense of nausea.

Not good. My computational ability ran too high. The cerebrovascular vessels were broken again.

And not one of them, but many. I’m going to be paralyzed!

Li Yao hurriedly stopped contemplating. His boiling brain cells gradually calmed down. He quickly picked out a few drugs from the myriad of medications beside him. Half of the drugs were taken orally, while the other half were smeared on his temples.

The drugs spread throughout his brain and fixed his cerebrovascular vessels, which were as wide as a spider’s web, together with his thousands of spiritual threads.

Three minutes later, more than ten lackluster pearls of blood popped up on Li Yao’s forehead. The internal bleeding inside his brain had been drained.

The blood-red in Li Yao’s eyes gradually disappeared. He felt refreshed and took a long, relieved breath.

This was the seventeenth brain bleeding for him in two days.

It could not be helped. A side effect of bringing up his brain activity and computational ability exponentially in the Super Perceptive State was that the burden for the cerebrovascular vessels would greatly increase, too. The blood would be flowing hundreds of times faster inside the brain.

Veins and nerves were the body parts that were the hardest to be trained. When they were functioning at hundreds of times their capacity, naturally, they would explode from time to time.

I have to find a few Cultivation arts that focus on the training of cerebrovascular vessels some day in order to improve the toughness of my cerebrovascular vessels. Without a large enough blood supply, my computational ability can barely do me any good.

Li Yao was gazing at the light beams in the midair on which hundreds of structural designs were still glittering. But due to his plummeting computational ability after exiting the Super Perceptive State, he couldn’t even understand any of them.

These were the files whose difficulty had been classified as Level 6.

Over the past two days, Li Yao had grasped the files up to Level 5, but he was somehow stuck in Level 6.

Everyone knows best what they are good at. His research field had been small magical equipment and crystal suits. As for super-large comprehensive systems like a starship, he had hardly touched upon them before, and his knowledge about them was little to none.

The first five levels of the maintenance manual had basically covered all the common faults that may happen to a starship and their corresponding solutions. A lot of articles were on the modifications of a starship for a specified environment. After he understood them, the basic maintenance and modification work would be no trouble for him.

Starting from Level 6, the truly mysterious and sophisticated core units were involved. Many theories that Li Yao had never heard of popped up, too.

Two months, or even two years, of devotion to them without the enlightenment of a master might not be enough to comprehend all of them, not to mention that he only had two days.

Li Yao was well aware of the limitlessness of the world of magical equipment. He had never intended to become a starship specialist, either. Therefore, he simply turned off the light beam and unplugged the jade chip.

The structural designs and spiritual energy flowcharts of hundreds of commonly-seen magical equipment of the Flying Star Sector stored inside the jade chip, on the other hand, had been analyzed and processed without much trouble.

Most of the magical equipment fell into the category of middle- or small-scale magical equipment, which was precisely what Li Yao was good at. Many kinds of magical equipment shared a lot of similarities with their counterparts of the Heaven’s Origin Sector. Therefore, it didn’t take long before Li Yao grasped all of them.

With the scattered components of the training area, Li Yao assembled twelve inconspicuous alarms to monitor the pathways around him.

Once everyone approached the area, the alarms would not ring out, but send a telepathic thought to an iron scrap that Li Yao wore close to his body. A feeble buzz would be triggered so that he would know somebody was coming.

Over the past two days, Li Yao had examined every corner of the training area and made sure that there was no surveillance magical equipment.

Together with these alarms, the training area would be his own kingdom.

Extending twelve spiritual threads to ensure that the alarms were functioning normally, Li Yao smiled and took out the three Cosmos Rings that he looted from Fengyu Ming.

During the two days, other than cleaning up the debris and studying the starship maintenance manual, Li Yao had also spent some time examining two of the Cosmos Rings.

The first Cosmos Ring contained a lot of high-nutrition food and clean water, both of which were not very worthy. But they had been preserved in the best storage rune arrays and wouldn’t go sour even if they were kept in the Cosmos Ring for decades. Even a gluttonous Cultivator would be able to feed themself up for several years with the supplies inside.

Inside the second Cosmos Ring was a huge amount of Flying Star dollars, gold, diamonds, crystals, and Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures that were much more valuable than cash and jewelry.

By his preliminary estimation, Li Yao had come to the conclusion that the load of money was enough to buy quite a few decent crystal suits or even a small second-hand carrier with a few crew members who preferred money to life.

As for the third Cosmos Ring, which was the most discreet and had been refined into the appearance of a capsule…

Li Yao casually retrieved all the objects inside the Cosmos Ring and placed them on the ground, before he stared at them in great interest.

Miscellaneous magical equipment of various kinds was lying in front of him. Li Yao tried for a long time to figure out what they were for.

These gadgets were all magical equipment for disguise and escape.

There was a capsule that, once crumbled and smeared on the body, would change one’s skin miraculously from a young man of twenty years old to a dry, crappy old man within several seconds.

There was also a piece soft magical equipment made of unknown materials that had the color and feeling of flesh. A muscular man could turn into a young girl with alluring curves after sticking the magical equipment to his body.

Altogether, there were four sets of such camouflage magical equipment, with compatible clothes and identity certifications. One could pretend to be an old man, two young men with one taller and the other short, and a young girl whose face was plain but had an amazing figure very easily.

Every one of them had background files that were tens of thousands of words long. Even the residences and professions of their remote relatives were listed clearly.

These items almost awed Li Yao.

Fengyu Zhong truly deserved to be known as a seasoned space pirate. No wonder he could escape from Heavenly Saints City’s siege multiple times. The things that he prepared for his only son were evident enough of his cunningness.

If Fengyu Ming had decided to abandon the starship and sneak into Star Lord Temple with that magical equipment, he really might have been able to get away.

It was a pity that, although Fengyu Zhong had prepared quite a lot of contingency plans, he must’ve never anticipated that somebody would play a decapitation move on his only son inside his own starship, and that the guy would coerce his son to surrender all the Cosmos Rings with both carrots and sticks.

What is this?

Other than disguise magical equipment, there were quite a lot of sordid, malicious weapons.

For example, a needle launcher that could be hidden below the tongue and would eject poisoned needles when activated.

Li Yao also discovered three blades that were thin, transparent, and barely recognizable unless one were to touch them with one’s own hands.

For a Cultivator that had studied ’Thousand Finger Soft Bone Technique’ and boasted an amazing hand speed such as himself, the three blades couldn’t be more useful.

The last thing that he found was a ragged jade chip.

What kind of files are stored inside the jade chip to make it qualified to be kept together with Fengyu Ming’s tools for his last escape?

Li Yao’s curiosity was aroused. He inserted the jade chip into the crystal processor.

Appearing on the light beam first was an intimidating declaration. ’Stormy Sword, Cut Your Throat!’.

”This is—”

Just browsing through the table of contents was enough to let Li Yao’s eyes bulge wide open and his eyebrows fly over his head. He couldn’t help but exclaim in disbelief.

The ’Stormy Sword’ was written by the great bandit Fengyu Zhong in person based on his decades of experience as a space pirate. To put it more simply, it was… an introduction to robbery!

This notebook might as well be called ’A Practical Handbook for You To Become A Super Space Pirate in 100 days’!

I understand it now. Fengyu Zhong wrote this for his only son to study in order to prepare him to succeed Storm Prison someday.

This notebook is so detailed. If one could learn all of it, they would definitely be qualified to be a super space pirate.

I’m the captain of Sparkle, which is currently wandering like a lone wolf in the Flying Star Sector. It’s hardly likely that I will cooperate with any organizations here.

In that sense, the strategies that Sparkle should employ are quite similar to the space pirates’!

This notebook is definitely worth properly studying!

’Stormy Sword’ included all the procedures for a space pirate robbery.

The choice of routes in the sea of stars, the defense against natural disasters, the art of hiding, the tactics of scouting, how to determine the value and the capability of the prey, how to avoid being hunted by the Cultivators who represented justice, how to assault, how to disguise, how to breach onto a hostile starship, how to interrogate the captives… Everything one could imagine was all elaborated on.

Li Yao studied the encyclopedia of bloody hunting as vast as ocean wholeheartedly for a good hour, only to find that he hadn’t even finished 1% of it.

Robbery is indeed an art in the sea of stars. Li Yao couldn’t help but observe.

It was also true that Cultivators in the Core Formation Stage were all remarkable. Although Fengyu Zhong was a notorious space pirate, he had truly got something in his hands, which must’ve been the reason why he could be such a famous space pirate for decades without being captured.

Many tactics about camouflage and assault would leave the impression that he had some sort of military background and perhaps was an expert in guerilla warfare in the sea of stars.

But when it came to the psychological knowledge employed in the interrogation of ’prey’, one would doubt that he was actually an erudite university professor.

As for the management of subordinate space pirates, the control of morale, and the award and punishment system, it was enough to qualify him to be the leader of a major sect.

In one word, professional!

What Li Yao liked most was the section named ’Architecture of Common Starships’.

This section took up half of the notebook.

During a robbery, it was inevitable for the space pirates to trespass on the preys’ starship and fight in close-quarters combat. The decapitation strategy was often utilized, too, which made it all the more important to know the structure of the prey’s starship, including the specific locations of crucial cabins such as the engine compartment and the cockpit.

Therefore, ’Stormy Sword’ had recorded the approximate structure designs of hundreds of starships.

What almost moved Li Yao to tears was that, in each structure design, very detailed notes and marks had been left to illustrate dozens of ways of infiltrating and attacking as well as hundreds of accidents that might occur during an infiltration and the pertaining emergency plans.

Xiong Tao’s maintenance manual taught Li Yao how to protect and repair a starship to maintain its basic functions during a fierce battle, but this ’Stormy Sword’ expounded on the simplest, roughest and most effective ways to destroy a starship and cut its throat in the shortest amount of time possible!