Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

The air in the hallway was thick and sticky. Time seemed to have been frozen. A weird face suddenly appeared on the colorful carpet. It gazed at Li Yao and Fei Ming, who were stepping over it in silence.

When the two of them disappeared in the emergence exit, the weird face said softly, ”Plan A went smoothly. Clean up the traces and fall back in half a minute, every team.”

The weird face softly whistled. After a ’Bo’ sound, something seemed to break. The hot and damp hallway resumed its usual wind and coolness immediately.

The weird face smiled. It melted into the carpet and vanished.

Li Yao was sitting inside a fully-sealed limo shuttle whose windows had been blocked by light beams to stop him from seeing the outside.

The shuttle was running very steadily, to the extent that it felt stationary.

Li Yao was studying the gyro wholeheartedly, with a satisfied and spellbound face.

But his computational ability surged quietly like a tide at night as he analyzed the route of the shuttle from every slight sign of slope, turn, acceleration, and deceleration, before he overlapped the route with a 3D map of the Thousand Edges Mountain.

He discovered that, although the shuttle was moving fast, it had been circling around. It seemed to have run for more than an hour, but it had returned to the building next to the hotel where he was staying!

Li Yao recalled the building to be a grey, inconspicuous plaza of seven floors.

The shuttle stopped. Ten minutes later, the door of the shuttle was opened slowly, revealing an enclosed pathway made of soft, silver materials.

At the end of the pathway was a gate in an ancient style.

Li Yao sneered. If it were a pure refiner, they would’ve thought that they had been brought to ten thousand miles away and would have been baffled about where they were now.

Fei Ming knocked on the gate three times. Then he bowed to Li Yao and said, ”Master Li Yao, please.”

The gate was opened slowly. A faint scent of wood drifted into his nose. The room seemed to be a messy shop of antiques. On the lackluster closets, there was nothing but glittering artifacts, jade ware, and miscellaneous jewels.

Li Yao’s eyes didn’t stop on any of the items, for his attention was attracted by the one nearby.

Huangpu Xiaoya!

It had apparently been much more troublesome to ’invite’ her here. There were bruises on her face and hands. Her clothes were untidy. Her eyes were bloodshot, from which electric sparks were bursting out.

She seemed to have been shackled by a certain barrier. Seeing Li Yao show up, she was beaming with joy at first. But very soon, she was caught in deeper desperation. She opened her mouth and tried to speak, only to let out meaningless hissing sounds.

Fei Ming said with a smile, ”Master Li Yao, Miss Huangpu, please do wait patiently for a moment. The host will be here in no time.”

Barely had he finished his sentence when a middle-aged, somewhat tired man whose temples were grey haired slowly walked out from behind a screen of bamboo.

His face was nothing unusual. But his eyes were ten times brighter than those of ordinary people. His hands were as dry as rotten rood, and he had six fingers on his left hand.

If anybody else had six fingers, the extra one would certainly be redundant and very weird.

But this middle-aged man’s left hand looked natural and perfect. It gave the impression that having six fingers was the norm, that it was not that he had one additional finger but that everybody else was short of a finger.

Such a weird left hand made Li Yao’s heart beat fast.

When he looked at the man’s face more carefully, lightning seemed to strike his head.

Before Li Yao could open his mouth, Huangpu Xiaoya, whose barrier had been eliminated at some point, exclaimed in shock with a twisted face, as if she had seen the last person she expected to see in the world, ”You are… Uncle Shiyi?”

With a closer look, the man’s face did share some similarities with that of Huangpu Xiaoya.

Li Yao’s pupils constricted violently. His face color changed as he cried, ”Huangpu Shiyi 1 ?”

Huangpu Shiyi was an unavoidable figure in discussions about the most distinguished refiners of the past thirty years.

He had been the most talented, the most hard-working, and the most arrogant genius refiner of his generation in the Huangpu family.

In the Skyhill Sword Seminar 29 years ago, Huangpu Shiyi had jumped out of nowhere and won the title of ’Sword Master’ effortlessly with unquestionable one-sided competitions. The Skyhill Sword Seminar that year could almost be called his one-man show. The skills and techniques he showed to the world were all as impressive as Li Yao’s ’carving a chip with his bare hands’, if not more!

When Li Yao was searching for information about the Skyhill Sword Seminar, he had seen videos of Huangpu Shiyi’s arts of refining, which had left such a deep impression on him that even he found it hard to believe that such a genius could exist, although he had always considered himself to be sort of a genius!

At that year, Huangpu Shiyi hadn’t even reached thirty yet. He was in the prime of his life.

There was no telling whether it was out of arrogance or madness, but Huangpu Shiyi was not satisfied after winning the title of ’Sword Master’ easily. He challenged the leader of the Mo family in front of thousands of spectators and all the seniors in the circle of refiners and claimed that he would defeat all the refiners of the Mo family within ten years!

”The thing about noble families of refining is that there are too many of them. One is enough!”

That was what Huangpu Shiyi had said during the ceremony.

After that, he went through the harshest training in the craziest ways.

Li Yao trained with Purple Ring Sword Ants to increase the speed and perception of his hands. But Huangpu Shiyi had found a world fragment with abundant spiritual energy of the thunder class and trained himself in the thunderstorms. He had tried to attract the lightning to his hands to trigger the ultimate potential within them!

But, alas, he was distracted due to an accident, and his hands were wasted.

The best refiner of his generation suddenly turned into the biggest joke. He fell into the abyss of darkness for all eternity before he really rose!

Later, it was said that he went to a space zone at the edge of the Flying Star Sector to look for methods to treat his hands. During his journey, his starship was destroyed in a space storm, and he was killed.

The most brilliant star had shined and perished just like that. The only thing left was the story of an insane and arrogant genius!

Li Yao and Huangpu Xiaoya never expected that the legendary refiner who should’ve been buried in the sea of stars twenty years ago would appear in the Skyhill Sword Seminar again and right in front of their faces!

A lot of things had apparently happened to Huangpu Shiyi. There was no arrogance nor insanity on his face at all. Like a gentle professor, he smiled and said, ”Xiaoya, when I left for the Million Star Space Zone, you had just been born. And now you are a grown woman who is qualified to participate in the Skyhill Sword Seminar representing the Huangpu family! I’ve studied the videos of your refining a lot. You are almost as good as I was at your age!

”Li Yao, my young friend. You, on the other hand, are the biggest surprise that I found in this Skyhill Sword Seminar! Carving a chip with supersonic hands, enduring the pain unendurable for other Cultivators, and training your hands with Purple Ring Sword Ants. Madness! That is pure madness! I see some of myself from the old days in you! You and I are the same type of person, and the same type of refiner!”

There was deep confusion on Li Yao’s face, as he mumbled, ”What is going—”

In the middle of his sentence, the aura around Li Yao entirely changed within a moment.

A moment earlier, he seemed to still be unclear of the situation. But now, he leapt forward like a leopard!

With two explosive sounds under his feet, every muscle on Li Yao’s body was reduced to minimum. He turned into a streak of brightness and lunged at Huangpu Shiyi like a battle saber unsheathed.

In the meantime, dazzling brilliance appeared on his left arm and wreathed it, which turned out to be a thin and sharp blade!

A paralyzed prude when quiet and a rabid rabbit when active, Li Yao attacked the enemy when he made up his mind without any hesitation!

But Huangpu Shiyi seemed to have expected his unannounced attack. His sunny smile was not affected at all.

Weird waves spread out in front of Huangpu Shiyi. The air seemed to become mud, which slowed down Li Yao’s motion a little bit.

Within the moment, two people, one fair and the other dark, appeared abruptly on Huangpu Shiyi’s two sides.

On his left was a woman who was extremely slender. Her neck was twice the length of ordinary people’s, and her skin was as dark as coal.

On his right was a stout man whose skin was so fair that it was almost transparent.

The two of them roared at the same time. They stood in Li Yao’s way and blocked his fatal attack easily.

Li Yao showed no expression, but his eyes were cold. Seeing that his attack had missed, he returned to a corner like a tornado. Then he juxtaposed his right middle finger and index finger and pointed them at his spiritual root on his forehead, while he mumbled spells in his mouth.

Streams of brightness flowed out of his body and formed around him what appeared to be an armor.

He was summoning his crystal suit!

However, he was not fast enough. Before the crystal suit was fully extracted, the long-necked dark woman appeared in front of him and struck his abdomen with her long leg.

BAM!

The dark woman was wearing multiple iron rings on her legs which appeared to be some kind of very aggressive magical equipment. Dazzling brightness surged from them and flooded into Li Yao’s chest.

Li Yao’s eyes bulged wide. His spell was disrupted. The components that he had already extracted splashed and fell to the ground. They belonged to the ’Eight Arm Suit’, created by the Silver Heart School with both combat and maintenance functions!

Li Yao gagged and collapsed helplessly.

The dark woman’s killing intent soared like a volcanic eruption. She chuckled like a night owl, while a black, glittering blade ejected from her boot and slashed at Li Yao’s neck amid earsplitting noises.

Li Yao was wearing the most terrified expression, but he couldn’t react because his legs were no longer his.

Seeing that the blade was about to cut open Li Yao’s neck, Huangpu Shiyi coughed slightly.

There was amusement in the dark woman’s eyes. The blade was retreated, and she simply kicked Li Yao in his chest.

Li Yao screamed and rolled into the corner.

From Li Yao jumping to attack to him being kicked into the corner, the entire process had lasted only five seconds.

Huangpu Xiaoya was almost dumbfounded to see what had happened.

Her eyes stopped briefly at the dark woman and the fair man. Then she shouted again, her voice trembling, ”Black Stone! White Dew! Are you not the most famous free Exos in the Sky Diver Space Zone who were assassinated by Spider’s Thorn five years ago?”

The dark woman was not Black Stone; she was White Dew.

The fair and stout man, on the other hand, was Black Stone.

White Dew and Black Stone smiled and returned to Huangpu Shiyi’s side, waiting for orders solemnly and quietly.

Li Yao was cramping and breathing like a bull. It was not until he took a rest on his knees and spat a mouthful of blood that he glared at Huangpu Shiyi and asked coarsely, ”When did you find out that I was not hypnotized?”

”I knew since the very beginning that you wouldn’t be hypnotized.”

Huangpu Shiyi smiled. ”If you made a major breakthrough in the True Fusion and the space swirl, your mental power must be tremendously strong. An insignificant ’Chaotic Star Gyro’ is far from enough to hypnotize you, is it not?”