Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

”The training of souls is different from the expansion of veins; it is much more dangerous. You will not necessarily be able to pass it even though your soul is very solid.

”Do you hear the screams in the secret cells below? They are all the experts of the Furious Bears Tribe. They used to be determined, unwavering tough men, but they all became mentally deranged because of the blast to their souls. They have completely lost themselves and have become animals who know nothing but slaughtering. Therefore, they can only be locked in this place to wait for their eternal peace.

”I did not plan to bring you to the real training place of the qi-trainers in the beginning, but your performance earlier was widely beyond my imagination.

”With everything reaching this point, I have no other alternatives other than to wager on you.

”It’s all up to you now. Do you want to go in or not?”

Xiong Wuji’s philosophical words raised a lot of questions in Li Yao’s mind.

The creepy screams from the depths of the cave almost terrified him, too.

However, expanding the veins with True Qi Locks could only increase the body’s spiritual gas capacity. He wouldn’t be able to fully control the overflowing spiritual gas when it was unleashed.

Li Yao vaguely sensed that the technique of spiritual gas resonation that Yan Chihuo had performed had something to do with the so-called ’real training’ deep underground.

Staring at Xiong Wuji without backing off, Li Yao replied briefly, ”I would like to have a try.”

Xiong Wuji nodded and pushed open a rusted iron door next to him.

The iron gate was almost one meter thick and looked strong enough to be installed in a vault. The interior side of the gate was riddled with interconnecting scratch marks, as if somebody had mauled the iron frenziedly.

”After you go inside, just follow your heart and try to enter a meditative state. If you are really connected to the ’Titan Warriors’, you will be able to enter the ’Titan Illusionary Land’. Do note that the Titan Illusionary Land can be very tempting. It’s very easy to dwell in it and fail to return to yourself. You must not forget who you are, or you will be just like the prisoners below.”

After finishing the speech, Xiong Wuji locked the door from the outside.

Li Yao observed his surroundings carefully. Behind the iron door was a crude cave whose walls were full of bumps and hollows. With a closer look, Li Yao discovered that they were all traces of fists deep into the rocks. There was no telling how many people had savaged the cave, but the rocks had been pressed so hard that they looked metallic.

In the middle of the cave were countless bizarre-shaped stones that were emanating glamorous colors. They looked the same as those Li Yao had seen on the meteorite mountains.

Li Yao immediately realized something. These are the scraps of the meteorite mountains. They are pieces of the apocalypse!

Some of the meteorites were carved with messy runes; some had shabby pictures, which looked like the wall paining of the primitive barbarians, carved into them. In the pictures, many mighty giants were fighting against ferocious beasts.

Several other meteorites looked like fossils, in which biological remains that had lithified were stored. They were all larger than Li Yao’s head and had extended countless tentacles spread out in various directions like octopuses.

LUM DUM! LUM DUM!

While Li Yao was gazing at the fossils, a powerful heartbeat echoed inside his brain.

Li Yao was suddenly alarmed.

He had realized what the objects sealed inside the meteorites were.

They were hearts. Judging from their scale, they were the fossils of hearts that belonged to giants more than three meters tall!

Did all the runes, paint, and heart fossils come to Iron Plateau together with the meteorites during the apocalypse? What are the Titan Warriors that Xiong Wuji mentioned just now?

As the heartbeat inside his brain became faster and faster, the runes and paintings on the meteorites seemed to turn into flowing lines that were spinning slowly deep inside his eyes.

Li Yao vaguely heard roars that were as loud as raging thunder. Thousands of noises congregated into a magnificent battlefield!

Li Yao stared at the largest heart fossil. He narrowed his eyes and entered a meditative state accompanied by the sounds of a beating heart and roaring.

A bottomless hole seemed to appear below his feet. He was falling, falling, and falling, until he heard an earsplitting explosion and found himself in a whole new world!

This was a bleak and vast world, and it seemed to be a planet in the primitive phase. Far ahead were erupting volcanoes whose magma had almost consumed the entire sky.

On the ragged land, tens of thousands of giants were grouping. Their average height was around four meters, and their shoulders were twice as broad as those of human beings. Their heads were the shape of triangles, their chins protruding significantly. Two sharp tusks jutted out like ivories.

Their skin was crimson, as if on fire, on which glamorous flowery stripes were growing. They did not look like tattoos but more like they had been there at birth. The flowery stripes turned into different forms and shades as their masters waved their hands and legs.

All the giants were wearing simple beast hide, some of which was covered with the bones or shells of eccentric beasts. Contrary to the rest of their primitive getup, they were holding very delicate metal blades that resembled axes and sabers in their hands!

Li Yao felt like he was having a heart attack, but then he suddenly discovered that he had become one of the red giants, too, and that he was charging forward under the command of his leader.

”Ughhhh!”

The red giants were apparently poor at speech. They could only utter several simple syllables, but the glamorous stripes that were continuously changing on their bodies were a unique form of communication for them.

Although Li Yao couldn’t understand their language, he could sense the meaning expressed by the roars and the changing stripes.

From beginning to the end, all the crazy roars and the bouncing stripes had but one meaning.

”Let’s fight! Let’s fight! Let’s fight!”

In the continuous mountains ahead of them, countless hollows appeared, making the mountains look like honeycombs. From the hollows crawled out terrifying beasts almost five meters tall that seemed to be hybrids of spiders and mantises. Several bigger holes even produced enormous beasts more than ten meters tall. It was like an exposition of gargantuan creatures.

The ferocious beasts out of one’s worst nightmares had in fact triggered the burning fighting will of the red giants, who charged forward without any hesitation. With the sabers flying and the axes dancing, they constituted a steel torrent and savagely crushed over everything in their way!

”Hoo!”

In the beginning, Li Yao still managed to keep his head clear. But as the battle became heated and the red giants beside him continued roaring, unfathomable waves were released from their brains, which bolstered Li Yao’s fighting will without him knowing.

He had planned to find a place to hide and observe the battle of the two unknown species as an outsider.

However, when he slashed open the shell of a strange beast and green, thick body fluid splashed all over his body, he suddenly felt that the blood of the beast was even more thrilling than the hardest liquor, which motivated his soaring fighting will. He was devoted to the battle, forgetting where or who he was!

The battle lasted an entire day. It was not until two blood-red moons appeared in the sky that Li Yao sat cross-legged on the battlefield, where blood was flowing like rivers, and gradually came back to himself.

But the scenes of slaughtering had been etched into his brain.

Looking around, he found that there were barely any red giants left now. The lose-lose battle had almost destroyed the two unknown species at the same time.

But the surviving giants couldn’t have been more excited. Now and then, they would stab their saber into their enemy’s dead body and raise it high, while they danced and roared in triumph.

For some reason, Li Yao felt that his throat was itching. He craved to yell, shout, and even continue fighting in the uncanny world.

The thought suddenly alarmed him. He shuddered, and after a blink of dazzling light, he had returned to the dark cave in reality.

However, he was soaked in sweat and stinky, black mucus. He felt extremely comfortable as if he had just gone through a gratifying fierce battle.

Li Yao took a long breath in relief. He was going to stand up, when he suddenly felt that his leg hurt. He lowered his head and discovered that a shallow wound had appeared on the outer side of his right leg.

Li Yao remembered clearly that, in his illusion, a giant insect had slashed him in exactly the same place.

What is going—

Li Yao was deeply confused. He pulled open the iron door while he pondered on his experience.

He could tell that the red giants in the illusion had been triggering special waves from their brains when they roared in the same way that the qi-trainers’ technique of spiritual gas resonation functioned.

Is this the source of the qi-trainers’ technique? Did they find the heritage of an unknown species during their struggle against the apocalypse and learn the technique of spiritual gas resonation from them?

The illusions felt similar to Ou Yezi’s memory pieces, but they seemed to be more advanced than the memory pieces! My body has undergone high-intensity training without me knowing while I was fighting in the illusions. Even the wounds that I suffered in the illusions have been fed back to the real world!

But why is such a technique hidden in a destructive apocalypse?

Three minutes later, Xiong Wuji opened the iron gate. Although he was still expressionless, there was astonishment deep inside his eyes.

”You saw it.”

Not a question, but a statement. ”I’m getting more and more curious now. Who are you exactly? You are definitely not a common Cultivator, at least not one of those Cultivators Sha Yulan has described.

”Normal qi-trainers can only stay in the ’Titan Illusionary Land’ for half an hour. But you stayed in it for three hours on your first try, and you are still rational without being mentally deranged.”

Li Yao asked in a hurry, ”Are Titan Warriors those red giants with skin like fire? What species do they belong to, and why would their heritage appear in an apocalypse?”

Xiong Wuji said, ”Titan Warriors are the name we made for the mysterious foreign species because of their large size. Judging from the size of their hearts, they are at least twice as tall as us. Also, they are born with bloodthirst and ruthlessness. In all the illusions, they are always doing the same thing: fighting! Therefore, we’ve been addressing them as Titan Warriors!”