Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

”As for why their heritage appeared in an apocalypse, I’d like to know the answer to the question, too.”

An indescribable expression surfaced on Xiong Wuji’s face, as he mumbled, ”For thousands of years, we only knew that, although the eggs of apocalypse often bring about tide-like eccentric beasts over time, we could also receive a huge amount of heritage from the pieces of the meteorites after we defeated them.

”We loath the outbreak of the apocalypse because countless towns and villages will be ruined.

”But we also look forward to the disaster because we will receive more knowledge and be even stronger after each outbreak as long as we are still alive!

”We turned into the Titan Warriors in the Titan Illusionary Land. We learned advanced battle skills after endless combat. Moreover, we learned the techniques to fully release one’s fighting will, to control spiritual energy with one’s fighting will, and even to reverberate with other people’s fighting will!”

It was not until then that Li Yao learned that the so-called spiritual gas resonation was formally known as ’Reverberation of Fighting Will’.

Fighting will was a very hollow concept. One’s fighting will might soar in a battle, but fighting will alone was never enough to win the battle however elevated it was. A three-year-old could never defeat a trained soldier from the special forces no matter how determined and resolute he was.

However, the rule seemed to be broken among the Titan Warriors.

They were a species whose capability grew with their fighting will!

Xiong Wuji stared at Li Yao and asked, ”The other purpose for which I brought you here is to let a space resident experience everything. Tell me from the perspective of a space resident, what exactly do you think apocalypses are? Are they salvation or destruction?”

Li Yao was deep in thought. He shook his head after a long while and replied in confusion, ”I don’t know.”

He really couldn’t tell the answer.

Before, when he witnessed the miserable appearance of Iron Plateau in person and heard the story that Sha Yulan and Xiong Wuji had told him about the arrival of the apocalypse, he had naturally thought that apocalypses were strikes launched by species stronger than mankind.

There were too many species in the sea of stars. The Star Ocean Imperium had destroyed countless alien species during its expansion, too.

However, the civilizations of such alien species were usually very underdeveloped. In most cases, they had never even set foot off their home planets.

But it was still possible that stronger civilizations were thriving in the vast universe where human beings had not set foot in yet.

When those civilizations noticed the potential of mankind, they launched an attack in advance in order to demolish it.

It was a natural and reasonable deduction.

However, after what he had just experienced, Li Yao found the theory ungrounded and questionable.

The first thing to be doubted was the speed of the apocalypse.

According to Sha Yulan, the astronomers of Iron Plateau five thousand years ago had determined that the meteoroids of the apocalypse were travelling toward them on a large scale no faster than one third the speed of light, which was not an impressive speed. Besides, during the hundred years of observation, there were no signs that the meteoroids had the capability to perform space jumps.

Since they could not perform space jumps, they could only pass through various space zones slowly and dutifully, and therefore gave human beings abundant time for the resistance and the escape plans.

But the question was, Iron Plateau had only thrived in the recent ten thousand years.

If there really was an alien species that had a civilization far more developed than that of mankind, their territory must have been very close to what the Star Ocean Imperium’s old territory so that they could detect the human beings’ existence in such a short amount of time and launch a close-distance attack unhurriedly.

But people in the era of the Star Ocean Imperium had explored their surroundings far and wide, and they never found such a terrifying neighbor beside them.

The only possible explanation was that the ’apocalypse’ had been launched ten thousand years ago, or a hundred thousand years ago, or even before the ancient Cultivation world was formed and before the first monkey to walk upright was born.

It was possible that the apocalypse was not aimed at Iron Plateau.

It was just that, during its long journey, when it flew past the Iron Plateau Space Zone, it detected a certain kind of civilization in this place and was triggered.

The eggs of apocalypse outbreaks made even less sense.

To deal with the outbreak of one egg of apocalypse, the six tribes of Iron Plateau had to work and fight together with all their available soldiers.

If the purpose of the apocalypse was destruction, the outbreaks of ten eggs of apocalypse would do the job very easily!

Also, the heritage concealed inside the meteorites of apocalypse was like free knowledge that had been sent on purpose.

Only by learning the battle skills of the Titan Warriors was it possible to live on in the harsh environment shaped by the apocalypse and defeat the brutal, bizarre beasts created by the apocalypse!

Apocalypses. What were the purpose of the mysterious apocalypses?

Li Yao quickly thought of the Grand Blue Planet, a primordial great world where all species originated billions of years ago.

Before mankind appeared, many species on the Grand Blue Planet had grasped Cultivation techniques, and they had encountered apocalypses countless times.

When Li Yao received the spiritual seed of Yan Ba, a Nascent Soul Stage Cultivator and a body fundamentalist, he had seen mottled pictures deep inside his cells left by the prehistoric experts.

In the legends, billions of years ago, dinosaurs had dominated the Grand Blue Planet. Among them, the tyrannosaurs discovered the mysteries of Cultivation and grasped powerful techniques!

It was said that the tyrannosaurs had been able to create a new world or clutch the moon in their prime.

They had created a once-flourishing civilization of dinosaurs and called themselves the ’Pangu Clan’!

The ultimate expert of the tyrannosaurs was known as ’Pangu’ 1 !

From the research of archeologists of various generations, it was verified that the Pangu Clan had been able to alter the surface and atmosphere of planets on a large scale and collect resources from the satellites of the Grand Blue Planet. Therefore, their claim of ’creating a new world and clutching the moon’ was not entirely bragging.

It was the earliest civilization to human beings’ knowledge that had been proven. There had been certain experts before the Pangu Clan, but they had only been strong personally, possibly due to fortuitous incidents, and had never led a really developed civilization.

Therefore, human beings regarded the Pangu civilization as the source of the civilization of mankind. Legends of Pangu establishing new worlds had been passed on generation after generation.

However, the Pangu civilization had been overturned by an apocalypse while it was blooming.

After the Pangu civilization, several other civilizations had replaced one another on the Grand Blue Planet. But then the second apocalypse arrived.

This time, it was not meteors, but an Ice Age that lowered the temperature of the entire planet by dozens of degrees for millions of years!

The prolonged Ice Age almost obliterated all civilizations. It was not until tens of millions of years after the Ice Age that mankind gradually rose up and walked out of the Grand Blue Planet and the primordial world. The civilization of mankind had thus branched and blossomed in the boundless cosmos!

When he heard the stories before, Li Yao had simply thought that the two apocalypses destroyed countless species and civilizations.

But now that he reflected on it, he discovered that, although the first apocalypse terminated the Pangu civilization, it had given birth to billions of brand new species in the millions of years to come, many of which had learned the arts of Cultivation. Countless experts and powerful civilizations had been born!

After the second apocalypse, the species and civilizations were all wiped out, but mankind—the strongest species in the battles amid the sea of stars—was created. They developed a brilliant Cultivation civilization and expanded their territory from a single planet to the entire universe!

It appeared that the civilizations born after each apocalypse were always stronger than their predecessors.

However, in the era of the Star Ocean Imperium, many worlds had failed to resist apocalypses, and their whole planets had been destroyed. In such cases, there would absolutely be no following civilizations.

The contradictory findings cast Li Yao in a maze of thought. He couldn’t figure out the logic at all.

Xiong Wuji patted his shoulder firmly and said, ”Never mind. It doesn’t matter what the apocalypses really are. All for survival, and survival is all. Try your best to train yourself and blow it up brutally!”

From that day on, Li Yao set off on the path of insane training again.

His training sessions were more tiresome than those of any other qi-trainers, even including Xiong Wuji.

During the day, he would put on the True Qi Locks and inject spiritual gas under twenty times the standard pressure into his body, and he would simultaneously improve his physical strength with barbells tons of weight. He was also engaged in speed training, namely sprinting and turning, and combat training, with a weight of almost a ton bound to himself. Each day, he would do his training for seven to eight hours without any rest.

In order to fill his stomach, Li Yao often devoured an entire bull during two training sessions!

After expanding his veins, Li Yao would go to the secret chamber in the deepest part of the temple of techniques that stored the knowledge of the Titan Warriors and appear in the Titan Illusionary Land in a meditative state.

Every heart fossil of the Titan Warriors represented a different memory piece. The larger a heart was, the higher the position that the Titan Warrior had once been, the stronger they had been, and the gorier and more brutal their memory piece was.

The other qi-trainers could often only bear to meditate for half an hour. They had to quit after half an hour, or it would be too much of a burden for their brains, and they might become mentally deranged. In the worst cases, their own memories would be jumbled with the memories of the Titan Warriors, and they would become monsters who knew nothing except killing.

However, it was different for Li Yao, who had been born with weird, foreign ’earth’ memories and had experienced Ou Yezi’s memory pieces. The structure of his brain was different from that of a common Cultivator’s, and his soul was extremely solid. Naturally, he was not scared that he would be affected by the Titan Warriors’ memories.

Each night, he would spent almost ten hours in the secret chamber and learn the battle skills of the Titan Warriors greedily from their heart fossils.

They were a species born for fighting.

They did not have the dazzling Cultivation techniques as mankind did; they focused all their attention on the training of ’fighting will’. They could manipulate and enhance their spiritual energy by increasing their fighting will and transform everything into the purest strength and damage eventually!

All the memory pieces were battles, battles, and more battles!

Most of the time, they were fighting hard against a certain kind of insect. But they were occasionally killing each other until their blood ran dry when they couldn’t find an enemy for a long time.

In the beginning, Li Yao had thought that they were fighting the insects to invade or defend their land.

But later, Li Yao realized that the purpose of their fighting was fighting, and that fighting was their everything!