Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

Wu!

Wu!

Ten thousand roars of thunder seemed to be passing his ears quickly, and a flock of birds were flapping their wings together. The ear-shattering noises, as well as the itching feeling on his bottom that seemed to indicate an electric shock, made Li Yao’s adrenaline spike. His every cell was energized, and the fire in the deepest part of his soul was ignited!

The highway, the opponents, the rivers, the mountains… The entire world seemed to be gone. He and his modified car were all there was.

Huchi! Huchi! Huchi! Huchi!

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

Li Yao heard his own panting, which sounded like that of a cornered animal, and his heart that was beating faster and faster.

He had been engaged in car racing countless times, but this was the strangest of all. He had never been so anxious that his spine was about to be compressed into a small cluster.

It felt like a pair of invisible eyes were staring at him coldly from somewhere in the dark.

It also felt that a fatal viper was hiding inside the small cockpit, looking for the best opportunity to attack.

Gritting his teeth, Li Yao pressed his right foot hard, as if it had been welded to the accelerator. The speed of the car rose continuously and soon surpassed two hundred kilometers an hour!

Every part of the modified car had been adjusted by him personally. It was vibrating with every cell inside his body and shrieking in the most ear-splitting sounds.

Every indicator on the dashboard was shaking crazily as if they were on drugs. The reading on the LED screen was changing quickly every second and lost all meaning!

The racing car that he had modified was about to collapse… in midair!

After he surpassed the two hundred kilometers an hour, the car was like flood that had broken the dam. It accelerated and accelerated unstoppably. Very soon, it had surpassed 220 kilometers an hour… 250 kilometers an hour… 280 kilometers an hour… until the vehicle was almost flying!

It was a speed that completely exceeded the specifications of the car and even violated the laws of physics.

However, as if spellbound, Li Yao felt none of it.

In his bloodshot eyes that were about to explode, the straight highway became zigzagging. It looked like both a mountain road and a mysterious channel of space and time.

Vaguely, he smelt sulfur and smoke. Li Yao, the modified car, the highway, and the entire world seemed to be on fire.

“Ahhhh!”

Li Yao found himself in such an uncanny state that he completely forgot everything. All he knew was how to accelerate, crazily accelerate, and then accelerate some more!

Every indicator on the dashboard was rotating rapidly like a fan. Li Yao could not tell whether it was a mechanical error, or he was really rushing at a weird speed of more than one thousand kilometers an hour. The LED screen was emitting brilliance that was even more dazzling than the sun until it exploded into nothingness in the end!

BOOM!

In front of Li Yao, at the end of the highway, a crimson lotus was slowly blossoming. The giant red lotus swallowed him and the modified car. The world broke apart in front of his eyes, replaced by runes that were dropping down rapidly like waterfalls. The octagonal, glittering runes lunged at him like locusts and drowned him.

In a trance, Li Yao felt that the modified car hit the rail on one side of the highway. It rolled more than ten rounds in midair and crashed heavily before a serious explosion erupted.

At the same time, he also felt that he was a strengthless baby that was picked out of a womb.

His eyelids were like gates that weighed ten thousand tons. Summoning all his strength, he managed to open a tiny gap. Observing ahead of him, he realized that it was an extremely ugly woman with scars all over his face who picked him up. The woman was wearing ragged leather armor, carrying a bloodstained chainsword on her waist and an impressive three-barreled storm bolter on her back.

Li Yao did not have time to observe the environment. He only vaguely felt that he was in the middle of a wasteland-like desert.

The super ugly woman grinned, revealing a mouthful of sharp teeth, before she cackled. “Welcome to Earth!”

Li Yao shuddered violently. Everything was gone all of a sudden. He jumped from his bed and fell to his knees. It was not until he gagged for a long time that he felt he was back to himself and recalled who he was in the freezing air.

“I am Li Yao, a Cultivator of the Heaven’s Origin Sector and a citizen of the Star Glory Federation. I am now in a temporary settlement on the Grand Desolate Plateau. I’ve been married for a month!

“However—”

Looking back at his bed, he found that it was empty. He checked the watch and realized that it was four o’clock in the morning, the darkest moment before dawn.

Ding Lingdang should have gotten up early and gone to train herself in the world fragments.

Li Yao was sweating hard and barely able to lift his hands or feet. He also felt that his lips were wet. Wiping with the back of his hand, he found that it was red now.

He must have bitten his tongue while he was having the nightmare.

“Hu…”

Li Yao heaved a long sigh in relief. He poured a glass of cold milk for himself in the kitchen and drank all of it. After resting for five minutes, he finally calmed himself down.

Another weird dream about Earth. I haven’t had such dreams for a long time.

The weird dreams about Earth had been haunting him ever since he could remember things.

The weird dreams that appeared every other day reminded him constantly that he was different from those around him. It was also one of the greatest motivations for his crazy training.

At the same time, the weird dreams had also given Li Yao the memories and wisdom of an adult when Li Yao was merely a little kid, which had allowed him to survive in the perilous magical equipment.

Since the weird dreams barely affected his daily life, Li Yao had gradually become used to them.

After he became a Cultivator and embarked on the journey to the sea of stars, the weird dreams had hardly harassed him anymore.

Except for the information about the Vulture Plan that popped up in the weird dreams while he was dealing with the Blood Stripe Virus, he only dreamed about Earth once every two months. Plus, the dreams were just mottled pieces, no different from the dreams that other people had.

Furthermore, Li Yao was occupied by the affairs of the collaboration of the three Sectors and the resistance against the Imperium of True Human Beings. Since he was just married, he was having competitions of beliefs quite often. Therefore, he gradually left Earth and the Vulture Plan behind him.

But the weird dream that day was different.

Li Yao had not had such a vivid, devastating dream for a long time.

Also, new information had appeared in his dream, something that was entirely opposite and contradictory to the information in his previous dreams.

That’s not right! Li Yao frowned, baffled.

He remembered having the same dream.

This particular weird dream had popped up in his head countless times. It was the memory of his last car race, in which he had unfortunately had an accident.

However, according to the development of the dreams that he used to have, he would be sent to the hospital and declared dead later.

After he was declared dead, his self-awareness was concentrated again, and he was reborn as a baby in a magical equipment graveyard in the Star Glory Federation of the Heaven’s Origin Sector.

Therefore, for a long time, Li Yao had thought that he might have been an earthling in his previous life, and he had somehow been teleported to the Heaven’s Origin Sector after he was killed in the car accident.

Such time travel and reincarnation, although not common in the world of Cultivators, was certainly not unprecedented or totally incomprehensible.

After all, all kinds of uncanny things could happen to a Cultivator.

But what was the scar-faced woman all about?

She was wearing a ragged leather armor, but in his quick glimpse, Li Yao still vaguely saw a few spiritual stripes between the blood and the stains on the armor.

It was a set of armor that could unleash spiritual shields and defense arrays.

Additionally, the scar-faced woman had been carrying a chainsword and a storm bolter. Although Li Yao did not have the time to distinguish their specific model, they were clearly not products of Earth.

At the very least, they were not the products of the commonly-known Earth in the 2010s.

However, the scar-faced woman had said something to him, something like a labyrinth and a puzzle.

Welcome to Earth!

“Ah…”

The more he thought about it, the greater the headache he had. Holding the milk container, he sat down in a corner of the kitchen and stared at the cold moonlight outside through the window of the shabby cottage.

What… was Earth exactly?

“Hey, are you there? Come on out!”

Li Yao unlocked the barriers deep inside his brain and summoned the mental devil.

The computational ability of Li Yao alone was not enough to figure out such complicated issues. He had to count on the mental devil’s half to get a general idea of it.

“I won’t.”

Deep inside his brain, the mental devil’s dull and wronged voice came out.

“Why?”

Li Yao was rather stunned. Was it not good to enjoy some fresh air?

“What do you regard me as?” the mental devil asked poignantly. “Every time you had a ‘competition of beliefs’ with your wife, you would kick me into the deepest part of your brain and suppress me with dozens of barriers. You don’t even let me watch! Now, your wife is not here, and you are calling me again because you feel lonely. Do you think that I’m a football that you can kick away and take back at your will?”

“Well, I admit that I was wrong,” Li Yao replied. “Next time, I will ask you to leave politely. I won’t kick you or strike you with lightning anymore. That should be enough, I believe?”

“Why? You and I are the same. You are me, and I am you. Therefore, Ding Lingdang is my wife, too. Why can’t I even watch?”

“…Forget it. You can keep yourself inside. Really. Just stay inside the depths of my brain!”

“I might as well get out then.”

Like a round, fat sloth, the mental devil slowly crawled out of the root of Ou Yezi’s memory tree. It took a memory piece from the tree and chewed slowly. “What’s the problem this time?”

“A weird one.”

Lightning-like thoughts struck inside Li Yao’s brain as he shared the weird dream that he had just experienced with the mental devil. “Look. The weird dream concerning the death of the earthling Li Yao, which we’ve been having for years, seemed to have an entirely different ending. The earthling Li Yao didn’t die in the hospital but… reached a weird place where he ran into a weird woman!

“Isn’t it contradictory to the weird dreams in the past?

“Help me analyze what is going on here. Does this so-called ‘Earth’ really exist? What’s the real identity of the earthling Li Yao? Which of the two different endings is true, and which is false?”