Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

After the central army was moved away from the Empyrean Terminus Sector, the capital of the Star Ocean Republic was at the most vulnerable moment in its thousand years of history!

Also, the ‘tiger’ that had marched a long way to the swamp at the frontier did not have much combat ability left, either!

By killing two birds with one stone, Wuying Qi created the most perfect conditions for a coup by himself.

His most elite force, which was armed with the starships of the Covenant Alliance and the Purple Thunder Crystals, certainly did not set off after hearing the news that he was captured and tried, either.

They would have been divided into two groups, one in the daylight and the other in the darkness, while he returned to the capital openly. The force in the daylight was disarmed by parliament and the Cultivators. However, the real force in the darkness was actually hidden with the help of the Immortal Cultivators in other Sectors and soared to the sky with a critical strike at the crucial moment!

If Wuying Qi had not fed himself to the central government, what would have happened?

He could have ruled over the ten or so vassal worlds at the frontier as a local warlord. But on the capital’s side, being more wary of him, they certainly would have constructed more defense lines between the frontier and the capital while increasing the garrison, thereby pushing him strategically from every perspective.

It was a war between a viper and an elephant. He would not have stood any chance in a head-on clash. The elephant would have stomped on his head easily.

Right behind him, the Covenant Alliance, which had just suffered a crushing defeat, would have been biting their lips in fury, too, and would not have minded stabbing him right in the back while he was confronting the Cultivators!

If so, however capable he was, there was no way that he could expect to accede to the supreme throne in the sea of stars!

Therefore, the viper had to crawl into the elephant’s head through the nose and inject venom into its most feeble nerves!

Wuying Qi had no choice but to go to the capital and feed himself to the enemy. He needed to have the central army in the capital dispatched to his territory to annihilate his border defense army, too.

How could he achieve that?

What kind of crimes would make parliament and the Cultivators determined to annihilate a credible general who had been stationed in the frontier for more than ten years with his troops without caring about the cost?

Only crimes against humanity and the crime of massacre!

Therefore, if it was a young man who did not know the first thing about the Immortal Cultivators and did not have a firm belief yet, when he heard Su Changfa telling the story of Wuying Qi’s legendary rise, he would inevitably feel that it was shocking, logical, and yet full of lucky coincidences. Wuying Qi had been forced into desperation every time and had no choice but to counterattack ruthlessly before he secured a final victory in the end!

It was indeed intriguing and satisfying. One could not help but feel that was what a great man should do!

However, if one were inferred backward from the result, it would be easy to notice that blowing up Karan and the 8.2 million innocent civilians on it, purging the ten or so vassal worlds with blood, and turning into a warlord that threatened the central government were certainly not Wuying Qi’s helpless choices. They were even not the strategies that he came up with during the war but plans that he had made long before the war began when he decided to swallow the entire Star Ocean Republic!

Every step was a trap that he had repetitively deduced and calculated. After a series of seemingly unconnected subtle movements, they led to the result of a perfect coup!

The almost ten million restless souls on Karan were the offerings that Wuying Qi had been long prepared to sacrifice in order to seize the highest power!

Moreover…

Li Yao even realized that all the words were simply Su Changfa’s side of the story. He claimed that, while Wuying Qi was fighting the Covenant Alliance in the front line in difficulties, the public, parliament, and Cultivators in the rear were shortsighted, ungrateful, and jealous!

Was it really true?

Was it possible that Wuying Qi was merely expanding the force of the border defense army with the military threat of the Covenant Alliance?

Was it possible that, after the public, parliament, and Cultivators gave him all the support and resources that he needed, he dedicated ten percent of the resources to the resistance and ninety percent to build up the Salvation Syndicate and raise countless Immortal Cultivators in secret?

Otherwise, how could the Salvation Syndicate have leaked into every Sector of the Star Ocean Republic, to the point where they took over the country in their final insurrection?

Was it possible that Wuying Qi and the Covenant Alliance had reached certain clandestine deals and that the large-scale attacks of the Covenant Alliance were within his expectations or even agreed upon?

Li Yao’s brain was like a spring with broken ice floating on the surface. He was calmer than ever and no longer under the influence of the fancy talks.

But on the surface, he pretended that he was completely fascinated. Clenching his fists, he pursued further in excitement, “Then, what happened next?”

With a pitiful and yet indignant face, Su Changfa said after a long sigh, “Wuying Qi becoming the president of the Star Ocean Republic was everybody’s hope and the necessity of history. Under his government, the Star Ocean Republic was reborn from fire and thriving again!

“However, while Wuying Qi was reforming society with the true path of immortality, it was only natural that the interest groups of the Cultivators fought back fiercely!

“The Immortal Cultivators who had just risen were like a morning sun. They represented the future of the civilization of mankind and were therefore utterly unstoppable!

“The shameless Cultivators and the ignorant ordinary people who were incited by them were obviously no match for them!

“The despicable bandits who were hoping to stop the wheel of history with their tiny arms were all ground to dust by Wuying Qi’s iron army!

“However, their shamelessness was still far beyond the imagination of Wuying Qi and the other Immortal Cultivators. For counterattack and comeback, to restore the reign of the Cultivators, they even conspired with the Covenant Alliance, their old nemesis in the past!

“The Covenant Alliance returned and helped the Cultivators reestablish the parliament of the Star Ocean Republic, which falsely claimed that it was the legal government of the Star Ocean Republic!

“Hehe. The so-called legal government was merely the Covenant Alliance’s puppet!

“When the two enemies joined their hands, they did seem rather formidable. Many vassal worlds wavered again and took the Cultivators and the Covenant Alliance’s side.

“A civil war broke out!

“This was the second civil war that Wuying Qi had been through, but this civil war was a hundred times larger than the civil war in the Martial Meritocrats civilization hundreds of years ago. Almost a hundred Sectors were involved in the fire of war. Nobody at the center of the cosmos was able to get away from it!

“The civilization of mankind reached a perilous moment once more!

“While coping with the Cultivators and the Covenant Alliance calmly, Wuying Qi contemplated on the real cause of the civil war and the regime that was most suitable for the civilization of mankind to develop and rise in the sea of stars.

“Finally, he reached a conclusion!

“The biggest problem was the ‘republic system’ being adopted right now!

“The universe was too vast. The Sectors were extremely far away from each other. The communication and transportation were inconvenient. Their environment and interests were different from each other’s. Therefore, there was a natural trend of division and independency!

“If the so-called free and democratic republic system was to be implemented any further, wherein every Sector, every space zone, and even every planet was able to utter their voice without restraint and without cost, division and civil wars would be unavoidable because they were all too selfish to place the interests of the civilization as a whole above the interests of their own world!

“Even if the Covenant Alliance and the Cultivators could be destroyed this time, new, unstable factors would pop up again next time. As time went by, the civilization of mankind would be destroyed in internal strife!

“The problem needed to be resolved from the source!

“The republic system was an underdeveloped system only good enough for the small countries when the civilization of mankind was still restrained to the planets. It was too outdated for the development in the era of the grand universe!

“In the boundless, dark, and cold sea of stars, the civilization of mankind needed to be unified under one banner, one voice, and one leader to march forward bravely and unstoppably!

“Solidarity! Solidarity! Solidarity is strength! Solidarity is everything!

“There was a reason the civilization of mankind was reborn from fire in the Star Ocean Imperium and defeated the civilization of demons, which had dominated the universe for thirty thousand years, regaining control over the sea of stars!

“The imperial system! It was exactly because the Star Ocean Imperium adopted the imperial system that the Supreme Emperor and the most excellent elites of mankind could play their roles in the best ways that they could and establish such a brilliant and glorious country!

“It was most hilarious that, although the Star Ocean Republic called itself the ‘rightful successor’ of the Star Ocean Imperium, it only inherited the empty shell and failed to learn the core system, which was the actual essence!

“When Wuying Qi realized that, it was the time when the war was most intense. Led by the barefaced Cultivators, the army of the Covenant Alliance raged into the territory, and the fire of war was almost ignited in the capital!

“Everything seemed to be in peril, but the night is darkest before the dawn!

“The greatest news came over from the depths of the Empyrean Terminus Sector!

“In the past, the Supreme Emperor once received three volumes of the Book of Revelation, which was the civilizational heritage of the Pangu Clan. However, the volumes were lost when the Star Ocean Imperium collapsed!

“But right now, the Immortal Cultivators had discovered one volume of the Book of Revelation from an ancient relic, from which the unbelievable techniques and technologies of the Pangu civilization could be retrieved!

“That was the destiny!

“That was the sign that the rise of the civilization of mankind was unstoppable!

“With destiny in hand, and as everybody hoped, in order to save the country and the civilization, Wuying Qi no longer hesitated and altered the regime of the country decisively from a republic into an imperial system. He ascended to the throne and proclaimed himself to be an emperor!

“The Star Ocean Republic evolved into a grand new imperium!

“In order to be distinguished from the Star Ocean Imperium in the past, in order to draw a clear line from the so-called ‘legal government of the Star Ocean Republic’ and also to demonstrate the belief and ideology of the new imperium, Wuying Qi named the new country… the Imperium of True Human Beings!

“Just like that, the young man who was tied up like a piglet by the ordinary people of the Martial Meritocrats Sector and thrown into the crater had finally grown into the supreme leader of the civilization of mankind, the protector of the three thousand Sectors, the founder of the Imperium of True Human Beings, and the forever first citizen of the imperium! He was henceforth known as Blackstar the Great!”