Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

Li Yao did not want to say anything.

When somebody was too shameless, even calling them ‘shameless’ sounded like a compliment.

“Fellow Cultivator Li!” Su Changfa’s eyes were glittering as he said earnestly, “I’ve talked so much to you for the sole purpose of convincing you of the fact that the Cultivators stand for the past while the Immortal Cultivators are the future! I know that you will not be able to completely understand it for the time being, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll need to make preparations for our exploration in the relic, which will probably take a few hours. You can take your time to study the files in the Grand Illusionary Land here!

“Right. There are also three books here, all written by famous scholars of the Imperium of True Human Beings. You can have a read and try to gain a deeper understanding!”

Su Changfa handed over a jade chip, in which three books, namely ‘The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind’, ‘The Age of Fools’, and ‘On the Collective Unconsciousness’, were stored.

After patting Li Yao’s shoulder, Su Changfa turned around, ready to leave the ‘brainwashing room’.

But Li Yao called him. “Wait a moment, Senior Su. I have two little questions.”

Su Changfa was never scared of questions from the audience because it was a sign that they were interested. What he was most scared of were the silent, irresponsive dudes who often proved to be too stubborn to be persuaded.

The old man turned around immediately and said with a smile, “Ask away, Fellow Cultivator Li!”

“Well, I want to know what became of the Martial Meritocrats Sector and the Sand Primitive Sector later.” Li Yao scratched his hair.

Su Changfa grinned hideously. “After Blackstar the Great founded the Imperium of True Human Beings and unified the center of the cosmos, naturally, he did not forget his beloved homeland! The two remote worlds, corrupted by the Chiyou Cult, turned out to have stagnated during the past hundreds of years. In many fields, they had even retrograded into a shocking level!

“When Blackstar the Great returned home with the imperial fleet, the ignorant believers of the Chiyou Cult even thought that devils had arrived to bring about doomsday!

“However, they were not entirely wrong.

“Blackstar the Great hated everybody in the Martial Meritocrats Sector and the Sand Primitive Sector so much that all the people of the two worlds, including their posterity, would be stamped with special marks as the lowliest slaves of the imperium for all eternity!

“It is unnecessary to treat such slaves as mercifully as we treat the common slaves. They are just the ‘little mice’ of the imperium and still play an ‘irreplaceable’ role in many fields even today!

“Hehe. After hearing about Blackstar the Great’s suffering in the past, you can certainly understand such fury, can’t you, Fellow Cultivator Li?”

Li Yao shuddered.

Of course, he knew what the ‘little mice’ were for.

He couldn’t help but recall the star child, who was a special spectral Cultivator that could only be born at the consumption of the souls of hundreds of babies. For the sake of the stabilization of the imperium, the hundreds of babies might not necessarily be the offspring of the common slaves; they were most likely the children of the remnants of the Martial Meritocrats Sector and the Sand Primitive Sector.

The ordinary people of the Martial Meritocrats Sector and the Sand Primitive Sector might be guilty and might be not, but such a severe, eternal punishment on their progeny was still quite detestable to Li Yao.

However, it was not the question that he was really interested in.

He only asked the question in order to ease Su Changfa’s alertness so that the second question would not be too obvious.

“So, that’s their ending. They truly had it coming!” Li Yao clapped his hands. Then, he asked, pretending to be casual, “By the way, was the Covenant Alliance demolished in the end?”

Su Changfa coughed. His face a bit unnatural, he nodded, “Yes. It was basically cleaned. Some of the last remnants are still hiding at the edge of the cosmos in a panic. They are not a concrete threat to the imperium anymore!”

That’s it!

Li Yao chuckled in his heart. After such a long time, he had finally grasped the enemy’s weakness!

Su Changfa might have been bragging about the thunderous might of Blackstar the Great all the time who swept all the filthy opponents on his way, but the critical parts still revealed the truth behind the rhetoric!

Hiding in a panic all day?

I’ll be damned if I believe you!

Li Yao’s foster father was from the Covenant Alliance, and it was around twenty years ago when he fled to the Heaven’s Origin Sector. According to Li Yao’s foster father, the Covenant Alliance was still at least on par with the imperium!

There was no reason for his foster father to lie to him, but there were definitely ten thousand reasons for Su Changfa to lie!

It appeared that the threat that Blackstar the Great had intentionally kept in the beginning so that he could build himself up had turned out to be beyond his control and was even burning him in the end. On the enormous body of the Star Ocean Republic, two monsters, namely the Imperium of True Human Beings and the Alliance of the Holy Covenant, were nurtured and born at the same time!

Li Yao calculated crazily in his heart, but his facial expression remained absolutely unchanged. Su Changfa watched carefully for a moment but did not notice anything. After bragging about the accomplishments of Blackstar the Great and the magnificence of the Imperium of True Human Beings again, he left the brainwashing room in a hurry.

Li Yao scratched at the center of the brainwashing room and touched the jade chip that stored the books, including ‘The Crowd’, pretending that he was reading them carefully. However, deep inside his brain, he was ripping apart every word that Su Changfa had said and every picture displayed in the Grand Illusionary Land with his computational ability and judgement. After quite some time, he assembled the pieces into the facts to his knowledge!

I think Wuying Qi, or Blackstar the Great’, finished the transformation from a ‘Cultivator’ to an ‘Immortal Cultivator’ the moment that he was tied up by the ordinary people and thrown into a crater.

After he survived the disaster, during his hundreds of years of travel in the dark, cold universe, he trained himself while he perfected theories of the Immortal Cultivators!

Of course, he didn’t encounter the Star Ocean Republic by accident. He must’ve gathered many star maps and learned the existence of the strongest country in the human worlds. Then, he considered it the best target and lunged toward it intentionally!

Chances were that the first things he did after arriving in the Star Ocean Republic were establishing the Salvation Syndicate and developing Immortal Cultivators in secret, disseminating his theories and his beliefs everywhere!

The rising of the Covenant Alliance gave him the best opportunity. He joined the border defense army. In more than ten years of battling, he slowly built up himself while keeping the enemy as a threat. Eventually, after a series of delicate schemes, he initiated a coup and successfully seized power!

However, after he seized power, there was still another critical problem!

The Star Ocean Republic was a civilization of Cultivators after all. Cultivators and ordinary people were equal and friendly. Everybody believed in the regime of republic. Although the country was no longer in its heyday, there was still some distance before its doom. The social contradictions were not too acute to be resolved yet.

In either the parliamentary system or the presidential system, Wuying Qi, even if he was the president, could not change the regime as he wished. He could not slaughter all the Cultivators in the hundred Sectors without a good reason, either.

In other words, after a thousand years of development, the Star Ocean Republic had its own ‘belief’, which could not be shaken easily by a foreigner who had only been in the place for less than twenty years and only seized power through a violent coup.

It is possible that the second invasion of the Covenant Alliance, which was aided by the Cultivators, was directed by him, too!

Only by doing so would he have the most justifiable excuse to eliminate the forces of the Cultivators, destroy the belief of the Star Ocean Republic, overturn the system of the country, and establish an Imperium of True Human Beings that solely belonged to the Immortal Cultivators!

Hehe. Such clever methods. What a manipulative villain!

Li Yao sneered in his heart.

“So what?” The mental devil was like a crazy fan who had run into someone that was insulting its idol. It jumped to the feet and shrieked, “Even if your assumption is totally correct, it only proves the smartness and the planning abilities of our Blackstar the Great!

“The universe is too large a place with too many stars. How can you rule over the entire universe without certain schemes?

“If what you analyzed is true, I’m admiring Blackstar the Great even more! All the stars in the sky are in my hands! Wow. My blood is boiling when I just think of it!”

“I’m afraid that not all the stars in the sky are in his hands. Even if Blackstar the Great had really taken everything into consideration, there is still one thing that he underestimated, which proved to be a matter of life and death later,” Li Yao replied coldly. “In order to seize power, Wuying Qi kept the Covenant Alliance as a threat. Maybe, he knew a thing or two about the formidability of the Covenant Alliance, but he must’ve been even more confident about his own capabilities and methods. He believed that he would certainly be able to control the ‘poisonous fire’, and the Covenant Alliance would be at his disposal.

“After all, once his cause succeeded, he would grasp the most prosperous area in the entire universe. With the tremendous resources and relics of the Star Ocean Imperium as the foundation, and with his planning abilities, he felt that absolutely nobody would be a match for him.

“Hehe. Little did he know that the Alliance of the Holy Covenant was probably deeply connected to the Pangu Clan in the primeval age. In terms of heritage, they were apparently much wealthier than him!

“Wuying Qi made all the correct choices, but he completely screwed up on this one. The Covenant Alliance that he thought he could domesticate as a cat grew into a ravenous tiger. The Imperium was rising, but the Covenant Alliance was rising at an even higher speed. Chances were that the latter was already able to swallow Wuying Qi’s lifelong enterprise that he had achieved after such arduous efforts!”

“Hehe!” Lost for words, the mental devil simply glared at Li Yao.

Li Yao ignored it and said calmly, “Su Changfa talked so much about the ideologies on their side. I haven’t come up with proper rebuttals yet.

“But I must point out one thing. If the Imperium of True Human Beings is truly as perfect as he claimed, and if it is the most advanced form of civilization for mankind where everybody’s infinite potential can be triggered, why is the Covenant Alliance still alive right now?

“He did not even dare to tell me the real capability of the Covenant Alliance but simply made up a lie that they were ‘living in fear all day’. Why? Was he scared that I would grow suspicious about the invincibility of the imperium after learning the truth?

“What do you think, dark me?”

Bloody mist was popping up from the mental devil’s head because of its fury. Grinding the teeth hard amid cracking noises, it argued, “I don’t care. I don’t care. Anyways, the true path of immortality is the ultimate truth in the dark universe. Only the fittest should survive. You cannot expect to refute such a sacred rule!

“It’s like the choice that you dodged a moment ago.”

The mental devil chose to attack instead of defending. Changing the topic, it grinned hideously. “If you were the commander, what choices would you have made if you could kill ten million people to save ten billion?

“Don’t say that Wuying Qi was doing that intentionally and had planning everything in advance. You are simply shunning!

“Let’s forget Wuying Qi and just focus on you. If you, a righteous, unselfish man, are caught in the same dilemma, what will you choose? Can you make a different choice from Wuying Qi’s?

“Speak now! Do you dare answer the question, Cultivator?”