Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

Three months had passed second after second.

While the Heaven’s Artillery, the super teleportation platform deep inside the Grand Desolate Plateau, was being modified with the heritage of the Pangu civilization and the state-of-the-art technology learned from the Immortal Cultivators, Li Yao was absorbing the complicated knowledge, technology, and techniques of various aspects crazily.

He was like a piece of well-tempered steel whose density had reached the maximum, only to be pushing new metal constituents into his body by brute force in the high temperature and high pressure!

At four o’clock in the morning, on Kunlun, inside the arena of fifty times the standard gravity.

General Cultivators in the Core Formation Stage would be staggering as if intoxicated after only a short while of high-intensity training under such gravity.

Li Yao, however, was wearing super-dense metal weights that were several tons on his hands and feet, which were bound by highly-tensile veins of demon beasts.

To perform every punch and kick, he needed to overcome the burden of the metal weights and the boundary of the veins of the demon beasts!

Ding Lingdang and Iron God Yan Ba, one on the left and the other on the right, bombarded him crazily!

Li Yao, however, was like a slipper ball that was rotating smoothly inside the arena. The spiritual shield around him was taking almost a hundred different shapes every second, allowing him to resist the opponents’ attacks in the most perfect angle. As a result, the powerful and tricky bombardments simply slipped over on his spiritual shield!

After three minutes, although he suffered hundreds of heavy punches from the two expert body practitioners, he was still standing magnificently due to such a weird defense technique with a confident smile on his lips.

“Three minutes are up!” Li Yao licked his lips. The spiritual energy around him suddenly grew sharp, turning into invisible wind blades and cutting off all the veins of demon beasts that were confining his hands and feet.

His palms and heels both seemed to have ‘withered’ for a moment, too, allowing the circular weights to fall off from his body. They were blown to the wall of the arena in ear-splitting wind so deeply that the entire arena was humming.

Swoosh, swoosh! Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh, swoosh!

After getting rid of the incarceration of the weights and the ropes, Li Yao punched hundreds of times casually.

The sharp aura from his fists was focused without dispersing, as if a hundred vipers dashed out of his arms at the same time!

“It’s my turn to attack!” Li Yao had still been jumping up and down to warm himself up a second earlier, but the next second, he seemed to be split apart into two persons that were lunging at Ding Lingdang and Iron God Yan Ba simultaneously!

Stormy shrieks were echoing on the dull and scorching arena again. Despite the wall that was more than half a meter thick, the staff outside still felt that their eardrums were being ripped apart.

At seven o’clock in the morning, on the orbit of Kunlun, in the field of star beacon assemble simulation…

Inside the deep, dark universe, Li Yao was wearing an engineering crystal suit that had six circular artificial arms making it look like a spider. He was floating in midair silently.

Right next to him, hundreds of magical equipment units and ten times more components that could connect the units were floating, too.

Li Yao’s telepathic thoughts spread out incessantly like tides through the eight artificial arms. Like invisible ripples, they covered all the units and components softly.

Suddenly, every unit and component was enveloped in dark red fluorescence.

They seemed both enlivened by Li Yao and embroiled in wild turbulence. Attracting and assembling themselves, they were gradually taking the form of a star beacon, and every detail of the form was outlined at a visible speed.

After the bigger modules were assembled, Li Yao cut into them immediately. His hands turned into two clusters of colorful lights, while spiritual threads darted out from his fingers into the depths of all the modules. He slightly adjusted the internal architecture of every module by manipulating the spiritual threads with his fingers before he connected all of the modules together carefully.

In the end, a star beacon that was more than fifty meters long and had eight umbrella-shaped metal membrane receptors, better known as ‘universe lighthouse’, appeared in the darkness!

“Time: one hour, twenty-two minutes, and thirty-five seconds!”

When the numbers appeared on the staff’s crystal processors, amazement and exclamations echoed inside the entire simulation test field.

Finishing the assembly and debugging of a super star beacon of such an enormous scale purely on his own with a time cost of less than one and a half hours!

Those who are qualified to be present at the simulation test arena were all the top refiners of the three Sectors, but even they had to admit that, in all the three Sectors, it was difficult to find a second refiner with such hand speed, skill, and precision!

“Li Yao, job well done. How do you feel?” Professor Mo Xuan asked.

“How do I feel? I don’t know,” Li Yao replied. “My ten fingers cannot feel anything now!”

At half past eleven, on Kunlun, in Li Yao’s special cafeteria…

In front of Li Yao, a demon beast ‘Single-Horned Elephant’ the size of a hill, which was shining greasily after being roasted and emitting pleasant flavor, was looming.

For someone who smelled it for the first time, they would definitely be drooling full of eagerness.

However, for Li Yao, who had been stuffed by excessive food for quite a few months in a row, it was quite a headache.

Faced with the mountain of meat that was more than three floors tall, Li Yao was emotionless. His eyelids were twitching nonstop, and cold sweat was popping up on his forehead. He stared at the Fire Ant King.

“Don’t look at me as gloomily as that. Do you have any idea what it cost to produce such a ‘high-energy Single-Horned Elephant’?” the Fire Ant King said with a smile. “This is the most excellent food that only proves to be a success after hundreds of tries. After genetic refinement, every piece of flesh of the Single-Horned Elephant contains tremendous spiritual energy. It is essentially an edible crystal!

“Even the bears know the importance of preserving fat and energy for their hibernation by eating more food, not to mention that you are going to hibernate for years. Most of Spark’s capacity will be dedicated to the star beacons and the facilities. If you can preserve more spiritual energy by yourself, the logistical burden will be reduced!

“Don’t be hasty. Take it slow. We have nothing but roasted meat!”

At half past three in the afternoon, on Kunlun, inside Li Yao’s personal crystal suit modification chamber…

Although Li Yao was a top-tier pilot of the Colossi, he was not planning to take any of them with him for the mission.

The Colossi were too huge in size. It was barely possible to compress them into a Cosmos Ring when the Cosmos Ring technology had not met any breakthroughs and the capacity was not enlarged yet.

Even if the Colossi could be dismantled into independent units, it would be still quite troublesome to assemble it bit by bit when confronting an enemy.

If he was engaged with an enemy in the Nascent Soul Stage or an even higher level, before he had time to assemble one arm of a Colossi, his head would have been pierced through by the enemy’s flying sword.

Besides, the Colossi had a very high demand on the logistics system, and it had to undergo rigorous maintenance after every fierce battle. It was impossible for Li Yao to finish the maintenance and refill the spiritual energy all by himself every time.

Most critically of all, the Colossi, which were often ten to twenty meters tall, were too huge to move inconspicuously right below the enemy’s nose.

Everything had its advantages and disadvantages. The Colossi were indeed marvelous weapons in the battles in the sea of stars, but just because the Colossi appeared did not mean that the crystal suits would no longer be important.

They were two types of magical equipment with different characteristics and usages. In the future battles, they were destined to be used together and would co-exist for a long time.

Li Yao had prepared three Mystic Skeleton Battlesuits for different purposes other than the engineering suit named ‘Black Spider’, which had been designed for the assembly of the star beacon.

In fact, Li Yao’s special Mystic Skeleton Battlesuits had nothing similar to the MP model of the Mystic Skeleton Battlesuit a dozen years ago. It was more of a serial name in honor of the tradition.

The three Mystic Skeleton Battlesuits were the products of dozens of the best crystal suit masters, including Li Yao, Professor Mo Xuan, and the crystal suit experts of the Flying Star Sector.

Even many experts from the Refining Department of Deep Sea University, who shared different ideologies in respect to refining with the Grand Desolate War Institution, joined the project and offered valuable suggestions and opinions from a different perspective.

To increase Li Yao’s chances of survival while he was alone in the foreign land, what was of the utmost importance was not the crystal suit itself but a 3D printing furnace system that was nicknamed ‘treasure box’ by the refiners.

With the furnace, which was based on 3D printing technology, Li Yao would be able to refine—or rather, ‘print’—the necessary components to repair his crystal suit.

Relatively basic magical equipment whose structure was simple could even be directly ‘printed’ without any further refining as long as the corresponding ingredients were available.

It was like the ‘treasure box’ in the legends that would offer all kinds of magical equipment that one desired.

With the ‘treasure box’, even if Li Yao landed on a barren, desolate land, he would still be able to build the simplest crystal suit workshop as quickly as possible.

At 7:20 p.m., on Kunlun, inside Li Yao’s personal residence…

Li Yao and Su Changfa, one Cultivator and one Immortal Cultivator, enjoyed some tea and wine while they sat down and discussed the Great Dao.

Lu Qingchen, Su Changfa’s true disciple who had yet to decide whether to be a Cultivator or an Immortal Cultivator, was serving the two of them. His big eyes were blinking while he was deep in thought.

It was a condition that Su Changfa had made.

He was willing to teach Li Yao the precious experience of Imperial Colonization University on the expansion in the sea of stars. In return, he wanted his only true disciple Lu Qingchen to be present and audit during the three months of teaching sessions.

“My disciple has his own understanding about where his belief will go. He is unwilling to be swayed easily.

“Li Yao, our ideologies are vastly different. The communication between us will certain raise the most dazzling sparks.

“If my disciple is allowed to be present and feels the collision of the path of the Cultivators and the path of the Immortal Cultivators in person, it may be of some help for him to consolidate his belief.

“If you believe that the path of the Cultivators is the rightful one, then it is very possible that you can ‘drag him back to the correct path’ by allowing him to stay here!”