Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

“Yes…” Long Yangjun did not deny it at all. “When the electric arcs unleashed by the green-haired monster coursed through me, I felt that a seal deep inside my soul was broken through. Countless bizarre, incomprehensible memory fragments have flooded out. My head is in a mess, with countless pictures, thoughts, and ideas hovering inside. It is true that I need a moment to calm myself down.

“Perhaps our opinions in the past were incorrect, or at least incomplete.

“The whole time, we have considered ‘mankind’ as tools of Pangu, which can be traced back to the three fundamental laws, or the Path of Ultimate Benevolence, which was discovered by you on Kunlun and interpreted by the Immortal Cultivators.

“Whether it is named ‘three fundamental laws’ or the Path of Ultimate Benevolence, it deprives human beings of their feelings and free will. That’s why we thought that human beings were to the Pangu Clan what ‘tools’ are to ‘masters’.

“However, the ‘three fundamental laws’ were written in the primeval language. Nobody can guarantee that the full meaning has been perfectly translated. More and more evidence has shown that the Pangu Clan did not just deprive human beings of their feelings and free will but also did exactly the same things to themselves. So—”

Li Yao craned his neck without him knowing. “So what?”

“Perhaps mankind and Pangu were not ‘tools’ and ‘masters’,” Long Yangjun said carefully. “Perhaps, just like the ‘parent and child’ civilization theory you mentioned, theirs is the relationship between an ignorant ‘child’ and his father who was highly rigorous, perverted, and paranoid.”

“…What a great relief to hear that!”

“Let me think more. I have a feeling that I will remember a lot of new things very soon, things that are of paramount importance.”

“That’s easy,” Li Yao said. “How about we prepare a few rune arrays of the thunder class up there and give you some electric shocks? Chances are that you will remember everything quickly.”

“No, thank you. You can just continue your exploration. I’m beginning to feel that the environment down there is familiar, as if I were there a long, long time ago.”

Long Yangjun was a clone of a Nuwa warrior from hundreds of thousands of years ago. Since her ‘original body’ had likely broken into the Pangu laboratory years ago, it was only reasonable that some of the memory pieces of the original body were kept in her head in a mysterious way.

The exploration team continued marching deeper into the Pangu laboratory. With the lessons that they had learned, they had a lot of high-pressure tanks of freezing foam delivered from above and would spurt into the darkness whenever they noticed anything wrong.

Li Yao and the other Nascent Soul Stage Cultivators stayed inside their Colossi without caring about the cost of their spiritual energy and spread out their telepathic thoughts as far away as possible.

On their way, they discovered another two ‘crab factories’, but all the giant crabs inside had been shattered and lost all signs of activity.

It was obvious that they were destroyed by the warriors of the Nuwa Clan before the laboratory was completely sealed.

The deeper they went, the more damaged and collapsed the structure was. Several floors had completely collapsed. The pathways, the laboratory, and the dead bodies were all squeezed together by the rocks. Their surface also looked like tinted glass because of the high temperature at the moment of explosion.

It seemed that the place was the ‘main battlefield’ of the war hundreds of thousands of years ago.

“I seem… to have attacked this place before.”

While Li Yao was focusing his attention on scanning the rocks, he heard Long Yangjun speak not very confidently. “Scan the third pathway on your left. Is there a gate inside?”

Li Yao blinked. Boosted by his telepathic thoughts, three floating crystal cameras darted out. After several beeps, they unleashed dozens of scarlet rays, illuminating every detail of the environment inside the pathway.

There was indeed a splendid gate more than twenty meters tall inside the pathway.

Like the other buildings, magical equipment, and devices of the Pangu Clan, there were no decorations on the gate. The only adornment was the square and sophisticated geometric patterns.

The gate was damaged hundreds of thousands of years ago, with a hole almost five meters in diameter. It might have been difficult for the soldiers of the Pangu Clan or the Nuwa Clan to crawl in with their enormous body size, but it was more than easy for a human being to walk in.

Since there was such a great hole in the gate, any devils and fiends inside should have escaped a long time ago.

Still, Li Yao did not dare act carelessly. He summoned the explorers to deploy defense rune arrays, half-fixated cannons, and freezing foam on the entire pathway outside of the gate. He then blocked the hole with Meng Chixin, Wu Suiyun, Yan Liren, and other experts before he commanded a hundred beast puppets through wire control to crawl into the room.

Scanned by the hundreds of crystal cameras from various perspectives, the world behind the gate slowly revealed itself on the 3D light beam.

The scale of the room far exceeded everyone’s imagination. It was similar to the factory to manufacture human beings that Li Yao had seen on Kunlun. Countless metal pillars rose up like trees in a forest, with dark red cysts hanging from the branches.

However, the cysts varied in size. The largest of them was more than a hundred meters long, obviously not designed to develop the embryos of humans.

Perhaps the Pangu Clan had once stored the seeds of all the creatures in the primeval era. It was a ‘warehouse of embryos’ that contained everything.

After all, if the Pangu Clan intended to be reincarnated, they could not just live on their own but also require the microorganisms, plants, animals, and the entire ecological environment that they were familiar with.

It was a shame that the ‘warehouse of embryos’ had been greatly sabotaged by the troops of the Nuwa Clan. Almost all the cysts had been burnt into nothingness.

Li Yao’s attention was not on the cysts.

He was fully attracted by the hundred culture cabins at the front part of the entire ‘warehouse of embryos’.

Those half-transparent culture cabins were multiple times sturdier than regular cysts. Therefore, some of the remains could still be found in the broken culture cabins.

Some of them were full of scales and did not have eyelids, with dried lenses above their eyes. There were also traces of gills on their heads. They had the unique characteristics of the aquatic animals.

Some had human heads and snake bodies, combining the features of mammals and reptiles.

Some had dense hair and highly elastic fingerbones that looked like folded daggers and could eject for fighting anytime.

Some were giants that were utterly naked without the slightest hair and had gray, coarse skin like a dinosaur, as Li Yao had seen in the ‘primeval memories’ from the depths of his cells.

Those dead bodies must have belonged to the different tribes that made up the Pangu Civilization hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The Pangu Civilization was not a unitary civilization in the first place but an ‘alliance’ established by thirteen independent carbon-based civilizations after they developed to a certain phase and discovered each other’s existence for a common purpose, perhaps to resist ‘chaos’.

Li Yao had seen a lot of dead bodies of the Pangu Civilization from Kunlun and the Nuwa warship. It should not have been very surprising for him.

But what surprised him was that the sizes of the bodies were smaller than outside, and the features as members of the Pangu Clan were less distinctive.

The further he went, the smaller the bodies were, and the less hideous and terrible they appeared. In other words, they looked more and more like humans.

At the last row of culture cabins, regardless of whether they had a human head and a snake body, or were covered in scales and horns, or had three heads and six arms in the beginning, they all became human beings with smooth skin and normal facial organs.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Li Yao thought hard. “Did the Pangu Clan come up with some sort of drug or secret technique that could compress them step by step until they turned into human beings?”

“I have suddenly discovered something interesting. I don’t know if it has ever occurred to you before,” Long Yangjun suddenly said in the communication channel. “Look, the Pangu Civilization is actually made of a dozen carbon-based intelligent lives which developed independently. That is why their body shapes varied and could be vastly different. It is hard to tell that the ‘Pangu Clan’ and the ‘Gonggong Clan’, or the ‘Gonggong Clan’ and the ‘Kuafu Clan’, were related because they were not related at all!

“However, no matter how bizarre they looked, they had a lot of features that were similar to human beings.

“There is a mathematical concept named ‘greatest common denominator’. Mankind is like the ‘greatest common denominator’ of the dozen carbon-based intelligent lives and has inherited some of the features that were of paramount importance to them.”

Li Yao thought of something and observed, “There’s indeed such a theory in the ‘Legends of Ancient Demons’, a classic passed on among demons. The Pangu Civilization ordered the Nuwa Clan to extract part of the features of many species and jumble them into a brand-new species—mankind.”

“Perhaps it was not ‘jumbling’, but filtering, optimization and compression,” Long Yangjun said. “Chances are that human beings are the strongest form that focused the essence of the thirteen carbon-based lives and the ‘evolved version’ of the Pangu Civilization. I still feel that such an explanation makes more sense than the tool hypothesis. Besides, even according to the ‘tool hypothesis’, human beings should still be stronger than the Pangu Clan.”

Li Yao was rather surprised. “The Pangu Clan created human beings and regarded human beings as tools, but human beings are stronger than the Pangu Clan? What’s with that logic? Please explain.”

“On some level, a tool must be stronger than its user, which is why it is invented and used in the first place,” Long Yangjun said matter-of-factly. “Why do human beings use swords and sabers? Because they are sharper, sturdier, and more enduring than our fists, of course! If swords and sabers were more sluggish than fists and would crumble at the first touch, who would ever use such tools?

“By that logic, why do human beings use guns? Because the guns can shoot bullets further and more powerfully than the possible damage of bare hands!

“Shuttles, crystal processors, crystal suits, starships… All the tools that human beings invented are at least stronger than human beings in one field, such as speed, strength, or computational ability. It is why human beings create and utilize them.

“Then, if human beings are weaker than the Pangu Clan every respect, what was the point of creating such a vulnerable, worthless tool?”