Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

It had been a while since Li Yao came to the Imperium, and he had a profound understanding of the warships of the Imperium with which the Imperium dominated the universe. He knew that there was a brief period where the giant cannons and enormous warships were revived in the military of the Imperium after three hundred years ago.

Supposedly, when the crystal suits and the Colossi were designed and maintained better and better, the combat abilities of the single soldiers were higher and higher, and the warships were more and more transformed into combinations of firepower output platforms and comprehensive supply platforms, instead of the units leading the charge.

When a hundred experts broke into a hostile starship armed in crystal suits to their teeth, it would be possible for them to destroy a starship that cost billions of dollars to be built. Even if they couldn’t, the greatest loss on their side would be the death of the hundred experts, who would’ve killed a lot of enemies before they were killed.

Considering the cost-efficiency, it was apparently not a bargain to spend military budgets on building larger starships. Devoting the resources to the construction of crystal suit legions and the maintenance and duplication of Colossi was a better option.

However, as the technologies about the crystal suits and the Colossi progressed, so did the firepower output, the spiritual shield, and the unmanned operation of the starships. Giant cannons and enormous warships were always every soldier’s dream, so somebody eventually proposed that, when the technologies of the crystal processors and the Spiritual Nexus were mostly developed, battle puppets, drones in various forms, and space torpedoes could gather into an overwhelming tide. Plus cannons that were large enough in number, they could destroy all the enemies, including the most powerful crystal suits and Colossi!

“The Colossi are absolutely not invincible. As long as there are enough battle puppets and drones, and the firepower output from the cannons is high enough to establish a continuous, impenetrable fire net, it will be easy to crush the Colossi!

“If you can’t, that means the number of the battle puppets and cannons is not large enough, and the fire net is not dense enough. If a hundred thousand cannons are piled on a single starship, what enemy can’t they destroy?”

It was exactly the opinion of the people who believed in cannons and warships.

Also, they were not just talking but also conducted decades of theoretical calculations and tests in the most authoritative military lab of the Imperium, proving their point in countless tests on the virtual battlefield. The “super arsenal warships”, equipped with hundreds of thousands of spiritual puppets and drones as well as at least ten thousand heavy cannons, were truly capable of causing great trouble to the general Colossi. Even if the specifications of the Colossi were improved to the level of what was used by the Divinity Transformation Stage experts, it was still barely possible for them to break out of the blockage of the “super arsenal warship”.

The military of the Imperium couldn’t help but feel tempted.

After all, the technologies on the development of the “spiritual residence”, which was the central cockpit of the Colossus, hadn’t been grasped by the Imperium yet. Even though they could duplicate or transplant the Colossus’ limbs or weapon kits, it would be a total loss once the “spiritual residence” was blown up.

There was no telling how long the war between the Imperium and the Covenant Alliance would last. If it was going on for another thousand years, the Colossi on the Imperium’s side would be fewer and fewer, whereas the Covenant Alliance, with their abundant primeval heritage, clearly had the technologies of Colossal maintenance and duplication that were more advanced than the Imperium’s.

If at the end of the war, the Imperium ran out of the Colossi but the Covenant Alliance still had some left, it would certainly be a very awkward situation.

It was exactly because of such concerns and the “perfect performance” in the virtual wars in the lab that the military of the Imperium activated the plan to build new super arsenal warships known as “Adamantine”!

The Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warships were all ten times larger than the biggest arsenal warships that the Imperium had ever built in the past. As a matter of fact, they were more like combinations of arsenal warships, comprehensive supply starships, and even space fortresses.

In the original design, the military stuffed at least thirty thousand cannons of various sorts, a hundred most advanced fire-control crystal processors, and more than five hundred thousand battle puppets and drones into each Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warships so that they would become the “perfect and doom-bringing ultimate warships that can end all wars”!

Would the actual combat ability of the Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warships be as incredible as the designers and contractors bragged about, and could they defeat the Colossi?

The question would forever remain a mystery.

Perhaps if those Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warships had been built according to the highest standard, it was true that they would be blowing up Colossi unstoppably and end all wars.

But before that, what they ended first would be the finance of the Imperium.

The whole construction of the Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warships was a sad yet cliché story.

Perhaps the ideas that firepower mattered most and an ocean of drones was invincible were not wrong, but the designers’ creations were too avant-garde and magnificent. They overestimated the development speed of the crystal processors in the Imperium and underestimated the technological difficulty to focus hundreds of thousands of cannons on one starship. Or rather, to get the Council of Elders to approve the construction plan of the super warships as soon as possible, from the designers to the few largest military contractors in the Imperium to the persons of interests within the Council of Elders, everybody showed the most intense optimism and turned a blind eye to the “minor difficulties”. They proposed a budget plan that was not at all cheap but still bearable if everybody gritted their teeth, as well as a promise that the warships would be ready for battle within twenty years.

The Council of Elders at that time approved the plan. Sixteen “Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warships” were built in the dock at the same time, and the construction lasted… a hundred years.

During the construction, not only did many natural and humane accidents take place because of technological challenges, but the advancement of the technologies of crystal processors and battle puppets also forced the designs to be updated again and again. The original plan and budget were soon thrown into the dustbin in the corner, and the new estimated fees of construction were higher and higher until the cost for each Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warship was twenty times more than the original budget!

However “martial” the Imperium of True Human Beings was and however the Council of Elders looked forward to the birth of the super warships, they were collapsing when faced with such budgets and such inestimable time of completion.

“The Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warships are truly the most magnificent warships in history, but they are actually on the Covenant Alliance’s side. They are about to destroy the Imperium by doing nothing and just lying in the docks!”

Many elders of the Imperium bashed the desk and roared.

However, they couldn’t do anything else other than roaring. Astronomical resources had been devoted to the project. It was not like they could sell the sixteen incomplete Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warships as garbage, right?

Besides, the astronomical investment of resources would not just vanish. It would only flow back to the persons of interest in the end.

Even the angry elders who were bashing the desk and roaring might have secretly benefited from the project too!

Just like that, the construction plan of the Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warships became a ceaseless black hole that exhausted the army of the Imperium. It was hard to say that the Covenant Alliance’s march into the Imperium and occupation of the five heavy industrial worlds had nothing to do with the weakening caused by the plan. Furthermore, the Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warships even contributed to the serious economic crisis after the war!

After the Covenant Alliance invaded the five worlds including the Black Wind Sector, the Imperium finally couldn’t bear the incessant postponement anymore, and the contractors seemed to feel that many people would lose their heads if they kept on dawdling. Then, the sixteen Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warships were finally put in service.

However, because of the fierce battles in the frontline and the shortage of budgets, the sixteen Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warships were not completed in the end. They were essentially “preborn babies” with congenital deficiencies. The designers and the military contractors claimed that it would not be their fault if the sixteen super warships could not carry out the theoretically maximal combat ability. It was the problem of time and budgets. If they were given several decades with two to three times more in terms of budgets, the Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warships would definitely blow up all the Colossi!

Even the designers and builders were so unconfident. It was not hard to imagine the performance of the sixteen gargantuan “premature infants”.

On the real battlefield, they completely lost their destructive aura on the virtual battlefield, and they also revealed their weaknesses of clumsiness and vulnerability. Also, because of the expensive cost, the four Kurfürst families couldn’t bear to send those super arsenal warships to the most intense battlefields at all. After only two of them were heavily wounded by the Covenant Alliance, the other fourteen super arsenal warships hurried to escape to their mother port in panic.

The Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warships became complete jokes. A hundred years later, there were no more believers of grand cannons and giant warships, and no more new super warships were crafted. In the meantime, the daily maintenance cost for the sixteen “preborn babies” was already so astronomical that even the four Kurfürst families could barely handle it. How could they be dragged into the factories to finish the real construction?

Therefore, a hundred years later, they were still the preborn babies that could only carry out 30% of the combat ability. Abandoned by the best fleets of the four Kurfürst families, they were allotted to the secondary fleets, which were then built into “Eight Adamantines” based on those warships and sent to the battlefield to annihilate the reformists.

“I know that the Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warships are never praised, but that’s a result of multiple factors. As a matter of fact, even though they are uncompleted, preborn babies that can only carry out 30% of the combat ability, they are still enough to devastate any enemy if they are determined to fight.”

Jin Yuyan said with a bitter smile, “Their lousy performance on the battlefield against the Covenant Alliance does not mean that they will show any mercy on our garrison fleet. You went through a lot of trouble to deceive the many Immortal Cultivators outside just now, but getting to the bottom of it, the sixteen Adamantine-level Super Arsenal Warships are the foundation of the four families’ coalition army. If we cannot destroy them completely on the battlefield, nobody will betray and join our side easily.

“Therefore, what’s your next trick, ‘Black Wind King Li Yao’? Where is your so-called ‘Black Wind Fleet’?”