Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

“What is this exactly?”

Every hair on Li Yao’s body seemed to have been electrified.

He noticed that the ‘super plasma torrent’ had been completely separated from the atmosphere of the ancient star. It was like an energy storm in the form of a giant crab that was raging toward the battlefield. The hideous posture did not seem to be natural weather or astronomical phenomena at all. Instead, it seemed to be a living devil, one or a bunch of ‘Electric Devils’!

“Yan Liren, isn’t your sword known for chasing wind and catching lightning, slaying gods and annihilating devils, and even slaying lightning with ease?”

Li Yao’s voice changed. “Are you interested in weighing such a thick lightning bolt?”

“I am a sword maniac, not an idiot.

Yan Liren refused without any hesitation. “The plasma storm is at least a thousand kilometers in diameter, which is enough to swallow an asteroid. How am I going to cut it? Not interested!”

“What about you, Your Majesty?”

Li Yao continued questioning Li Jialing. “Didn’t you claim that you would be the Star Ocean Imperator and the dominator of the universe and that billions of stars, white dwarfs, and black holes would bow down to you? Everybody is following your lead right now!

“… The Lord must not raise an army in anger.”

Li Jialing swallowed hard and said, “I feel that the super plasma torrent is too weird. There’s no need to fight it head-on. We might as well retreat as far away as possible. Or maybe, the Black Wind King, you are the real top expert of the Pangu Universe and an invincible existence in the Divinity Transformation Stage. Even I respect you very much. Why don’t you go first and unveil the mysteries of the weird energy body for us? Not long ago, you said that you would devote your limited life to the infinite exploration of the universe. Even if we are just a speck of dust, we must march forward fearlessly in the face of the boundless universe,

right?”

“Alright. As I said, we don’t need to be scared of the tiny universe strategically, but we cannot be careless about tactics. Therefore…”

Taking a deep breath, Li Yao shouted at the top of his voice, “Cut the crap! Run at 120,000 horsepower!” In the face of the overwhelming, overwhelming torrents of plasma, the giant soldier, the crystal suit, the space shuttle, and the starship all had one thing to say: run!

Unfortunately, it was not that easy to run away.

The speed gap between the two parties was obvious. The super plasma torrent was an energy body, and its speed was definitely a hundred times higher than that of the starship and the giant soldier. Although they were hundreds of thousands of kilometers away from each other in the beginning, it was already too late when they ‘saw’ the lightning rush out of the atmosphere.

Li Yao opened his eyes and watched the super plasma torrent split into five tributaries that snatched at the fast-attack warship closest to the ancient star like the sharp claws of a devil. Dazzling electric arcs and fireballs were flying everywhere. The spiritual shield of the fast-attack warship was cracking and disappearing like a thin sugar shell. The turrets, the power units, and the protrusions on the shell were all melting. The black plate armor had been burnt orange.

The power of thunder was indeed terrifying. One claw was enough to paralyze a fast attack starship.

“Yangwei! Yangwei!” Li Linghai called the fast attack starship that was wreathed in electric arcs and sparking in vain in the communication channel. The only response she got was the rattling noises of electromagnetic interference. The parameters of the starship that she was monitoring from a long distance were reset to zero, too, indicating that the enemy was out of the combat network and that all the crew members were likely to be killed.

“Attack freely and brutally!” Li Linghai gritted his teeth and issued the command. The starships zigzagged in the stone belts and dashed forward, while they waved thousands of colorful spears of light and stabbed at the super plasma torrent.

OCE

However, when the thousands of spears of light pierced into the torrents of super plasma, they were like oxen made of mud sinking into an ocean. Not only did they fail to destroy the enemy’s form, they even made the enemy appear clearer and larger. In the end, the enemy was even triggered and extended thousands of tentacles of lightning toward the entire exploration fleet from various directions. BOOM! BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!

Dozens of starships were hit by the lightning instantly. The energy contained in the tentacles was already much lower than before. The spiritual shields of the starships were still on the verge of destruction.

Invisible radiation and high-energy particle streams pierced through the plate armor, the shell of the starship, and the walls of the starship through the spiritual shield. They stirred the vitality magnetic field of every crew member brutally, making their hair stand up, their fingernails explode, and their clothes splutter with sparks.

The intense interference of the spiritual energy even disrupted and paralyzed the mainframe crystal processors of every starship. Even the communication channel was filled with roaring wind and thunder. Everybody had to shout at the top of their lungs in order to be heard.

“Hunting Falcon has been hit. It has lost 30% of its impetus. It is estimated that the spiritual shield can sustain two attacks of the same level!”

“Stainless Steel Mouse has been hit and lost 25% of its impetus temporarily. What the hell is this? It is burning my mainframe crystal processor!”

“It’s too weird that Alloy Virus was hit. How did it lock onto us? It was as easy as a lightning bolt hitting a lightning rod!” Crying and screaming echoed inside the communication channel. No one knew what the terrifying super plasma torrent or thunderstorm was exactly.

In the next second, an even more unbelievable and appalling change took place.

It was floating in the periphery of the stone belts like an enormous jellyfish. The thousands of lightning bolts that constituted its ‘body’ were wriggling and dancing crazily in a weird pattern, turning it into a certain… well-defined, rigorous, and man-made form. “Withering Wood Fortress!”

Gasps were echoing in the communication channel.

Yes. The cluster of ‘living lightning’, or ‘electricity’, turned into the appearance of a dry fortress after a moment of wriggling. The slender body of the fortress and the hundreds of ‘roots’ were all vivid in his mind. Except for the fact that they were made of bouncing lightning, they were almost identical.

Moreover, through the scanning of the high-resolution crystal cameras, the experts even noticed that countless blue light spots were floating around the ‘Withered Wood Fortress’, which was wreathed in lightning. Every blue light spot had limbs and a head. They were tiny people made of electric currents and magnetic fields.

A blue figure made of thousands of electric currents was floating in the dark vacuum, staring at the defeated exploration fleet. Such a scene would never have happened in the most absurd nightmare.

“Is it… the army of ghosts?”

It was hard not to wonder whether or not Lu Qingchen had grasped some kind of evil secret art and sacrificed the lives of all the crew members in the Dry Wood Battle Fortress to a certain devil king lurking on an ancient star, turning the living soldiers into an army of ghosts. Even the Dry Wood Battle Fortress had been ‘energyized into a ‘pure energy fortress’!

Ghosts existed objectively in the Pangu Universe. Ghosts were a set of waves bound by magnetic fields. It was not impossible for them to be further energyized and combatized.

“Are you kidding me? That’s impossible!”

Li Yao could not accept such speculation.

Even if the soul of a human being could be quantified and possess the power of lightning, how could Lu Qingchen command the ‘energy puppets’ to attack the exploration fleet? Were the ‘soldiers’ and ‘workers’ of the Holy Alliance, whose bodies had been burnt to ash, going to listen to Lu Qingchen’s command?

Besides, even if the soul of a human being could turn into… a lightning-like form, how could such a huge fortress turn into a gargantuan ball of lightning? It was impossible for Lu Qingchen to control everything. The best he could do was to discover that something made of lightning was lurking inside the atmosphere of the ancient giants and figure out a way to make use of it.

Then, what was it exactly? Some kind of life? Some kind of ‘energy life’ that was made of lightning and lived inside the atmosphere of ancient giants?

Such a life form was far beyond Li Yao’s imagination.

It was not because his narrow-mindedness dictated that he could only accept carbon-based intelligent life. Rather, it was because, even if he could accept the existence of energy-based life and even if he himself was gradually evolving in the direction of energy-based life, the foundation of energy-based life would always be carbon-based life. Moreover, he should live in a place with a more stable electromagnetic environment.

The ancient giants were sweeping storms all year round. The furious atmosphere, which was full of lightning and thunder, was not a place for life, at least not for the intelligent creatures.

“Then, let’s just consider you to be some kind of… ferocious beast condensed from lightning. You should only have the instincts to hunt and devour. You don’t have the conventional sense of ‘wisdom’, right? Because if you had the wisdom, we would all be dead!”

Li Yao was sweating hard. He mumbled to himself, “How did you take the form of the Dry Wood Fortress and the crew members? Did you analyze the spiritual energy transmission routes and the vitality magnetic field of the crew members and simulate their appearance after you swallowed the Dry Wood Fortress and all the crew members? Why? Were you… studying? What were you trying to do? How did you discover and lock onto us, you animal with electric arcs?”

The question was of paramount importance for the exploration of whether or not the fleet could get out of the hunting range of the ‘Electric Fiend’. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The torrents of lightning in the form of the Supreme Battle Fortress and the crew members attacked again. The torrents of plasma hit every starship of the exploration fleet brutally. The spiritual shields of many of the starships were extremely lackluster. More than half of their impetus was lost. They were knocked over and dispersed by the ever more furious meteoroid showers.