Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

“Am I the answer?” Li Yao mumbled to himself, “Does the ‘Supreme Emperor’ not know who he is, where he is from, and where he is born?”

“Yes. The man who was known as the ‘Supreme Emperor’ in the legends later and left countless bizarre and absurd legends was just a passer-by who lost his way in the sea of stars. He was a man who spent his entire life searching for answers. It’s a pity that, until the end of his life, he did not know the significance of the creation of his civilization and the entire human civilization, nor did he know the mission that we… might have delayed for billions of years. The gravekeeper’s voice was filled with desolation, antiquity, and helplessness. As the information streams rippled and surged, the vague illusions nearby became clearer.

It was like going back hundreds of thousands of years to when the Pangu Civilization had just discovered the primeval relics and established a large, cutting-edge laboratory in this place. “Supreme Emperor… My memory begins with a tiny embryo.

The gravekeeper’s voice turned lower and lower, like the ravings in a dream. He had entered the role of the Supreme Emperor, or rather, he was playing the Supreme Emperor’s last words. “I was like an ancient fungus floating in the primitive ocean, drifting in the hot and nutritious seawater. In a few days, I experienced the path that would take billions of years from a bacteria to a carbon-based intelligent life. It was not until then that I realized that I was not floating in the ocean but living in an artificial nutrient solution.

“It was indeed a weird feeling.

“If I were really a bacterium, or just a cell, or even an embryo of a carbon-based intelligent life, I should not have developed self-awareness and precise thinking ability. I should not have been able to ‘awareness’ my own living environment, and I should not have been able to release things like ‘telepathic thoughts’ to perceive and explore the world around me.

“But as it happened, I had the ability to clearly perceive the entire process of me evolving from a small bacterium waving flagella and tentacles into a multi-cellular organism or even an intelligent life embryo. I could even scan the strengthened glass wall outside the nutrition liquids and the vast and complicated laboratory outside the culture chamber.

“It was a laboratory that was hundreds of times larger and more advanced than the one in front of your eyes. Thousands of similar culture chambers seemed to be breeding batches of fetuses or similar things at the same time. Many fetuses that had grown mature but were not very successful were exploited by the waste, too. They were dissected and studied in the operating tables and crystal processors of the Pangu Clan and the Nuwa Clan for virtual experiments. Weird, whimsical experiments were conducted day and night. As the gravekeeper played the last words of the ‘Supreme Emperor’, the environment around them changed, too. Countless Pangu Clan and Nuwa Clan members in sealed, sterile clothes were indeed engaged in experiments.

On the operating table and on the light beam of the crystal processor, there were all kinds of bizarre-shaped animals, but most of them were still recognizable as human beings.

“At that time, I didn’t understand what the primeval species were doing at all. I only knew that they raised thousands of embryos that were similar to me and stimulated the embryos in various ways, hoping to activate the mysterious power buried deep inside the embryos. But most of the experiments failed.

The Supreme Emperor continued speaking in a low and sad voice. “Some of the fetuses were unable to activate any strength and came to an abrupt end in the middle of their evolution, turning into all kinds of carbon-based creatures without the slightest bit of intelligence, animals that feast on raw meat and blood. Some of the fetuses could not withstand the intense stimulation and exploded and were destroyed, melting into the nutrition liquids. Most of the fetuses, although successfully growing into fetuses and turning from fetuses into babies, did not show any extraordinary abilities after they fell to the ground. Except for their reproductive ability and adaptive ability, they were far weaker than the Pangu Clan, the Nuwa Clan, the Gonggong Clan, the Zhurong Clan, and the other advanced and powerful prehistoric species.

“The researchers of the Pangu Clan and the Nuwa Clan seem to be very dissatisfied with the experiment results. I can sense their anxiety, anger, and even desperation.

“At that time, I was just a tiny embryo that was no more complicated than a bacterium. To my knowledge, the primeval species were more than gods and devils; they were creatures of a higher dimension. There was something that could make them feel ‘anxious’ and ‘desperate’. I could not imagine what it was exactly. “All in all, the researchers of the primeval civilization conducted experiments on countless fetuses and inputted the data of the failed experiments into the next batch of fetuses. The parameters of the experiment environment and the stimulation were changed, and the next batch of fetuses suffered another failure. However, in every batch of fetuses that failed, 1% of the fetuses were lucky enough to survive. They were not destroyed by the intense stimulation, nor did they embark on the wrong path of evolution. They grew and matured in a relatively weak way. They merely maintained the form of fetuses, absorbed the fetuses quietly, and continued hibernating.

“I was one of the luckiest embryos. It took me three years to go from cells to fetuses.

A culture chamber that looked like a crystal tower appeared in front of Li Yao’s eyes. At first, the chamber seemed to be empty except for the bright green nutrition liquids.

Only by releasing his telepathic thoughts to the maximum could Li Yao detect a cell-like object in the nutrition liquids.

The reason why it was called a ‘similar cell’ was because the structure of an ordinary cell should be very simple, but the inside of this cell was extremely complicated, as if… it contained the entire universe.

As time went by, the researchers around the crystal tower changed one batch after another.

From the Pangu Clan, which was tall and had a deformed brain in the beginning, to the Nuwa Clan, which had a human head and a snake body and a tail that boasted ‘gene capsules’ that could disassemble and combine genes at will, to the Kuafu Clan of plants and the Houyi Clan of insects, as well as the Zhurong Clan and the Gonggong Clan, and so on, every prehistoric, carbon-based intelligent life had been refining the embryo with their unique secret arts and injecting tremendous nutrition, gene segments, spiritual waves, and information into the embryo.

Under the stimulation and ‘feeding’, the embryo slowly expanded. From the bacteria in the beginning, it grew into a bright gold meatball more than twenty centimeters in diameter, like a crystal that had shrunk the star billions of times. It revolved slowly and breathed in and out, emitting mysterious, glamorous brilliance. As the Supreme Emperor had said, it had been hibernating and absorbing for three years and was unwilling to break out of the shell one second earlier.

“I seem to be the experiment subject who lasted the longest in the embryo state in the entire laboratory.

The Supreme Emperor said, “After I distinguished myself among the countless embryos, naturally, I attracted the attention of most of the researchers in the primeval era. All the resources of the laboratory were focused on me, and I was stimulated more and more. Under such stimulation, I saw a lot of pictures and awakened a lot of knowledge, wisdom that did not belong to this era or the universe. “It was as if this was not my first life but my ‘reincarnation’. Before I was trained in the laboratory, I had lived once, or even countless times, in the boundless sea of stars beyond the Pangu Universe. I struggled, resisted, collapsed, despaired, and fled!

“Countless pictures were flashing inside my brain. Even the simplest picture was beyond description.

“I saw myself in the past, or human beings similar to us, with bright gold stripes all over our bodies. We were born with the ability to summon the wind and summon the rain, and we were born with the ability to steer all creatures. We stepped on unbelievably enormous warships, waved lightning and thunder, and roamed the sea of stars and even the multiverse. We conquered the intelligent creatures in different forms from us, deprived them of their wisdom, devoured their civilization, and melted the essence of their civilization into ours. We even transformed everything about their civilization into information streams and carved them into our gene pool. “Whether it is the giants that are as tall as mountains on the super-low-density planets in the center of the glorious sea of stars, the crystal-clear, weak, boneless oceanic people on the oceanic planets, or the solar-powered insects that are born on the planets that are too close to the stars and barely have an atmosphere, or the extremely hot planets… All kinds of intelligent creatures that look hideous and won’t even appear in our nightmares have been conquered by us. They have become tiny and clear marks in the gene bank of mankind.

“Every one of us, every cell in the body of every human being, is a ‘museum of cosmic civilization’. Everything that contains hundreds of carbon-based intelligent creatures is stored on every gene strand. They are our trophies.

“With dragons as symbols, we can even unlock our abilities and turn ourselves into real dragons. The so-called ‘dragons’ are super creatures that swallow billions of creatures and build themselves up with the genetic essence of billions of creatures.

“However…

“Even the super creatures as strong as dragons or gods and devils will reach their limits when they are faced with the mysterious, boundless universe.

“After our civilization climbed to the peak, it hit rock bottom almost instantly. The golden years of invincibility were shattered into pieces. We turned from the dominators of the multiverse into stray dogs. The glory and glory of victory turned into endless humiliation and fear.

“Who are our enemies exactly? How did we end up like this? If this is everything I experienced in my ‘previous life’, then how did I come from my ‘previous life’ to ‘the present world’?

“I would very much like to know the answers to these questions. I would very much like to continue exploring the bizarre scenes and the endless past.

“But the primeval researchers in the laboratory were not willing to let me continue the intense stimulation. I could vaguely sense that they were… scared of the awakening of human beings.