Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

After pondering for a long time, he decided to restrain the impulse in his heart for the time being. The main reason was that climbing the ventilation tube from here was really a waste of time. According to the display of the tracker, Zhang Daniu should have been locked in a certain room between the 25th floor and the 27th floor. There was no need for him to climb more than 20 floors through the ventilation tube, right? How long would he have to climb for?

Therefore, Li Yao planned to take the stairs to the twentieth floor and see how it went.

He crouched and sprinted on the stairs like a weightless shadow.

BOOM! BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!

Inside the building, explosions were breaking out one after another, mixed with high-pitched screams that sounded like the song of a banshee. There were even sounds of bones being crushed. Li Yao felt that his blood was freezing, and a hot stream was flowing out of his heart.

He stuck his palm to the wall. He could clearly feel the shaking of the wall and the waves of energy spreading out along the rebar and concrete. They were crashing and bursting like countless destructive swirls not far away from him.

Li Yao had no time to interfere with the battle between the apocalypse and the ark. He could only lower his head and rush forward.

At the corner of the seventh floor to the eighth floor, he encountered his first enemy.

“Mooooo!”

A weird shriek that could make one’s teeth ache and legs go weak rang out again. A woman with grayish-white skin emerged from the shadows. She held a heavy and sharp fire axe in her hand as she ruthlessly slashed towards Li Yao.

She had been crouching in a corner, like a hunter who was lurking on purpose. Had Li Yao not heard her feeble breathing and heartbeat in advance, he might’ve been hit by her.

But right now, Li Yao was certainly not going to be fooled. Before his opponent’s fire axe reached the highest point, he had already kicked his opponent into a corner.

After making sure that the other party had already tossed the fire axe to the side, Li Yao finally had the time to carefully observe.

It was a girl who could be considered pretty. Judging from her clothes, she should be an office girl from the Fortune Plaza. She did not look like a professional bodyguard or an assassin. Naturally, she did not look like an Awakener.

Her skin seemed to be covered in a layer of gray scales, and a beast-like glow blossomed in the depths of her eyes. Her expression was vicious and malevolent, and her temperament was completely not that of a white-collar worker in the metropolis. She was somewhat similar to... Li Yao’s roommate, Zhao Kai. Of course, it was Zhao Kai when he went on a rampage.

Li Yao glanced at the girl’s ear and found a Bluetooth earpiece on her left ear. He sighed and shot a steel nail out of his fingers. Before the girl recovered from the shock of her internal organs, he blew the earpiece into pieces. The girl was dazed as if she had been electrocuted. She vomited a mouthful of black blood and collapsed.

It appeared that she was not an Awakener of the Heaven’s Origin Sector. Like Zhao Kai, she had been remotely controlled by someone in the Heaven’s Origin Sector through the phone and awakened part of the brutal memories of her previous life. She had been turned into a puppet and stationed here as a guardian on purpose.

In the office building of the central business district, many people were workaholics who worked 9 to 10 hours a day. Now that they had encountered such a rarely-seen rainstorm, the underground garage had been flooded, and the public transportation had been halted. Countless office workers were trapped in the building, unable to leave. Right now, the ‘apocalypse’ was engaged in a fierce battle with the ‘Ark’ Awakener. The innocent people were involved, too. Other than the woman in front of them, there were bound to be more victims.

Although the hunter had said that the people in the ‘World of Reincarnation’ all had unlimited lives and that the life and death of a certain life were irrelevant and could be erased easily, Li Yao did not think so.

If possible, he would still try his best to help everyone he could and save everything that was worth saving!

He checked the woman’s breathing. Although it was weak, it was stable. She must’ve lost all her strength. Except for the bruises on her chest and her back, there was nothing wrong with her. Li Yao was relieved and continued walking.

Knowing that the apocalyptic organization might have deployed guards on the escape stairs, Li Yao was even more cautious in his actions. He had to listen to the sounds above him on every floor. If he found weak breathing and heartbeat, he would rather find a different route than to get into a conflict with the puppets controlled by the mobile phone. These people were as innocent as Zhao Kai. Besides, Li Yao was not sure whether or not he would attract the attention of the experts of the apocalyptic organization by slaughtering his way up. The experts did not even need to confront him directly. As long as he could shift Zhang Daniu’s position in time, it would be a headache for him.

Thankfully, there were not many awakened Cultivators in the Heaven’s Origin Sector and the Ark Foundation.

In the morgue, the ‘Grey Mist Lady’ said that the Ark Foundation would send ‘ten Deep Sleepers’ and two ‘Ultimate Sleepers’ to reinforce Jiang Nan City. They were all high-end warriors who had come from other places. Although there was no telling how many primary-level warriors there were in the area, there were unlikely to be more than a hundred of them.

In order to ensure the confidentiality of the traps, the Heaven’s Origin Sector wouldn’t send five hundred people to set up an ambush.

Since the competition between two to three hundred people was focused on each other, it was quite easy for Li Yao, who was an expert at sneaking around, to dodge.

Although he chose to stay out of the conflict and did not witness the fierce confrontation between the two parties, he had passed by quite a few broken and messy floors.

The shocking scene told of the horror a moment ago.

The 17th floor of the Wealth Building seemed to have experienced a terrifying explosion. The cubicles and the walls were all gone. Black scorch marks were everywhere. What was odd was that the seemingly fierce fire did not spread to more than the 18th floor and was confined to the narrow space.

On the nineteenth floor, although the booths and pathways were still there, messy, dense vines were everywhere, as if they had crawled into a primitive forest. One could even hear the sounds of the vines growing and wriggling.

When he reached the 21st floor, something even weirder happened. After Li Yao made sure that there was no one inside and opened the door of the escape channel, he discovered that the entire floor was filled with cold seawater. He could vaguely see terrifying sharks in the seawater, but the seawater was sealed by an invisible barrier. It only surged on the 21st floor and did not leak out at all, as if it were a crazy aquarium.

“Is this the power of the awakened?”

Li Yao was baffled. “The water is bitter and salty. It is indeed seawater and not rainwater or water from the fire tubes. How did they ‘transfer’ so much seawater to this place and seal it?”

There was no time to think.

The energy waves above were getting more and more intense. The sounds of fighting were echoing nonstop, too. It seemed that most of the awakened Cultivators had gathered above the 25th floor for the final attack and defense.

Li Yao finally had the opportunity to awaken the deepest and most familiar memories.

While he was walking up the stairs, he found several emergency boxes and took out the water belts inside.

He pulled out 3-5 fire hose belts in a row. They were probably over a hundred meters long from front to back and weighed over a hundred pounds. In any case, right now, he possessed an inexhaustible amount of monstrous strength. These weights were nothing.

Li Yao kicked open the protective door of an elevator. Inside the elevator was a dark and empty shaft. Carrying the fire hose, Li Yao climbed up along the iron rope of the elevator until he reached the 24th floor and found the ventilation tube nearby.

Li Yao slithered silently in the ventilation tube.

He was like a happy zebra that was happily playing on the savanna of Africa.

Very soon, he sensed two powerful waves of energy. They should be the ‘Gray Mist Lady’ and the ‘Hunter’, the commanders of the battle of Jiangnan City.

Li Yao was of a mind to observe the competition between the two powerful awakeners, but on second thought, since he had just awakened not long ago and could not control his overflowing strength very well, he decided not to rush out and ask for trouble.

Li Yao avoided the two commanders and continued climbing his ventilation tube carefully.

How should he put it? Although the ventilation tube was zigzagging, narrow, and dark, Li Yao felt that he was like a fish in water when he was passing through it. The only drawback was that the design of the ventilation tube was too unprofessional, and it was not guarded at all. There was no difficulty at all when he was sneaking in.

Li Yao had planned to go to the room where Zhang Daniu was locked.

But before he reached the 27th floor, according to the tracker, Zhang Daniu started moving in his direction.

Li Yao was dazed for a moment. Then he heard two bangs coming from the top of the elevator shaft, which indicated that somebody had sabotaged the door of the elevator.

It appeared that great minds think alike. Li Yao had the same thought as the members of the Heaven’s Origin Sector.

Everyone wanted to go up and down through the elevator shaft as quickly as possible. However, Li Yao had invaded the 27th floor through the elevator shaft, and the members of the Heaven’s Origin Sector must’ve been unable to withstand the pressure of the Ark Foundation or prepared to move Zhang Daniu to somewhere else through the elevator shaft just in case.

With such a heavy thunderstorm, the entire building’s water supply, power supply, fire control, and elevator system had all been shut down. However, the elevator shaft itself was impossible to disappear. With the abilities of the Awakened, whether or not there was an elevator didn’t make much of a difference.

Sure enough, Li Yao pricked up his ears and heard Zhang Daniu’s screams coming from above.

“Since you’ve delivered the goods to my doorstep, I won’t hold back.”

Li Yao grinned. He went back the way he came and returned to the elevator shaft through the ventilation tube. Then, he noticed that sparks were popping up in the darkness above his head. It was probably because the members of the Heaven’s Origin Sector were rubbing the steel rope with tools when they were sliding down the elevator.

Including Zhang Daniu, there were four of them.

Two well-trained muscular men were wearing black sportswear, tactical vests, night vision goggles, and gas masks. Their waists were bulging, indicating that they were armed with guns or knives.

The third muscular man, on the other hand, grabbed Zhang Daniu with his legs and fastened two iron rings to the rope. He descended quickly under the protection of his two companions.