Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

The boy and the girl sometimes talked in peace and sometimes argued fiercely. There were even several times where the boy threatened the girl that he would launch a “war”. But soon after a “war” began, the two of them would be singing together as happily as before.

What they were singing appeared to be a song that Li Yao had once heard from Earth. The name of the song was exactly “Find My Father”.

“I am not afraid of rainfall or snowfall. Even if a cold wind is blowing—

“—I will be not scared at all, as long as I can see his face every day.

“I want to, I want to find my dad. I must find my dad wherever I go.

“I haven’t found my good father yet. If you ever meet him, please tell him to go home!”

Then, it was the innocent giggle of children.

There was no telling how many times the children’s rhythm echoed, but Li Yao was finally back to himself.

“Huh…”

In the voice that sounded like a rebirth after being sealed for a hundred years, his consciousness broke out of the infinite darkness and became clear and sharp again.

Every bone, every muscle, and every drop of blood in his body was back to his control. The feeling of pain and the inertness were entirely gone. His perception and his sensitiveness had reached a whole new level.

What… happened?

Li Yao sensed eruptive strength from every cell inside his body. His broken soul seemed to have been entirely repaired. It appeared that he had taken off an unnecessary shell and gained an even larger room of growth. It truly felt great!

Taking a deep breath, he discovered that there was still the last hindrance around him. Something was enveloping him like an enormous cocoon.

When he thought of it, his blood flow was immediately accelerated by 1%, and the muscles around his body quaked softly. The “cocoon” enshrouding him immediately let out cracking sounds and fell apart.

What collapsed to the ground, however, were dim, arc-shaped metal pieces, which had far exceeded the limits of metal fatigue and became as fragile as pebbles.

What are those? Wasn’t I heavily wounded? How did I turn into this?

Li Yao shook off all the metal cocoon pieces that had been stuck to his body before he sensed his brand-new body in astonishment. Although it was still made of flesh and blood, it was filled with a metal texture that was beyond any description. The dark gold, the silver, and the bronze signs of brilliance were flowing and illuminating each other all over his body.

Even without using the slightest spiritual energy, his body was still brimming with the suffocating sense of beauty!

Shua! Shua! Shua! Shua! Shua! Shua!

Li Yao punched a hundred times casually. Without even exerting his strength for real, the edge of his fists had already torn apart the air, resulting in rings of ripples. Before the old ripples vanished, the new ripples were already spreading slowly. Like a pond where a drizzle was going on, the waves moved out nonstop.

Li Yao felt that his body sturdiness had been increased to a whole new level.

It was not an improvement of pure brute force but a deeper understanding of the nature and utilization of strength as well as the relationship between his strength and the world around.

He could easily sense how his fists raised the ripples in the air, how the waves interfered with and affected each other, and so much more information that he could not perceive before.

It implied that not just his body, but his computational ability and his soul power had leaped to an unbelievable new height, too.

For some reason, he was confident that he would’ve secured a better result if he were faced with overwhelming battle puppets right now. He could even enshroud all the battle puppets with his “domain” and transform the battle puppets into parts of himself.

Recalling the battle previously, Li Yao sniffed in confusion, his pupils constricted abruptly.

“This is unreasonable. Faced with so many battle puppets and Immortal Cultivators, there was no reason why I could’ve survived when I was exhausted and heavily wounded. Shouldn’t I have sacrificed myself valiantly, leaving a splendid, magnificent back for the people in the next hundreds of years to come to sing over and live up to as the greatest legend of mankind? Why am I still alive and even… so comfortable?”

Li Yao frowned. “Was Long Yangjun moved by my noble charisma at the last moment and saved me? That can’t be right. Even if Long Yangjun did save me, she couldn’t have renewed my soul that was on the verge of collapse, much less further improving it. If she were capable of them, she would have certainly made her own soul indestructible!”

Li Yao vaguely remembered that while he was in the coma, there seemed to be two or many hundreds of pairs of chubby hands touching his soul. He also heard the weird conversation between two children about war, destruction, overwriting, chain of causality, etc.

Two children in such a place?

Li Yao sorted through his messy memory pieces as he stood straight and observed the environment he was in.

He was in a clean and peaceful medical chamber.

Until just now, he had been submerged in a medical cabin of liquid metals.

The medical cabin of liquid metals could send the super-tiny medical puppets in the mustard-seed level into the human body to repair the seriously wounded tissues.

The metal shell that had been covering him and lost activity was the “debris” of the super-tiny medical puppets that had finished the treatment and run out of spiritual energy.

It was a rather extraordinary art. Even the Star Glory Federation and the Imperium of True Human Beings had never fully grasped it. Only the armies of the Supreme Emperor in the Star Ocean Imperium had once retrieved relevant technologies because of the enhancement of the three volumes of the Book of Revelation.

However, after the rebellion of the Blood God and the collapse of the Star Ocean Imperium, the precious technology was lost and gone for good in the thousands of years of chaos that followed.

As he expected, Li Yao found the Star Ocean Imperium’s emblem where a red dragon was swallowing the sun and the names of renowned legions in the Star Ocean Imperium on the medical cabin as well as all the medical facilities around.

So, was this place a certain military base or a shelter of the Star Ocean Imperium?

Although there was no device around that indicated the altitude, Li Yao’s keen skin allowed him to sense the suffocating air pressure, which meant that he was still tens of thousands of meters below the ground.

Pushing the door of the medical chamber, Li Yao discovered that it was indeed an underground shelter that had all kinds of living and training facilities despite the small size.

Different from the shelters such as the 10,084th district, the scale of this shelter was smaller and devoid of residents, but all the facilities were as good as new, as if somebody had been maintaining and cleaning them every day, and they had found sufficient energy to keep the operation of the shelter.

Even the recycled air had been added with a lot of microelements that were beneficial for the human body. It was as refreshing as the fresh air in a forest.

Li Yao even found a fairly large refining workshop next to the lobby, where all kinds of peculiar maintenance magical equipment were floating in the midair. Even a master of refining such as himself felt dazzled.

Although he did not know the names of many of the devices, he was certain that it was possible to maintain and repair a Colossus in the place with his abundance of experience!

The great surprise overwhelmed Li Yao, who felt that he was in a dream.

“Am I really not dead yet?”

Li Yao pulled his ears with the greatest strength of his life before he grimaced in pain. “Fine. Everything here seems to be real. But what the heck has happened?”

Deep inside his brain, however, two smiling little kids popped up.

Li Yao blinked, and passing through the empty, dustless corridor and lobby, he reached the double airtight gates of the shelter that seemed to weigh a thousand tons.

Beep!

A red light scanned his face and immediately turned into a gentle green. Two airtight gates were opened one after the other, and a hot wave instantly flowed in.

Against the hot waves, Li Yao walked out of the shelter into the scorching wilderness of the underground world.

When he looked back, he discovered that more than half of the shelter was embedded in the toughest shell, with a framework made of thick metal pillars to maintain the hardness of the overall structure. Perhaps it was exactly because of such a careful architecture that the shelter did not collapse after being squeezed for ten thousand years below the ground.

The cave before him, on the other hand, seemed to be a legendary inferno of fire.

At the center of the cave, a highly unstable magma lake was bubbling in orange, red, and violet colors of different shades. Now and then, a few magma tentacles would be thrown to the shore and consolidated into what appeared to be the aerial root of a banyan tree.

The temperature of the magma was different according to different elements, but the magma lake was at least a thousand degrees in temperature. Under the sweltering heat, even the temperature of the air was more than a hundred degrees. It was absolutely unsuitable for the survival of regular humans. Even the trainers or the demonic creatures that had been modified would find it unbearable to be exposed to such an environment for a long time.

The magma lake where waves were surging, on the other hand, was undoubtedly a forbidden area for any life form.

However, Li Yao vaguely detected quite a few unusual spiritual waves from the magma lake. Maximizing his eyesight and observing it carefully, he discovered that some extremely tiny creatures were actually living in the magma.

These creatures looked like a hybrid of tadpoles and oncomelania. Each of them had a huge head and a pointy tail, and with a body that was in the shape of a helix and wriggling all the time.

Of course, these creatures were much smaller than tadpoles or oncomelania and only in the size of millet and ants. However, emitting the colors of metals, those creatures were floating in the magma, showing no sign that they would be melted.

It was impossible for the primitive carbon-based life of such a simple structure to survive the magma. They appeared more like tiny puppets that were made of certain metals that boasted an extremely high melting point.

But who on earth would craft such a bunch of uncanny tiny puppets and project them to the magma lake deep below the ground?

While Li Yao was stunned, a second type of spiritual puppets suddenly surfaced in the magma lake. Those puppets were the size of a human palm and looked like starfish, but they had six soft metal tentacles, which waved and caught a lot of the “metal oncomelania” into their own bodies.

The “metal oncomelania” all fled in panic, but the “metal starfish” were chasing after them relentlessly while they transformed the tentacles, hoping to swallow as many “metal oncomelania” as possible.

The two kinds of amazing spiritual puppets were actually engaged in an unbelievable “predation” in the magma of a thousand degrees in temperature!