by <unknown>
…
Li Yao's training log. Day 733.
"The red mice have gone extinct today. The ambitions deep inside Yan Xinjian's heart are finally gone.
"Barely any mice in other colors are alive now. As for the pure white mice, there is only the last of them.
"For some reason, as Yan Xinjian's remaining soul perished bit by bit, I was gradually grasped by desperation, too, and I did not have the courage to imagine what my life would be like once all the remaining souls were gone.
"Maybe, deep in my mind, I considered his remaining soul as someone alive, no matter how evil and sordid he was.
"Once the 'someone' died, I would be the only person in this room.
"Can I really succeed in forming the core? Will I ever get out of this place?
"Today, I asked myself in the mirror such questions.
"A weird thing happened!
"The me in the mirror looked like a totally different person. His left eye was emitting demonic red brightness, and he nodded his head affirmatively with a mysterious smile on his face.
"I was greatly shocked and shook my head hard. When my mind was clear again, I looked at the mirror, only to discover that—
"There was no mirror.
"I was merely talking to myself against a wall."
…
Li Yao's training log. Day 809.
"I feel that I'm now mired in a weird swirl.
"My strength continues expanding, but my Cultivation does not rise accordingly.
"Recently, I've been feeling that my brain is not enough to control every part of my body. I often make attacking movements subconsciously, like a tyrannosaur driven by the lust of killing whose brain is only the size of a peanut.
"Is this mental derangement?
"I've read a lot of books, including those left by Yan Xinjian and the ancient classics in the Heavenly Refining Tower deep inside my brain. I searched for the symptoms of mental derangement when a Cultivator was about to break into a higher level.
"I discovered that the anomalies that happened to me were different from the normal symptoms of mental derangement.
"But anyway, I cannot continue training in such a way. Something serious is definitely going to happen to me if I go on!
"After a long period of consideration, I've decided today that I'll put my training on hold for now.
"After all, my combat ability is dozens of times higher than that of the peak of the Building Foundation Stage in common sense. Since so many Cultivators in the peak of the Building Foundation Stage have formed their cores with a lesser combat ability, the obstacle that blocks me from forming the core should not be my body.
"Of course, I will not idle by ten thousand meters below the ground. Don't forget that I'm a hybrid-type Cultivator. Other than talent in combats, I'm also gifted at creation!
"I've stopped worrying about the ways to form the core and brought out the Mystic Skeleton Battlesuit, the Dragon King Battlesuit, and the Unparalleled Extension. I plan to study how to combine the two super crystal suits and the most advanced Ares Extension of the Flying Star Sector.
"Many Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures in Yan Xinjian's training room are not absorbable. Leaving them below the ground will be the greatest waste ever.
"I'm planning to craft the best crystal suit of the Flying Star Sector, the Heaven's Origin Sector, and the Blood Demon Sector with those Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures as well as the key components on the two super crystal suits.
"Then, based on the crystal suit, I will build a tailor-made Unparalleled Extension for myself!
"Mystic Skeleton plus Dragon King, Unparalleled in the sea of stars. Just thinking about them is enough to make me thrilled!"
…
Li Yao's training log. Day 1000.
"What a nice surprise!
"Since I gave up the pursuit of absolute strength when I sensed the untamable desire for killing deep inside my heart half a year ago, I've been polishing my mind by refining crystal suits.
"The combination of the Mystic Skeleton Battlesuit and the Dragon King Battlesuit went very well. Also, during the arduous tasks of designing and forging day after day, I could clearly feel that my mind was cleansed and perfected.
"As a result, last night, when I completed the design of a critical valve of the strengthened crystal reactor, I suddenly felt that my spine was itching so hard that I could barely resist. My limbs and internal organs seemed to have turned into endless dragons flooding into my spine and then gathering at the end of my spine!
"I had the feeling that the end of my spine was 'expanding'.
"I knew that the evolution had begun!
"My 'second brain' is awakening, maturing, and taking shape!
"When the ancient Cultivators strove for a higher level, they often valued 'opportunity' or 'spur of the moment'. In fact, such feelings were just the reactions between their brand-new organs and the surrounding spiritual energy.
"This is my opportunity!
"Better late than never. I'm going to have everything prepared in three days and advance into the Core Formation Stage officially!"
Chapter 770: Breaking Out of Seclusion |
Three days later, at the bottom of the secret training room, Li Yao was sitting in the middle of the meditation chamber, which was made of an intact meteorite, surrounded by the carefully selected Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures. The pills and the crystals were all glowing, making him seem to be made of translucent jade, too. Immense vitality was flowing below his skin like tides.
After more than three years of high-intensity training in solitude, Li Yao was now more serene, solemn, and peaceful. His eyes looked like oceans before a great storm.
Finally, I've reached the threshold.
Li Yao sensed the tremendous energy inside his body that was about to burst. There was no emotion on his face, not even expectation, because everything was natural and a matter of course.
My current capability is dozens of times higher than the peak of the Building Foundation Stage. Stably compressing such tremendous spiritual energy from the liquid form into the solid form is going to be extremely difficult!
If I'm careless for one moment during the compression, the spiritual energy in the solid form will become disordered and transform into the purest chaos, which will rip me apart directly.
However, if I miraculously succeed…
Li Yao exhaled slightly and dispelled the messy thoughts from his brain.
He checked the items that might be of use for the last time and began the process of forming the core!
I will not fail.
On the other side of the sea of stars, in my home, somebody is waiting for me!
I already have a way to calculate the coordinates of the Heaven's Origin Sector. The path home is right before my eyes!
Nothing in this world is going to stop me!
Li Yao gritted his teeth and activated the 'Core Formation Instrument'.
The Core Formation Instrument was a piece of ancillary magical equipment to help the formation of the core that Li Yao had invented himself. It looked like a special crystal suit, except that countless bottles of drugs were connected to the shell of the magical equipment.
When Li Yao released his spiritual energy unstoppably, the fully-enclosed suit would cover all the spiritual energy inside. Together with the tightness of the meditation chamber, an environment similar to the super-compressed crystal reactor would be simulated.
The strengthening drugs were condensed into lines of liquids thinner than his hair because of the high pressure, and they penetrated into Li Yao's body before being released among Li Yao's muscles, veins, and nerves.
In a moment—
As Li Yao fully released his spiritual energy and started compressing it, Li Yao shuddered violently and felt that his entire spine had woken up. It was expanding, expanding, and expanding into a raging gold dragon!
In the meantime, all kinds of illusions were popp
ing up inside his brain. The wheel of time was reversed, and his consciousness went backwards as if it were ebbing. It returned to the surface of Spider Den, Heavenly Saints City, the Iron Plateau Space Zone, Boneyard, and the Heaven's Origin Sector. In the end, it came back to the magical equipment graveyard in Floating Spear City of the Star Glory Federation.
He was a baby lying in a stinky gutter, staring at the dim, yellow sky quietly.
Backwards. Backwards. He continued going backwards on the path of his life!
There was suddenly nothing but blackness in front if his eyes. Li Yao found himself in the middle of warm water and could not have felt more comfortable and safer. He had turned into a tiny fetus and returned to the original point of his life.
At this point, his life had only just sprouted. There were endless possibilities in his evolution. His brain, spine, limbs, and internal organs did not exist yet. The only things that existed were episodes of causality that interweaved into helical forms and were dancing like butterflies.
Li Yao's soul was as clear as moonlight. He knew exactly what he was going to do.
He had already found the password of his body. He would optimize his body from the source and unseal the barrier of evolution so that the speed of evolution could be hundreds, thousands, millions of times higher!
With a telepathic thought, part of Li Yao's spiritual energy flew toward his episodes of causality.
The chains of genes were ripped apart!
The evolution rushed forward toward a whole new direction!
BOOM!
A thunderclap echoed inside Li Yao's spine.
An organ that did not exist in the beginning, similar to the 'spiritual root' except that it was hundreds of times stronger, was sprouting, growing, developing, and expanding at the end of Li Yao's spine!
If Li Yao's soul could have left his body at that moment and observed himself externally, he would have discovered that his every cell was spurting endless light and heat like a volcano. The brilliance had even pierced through the iron suit he was wearing and turned it as transparent as glass.
Below the transparent suit, his veins, nerves, bones, and internal organs were so clear that they seemed to be soaked in certain white, fluorescing liquids.
Li Yao finally could not hold it any longer and roared!
"Ahhhhh!"
He felt as if a small blackhole that was about to devour his soul, flesh, and spiritual energy had appeared at the end of his spine.
He had no choice except to summon the spiritual energy all over his body and throw it into the 'blackhole' incessantly!
Li Yao had a vague feeling that, if he could fill the 'blackhole' before the spiritual energy inside his body ran out, he would not only be advancing into the Core Formation Stage but also forming a unique, super core.
But if he failed to fill up the 'blackhole' before his spiritual energy ran out, it would definitely continue devouring, eventually crushing Li Yao into the most fundamental particles. He would be gone from this world for all eternity!
Time and space had lost their significance. Li Yao had no idea how long the process had lasted at all.
He kept drifting in a vast universe like a lonely cell. His telepathic thoughts left him at the speed of light and turned into shining stars in the dark space very soon.
Did I make it?
Did I make?
Did I?
Did?
?
…
Another year had passed.
It had been five standard years of the Star Ocean Imperium since the great confrontation between the previous king of space pirates and the new one.
The Flying Star Sector had changed more during those five years than it did during the five hundred years before the event.
The fire of war had consumed many space zones. Countless Cultivators had unfortunately perished. A lot of new organizations had risen to fame in the chaos, and the new-generation's experts had gradually stepped onto the stage, drawing new paintings in the sea of stars with their hot blood and the blades in their hands.
Capital Nest, the biggest city on Spider Den, had been totally reshaped by the continuous war.
In the afternoon of that day, inside a forsaken tunnel of Capital Nest, the earth was shaking slightly, and feeble sounds were echoing deep below the ground.
A moment later, the earth suddenly bulged high before it collapsed down and revealed a hole more than half a meter in diameter.
The broken rocks fell silently, but there was no sound of them hitting anything for a long time, which indicated that the hole was very deep and perhaps led to the core of the planet.
Half a minute later, an average-sized young man awkwardly crawled out of the hole.
He looked quite plain. His messy hair covered his shoulder randomly. Since he had been out of the sunlight for a long time, his skin was so pale that it was almost transparent.
His eyes were quite weird. They seemed to be covered by a colorful membrane. Even in the depths of darkness, colorful brilliance was still shining in his eyes as he looked around.
He seemed a bit thin, and there was not much muscle on his body. However, when the sharp-edged rocks scratched his skin, not only did they fail to break his skin, their edges were also polished smooth, as if somebody had touched them thousands of times carefully.
Almost ten colorful rings were outside of the young man's pupils. In the darkness, all the rings were expanding and shrinking, as if the most precise crystal cameras were adjusting the focal length.
When he finally sensed the brightness outside of the tunnel, the young man was dazed for a moment. His eyes were soon filled with tears. He lay on the ground, his limbs all stretched out and waving crazily. His belly was rising and falling, as if an ocean had been stuffed inside. Cries of joy and relief were echoing deep inside his throat.
The young man was, of course, Li Yao.
After five years, he had finally escaped from Yan Xinjian's secret training room!
"Old Yan, come here."
Li Yao cried and laughed for a while. Then he took out from his pocket a metal cylinder, which had ventilation holes, and opened it carefully. Inside the cylinder were two mice.
Over the past five years, Yan Xinjian's soul fragments that were attached to the mice had gradually withered. When Li Yao broke out of the training room, all the other remaining souls had dispersed except for a mouse that had been emitting white colors in the beginning.
However, the white colors on the mouse was fading away, too, and its behavior was no different from common mice. Regret and longing similar to human beings occasionally appeared in the mouse's eyes, but they were soon eclipsed by the cruelty of animals.
When Li Yao left Yan Xinjian's secret training room, he brought the mouse and a female mouse that it would not let go of out together.
"Go now, Old Yan, and your… Xiao Yu."
Li Yao put the two mice on the ground. They hugged each other and crawled to the inside of the tunnel, staggering. Soon, they disappeared into the darkness.
Watching the two mice gradually disappear, Li Yao felt both delighted and lost.
He calmed himself down and thought of his plan again.
When he was digging holes below the ground, he could vaguely sense the frequent intense explosions on the surface. It seemed that a fierce war was still on.
It was a good sign that suggested that Xiao Xuance's Grand Illusionary Soldiers had not taken over Spider Den completely yet.
There was still a chance to change everything.
Xiao Xuance, the crownless king of the Flying Star Sector. The war between you and me has finally begun!
Li Yao smiled and walked out of the forsaken tunnel. He raised his right hand and retrieved a ragged, gray coat from his Cosmos Ring before he put the clothes on.
After every step he made, the air around him would slightly change. The strange colors inside his eyes were gone, and his eyes appeared dirtier. His skin, which was as warm and smooth as jade bef
ore, turned thick and rough, too.
When he got out of the forsaken tunnel, he seemed to be a totally different person, a shrimp of the lowest class that could be seen everywhere on Spider Den.
Chapter 771: New Version of the Grand Illusionary Soldiers |
Capital Nest was burning.
The biggest city on Spider Den had never been affected by any war since the battle to protect Spider Den five hundred years ago. But in Li Yao's five-year absence, it had become battered and buried in debris.
Li Yao walked upwards along the spiral stairs. Wherever his eyes reached, he could see that countless tunnels and caves had collapsed, and many of what used to be buildings were debris lying awry on the ground now. Traces of fire and battle could be found in a lot of places. In some places, even the mountains were half blown apart, revealing the bare, ugly rocks below.
Li Yao was planning to capture a space pirate for interrogation when hasty alarms suddenly echoed above his head. He raised his head and found dozens of white pillars of smoke left in the sky, as if several shooting stars had just flown past the broken atmosphere.
Brightness vaguely flowed out of Li Yao's eyes. He raised his hands and released Neltharion, which had been heavily modified by him. The magical equipment entered stealth mode instantly and observed the earth from the sky hundreds of meters from the ground.
The surface of Spider Den was enshrouded in smoke and dust. The ground near Capital Nest seemed to have been hit by hundreds of meteor showers. Steams and smoke were popping up nonstop from the pits. The colorful smoke did not vanish until a long time later, as if it had been frozen. On the top, the smoke dispersed into what seemed to be mushrooms, making them look like a weird forest.
When the 'shooting stars' passed the sky, hundreds of sword auras and pillars of light rose from the ground and darted toward the 'shooting stars'. A certain defense rune array seemed to be functioning.
However, the trajectories of the 'shooting stars' were extremely unsteady, and they were as unpredictable as dry leaves in a blowing wind. Besides, there were defense rune arrays outside of the 'shooting stars', too. Even when they were hit by the sword auras on the ground occasionally, they would continue smashing at the ground without being damaged after ripples of light spread out over their surface.
