by <unknown>
"Of course," Ding Lingdang said softly. "I'll certainly be waiting for you, until the day the universe is destroyed."
…
A month later, the first Trilateral Magical Equipment Exposition of the Heaven's Origin Sector, the Blood Demon Sector and the Flying Star Sector came to a successful conclusion amid amazement and applause. The superstring magical equipment, the Colossi, the automatic resource-collecting puppets… All the magical equipment was a dazzling eye-opener for the tourists.
A new batch of super projects, including the Heavenly Road Plan, were initiated one after another. The glorious prospects that they described were a great 'cardiotonic' for the general public of the three Sectors, filling them with confidence in the future.
However, in the secret fields that were inaccessible for the general public, undercurrents were flowing, and many people were quite ill at ease.
The mysterious signal from deep inside the dark nebula—the greeting or threat from an unknown force—made the leadership of the three Sectors and all the Nascent Soul Stage Cultivators and demon emperors have a 'it never rains; it pours' feeling.
After realizing the severity of the issue, everybody agreed unanimously that, however great the price was, an explorer had to be sent toward the dark nebula!
Li Yao's capabilities and experiences in the past clearly made him the best candidate.
It was also the exploration mission of the highest priority in the 'Heavenly Road Plan'.
Right now, the directional modification on Spark and the space gate was being carried out busily. The Heaven's Artillery would have to be adjusted to the extreme mode in order to maximize the distance of teleportation.
Li Yao had three months for his 'super intensive training'.
A training team consisting of more than thirty Nascent Soul Stage experts was providing service for, or rather, torturing, him and him alone.
The cruel, hellish training reminded him of the miserable sufferings when he was a young man.
Although he often found pleasure in self-abusive training, he was now groaning in pain from morning to dawn.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
Every day at four o'clock in the morning, inside the training chamber of thirty times the standard gravity deployed on Kunlun, Li Yao's daily torture would begin with the bombardment from Ding Lingdang and 'Iron God' Yan Ba, the expert body practitioners.
There was no need to mention 'Iron God' Yan Ba, who was an old battle-type Nascent Soul Stage Cultivator in the federation, an extremely crazy body fundamentalist, and a monster that could tear apart a crystal suit barehanded as easily as tearing apart a matchbox!
Ding Lingdang, a newly-risen battle-type Nascent Soul Stage Cultivator, showed absolutely no consideration for their husband-wife bond at all. She was punching him so hard that she did not stop until Li Yao was bleeding from his every orifice.
"Hurry, hurry, hurry. You are too slow. Way too slow!"
"You think you are awesome because you can pilot a Colossus? When you reach an unfamiliar foreign land, will there be Colossi and crystal suits available for you?
"Any magical equipment can be worn and broken. In the harshest environment, you can't find resources and tools to repair your magical equipment!
"Therefore, your body is your most trustworthy 'magical equipment'!
"Only by polishing your body to the point that it has a higher density than the neutron star will you be able to secure a slim chance of survival in the mysterious land!"
Whetted and bombarded by the two expert body practitioners, Li Yao felt like crying. At times, he felt like he was truly compressed into a neutron star with an extremely high density and then ripped apart into spraying dust.
The body build-up would last an entire hour. Then, he would spend an hour recovering in the medical cabin.
However, he was not idle in the hour. Although he could not move his body, Guo Chunfeng, director of the Secret Sword Bureau, was still able to train him on the intelligence work.
"Over the past dozen years, you've done a great job in both the Flying Star Sector and the Blood Demon Sector, but too much of your success was based on luck and accidents," Guo Chunfeng said. "During both of the two adventures, you made friends with big shots of certain forces by accident, got involved in mysterious plots, and finally laid your hands on the information and secrets inaccessible for normal people.
"Obviously, we cannot put our hope on luck and accidents. You will have to abandon all your self-taught knowledge and systematically learn how to fake an appropriate identity, break into the core of the target force, and gather the most crucial intelligence consciously!
"In such a short period of time, it is impossible and unnecessary for you to study the most rudimental theories from zero.
"I have prepared a lot of cases here. All of them are top classified files in the Secret Sword Bureau, including the classic infiltrations between the Heaven's Origin Sector and the Blood Demon Sector over the past two hundred years!
"There's the case of an expert in the Blood Demon Sector, known as 'Thousand-Faced Fox', who lurked in the federation for decades until he was promoted to the Deputy Director of the Classified Files in the Department of National Defense. There's also the case where our Secret Sword Agent snuck into the Blood Demon Sector and infiltrated the Pantheon of Demons. Of course, there are also experiences where they were seen through, captured, resisted interrogation, broke out of prison, and escaped!
"If you figure out every detail of the hundreds of cases, I believe that the mysterious new world will not trap you at all whatever it really is."
Pausing for a moment, Guo Chunfeng said, "Unless, of course, the locals of the new Sector are all members of the Pangu Clan who are twenty meters tall, in which case even the gods will not be able to help you. You will have to count on your own luck!
"It is also part of the lessons that we will get in touch with later—how you can avoid being captured alive when you are in a desperate situation, and how you can terminate your own life cleanly and painlessly without leaving any useful information to the enemy even if you are captured alive!"
"Huh…"
"If you think that it is too difficult, there is still time for you to turn back. To be honest, I'm quite interested in the mission myself!"
"Hehehe." Li Yao chuckled. "I went through all the trouble of persuading my wife to let me go on the mission. How can I give up the chance so easily? You must be joking, Brother Guo!"
After dwelling in Guo Chunfeng's mysterious world of underground battles for an hour, Li Yao would enter the routine of magical equipment maintenance.
The elite teams from the Refining Department of the Grand Desolate War Institution and the Refining Department of Deep Sea University, including Professor Mo Xuan and Supernova Jiang Sheng themselves, gathered and poured all the knowledge about the assembly and maintenance of the space gate to Li Yao.
Although Li Yao was a top refiner, his specialties were crystal suits and Colossi.
He could make do with regular star beacons, but the array of star beacons of an enormous scale, and the space gate made of said star beacons, was a completely different issue!
In order to send the coordinates information from the dark nebula to the Heaven's Origin Sector, covering a distance of millions of lightyears, the space gate was destined to be gigantic. It was estimated to be made of at least three hundred star beacons and tens of thousands of magical equipment units.
When the magical equipment units were launched into the depths of the dark nebula, it was impossible for them to be precisely projected to Li Yao's surroundings. Therefore, the magical equipment units would be installed with special radiative sources that would emit unique signals that were perceivable to Spark alone. Then, Li Yao would maneuver Spark to collect all of them and assemble them.
After the space gate was assembled, a series of thorough and repetitive debugging procedures were also mandatory for it to work and send out signals normally.
The fundamental files and the operation manuals concerning the work were as boundless as an ocean. The jade chips being delivered to Li Yao every day could be measured by 'basket'!
Chapter 1325: Special Training! Special Training! |
It was yet another great burden for Li Yao's head.
When the incessant information inundated his brain, he felt as if his brain was about to explode. Yet, his hands could not stop. He had to repeat the complicated assembly and maintenance work time and time again until every procedure became muscle memory and was deeply etched into his nerve endings.
Li Yao had not tasted the feeling of his fingers being scathed for years. Right now, when he felt that sensation again, he could not help but feel that he was back to the past.
The feeling made him feel as if a tiny sprout was growing out of the soil deep inside his soul.
The only thing that could almost be called a relief in an entire day was when he learned the arts of breath and meditation after Gui Suishou so that his body would train itself while he was unconscious in the hibernation state.
"All the functions of a human body can be divided into two parts, the conscious ones and the subconscious ones.
"Raising your hand, walking, blinking, or opening the mouth are all controlled by the shallow consciousness. Even ordinary people can influence them freely," Gui Suishou said. "But some other actions—say, the rhythm of the internal organs, the opening and closing of the pores, and the secretion of body fluids—are not controlled by the cerebrum but by the cerebellum and brainstem.
"Normally, it is very difficult for ordinary people to control their own heartbeat and secretion of hormones. When they are anxious, their heartbeat will be faster, and they will sweat. When they are horrified, their hands and feet will be cold, and they will get goosebumps. Such phenomena are perfectly normal.
"The Cultivators, however, can control everything that I mentioned to some extent.
"The higher a Cultivator's level is, the deeper their understanding and control over themselves will be, and the more organs and hormones they will be able to influence.
"If we consider a human body as a crystal processor with an operating system, then the process in which the Cultivators break the physiological limits by training through their arts can be compared to the process in which the higher permissions—say, the administrator's or even the developer's—are gradually unlocked for the crystal processor. Eventually, the user is able to debug and edit the architecture and even the hardware itself, making the crystal processor work stably with a performance much better than previously.
"In other words, when a Cultivator is training themself and releasing the techniques, their body is actually 'overclocking'!
"However, while overclocking can significantly increase the work efficiency, there are serious side effects. To say the very least, the energy consumption will significantly rise. Or put in a more straightforward way, the Cultivator will be 'burning their life and soul'!
"For a space journey that can possibly last a hundred years, what we really need is not 'overclocking' but 'underclocking'. The real problem is how to maintain a Cultivator's vitality and Cultivation with the minimum energy cost, and how to make sure that they recover immediately after they are woken up!
"To achieve the purposes, we have to partly count on the 'hibernation cabin' and the circulative drugs, and partly rely on the Cultivators to perform the useful Cultivation arts unstoppably even if they are unconscious!
"Did you know this, Li Yao? In fact, such a long-distance trip in hibernation is a good thing for you," Gui Suishou said with a smile.
"Oh? How so?" Li Yao was rather curious.
"Both demons and human beings will have to rip apart the muscles and heal them time and time again during their training," Gui Suishou said unhurriedly. "For the experts who have advanced into the demon emperor stage or the Nascent Soul Stage, all of them will have recovered from heavy wounds before, right?
"But how can there be no cost when you are breaking the limits of a body? Even the top sportsmen, who have the best teams to train and offer medical advice to them, are often rife with diseases when they retire, not to mention the Cultivators whose training regimes are hundreds of times more intense than that of the general sportsmen.
"Although invisible on the surface, tiny 'cracks' are packed inside the body of every Nascent Soul Stage Cultivator and every demon emperor. Even their soul is often riddled with holes because of repetitive exploitation and burning. They are only supporting themselves with their belief!"
"Is it so serious?" Li Yao blinked. "Our self-recovery abilities are a hundred times better than ordinary people's. Take me for example. However heavy the wounds I suffer, I will recuperate very soon, without any after effects whatsoever!"
"If you tear a piece of paper in half, it may be repaired as perfectly as before by a pair of deft hands." Gui Suishou smiled. "But what if the paper is torn apart a hundred times, a thousand times, ten thousand times?
"Don't think that I'm exaggerating. The modern training theories have surpassed their counterparts from the age of the ancient Cultivators tens of thousands of years ago in many regards, but when it comes to the 'art of health', we are actually left far behind.
"Paying too much attention to training and little to health results in the 'hidden wounds' that are everywhere in the soul and the body. So, as you can see, modern Nascent Soul Stage Cultivators can only live two to three hundred years. Those who are older than four hundred years are already rarely-seen. Just look at the Star Glory Federation. Has there ever been any Nascent Soul Stage Cultivator who lived more than four hundred years?
"But in the age of the ancient Cultivators, Cultivators four to five hundred years old were anything but unusual.
"Of course, one of the very important reasons is that the spiritual energy in the age of the ancient Cultivators was much more abundant than nowadays.
"However, even if we take the factor into consideration, it would be difficult for a modern Nascent Soul Stage Cultivator to live another hundred years if they paid more attention to their health.
"Back to you. The problem is even more serious for you."
Li Yao was quite surprised. "How serious?"
"You entered the Nascent Soul Stage too early.
"Do not think that it is necessarily a good thing that you entered the Nascent Soul Stage so early. Have you ever heard the tale of 'pulling up seedlings to help them grow'? Everybody's body and soul have their own patterns. Although it is the significance of Cultivation to break the patterns and defy nature's will, the retaliation of the patterns is also unavoidable for any Cultivator!
"You are only slightly more than thirty years old right now. Among the Cultivators, you are like an elementary school student. However, you have successfully advanced into the Nascent Soul Stage through bloody battles. Behind your ostensible magnificence, there are already countless tiny cracks inside your body and soul, which will eventually escalate into internal wounds and corrode your longevity. As a result, you will also perish much earlier than you should!
"Over the past five years, has it ever occurred to you that your level could barely be upgraded however hard you trained, and that your blood was simmering and your Cultivation was unstable once in a while?"
Bulging his eyes, Li Yao nodded quickly. "Yes, exactly. I thought that it was because I was new to the Nascent Soul Stage and I wasn't used to it yet!"
"If you don't pay attention to it," Gui Suishou said casually, "I guarantee that you will die before you are two hundred years old, or even a hundred and fifty.
"Just like the 'young prodigies' recorded in the history books who rose to fame at an early stage only to flash and be gone forever like a shooting star on a night sky."
Li Yao grew serious.
He was not interested in the meaningless longevity, but it was true that he wanted to lengthen his short life as much as possible so that he would have a chance to visit the Imperium, the Co
venant Alliance, and even the distant universe beyond the three thousand Sectors, where he would explore the secrets of the primeval civilizations such as Pangu, Nuwa, and Chaos.
Gui Suishou was the oldest individual in the three Sectors. He must have a special understanding on the arts of health.
"Master Gui, then how should I heal myself?" Li Yao asked respectfully.
"That's why I said the prolonged interstellar journey is a good thing for you," Gui Suishou said with a smile. "Since you were generous enough to ask the Glorious Sunlight Group to sponsor my Monument Plan greatly, as part of the deal, I will teach you the whole Great Dream Tortoise Hibernation Art and the tricks in the training without any reserve in the next two months.
"The art will not only make your body and soul enter the 'extreme underclocking' state, where the activities of your cells and mitochondria will be almost frozen at absolute zero, but also repair your 'hidden wounds' from the fierce battles over the past dozen years without you knowing!
"I believe that the hidden wounds in your body will be generally cleaned up after a hibernation of decades."
"Thank you for your wholehearted tutelage, Master Gui!" Bowing deeply, Li Yao suddenly thought of something else. "Right, Master Gui. If what you say is true, and that the earlier you enter the Nascent Soul Stage, the more serious the hidden wounds inside your body will be, isn't my wife in a very dangerous position, too?
"If the Glorious Sunlight Group increases the investment on the Monument Plan by twenty percent, can you give some enlightenment to my wife, too, regarding the tricks and mysteries in the art?"
Gui Suishou smiled kindly and gently. "Hehehehe. Our friendship is too sacred to be exchanged for money… but if my young friend insists, an increase of forty percent will do."
"It's a deal then!" Li Yao snapped his fingers.
This time, he would have no more worries.
After receiving Ding Lingdang and Iron God Yan Bu's training to build up his body, Professor Mo Xuan and Supernova Jiang Sheng's training on the arts of refining, Guo Chunfeng's training on the intelligence subjects, and Gui Suishou's training on the hibernation skills, Li Yao welcomed an unexpected teacher.
