by <unknown>
Li Yao thought of something. Did such a control pattern on the warship suggest that other species on the Nuwa Clan's side also played an important role and that the Nuwa Clan treated the vassal species in a relatively equal way?
Glamorous colors were beaming out of Long Yangjun's eyes.
She was engaged in a profound thought exchange with the 'tree of light' to issue instructions.
Suddenly, her eyeballs turned into almost ivory, like two powerful light bulbs, from which hundreds of electric arcs were unleashed!
As her eyes were dazzling, the tree of light before her also emanated thousands of electric arcs that spread to the rest of the crystal pillars nearby, triggering a chain reaction immediately. The twenty or so crystal pillars nearby were immediately awakened. Countless branches were extending out, and every branch was teeming with clusters of light-like buds. A lot of light clusters were blossoming slowly, revealing the pistil that was shivering slightly in the middle!
Li Yao felt that he was at the bottom of an ocean of light.
The twenty or so crystal pillars around seemed to have turned into the glittering, colorful seaweed and actinia.
The light clusters that were gradually expanding were spreading threads of light into the distance. They looked like some sort of glowing jellyfish.
Li Yao estimated that every flower of light represented an operation post on the Nuwa warship. As long as one connected their brain to the threads of light, they would be able to operate with their telepathic thoughts.
"I am feeling… very strange." Long Yangjun was seemingly both mumbling and moaning. She appeared to be sighing in great comfort. "I feel that I have melded with the warship. The warship is my body. I don't need to know the specific ways of control, nor do I need to activate any menu. Just like I can control my breath, heartbeat, and nerves, I can also manipulate it easily—Ouch!"
Her eyes suddenly shivered, and she put on a miserable expression.
"The warship is seriously damaged. Most of the cabins have problems. I feel that my bones have all been broken and my guts have been scorched, although my skin still looks intact!"
Long Yangjun gritted her teeth. "Of all the… 188 glittering pillars, only twenty-four of them are still usable at this point. Only ten to twenty percent of the computational and control abilities of the warship can be restored!
"It hurts. It hurts a lot!
"Hu—Hu—I'll try to activate the warship with extreme spiritual energy and see if I can switch it from the 'hibernation state' to some sort of 'self-recovery state'!"
She bit her lip so hard that her teeth were deeply embedded into it. Her eyeballs trembled at a high speed. Even her plump body was slightly shivering.
"Wait!" Li Yao's heart suddenly raced. He shouted to interject.
Long Yangjun managed to free herself from the uncanny state where she and the warship were melded. She stopped her movement and asked, "What's wrong?"
"You can't do that!" Li Yao thought of something critical. Cold sweat was pouring from his temples as he said, "In case you have forgotten, something terrible happened a hundred years ago here, which caused you to be launched out of the Nuwa warship and a mysterious signal to be sent to my world!
"Whoever, or whatever, did that thing, it is very possible that they are still lingering on the Nuwa warship, or they may be monitoring the status of the Nuwa warship in secret through one way or another!
"We have only just entered the bridge and awakened part of the pillar-shaped crystal processors. There shouldn't be much influence on the warship itself yet. Even if there is some, it must've been eclipsed by the chaotic battles of the thousands of middle-level and high-level Cultivators outside!
"However, if you completely activate the Nuwa warship and somebody is indeed lurking in the darkness, they will certainly notice the anomaly on the bridge!"
Long Yangjun was dazed for a moment. Cold sweat was popping up on her face, too. "Very reasonable. Existences that are more terrifying than 'Emperor Phoenix' Zhu Zongyou could be hiding on the Nuwa warship. If we act recklessly, we will essentially be feeding ourselves to them!"
"Even if we are just fretting and there isn't such a force," Li Yao said, "if the thousands of Cultivators outside notice the weird behavior of the warship and trace it back to this place, we don't know if the gates that have been inactive for hundreds of thousands of years can really stop all of them!
"After all, there are dozens of Nascent Soul Stage Cultivators and hundreds of Core Formation Stage Cultivators outside! If they all go on a rampage, even the solidest warship could be torn apart!
"Even if they can't tear it apart, they can still guard the gates instead of going anywhere. It's not like we can hide inside the bridge for the rest of our lives, right?
"Therefore, before we completely figure out the situation outside and get everything under control, let's not make any random attempts. After all, nobody knows how severely the warship has been wrecked or the consequences of the instructions that you sent out!"
"It's very prudent of you," Long Yangjun said solemnly. "Then, what should we do? Just sit here and wait?"
Li Yao took a few deep breaths and rubbed his temples with his thumb and his middle finger. After pondering for a moment, he said, "How about this? I don't know whether or not the Nuwa warship boasts such techniques, but theoretically speaking, there should be. You can have a try first.
"Firstly, try and see if you can activate all the internal surveillance systems on the warship with the pillar-shaped crystal processors in the hibernation state so that we will know what is going on in the cabins through the cameras deployed everywhere on the warship!
"Secondly, check if there are any teleportation arrays directly leading to the central cabins and if they are still functional after sleeping for hundreds of thousands of years.
"The two techniques are the fundamental functions on every super large starship. There's no reason that the Nuwa Clan's warships would not be installed with them when their technology is apparently so developed!"
Long Yangjun pondered for a moment and nodded heavily. "Fair enough. After the two techniques are activated, we will have countless 'eyes' that are distributed in every corner on the warship and grow a pair of wings that allow us to go to every part of the warship!"
Shua! Shua! Shua! Shua!
The branches of light and flames on the ten or so crystal pillars nearby were interweaving with each other. Quite a few flowers blossomed, delivering the pistil of light to Long Yangjun's hands and entangling her fingers.
Long Yangjun's fingers grew ever faster, as if she was playing a musical instrument, until they became a cluster of hazy mist!
Her breathing became more and more rapid, and her breasts were shivering. Even the sweat leaking out of her skin was translucent, like glittering pearls.
"Found them!"
Long Yangjun's voice sounded as if it came from a deeper world far, far away. She suddenly clenched countless threads of light in her hands before she threw them away. Her telepathic thoughts were transmitted to twenty-four crystal pillars through almost a hundred light threads like ripples.
The glow from the pillar-shaped crystal processors waxed and waned, as if they were running intensive computations. The spiritual waves in the air were growing more and more intense. A moment later, almost a hundred branches of spiritual energy dangled down from midair, with a shivering cluster that was blossoming like a flower at the end. They then turned into almost a hundred 3D light beams!
Ivory flames were bouncing on the light beams first, but they gradually turned clear and manifested the surveillance footage on the Nuwa warship both inside and outside in hundreds of different scenes.
"You're not wrong. Surveillance cameras are indeed scattered everywhere on the warship. Also, their activation clearance is very high. They can be turned on even if the warship is in the hibernation state!" Long Yangjun exclaimed in a low voice. "It's a pity that most of the surveillance cameras have been damaged
or require a lot of computational ability from the glowing pillars to be activated. The pictures right now are the only things that we can see!"
Chapter 1486: Small Dark Forest |
Li Yao calmed down and observed carefully. The hundred 3D light beams were like a hundred glowing flowers that were connected by countless complicated threads of light into the shape of a spindle. They seemed to be distributed according to their actual position on the warship.
It meant that the picture at the rear of the 'spindle' displayed what was happening in the engine compartments at the rear of the Nuwa warship.
In such a way, the observer would understand the overall situation of the warship with the least trouble.
Li Yao first cast his eyes to the few pictures that were occupied by whiteness at the periphery of the 'spindle'.
They were the real-time image sent back by the probe cameras installed on the shell of the warship to observe the situation of the outside world.
Right when he and Long Yangjun were having the game in the bridge and exploring the pillar-shaped crystal processors, the environment of the outside world had undergone drastic changes.
Perhaps because of the breaking ice shell, an enormous pit—dozens of kilometers in diameter and more than ten kilometers deep—had appeared on the ground and affected the microclimate of the local area. An overwhelming snowstorm was raging, filling everything between the sky and the earth with whiteness. The howls of the wind were the only sound in the footage. The entire canyon had been covered in a layer of thick snow. The majority of the Cultivators had escaped into the Nuwa warship. Those who were too heavily wounded to move were buried under the snow, unlikely to live through the disaster.
The survivors had been sealed within the Nuwa warship, at least for now, until there was a result to their fighting!
Li Yao thought of something and suddenly felt that those 'glowing flowers' were somewhat weird.
He tried extending his hand into them. Something weird happened!
The 3D light beam blossomed violently like fireworks and constituted a translucent 'Half-Step Grand Illusionary Land', making him feel that he was actually in the middle of the freezing canyon outside of the warship!
Not only could Li Yao clearly feel the sting when the snowflakes smashed into his eyes and hear the broken rocks of ice cracking because of the heavy burden of the snow, he even sensed the utter iciness from the depths of his bones!
"Such… such surveillance cameras can completely simulate the environment of the outside world. Not just the visuals and the sound, even the smell, the touch, and the subtle spiritual waves of the outside world are being collected. This is amazing!"
Li Yao was quite astonished. He exited the 'Half-Step Grand Illusionary Land' and scanned forward step by step from the engine quarters at the rear of the warship.
Most of the Cultivators had escaped into the Nuwa warship in time.
However, while they could get away from the terrible gales and blizzards on the Land of Eternal Night, they could not get away from the internal fight caused by greed, mistrust, hatred, and fear!
Not everyone could be as calm and rational as Li Yao and Long Yangjun.
The inside of the Nuwa warship had already turned into a gory slaughterhouse.
It could be seen clearly from the surveillance light beams that the bloodiest battles took place at the end of the dozens of interweaving jet tubes, where the fuel cabin and the engine cabin were located.
The battles were particularly fierce in the fuel cabin because some of the fuel tubes that were stored hundreds of thousands of years ago had survived to that day.
In the eyes of the locals of the Ancient Sages Sector, the delicate cubes that contained tremendous spiritual energy were definitely priceless treasures!
Li Yao glanced at the broken limbs scattered on the ground and the sweeping river of blood. He watched the bloodstained faces that were frightened, baffled, extremely twisted or filled with reluctance to leave the human world.
Even though he was not particularly fond of the ancient Cultivators, he still could not help but sigh in his heart.
He could totally imagine what had happened.
The Cultivators that belonged to two sides and more than ten different forces crept in through the engine tubes at the rear part of the Nuwa warship and reached the end without meeting any hindrances. They then made use of their wisdom and released their techniques to blow up the walls of the engine tubes. Finally, they reached the engine cabin and the fuel cabin simultaneously!
The fuel tubes that contained vast spiritual energy became the best reason for their fighting.
After only a brief moment, the precious lives of hundreds of Cultivators were left in the cold cabin forever.
Going forward from the engine cabin and the fuel cabin, the ten or so subsequent cabins and the zigzagging pathways were the same. Fresh bodies and blood that was not entirely frozen yet were lying everywhere on the warship.
Most of the dead bodies were piled up at the entrances of the cabins or the turns of the pathways. The fatal wounds were all on their backs.
A lot of them were crouching on the weapons and armor of the Pangu Clan and the Nuwa Clan, with fascinated smiles on their faces. It appeared that they had been ambushed from behind and killed in their ecstasy after discovering the 'primeval treasures'.
Li Yao and Long Yangjun looked at each other and both sighed gloomily.
If the hostile Cultivators that belonged to different sides could not keep their distance from each other in the open territory on the ground and dilute the intense atmosphere with enough space, then, inside the Nuwa warship that was dark, narrow, and complicated, with so many 'primeval treasures' as fuses, the battles had already reached the most heated phase the moment they started!
The Ancient Sages Sector did not have an advanced tactical local area network like the modern Cultivation civilizations. There was not even a public communication channel for the members who belonged to the same force.
It meant that either Emperor Phoenix, Han Baling, Qi Changsheng and Wan Mingzhu, or the elders and leaders of the six major sects could only command the subordinates that were within their sight or the range of their telepathic thoughts.
The problem was that they had been separated from most of their subordinates since the very second that they broke into the Nuwa warship. The members of the two parties had been completely mixed up in a mess. They were doing well if a Nascent Soul Stage Cultivator could gather twenty subordinates around them. Most of the people could only return to the most primitive state and fight all their way forward with their remarkable personal abilities.
Traces of living people appeared from the ninth surveillance light beam that Li Yao observed.
Perhaps it was because all the valiant and reckless Cultivators had been killed earlier. The survivors were the calmest and most prudent guys.
They tried their best to suppress every spiritual wave in their body while they lurked at the turns of the dark pathways or on the ceiling, or buried themselves deep under the primeval armor and bones. Even their eyes were not fully opened but only revealed a tiny gap. They stared at the darkness coldly, waiting for the arrival of the next rash prey.
Even if somebody was moving, they would also choose to slowly crouch and wriggle over the floor, but those who made such a choice were often those who died fastest.
Li Yao saw that three Great Qian Cultivators wearing the robes of the central plateaus were rushing forward in a pathway in streaks of brightness together, trying to pass an intersection as rapidly as possible, only to be minced into pieces by five 'corpses' that jerked up in the darkness.
Although they were probably high-level Cultivators in the Core Formation Stage, they ended up as broken body parts with a rain of blood before they even had the chance to scream!
Under the illumination of another highly conspicuous camera, two Ghost Qin Cultivators were extending their hands to a glittering armor of the Pangu Clan greedily
. However, the moment that they touched the armor, more than twenty grenades attached by tiny threads to the back of the armor exploded abruptly.
Before they came back to themselves from the shock of the serial blasts, almost ten flying swords had already minced apart their hearts!
Similar scenes were happening in dozens of pictures simultaneously.
Therefore, when the last brave, reckless, and idiotic Cultivator died miserably, the survivors made the most optimal and rational choice at the same time.
Hide themselves. Hide themselves as much as possible!
The inside of the Nuwa warship immediately turned into a tiny dark forest.
In the depths of every dark pathway was hidden a dark hunter.
They controlled their breath, heartbeat, and scent carefully so that they did not expose themselves in anyway.
They deployed as many traps around them as possible without caring about anything, regardless of whether or not it was necessary and who the victims might be.
They activated all their remote magical equipment. Swords, locusts, nails, venomous smoke, mist… everything was set.
Other than the top players at the peak of the Nascent Soul Stage, the personal strength of the other individuals was not the key to their life and death.
However strong one was, it was very possible that existences who were stronger than one and hostile were lurking around one.
Hiding. Hiding was everything.
Their 'coordinates' became the most important things in this cruel world. Once their coordinates were exposed, or so much as the very fact that they existed was exposed, they might suffer stormy blows from every direction!
Therefore, after the screams and explosions lasted more than an hour, the Nuwa warship suddenly fell into a weird silence.
But the silence was like a bow that had been stretched to the maximum, or an ice shell that was uttering the same noise as the exploding firecrackers. There was a dangerous, suffocating air everywhere!
