by <unknown>
Li Yao smiled. "You talked so persuasively that I was almost convinced. However, even if what you said just now is perfectly true and reasonable, how can you explain the surgery you performed today? You polished the spiritual root of a mediocre young man with the brains and bodies of dozens of training geniuses, just because the mediocre young man had a powerful father or grandfather? Was it in line with the 'original' true path of immortality that you just described?"
Dongfang Renxin was so eloquent a moment ago that he seemed determined to persist to the end of the debate.
Li Yao's sentence, however, was like a punch of an iron fist right on his face. He stuttered for a long time, only to come up with no rebuttal.
Li Yao said, "Save it. You know that I won't let go of you today."
"I know… I know…"
Dongfang Renxin immediately withered like a balloon whose air had just leaked. A moment later, with brutality beaming out of his eyes, he grimaced. "Now that this is just another power struggle, just don't pretend that you are serving the cause of justice. It's disgusting!
"You and I are both well aware that I am not the only one studying the secret techniques of 'cannibal training'. Are any of the four Kurfürst families and the forces at the edge of the Imperium not studying similar techniques and killing countless Immortal Cultivators in secret?
"However, hehe, those guys are too idiotic to come up with such incredible arts. Only I can develop the unprecedented, unparalleled secret techniques that can change the entire world thanks to the inspirations of the ancient classics!
"You have no idea what you are messing with, Vulture Li Yao. You think that a few leaders of the Dongfang family are the only ones who tasted the feeling of 'cannibal training'? Hahahaha. You will be terribly wrong if you think so. The enormity of my clients far exceeds your imagination. You can't afford to piss them off. Even if you are backed by Li Linghai and all the reformists, you will have to concede in the end and even join the game!
"You think that you can annihilate me because you have captured me? That is the greatest joke in the world!
"You can't destroy me. It is possible for you to destroy Dongfang Wang, but you can never destroy me! The most precious thing in the world is technology. Does any of the leadership of the four Kurfürst families who are hundreds of years old not want to live another five hundred years? Only I can help them with that!
"Therefore, even if you have destroyed my secret research institute, so what? Before long, under the protection of the four families and even your queen, I will change my name and establish a bigger, more advanced institute in an enjoyable, inconspicuous place under a different identity. By then, you might be crying and begging me to strengthen yourself!
"Therefore, you'd better mind what you are doing right now, because we will meet again sooner or later. Remember that!"
After a long hesitation, Li Yao said, "The four families have really been indulging and even endorsing your 'cannibal training?"
"The four families, the emperor, and the queen; is there any difference among them?"
Dongfang Renxin laughed crazily. "In a man-eat-man world, if you don't eat other people, other people will eat you. Is there a third approach?"
Li Yao was silent for a moment before he asked again, "Are your medical arts really so brilliant?"
After a brief daze, Dongfang Renxin was overjoyed. He nodded his head quickly and said, "Of course, of course. I can give you a hundred times more strength!"
"Your offer was ten times a moment ago, and it has grown to a hundred times so quickly?"
With a casual smile, Li Yao said, "Alright. Since your medical arts are brilliant, I'll give you an opportunity."
Hardly had he concluded his sentence when he suddenly kicked Dongfang Renxin right in the chest brutally!
The kick was both fast and heavy. Li Yao also activated the power rune array below the foot of the crystal suit when he kicked. The high-heated exhaust flames immediately blackened the flesh on Dongfang Renxin's chest.
"Ahhhh!"
In excruciating pain, Dongfang Renxin cried miserably.
Without changing his expression, Li Yao kicked Dongfang Renxin's limbs and joints as quickly as bolts of lightning without stopping. Very soon, all his bones had been blown into smithereens, but the nerves of pain were not affected at all. As a result, Dongfang Renxin was still able to taste the most intense agony.
In only half a minute, Dongfang Renxin turned into a pile of mud on the ground. He couldn't do anything anymore except for breathing hard on the ground and glaring at Li Yao in hatred.
"I almost forgot. Your soul is so powerful that it may escape to an artificial body even if your current body is broken and shattered, and you may hurt even more people."
Grinning, Li Yao extended a finger and stuck it to the center of Dongfang Renxin's forehead. Then, he leaned to the man's ear and said in a low voice, "Right now, I am about to damage your brain, cripple your spiritual root, and tear apart your soul. If your medical arts are so brilliant, why don't you try to cure yourself under such circumstances? I'll let you go if you can cure yourself!"
Chapter 2298: National Indignity! |
While talking, Li Yao's index finger was already as bright as an iron block that had been heated to the point of melting. Reacting with the air, it let out earsplitting sounds.
Rings of spiritual energy also drifted around his finger into waves the shape of sawtooth, and they revolved rapidly like the whorl on a drill.
He stuck his finger into Dongfang Renxin's forehead brutally like a drill sticking to the steel. Squeaky noises echoed first with white smoke popping out. Then, dazzling electric arcs burst out from the point of contact and covered Dongfang Renxin's entire head.
All the muscles on Dongfang Renxin's head were exploding. He tried to shake his head, but his limbs and his spine had all been shattered by Li Yao, making him unable to move at all. Even his devastating screams sounded more like the whining of the pigs that were to be butchered. After a predicament of three seconds, Li Yao's finger stabbed brutally!
His fingertip was like a gate that had just been opened, ushering the most furious spiritual energy into Dongfang Renxin's brain.
The soul power of the Divinity Transformation Stage was too massive. Like a scared beast, it launched an intuitional counterattack.
But Li Yao was clearly more skilled. He simply gritted his teeth and compressed his disgust and hatred into torrents of fury, which raged inside Dongfang Renxin's head unstoppably and destroyed everything.
From Dongfang Renxin's eyes and ears, red flames spurted out, with gold brilliant at the edge. They were exactly the aftermath of Li Yao's spiritual energy.
His screams gradually died down.
Li Yao moved his finger away. An invisible spring of spiritual energy erupted out of the center of Dongfang Renxin's forehead crazily, as if a colorful flower were blossoming slowly in the darkness. It did not wither until a long time later.
As the spiritual energy leaked out, Dongfang Renxin's previously healthy and young face turned into a bag of bones. But he was still as alive as before. Staring at Li Yao with his sunken eyes that had almost been burned through, he appeared to be both desperate and shocked that Li Yao was really bold enough to do that.
Li Yao smiled at him and retrieved a few dosages of medical drugs and high-energy nutrition drugs from his Cosmos Ring. Injecting them into Dongfang Renxin's carotid artery, he helped the walking skeleton to keep alive.
He then groped Dongfang Renxin's body, which was like a pile of mud on the ground. Soon, he found four Cosmos Rings.
The four Cosmos Rings had all been planted with barriers, but it was not a problem for Li Yao who was a master of refining.
Hearing the roars and collisions of crystal suits drawing closer and closer, Li Yao suddenly thought of something. He knocked the half-dead Dongfang Renxin into a coma and dragged him to a dark corner in the deeper abyss.
He found a forsaken mining cave in the c
orner of the deeper abyss. After spending ten minutes cracking the four Cosmos Rings by brute force, he indeed discovered what seemed to be the storage chips of a mainframe crystal processor.
All the raw data of Dongfang Renxin's experiments and surgeries in the past must've been stored inside.
Due to the limited time, it was impossible for Li Yao to copy all the data inside the storage chips. Pondering for a moment, he stuck a mini chip that he produced deep inside the storage chips.
The chip that was only one fourth the size of a fingernail and completely melted with the rune arrays of the storage chips themselves was equal to a physical "backdoor". It also boasted a very strong navigation ability, allowing Li Yao to locate it from dozens of kilometers away.
Li Yao did not know why he played such a trick, perhaps because of what Dongfang Renxin just said, or because Long Yangjun's reminder a few days ago was still lingering in his head.
In any case, he felt that the so-called "victory" came too easily.
Assuming that the incident of the Blood Oath Alliance was a scheme carefully concocted by Dongfang Wang, and the reformists were simply counterattacking in a hurry under the leadership of Li Linghai, the "scheme" would seem too clumsy and inconsiderate, and the "counterattack" was too aggressive, seamless, and unstoppable.
After assembling the four Cosmos Rings into their original looks and sealing them with the original barriers, Li Yao dragged Dongfang Renxin back to the twenty-seventh district.
In the darkness around, countless underground hominoids were staring at him without blinking. Some young men were exclaiming like panicked cubs, but more people were already used to the darkness below the ground. Their lifeless eyes were teeming with numbness, as if the fierce battle that happened just now was a drama that had nothing to do with them at all.
It would truly be a long and difficult path to let the people who had never seen sunlight to believe in brightness.
However, Li Yao would never give up, and he would fight with his best!
"I will definitely find out the truth… Li Linghai, what game are you playing exactly, and what is your 'secret weapon?"
Looking at the devil huntresses who rushed close, Li Yao mumbled to himself, deep in thought.
…
Dongfang Renxin's secret research institute was destroyed after all the pieces of evidence were seized. Even Dongfang Renxin himself failed to escape but was sequestered in the secret base of the Tribunal of Extraterrestrial Devils. The news was as shocking as a destructive storm at the center of the cosmos.
Before the reinforcement of the Dongfang family arrived, the Li family's fleet had already appeared at the sky right above the twenty-seventh district. All the cannons and spiritual shields were activated, suggesting that they could start a battle at any moment. The reinforcement of the Dongfang family did not have the courage to act rashly.
Very soon, undeniable proofs were publicized on the Spiritual Nexus, revealing the crimes that Dongfang Renxin committed.
Li Linghai's judgment was quite correct. What Dongfang Renxin did had crossed the lines of the Immortal Cultivators as well as the unspoken game rules.
The Imperium of True Human Beings was a country of Immortal Cultivators where "true human beings" were the ruling class. No Immortal Cultivator could tolerate the fact that their companions were tied to an operation table, butchered, and even drained while they were alive. It was obviously a treatment for "hominoids", not something suitable for the high and mighty true human beings!
The victims of Dongfang Renxin's secret research institute, on the other hand, were not regular true human beings but mostly nobles of both large and small. Some of them were even the core members of the four Kurfürst families.
Many Immortal Cultivators had gone missing after their starships or bases were blown up by the enemies in the fierce battles against the Covenant Alliance in the frontline. In a universal war, the attacks could easily carry a temperature of thousands of degrees, which was more than enough to vaporize a body into nothingness.
As a result, after a massive battle, ninety percent of the bodies would go missing, either vaporized or drifting in space aimlessly, and only ten percent of the bodies could be found. It was perfectly normal.
Therefore, many missing soldiers were announced to have sacrificed for the country. Their family also thought that they were killed by the sabers of the Covenant Alliance.
But as it turned out, they were not killed by the Covenant Alliance but by Dongfang Renxin. Their cores and spiritual roots were even absorbed and used as the nutrition for other Immortal Cultivators!
The whole country was mired in indignity immediately. The relatives of the victims, who were naturally also powerful Immortal Cultivators, were more than infuriated.
The leaders of the Li, Yun, and Song families were absolutely incapable of suppressing the flames of fury. They could only grit their teeth to set up a joint investigation group with the reformists under the boost of the public indignity to investigate everyone that was involved in Dongfang Renxin's case.
On June 17, an elder from the Yun family filed an impeachment proposal in the Council of Elders, demanding Prime Minister Dongfang Wang to resign immediately and his cabinet be disbanded and replaced by a new, temporary cabinet.
There was no direct proof that suggested Dongfang Wang was involved in Dongfang Renxin's evil researches yet. Therefore, although the impeachment proposal partly won the support of the elders from the Yun, Li, and Song families, it was not passed.
However, everybody whose eyes were sharp enough could tell that the impeachment was a declaration of war. It meant that the Yun family and the Song family had taken the sides of the Li family and the reformists. The three Kurfürst families and the reformists had forged a temporary alliance, pointing their weapons at the Dongfang family at the same time!
The Dongfang family, on the other hand, had a morale lower than ever. It was even falling apart.
That was because the victims hit most by Dongfang Renxin's studies were exactly the people within the Dongfang family. When some of the leaders benefited from Dongfang Renxin's researches, some other leaders who failed the competitions naturally hated him and craved to seize power again.
The leaders were immediately divided into two parties if not more, which accused and blamed each other. They even considered in secret who should be pushed out as a scapegoat to settle the matter.
For the Immortal Cultivators of the branch family and at the bottom level, they were fully aware that they were but the cannon fodder of the family, and it was barely possible for them to distinguish themselves in the enormous system that was getting ossified. Most of them had already succumbed to their fate. However, the revelation of such a wicked and appalling case was still an astounding shock for them.
As it turned out, as the branches and the bottom of the family, not only did they have zero chance to distinguish themselves and had to fight desperate battles as cannon fodder, but they might be captured by the leaders of the family and squeezed into "high-energy nutrition drugs" for the enjoyment of the leaders and their descendants, as long as they slightly showed some talents in training!
Such a family was not a family at all but a cave of monsters!
After all, they had never benefited from the family at all. Even if the Dongfang family was completely screwed, did they need to do anything about it?
It was even so for the Immortal Cultivators of other surnames and the hominoid soldiers living on the Dongfang family's dominion or working inside the Dongfang family's fleet.
The Dongfang family governed almost twenty prosperous Sectors. The Immortal Cultivators under their governance were numerous. Naturally, not all of them had the "Dongfang" surname.
In fact, in the Dongfang family's dominion and army, the Immortal Cultivators with the Dongfang surname only took up 10% of the population. The other 90% all carried miscellaneous names.
Among the hominoid soldiers, the ratio of the miscellaneous na
mes was even higher. It was above 95%.
Before, the Immortal Cultivators of other surnames had been suppressed by the Immortal Cultivators of the Dongfang family. They could not distinguish themselves however talented they were, and they had been grumpy and dissatisfied about the situation for a long time. It was just that the Dongfang family was too deeply-rooted and powerful for them to vent their fury or change the reality.
However, now that the Dongfang family was caught in peril from both inside and outside, the Immortal Cultivators of other surnames could not help but take action, or at least start making other plans.
Chapter 2299: Cursed by Everybody! |
For even the strongest deep-sky fleet, even if the important posts such as captains and chief of staff were occupied by the members of the Dongfang family, the remaining professional jobs had to be taken by the Immortal Cultivators of other surnames who were ten times larger in number.
It was needless to say the fundamental jobs at the bottom level. Hundreds of times more hominoid soldiers were required to play the glorious and sacred role that was "cannon fodder".
By the same logic, in the factories that produced those starships, the crystal suit legions that acted in company with the starships, the regiments which provided fire support for the crystal suit legions, and in the crucial and fundamental posts that supported the effective operation of the Dongfang family, countless Immortal Cultivators of miscellaneous surnames and hominoids had been working dutifully.
If the Dongfang family could be compared to a pyramid, only a few bricks at the tip of the pyramid were carved with the surname "Dongfang", whereas the enormous footing that supported the tip was exclusively made of Immortal Cultivators of other surnames and hominoids.
