Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

Splendid, spectacular cities appeared in the light and shadow behind Su Changfa. However, in the modern establishments that were brimming with skyscrapers and spirituality, the glittering shadows of Cultivators were fewer and fewer. What was left of them were weary, exhausted and could barely stand on their feet.

On the other hand, the believers of the Chiyou Cult, covered with eccentric tattoos, who had bloodshot eyes and delirious faces, became more and more common.

Because the Chiyou Cult had mastered the ability to trigger the life potential of ordinary people and turn them into ‘berserker warriors’, and it was highly organized and militarized, more and more ordinary people joined the Chiyou Cult in the thirty years of civil war and fought against the liberals of the Cultivators under the lead of God Chiyou.

At the last picture, almost every alley and boulevard was occupied by the fanatic worshippers of the Chiyou Cult, who prayed to their god in the most primitive and barbaric ways right below the coruscating skyscrapers.

The few Cultivators were entirely surrounded, if not swallowed, by them. They looked vulnerable, isolated, and helpless!

Li Yao sighed deeply.

Cultivators were the sabers of the civilization of mankind after all. They were the protectors and the guides for everyone!

Right now, the ordinary people of the Martial Meritocrats civilization broke the saber themselves and abandoned their protectors. Then, the tragedy to come was unavoidable!

Su Changfa sneered. “The expiators of the Cultivators thought that they would be trusted and embraced by the ordinary people again after they annihilated all the liberals and helped the ordinary people win the civil war. They were too simpleminded!

“The ordinary people were scared and jealous of them not because of what they did but because of what they could do!

“Even though they had raised the cleavers toward their own kind in the civil war time and time again, butchering all their compatriots and even their friends from the same sect, it was impossible for the expiators to be trusted by the ordinary people!

“The stronger and the more damaging they were in the battlefield and the more glorious accomplishments they achieved, the more scared, wary, and antagonistic the ordinary people were to them!

“In the past, the liberals were the common foe for the expiators and the ordinary people. They were still able to fight side by side to defeat the enemy.

“But the bows and the hounds were useless after the birds and the hares were captured. Now that all the liberals of the Cultivators were annihilated, how could the expiators survive the disaster?

“After the civil war, the expiators did not know yet that the ordinary people had already heaved the guillotine and put the thorny nooses on their necks in secret. The ‘Committee of Equal Human Beings’ was still busily doing its work to limit the rights of the Cultivators in full scale, including day-and-night surveillance, registration of Cultivation arts and techniques, ‘presumption of guilt’ on the Cultivators, and such!

“The Cultivators thought that, as soon as the bills were passed, the ‘grand reconciliation’ between the Cultivators and the ordinary people would be achieved, and everybody would be reunited again!

“Hehe. How could it be so simple?

“The bills were passed one after another. The rights of the Cultivators were gradually reduced until they were unable to move at all like bears trapped in cages! Still, the greedy ordinary people were not satisfied. They pushed further and eventually came up with a final solution!

“The solution demanded that all the Cultivators have a crystal bomb, which stored high-purity marrow crystals powerful enough to blow their head away from their torso, put in them the day that their spiritual root was awakened!

“The remote-control rune array of the crystal bombs, in the meantime, would be kept and utilized by an independent department made of the members of the Committee of Equal Human Beings, who were ordinary people!

“In such a way, the ordinary people would have the ability to harm the Cultivators, too!”

Shocked, Li Yao exclaimed.

He remembered the Venomous Scorpion Bone Biting Shackle that Jiang Shaoyang had crafted.

If all Cultivators were to wear such a shackle for their entire life, with the rune arrays that controlled the shackle in the possession of the ordinary people, such a life would be worse than death!

The expiators of the Cultivators were truly the victims of their own wrongdoings!

“At this moment, the expiators of the Cultivators finally understood that what the ordinary people wanted was not reconciliation but complete suppression. They were trying to take away all of the Cultivators’ rights!

“They also finally came to the realization that Cultivators and ordinary people, both physically and mentally, were two species that were entirely different from each other and that individuals of different species could never understand each other!”

Su Changfa continued in that same unemotional tone. “The expiators of the Cultivators, who could not have regretted their actions more, finally stood up to resist, but it was already too late!

“In the thirty years of civil war, they had personally seen that most of their own kind were sent to hell. They had suffered tremendous causalities themselves, too. The ordinary people, in comparison, were armed by the magical equipment that they had provided and even grasped some of the methods to deal with the Cultivators under their personal enlightenment!

“In the meantime, the Sand Primitive shamans and the celebrants of the Chiyou Cult slowly seized the power of the Martial Meritocrat civilization in the civil war step by step. Most of the citizens of the Martial Meritocrat Sector had been bewildered by them!

“At this moment, the Sand Primitive natives finally ripped apart their disguise and revealed their true faces!

“The space gate that connected the Martial Meritocrat Sector and the Sand Primitive Sector was activated to the maximum. Large batches of warriors of the Sand Primitive Sector marched into the Martial Meritocrat Sector on the shabby starships and crushed the vulnerable fortresses of the expiators like burning tides!

“The high, mighty, handsome, omnipotent Cultivators kneeled in the dust, beheaded, hanged, and minced!

“Their family and children were enslaved, their sects were burnt to the ground, and the lineage of their bloodlines and their techniques were cut off!

“Even the firmest expiators in the Committee of Equal Human Beings failed to escape their doom. They were executed for all kinds of crimes that they didn’t commit. Their heads were cut off amid the cheers and applause of thousands of people!

“Just like that, the once glorious Martial Meritocrats civilization was destroyed by the childishness, cowardice, and weakness of the Cultivators! The Chiyou Cult became the final victor of the war. Almost all the Cultivators were annihilated and butchered!

Behind Su Changfa, pictures of turmoil, battles, massacres, incineration, and ordinary people lunging at the Cultivators with their hideous faces appeared.

Screams, cries, roars, laughter, and prayers were echoing from the stereo broadcast rune arrays nonstop.

In the end, the splendid and prosperous Martial Meritocrats civilization ended up as a dark, desolate wasteland!

Below the wasteland were the piles of bones of countless Cultivators.

Above the wasteland, however, were the zealots of the Chiyou Cult, in their barbaric and ignorant ways, with a state of mind that was incompressible for normal human beings, burning the classics of Cultivation, breaking any idols other than Chiyou, and detonating the headquarters of every Cultivation sect—they were eliminating all traces of the Cultivators at a visible speed!

Although he had known the outcome since the beginning, Li Yao could not help but feel deeply sorry when he did see it.

To be honest, the destruction of the previous two civilizations, namely the Curly Dragon civilization and the Medicine Fork civilization, did not trouble him too much.

He believed that it was because of the ‘technological issues’ that they were ruined in the end and that their destruction had nothing to do with the path of Cultivation per se.

However, the destruction of the Martial Meritocrats civilization, the contradiction between the Cultivators and the ordinary people, and especially Su Changfa’s declaration that individuals of different species could never understand each other indeed touched Li Yao more or less.

He vaguely felt that something was wrong but could not tell exactly what it was for the time being.

After all, the materials were the ‘brainwashing tutorials’ that the Imperium of True Human Beings must have carefully compiled. The presentations of the three civilizations were in a logical order, with the first two being the groundwork for the third. At first glance, theory was indeed convincing and flawless, and it was not something that he could refute immediately.

Li Yao thought for a moment and suddenly realized that Su Changfa was not telling the whole story yet. He frowned and asked, “Senior Su, you mentioned just now that ‘almost all the Cultivators’ were annihilated? So, some of the Cultivators did escape from the Martial Meritocrats civilization?”

“Not some, but one.” Su Changfa smiled and said unhurriedly, “The young Cultivator was the youngest son of the chairman of the Committee of Equal Human Beings. He had received the most extreme brainwashing education since childhood and had absolutely no doubt about the expiators’ theories!

“Since his spiritual root was awakened and he became a Cultivator, he had dedicated his life to the most glorious cause in the entire universe, or to wit, to be at the service of all ordinary people like a cow or a mule.

“In the thirty years of civil war, he was a tough warrior on the expiators’ side. He was as peaceful and warm as a spring breeze when he was with the ordinary people, but he was as cold and ruthless as a blizzard when he was faced with the liberals of the Cultivators. He made great contributions to the victory of the civil war and thereby became the youngest member of the Committee of Equal Human Beings!

“He was too deeply poisoned to be rescued. After the ‘final solution’ was raised by the ordinary people, and even his father, the chairman of the Committee of Equal Human Beings, was planning to stand up to resist, he was still obstinate enough to leak his father’s plans to the ordinary people and made yet another contribution for the final fallout of the expiators!

“Hehe. The young Cultivator had truly done everything that he could for the ordinary people!

“As the saying goes, you don’t thank somebody else for saving your life; you express your gratitude with real actions. He had done such a great favor to the ordinary people that the ordinary people, feeling that there was no way they could return it, threw him into a highly active volcano and watched him being swallowed by the burning magma!”

Li Yao could not help but sigh again.

Any extremely belief would turn out to be a disaster in the end. The young Cultivator was truly pathetic, pitiful, shameful, and detestable!

“Senior Su, did the young Cultivator have a high Cultivation? After he was swallowed by the magma in an active volcano, did he survive?”

Hearing that question, Su Changfa smiled knowingly. “He was a young man. How high could his Cultivation have been? After being soaked in the magma for more than ten minutes, even the strongest spiritual shield was about to be exhausted. Most of his body tissue was about to be melted by the magma, and death was already knocking the door!

“However, the time of his doom hadn’t come yet. Nobody realized that a relic from the Star Ocean Imperium was actually hidden in the deepest part of the active volcano!”