Forty Millenniums of Cultivation, page 1347
Wuying Lan's body continued expanding.
Li Yao's spiritual energy that was raging like a flood had already burned up parts of his brains, making his ability to control the mutated cells inside his body completely go out of control. His limbs expanded and wiggled beyond his control, now growing clusters of hair and putting on scales, before the skin was completely ripped apart and dissolved, revealing the flesh down below that was as packed as tumors.
"Ho! Ho! Ho!"
Waving his abnormal arms, Wuying Lan tried to struggle, but he could not get out of Li Yao's control however hard he tried. His body had already expanded to almost five meters tall, but the crimson flames of spiritual energy dancing around Li Yao had been condensed into an image almost ten meters high, which was still suppressing him tightly.
Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!
Wuying Lan's expansion had finally reached the limits. The mitochondria in his cells had almost been entirely burned up. The bones all over his body were broken and collapsing like a glass castle. Rampant spiritual energy dashed out of his face and his ripped flesh. His enormous body was blackened and constricting rapidly.
"No! No! No!"
Wuying Lan's soul let out devastating screams before it ran from the shell that was riddled with holes and burning furiously. It turned into hundreds of telepathic thoughts and escaped to all directions, hoping to get rid of Li Yao's savagery.
However, before the telepathic thoughts ran far away, hundreds of streams of spiritual energy that looked like tentacles had already extended out of his shell, entangling every telepathic thought and pulling them back to the burning shell that was getting smaller and smaller.
Zhi! Zhi! Zhi! Zhi!
The telepathic thoughts already couldn't constitute systematic thinking, but they were still shrieking like rats that had fallen into boiling oil, struggling futilely, until they were all pulled back into the body in the end and burned up into nothingness in the furious flames!
In less than half a minute, the abnormal body, which was as magnificent as a mountain before, turned into a burnt corpse no more than one meter long, which then fell apart into pieces.
The last bit of the remaining soul dashed out of the burnt corpse and condensed into a fuzzy face in midair vaguely in Wuying Lan's appearance.
There were complicated expressions on the face, including pain, regrets, desperation, confusion, and many others.
The crystalline lens in Li Yao's palms hadn't retreated into the body yet. He opened his fingers and aimed at the remaining soul. As the light balls flashed continuously, it had already been completely blown up into smithereens before it emitted the ripples of begging for mercy!
Wuying Lan, the owner of "Manjusaka, the City in the Sky" who was trying to create a media empire ambitiously, was obliterated in the cold space without any hope of reincarnation just like that.
The only things that could prove his existence was the pieces of the burnt body on the ground that looked like charcoals and the fragments of his crystal suit, which had been melted into lumps!
Shua!
The bloody wings on Li Yao's back that were raging like angry flames retreated, and the biochemical crystal lens in his palms that were used to activate the Cell Obliteration Cannon disappeared too. He did not even bother to look at the remains of Wuying Lan, who was nothing more than a lackey that did not deserve to waste his time.
Li Yao hurried to jump at the main reactor of the energy core.
Of course, he was not stupid enough to really destroy the main reactor.
It must be noted that the energy core was not only responsible for providing incessant energy for the defense system and the anti-gravity rune arrays of "Manjusaka, the City in the Sky", but it also served as a protector of the overall structure of the space fortress.
If the main reactor completely exploded or shut down, the immense tidal forces alone would have been enough to tear apart "Manjusaka, the City in the Sky" immediately and transform it into the most dreadful meteor shower that would hit the surface of the Martial Meritocrats Planet brutally, making the life on the Land of Sins, which was already difficult enough as it was, even more difficult.
In that case, the ordinary people living on the Land of Sins would have to shoulder a second catastrophic strike.
However, Li Yao did not want "Manjusaka, the City in the Sky" to continue floating above the atmosphere either.
His main concern was that the people of the Land of Sins required the food and resources projected from "Manjusaka, the City in the Sky" regularly in order to survive.
Right now, "Manjusaka, the City in the Sky" had been embroiled in chaos. It could be foreseen that few assets would be projected into the atmosphere in the next year and a half.
The Imperium couldn't have cared less about the life or death of the people of the Land of Sins. Perhaps it would even save them a lot of trouble if the people of the Land of Sins were all starved to death.
Therefore, Li Yao had to figure out a way to land "Manjusaka, the City in the Sky". It did not matter if the space fortress was blown apart, but the speed of the crash must not be too high. It would be best if the space fortress could be dismembered and sent to every part of the planet so that the people of the Land of Sins would have an opportunity to seize the abundant assets stored inside the space fortress and find new hope based on those things!
Li Yao ran to the control panel of the main reactor.
The control panel was well-protected by him just now with defense rune arrays, unaffected from the fierce battle between him and Wuying Lan.
As he expected, the main reactor was absolutely undamaged, except that its power output was slowly dropping because the affiliated units around it had been sabotaged by Li Yao.
Li Yao took a breath in relief.
The mental devil's voice came in his head. "You are already done? Simple as that?"
"I'm done."
Li Yao said, "What do you mean by 'simple as that'? Shouldn't there have been more?"
"I thought that you were going to chatter with Wuying Lan for a long time."
The mental devil said, "First of all, he would tell you all the pretentious but reasonable-sounding philosophies. Then, he would narrate his miserable origins, the reasons why he had to do everything he did, and his lofty ideas. After that, he would unravel certain shocking secrets. Eventually, you would find that he talked about so many things just in order to buy himself more time so that he could perform a certain awesome and dominating transformation. Later, with the ultimate transformation, he beat you up like you were a pig, but you somehow perceived a certain mysterious super ultimate skill the moment before you were killed like a pig, which allowed you to finally kill him at the most perilous and life-blighting moment."
Li Yao: "… How could it have been so sophisticated?"
The mental devil: "It is not sophisticated at all. You've been fighting like that before all the time!"
Li Yao: "Says who? 'Vulture Li Yao' is best known for his rapidity and decisiveness. I never talk if I can fight! Besides, I'm in the Divinity Transformation Stage after all; why did I need to listen to the bulls*it of a junior in the Nascent Soul Stage? It would've been a waste of my time! Enough of the crap. What's your situation? Is our 'show' ready?"
Chapter 2107: Beginning of the Stream! |
"Everything is set. It is exactly what you have expected."
The mental devil shared the sounds and visuals with Li Yao. It was now lurking in the middle of an enormous array of crystal processors at the main control center of "Manjusaka, the City in the Sky" and peeking at the specialists who were running about crazily like headless flies. "The space fortress indeed has an emergency plan for fully-automatic landing, which means that it can dismember on its own and slowly land on the ground when it suffers an expected strike, in order to ensure the completeness of the main structure and the safety of the members inside."
"It is only reasonable."
Li Yao said, "Such orbit space stations generally have standard automatic landing plans. Even if those inside the space fortress want to spare themselves of the trouble, those living on the planet certainly do not want to get killed in a crash! In the federation, all the orbit space stations must be installed with fully-automatic buffers and landing units. I imagine that same goes for the Imperium."
"Now, the landing plan has been activated."
The mental devil said, "The anti-gravity rune array is now gradually being shut down and weakened. We are cutting into the atmosphere slowly and will probably land on the ground in six to eight hours. As long as you stop sabotaging the energy core, I don't think that the Immortal Cultivators in 'Manjusaka, the City in the Sky' will disrupt the landing program to crash them into pieces, will they?"
"Very good. I did not destroy the main reactor of the energy core violently but only sabotaged part of the cooling units so that the power output dropped to about… 70%."
Calculating quickly, Li Yao continued, "Such a power output shouldn't be enough to sustain its defense shield or provide much support for the mainframe crystal processors. On the other hand, how is the stream right now?"
"It is still ongoing."
The mental devil said, "The enemy obviously does not bear to abandon the epic quest of 'Dying Light'. Just now, I vaguely heard that it was deeply associated with the lottery groups, the stock price, the financial market, the interests of the major families, and so many other things. It is not something that Wuying Lan could cut off if he wanted to.
"The live stream is still going on. But what they are sending out right now are the data packages that have been highly rendered and modified. Some of the sounds and pictures are even purely fabricated. Technically speaking, this is no longer an actual 'stream'.
"Now that Wuying Lan has been killed by you, 'Manjusaka, the City in the Sky' is in lack of leadership. The remainder of them will only be at an even greater loss about what to do. None of them will have the courage to shut down the stream."
"Got it. They will soon learn the feeling of falling into their own traps."
Li Yao sneered, "Have you located the nodes through which they are broadcasting the data packages and hacked them?"
"Of course. Can you ask some meaningful questions next time?"
The mental devil grimaced. "Don't forget that I swallowed abundant tenebrum energy from the 'Internet Extraterrestrial Devil' and absorbed all of Professor Mo Xuan's heritages on the Spiritual Nexus and the crystal processors. It is not exaggerating to say that I am a strengthened, new-generation Internet devil!
"The Internet devil before had devoured the 'star child' from the Imperium at the beginning and had a deep knowledge about the features of the crystal processors and the Spiritual Nexus of the Imperium. Also, you reduced more than thirty percent of the power output of the energy core, which significantly decreased the performance of the mainframe crystal processors here. Furthermore, I played the trick of distraction and misled the enemy into thinking that I was going to attack the mainframe crystal processors of 'Manjusaka, the City in the Sky' in full strength to seize control over the space fortress.
"As it turned out, the enemy dedicated whatever left of their computational ability to the defense of the mainframe crystal processors. None of them realized that our real targets are the nodes of the Spiritual Nexus in 'Manjusaka, the City in the Sky' and the data transmission bases!
"Hehehehe. This is now essentially an undefended city where I can gallop free at will without meeting any hindrance!
"However, I need to remind you that I can only catch the enemy unprepared at best. They have an enormous array of advanced crystal processors after all, which are too overwhelming for me to resist. Once they realize what is going on, it is absolutely possible for them to block all the loopholes in one minute.
"Also, we can only solve the problem on the data sender's side, but we cannot influence the countermeasures of the data receptors. If the data from 'Manjusaka, the City in the Sky' are packed and sent to a certain Sector on the other side of the sea of stars, and the receiver finds that they are malicious, it is possible for the receiver to modify or even close the data exchange channel. Once the receiver closes the window and the door, there is nothing we can do about it."
Frowning, Li Yao asked, "Ignore the details. Tell me, how much time can you earn at best?"
"Here, about one minute."
The mental devil replied, "After the data are sent to other Sectors, depending on how smart the information scrutinizers of those worlds are, I may be able to persist for half a minute, or maybe ten seconds."
"Ten seconds to half a minute?"
Li Yao grinned in satisfaction. "That's enough. Remember to hack a few more crystal cameras and aim them at me. Try to make me look handsome, awesome, and extraordinary!"
While communicating with the mental devil on strategies, Li Yao did not slow down at all. After scanning and figuring out the situation in the main reactor, Li Yao simply reached for the collapsed pathway and waved his hands, blowing away all the metal remnants that had blocked the pathway!
On the other side of the pathway, a team of Immortal Cultivators was soaked in sweat as they tried to break through the pathway. Seeing that the pathway automatically expanded, they were all slightly dazed.
Li Yao did not leave much time for bewilderment and desperation for them.
The Mystic Skeleton Blood Wing turned into a streak of crimsonness and darted into the Immortal Cultivators, raising an overwhelming torrent of flames in exclamations of devastation!
Three minutes later, the furiously burning Mystic Skeleton Blood Wing strode forward unstoppably in the central area of "Manjusaka, the City in the Sky".
The central area that was peaceful, quiet, comfortable, and filled with the extravagance and nonchalance of the upper class half a day ago had now turned into a hell drowned in the ocean of blood.
Roars of the prisoners and cries of the staff were resounding everywhere, mixed by the curses of some battle-type Immortal Cultivators. But their curses were often swallowed by the sounds of attacks and ferocious beasts having food after only a few seconds.
It was their own karma. Li Yao had only limited sympathy, and most of it had been given to the ordinary people on the Land of Sins. He found no disturbance at all when he saw the gory bodies of the Immortal Cultivators.
"Help me! Help me! Help me!"
A middle-aged man wearing a white gown who looked like a researcher of the laboratories ran to Li Yao in panic.
Perhaps Li Yao's crystal suit and his indifferent vibe gave him the illusion that Li Yao was also one of the Immortal Cultivators. As if he had met a lifesaver, he jumped to Li Yao's leg, half running and half crawling.
Li Yao rolled his leg and kicked the man right back into the hundreds of hideous, insane prisoners behind.
The sounds of flesh being torn apart and bones being broken immediately echoed in the crowd. In desperate screams, the researcher was ripped into sliced meat the size of fingernails by the "experiment subjects" he had created in person.
Huchi! Huchi! Huchi! Huchi!
Bulging their bloodshot eyes, the prisoners stared at Li Yao.
"Huh?"
Li Yao slightly frowned, releasing the most aggressive aura that lashed at the prisoners who had been caught in craziness like burning whips. They all grunted and finally cooled down more or less.
"If you have had enough killing, go steal some more fuel and assets. Then, try to find a carrier in the spaceports."
Li Yao said, "Some of you must have experience in piloting the mining starships, don't you? It depends on your luck if you can pilot a carrier. This space fortress will soon crash on the surface of the planet. If you really can't find a carrier or are unable to pilot one, you'd better be prepared to live and lurk on or below the planet. In any case, this is as far as I can help all of you!"
All the prisoners were slightly dazed. After looking at each other in bewilderment for a while, they rolled their eyes in bewilderment and dispersed.
Li Yao continued pushing forward through the burning, exploding pathways, on the bleeding, twisted bodies of the Immortal Cultivators and prisoners, all the way to the most critical part of "Manjusaka, the City in the Sky", which was the area where the main control room and the information processing center were at.
It was the last position that the Immortal Cultivators were still holding. Guarded by the elites of the Heavenly Eye Legion, the place was yet to be conquered by the tides of prisoners.
The dead bodies of the prisoners had been piled up on one side of the pathway. The prisoners who had gone berserk tried to break in time and time again, only to be blown back by the stormy firepower of the Immortal Cultivators. They were so exasperated that they were shrieking in fury and scratching themselves hard until they were bleeding.
Li Yao's arrival raised the howls of the prisoners. Their passion and hot blood were almost blowing up the entire pathway.
Li Yao was unmoved. He simply patted one side of the helmet on his crystal suit lightly and sent a ripple to Neltharion that had long dived into the place. "Are you ready?"
"Everything is ready. All the crystal cameras have been aimed at you."
The mental devil blew a whistle. "Bring it on!"
"You must make sure that I look handsome, invincible, graceful, and absolutely charming!"
Li Yao couldn't remind the mental devil enough. "This is the first time in the past thousand years that a Cultivator has held an unprecedentedly super live stream toward all the people in the entire Imperium!"
"Got it. Come on."
The mental devil said, "I guarantee that you will be as awesome, attractive, and charming as you can imagine and that even if the picture may only be a few seconds long, the girls in the entire Imperium, young and old, will feel their hearts flipped and fall in love with you without regrets and complaints as if intoxicated!"
"That's good."
In a smile, Li Yao hinted to the hideous, rampant prisoners to clear the way, while he fell on one of his knees, making preparations for a short-distance dash. Then, the two bloody rings were raised again like two red flags flapping in the end. It could even be vaguely seen that two enormous dragons were dancing crazily on the "flags".
