Forty Millenniums of Cultivation, page 1366
Li Yao said, somewhat unnaturally, "Why would I be interested in the queen?"
With a "you can't fool me" look on his face, Li Lingfeng said, "Stop pretending, Fellow Cultivator Li. We have been communicating well and genuinely. Now that a great enemy is underway, is there any need to hide at all? If you and the force behind you are not interested in the queen, how on earth could you have learned so many secrets?"
Li Yao was dazed for a while, and the defense on his face gradually loosened as he said, "Alright. I admit that the major forces in the Imperium are all greatly interested in the queen. After all, as you said just now, she has gradually revealed her ambitions, and she poses a threat to many different people, doesn't she?
"Who can argue with that? My sister is turning more and more unpredictable, immeasurable, and even horrible after only a hundred years."
Li Lingfeng sighed and said, "Pushing her to the throne of 'queen' was perhaps the gravest mistake that the Li family made in the past hundred years. But who could have foreseen that she would grow into something like this?
"All in all, she has got everything she needs, and she is about to bare the most aggressive tusks. At such a critical moment, she absolutely will not allow any unexpected factor to disrupt her plan. The three of us have to be killed here!
"If we continue brutalizing each other, we will only be killed by her one after another. There's no chance of winning at all.
"However, if we can join our hands, with two experts in the Divinity Transformation Stage and Li Jialing, a 'perfect experiment subject' that Wuying Lan and I carefully refined, we will not entirely be on the losing side!
"It must be noted that Li Jialing's existence has always been her biggest secret. Even the 'Deep Sea Fleet', the secret troop that she founded on her own, will not be allowed to learn the truth.
"Besides, she couldn't have guessed that we would join hands. She thought that the two of you had escaped into the deepest part of the thunderstorm. So, she would certainly come here to hunt on her own without bringing any help.
"This is our best opportunity!"
Li Jialing had been listening in silence all the time. He finally couldn't help anymore, and so, he asked, "You want us to kill her together?"
Li Lingfeng chuckled. "I didn't say that she must be killed. I know that you might be unable to make up your mind for that. However, getting her under control, talking to her, and making some deals with her, or asking her to tell the truth of your origins—Do you find that acceptable?"
"Rest assured. Your uncle wouldn't bear to kill your mother."
Li Yao said to the young man coldly, "He still wants to control the forces deep inside the royal palace with your living mother. Or to put it more frankly, he wants to swallow the forces that your mother accumulated in secret in the past hundred years to realize his own ambitions. Do you understand?"
Chapter 2137: The Weird Queen! |
"Smart!"
Giving no denial at all, Li Lingfeng simply grinned. "If the queen truly dies, many people will smile even in their dreams. But will that bring us any good? We will simply be doing somebody else's a favor, won't we?
"Besides, she is my sister who shares the same father and mother with me after all. If possible, I do not want to completely end up on bad terms with her.
"My plan is to talk to her nicely and see if we can combine our resources. Then, if I want to take back what is mine in the Li family, or she has any plan, or Fellow Cultivator Li has other ideas for the future, it will be easier for us to achieve the purposes if we help one another, right?
"I believe that as long as we join hands, faced with the 'sincerity' of two experts in the Divinity Transformation Stage, even my sister would have to think about it carefully.
"I'm done. Please cherish the rarely-seen opportunity. Fellow Cultivator Li, you should be well aware that if I hadn't run into today's misfortunes, I definitely wouldn't have told you so many secrets and so many truths.
"Now that you have learned so many secrets, it is impossible for you to return in one piece. Cooperation with me is your only way out. Otherwise, even if the queen and I don't kill you, thousands of people will if they know you know it!
"All in all, the lives of the three of us now lie in your hands. 'Vulture Li Yao', you will decide where we will go next!"
Li Yao's eyebrows were furrowed, and his expressions were changing all the time. His eyes were now filled with brutality and now as profound as abysses. His eyeballs were also rolling crazily, as if he were calculating the moves in the game. Finally, he said cautiously, "It seems that I do not have a second choice other than trusting you. However, I have to figure out a few things first, which concerns the odds of success if I take action."
Narrowing his eyes, Li Lingfeng stared at the edge of the thunderstorm and said hastily, "Alright. Just ask!"
Li Yao said, "What exactly is the greatest disagreement between you and Li Linghai? You are biological siblings. Although familial bonds are never what we, the Immortal Cultivators, care for, the two of you shouldn't have too many conflicts of interest. It should've been possible for you to communicate well and deal with the older generation of your family together. Why have you become so antagonistic to each other? Isn't such a 'civil war' too stupid?"
The question seemed to have poked Li Lingfeng's critical parts. The muscles on his face jumped crazily for a while. Then, perhaps because the situation was too urgent for him to make up any lies, he pondered for a moment and said, "Yes. When my sister became the queen of the Imperium, it was impossible for her to return to the Li family as the leader and the Kurfürst. So, theoretically speaking, she can't be my competitor, and it is only reasonable that the two of us form a stable alliance of interests, with one inside the Li family and the other in the capital of the Imperium.
"However, more than a hundred years ago, when the Li family was selecting a queen, she was still a junior without much influence, while I already distinguished myself and had a say in the matter.
"Regarding the issue of her entering the royal palace, I… might have played some tricks, which might have caused her to hate my guts even to this day."
Li Yao thought of something. "She didn't want to become the queen?"
Li Lingfeng nodded at Li Jialing. "If she were willing to be the queen, why on earth would my little nephew here be born? However, it was already more than a hundred years ago. Power tastes like the most delicious wine. Whoever enjoys one drop of it will not be able to get rid of it anymore. In recent decades, I could tell that she quite enjoyed being the queen!
"However, the thing about hatred is that it will eventually be worn out by time. The greatest disagreement between her and me is not the old grudge but our different beliefs."
"Beliefs?"
Li Yao was slightly dazed. "You are both ambitious Immortal Cultivators. Are your beliefs any different?"
"They are absolutely different. My sister's dreadfulness is utterly beyond the imagination of other people. Even the big shots of the Li family have never seen through her completely. Only I, as her biological brother who shares the same bloodline, can notice a thing or two unusual in her!"
When he mentioned Li Linghai, Li Lingfeng even shivered slightly. He struggled to continue, "My ambition is to be the leader of the Li family and one of the four Kurfürsten, which is not exactly a big secret. It is even safe to say that every Immortal Cultivator in the four Kurfürst families has the same ambition as mine. I believe you are the same, too. Do you not want to be the master of your force?
"It is a very common ambition. Nothing extraordinary.
"But my sister is different. She… She… In the few close-distance contacts with her over the last couple of years, I could clearly sense that what she wants is much more than a simple Li family; she wants the entire Imperium!"
Li Yao's eyes were glittering. "Are you suggesting that Li Linghai intends to rule over the entire Imperium?"
Li Lingfeng shook his head. "If only it were so simple. I'm highly suspicious that her burning ambition will eventually destroy the entire Imperium!"
Destroy the Imperium!
Li Yao was truly stunned for a moment.
Li Lingfeng might not be the smartest person in the world, but he was without a doubt a bold, determined man.
Even someone like him had been awed by Li Linghai's ambitions. What was Li Linghai trying to achieve exactly?
Taking a deep breath, Li Yao managed to calm himself down and asked, "Fellow Cultivator Li, you seem to be overstating. Do you have any proof?"
"I do not have any direct evidence."
Li Lingfeng shook his head and said, "However, for those in the Divinity Transformation Stage like you and me, we can sense a lot of things through subtle traces based on our intuitions. In many cases, conclusions can be drawn without concrete evidence."
"Intuitions?"
Li Yao smiled. "Your intuitions told you that our queen was as horrifying as that?"
"Trust me. There's no need for me to lie to you at such a moment!"
Li Lingfeng said in a hurry, "I was perhaps the earliest person who discovered her horrors in the entire Imperium. The reason was simple. Decades ago, I accidentally intercepted the fetus of my nephew Li Jialing. After learning the background of the fetus, I tried to restore my relationship with her with the fetus as a leverage…"
Li Yao interrupted him, "I'm afraid that you did not want to restore the relationship but hoped to blackmail her so that she would stand by your side in the competition of the leader of the Li family and the Kurfürst, right?"
"It's the same."
Li Lingfeng said, "The bottom line is, after receiving Li Jialing's fetus, on one hand, I asked Wuying Lan to devise a set of most perfect fetus strengthening plans, preparing to develop him at an appropriate moment. On the other hand, I secretly ran investigations on Li Linghai, trying to grasp more of her weaknesses before we showed our hands to each other.
"However, while I was utterly ignorant before the investigation, I couldn't have been more shocked after the result of the investigation was out.
"As it turned out, my dear sister was not a loyal, dutiful tool of the family as she appeared to be at all. She had built a secret armed force known as 'Deep Sea Fleet' in secret, and she had also extended her influences into the critical departments of the Imperium, gathering power and establishing her own forces. There was no telling what she was up to at all!
"Not just that, her personality and her abilities had been through drastic changes, and she was like a totally different person from before. I even had a very ridiculous feeling—Her Grace of the Imperium of True Human Beings was not my biological sister at all, at least not the Li Linghai that I escorted to the royal palace in person more than a hundred years ago!"
"What?"
Greatly surprised, Li Yao thought quickly, "Somebody replaced or possessed her?"
"It's impossible."
Li Lingfeng shook his head. "It is a serious issue. It is absolutely impossible to possess the queen of the Imperium. The rigorous tests on blood samples, cells, genes, and even soul waves every year proved that the woman is indeed my biological sister Li Linghai.
"Otherwise, considering the brainwashing methods of the Covenant Alliance and the brain invading techniques of the extraterrestrial devils, if the queen could be possessed or replaced, wouldn't the same thing happen to the emperor and the warlords? The vast Imperium would collapse abruptly!
"However… However, despite knowing for a fact that the woman is my biological sister Li Linghai, I still feel creeped out time and time again.
"For example, more than a hundred years ago, before my sister became the 'Crown Princess' in the capital, she was a very pure battle-type Immortal Cultivator and an elite warrior of the family. She was even an overly sentimental and indecisive person.
"She was indeed talented and even more gifted than me in training. No matter how complicated and abstruse a technique was, she would grasp them after a quick look. When she was in her twenties, she was already able to fight an even match with the warriors in the prime years of their lives in my family, and also me, who had already distinguished myself.
"However, for the standards of the Immortal Cultivators, she was simply too merciful, naïve, innocent, and ignorant of the treacherousness of human minds.
"Perhaps it was exactly because of her qualities of sentimentality, leniency, and innocence that she was finally picked by the family as the Crown Princess as that time and the future queen."
Li Yao nodded his head. "Got it. A woman whose feelings were so abundant that she was almost fragile would be easier to be restrained and controlled by the family. She would serve better as a tool to monitor the emperor for the family. Should anything go wrong, she would have lots of weaknesses that you could take advantage of."
Li Lingfeng hesitated for a moment, but he still nodded his head. "You're right. None of the four Kurfürsten wishes to see an ambitious, sophisticated, and uncontrollable queen. Such tender, sentimental women who are highly dependent on the family have always been the best candidates for queens in every generation.
"On the other hand, although everybody was aware of the truth behind the political marriage, it was necessary to take the feelings of the prince or His Majesty himself into consideration too. It would be too simple and crude to see a well-trained, cold, and ruthless female spy as the Crown Princess or the queen. Should the prince or the emperor be provoked and grow resentful, it would be rather bad.
"Therefore, the four Kurfürst families still hoped to pick an unsophisticated, truly attractive woman, preferably with some unnecessary innocence, naivety, and kindness. Finally, it was my sister Li Linghai who was chosen in the end!"
Chapter 2138: The Rapidly Growing Young Man! |
"That explains a lot. I must thank you for your enlightenment, Fellow Cultivator Li."
Li Yao said, "I've heard a thing or two about news from the royal palace whose authenticity I was not certain about. The… force that I belong to was involved in the issues of the election of the Crown Princess too. However, hehe, those guys only wanted me to train myself hard into a slaughter machine with more brawns than brains. So, they never cared to explain the inside information to me so clearly!"
Li Lingfeng said with a smile, "There is still a lot more intelligence that we can communicate with each other after things are settled here."
Li Yao sniffed, giving neither approval or disapproval. "Please continue, Fellow Cultivator Li. If the queen was a kind woman, if not weak in nature, why are you so terrified of her right now?"
"That is the problem. My sister's personalities have changed greatly in the past decades. She has turned even colder, more ruthless, and more iron-hearted than me. Perhaps she already changed more than a hundred years before she entered the royal palace, but she disguised herself very well and nobody discovered it."
Li Lingfeng sighed and turned to Li Jialing. "Jialing, I do not want to lie to you. At first, I wanted to use you as a leverage because I thought it would be hard to completely eradicate one's nature no matter how cruel and cold your mother tried to be. And that when we met, she would more or less show some hesitation or loopholes.
"In a competition of two experts, one moment of hesitation or loopholes would be more than enough to decide the outcome of the battle.
"I even thought that, even if she was relentless enough to dispose of you when you were a fetus, which in fact was nothing more than 'abortion', she would certainly hesitate slightly when she saw you standing before her as a grown man, right?
"But I was wrong. I truly underestimated my 'kindhearted, sentimental, and docile' sister. Or maybe, she had encountered amazing incidents in the past decades, which granted her terrifying opportunities.
"All in all, when I fought her just now, I intentionally used you to disrupt her mind. But I sensed very clearly that she couldn't care less about you, and that she was exactly here to kill you. There was not the least maternal love in her at all. You must trust your uncle!
"Furthermore, I would like to disclose an even greater secret to you. In the past hundred years, my sister and His Majesty had twelve princes and princesses in total, four of which died. According to my secret investigation, the deaths of at least two princes were highly suspicious and very likely to be related to my sister!"
Li Yao and Li Jialing were both stunned. Li Yao asked, somewhat in disbelief, "Are you implying that she has already killed at least two of her own children?"
"Very possible, believe it or not. There's no need for me to lie to you about that, right?"
Li Lingfeng sneered, "Jialing, you should understand it now. Ancient people said that 'even ferocious tigers do not eat their own children', but your gene provider is a fiendish woman a hundred times more ferocious than a tiger. If you have the slightest expectations or extravagant hope in her, it will be you who suffer in the end!"
Li Jialing swallowed hard. Despite the super modifications that Li Lingfeng and Wuying Lan performed in his head, everything that happened today was enough to make it explode.
Li Yao narrowed his eyes. "So to speak, something is truly wrong with the queen?"
"Of course!"
Li Lingfeng said, "Think about it. She was just a mediocre woman who knew nothing but fighting at the beginning, but in only a hundred years, she founded her own forces while keeping it a secret from the spies of the four Kurfürst families and so many warlords. During the full counterattack of the Imperium against the Covenant Alliance, she also helped the emperor to consolidate his authority in the army and even won the support of the tremendous bottom-level officers in the army. Such sophisticated planning and the resources and wealth that were required for her to recruit her subordinates while deceiving everyone, where did they come from? They couldn't have just come out of thin air, could they?"
