Forty Millenniums of Cultivation, page 1396
For the soldiers who had just retreated from the battlefield, many had incomplete crystal suits, with bloodstains and dark grime still lingering on them.
But it only added to the intimidation of a battle-tested army.
"Long live the Imperium!"
When the soldiers of every square array passed the podium, they would take off their helmets, raise their proud heads and perform a standard "unity etiquette" by straightening their right arms and clenching their fists.
The head that was held high represented the pride of the civilization of mankind, the arm that was straightened forward symbolized the path of humanity, and the clenched fist stood for the solidarity of all the human beings in the three thousand Sectors. The "unity etiquette" which was decided by Blackstar the Great himself was the highest etiquette in the Imperium of True Human Beings as well as the formal military etiquette of the Imperium's army.
The important officials on the podium returned the etiquette to the soldiers and said solemnly, "Long live the Imperium's army!"
The assault warships that sailed past in midair slowly blew the cannons to present glamorous fireworks in the clouds, showing the respect of the soldiers on board for the elder of the Imperium.
Such triumph ceremonies had been held far too many times in the Green Wind Sector.
At this moment, while the passion of the crowd was not reduced at all, the important officials on the podium had already formed mechanical reactions.
Dongfang Tuo, an elder of the Imperium, while performing the "unity etiquette" and roaring "long live the Imperium's army", stared at the troops that passed by in high spirits before them gravely and considered how much money would be spent on the regrouping, maintenance, and refilling of those troops as well as the treatment for the wounded Immortal Cultivators and the compensation for the sacrificed soldiers.
The elder of the Imperium felt that his heart was aching every time one more "zero" popped up in his head.
Dwelling in the world of numbers, Dongfang Tuo did not realize that the atmosphere was getting weird.
Although the triumph team that was slowly walking past the podium was emitting the distinctive scent of killing, it did not raise the attention of anyone. They were a troop that had just returned from the frontline after bloody battles. To show off their accomplishments, many of them did not even wipe the bloodstains on their crystal suits, and repugnant smoke was still rising from the gaps of their weapons. It was quite normal that they had the killing vibe. In fact, it would be strange if they did not.
It was not until ominous noises echoed from the midair, mixed with the scratches of metal scratches and explosions, that Dongfang Tuo finally realized something was not right.
When he raised his head, the elder of the Imperium was so astounded that his blood was almost frozen.
Above the podium, in the fleet of the assault warships that were passing by slowly, one of the assault warships had changed the direction and dove at the podium!
To let the people feel the "glory" of the Imperium's army, the air troop that participated in the triumph ceremony consisted of the assault warships that could take off or land vertically, fly at a low altitude, and boast a high attack ability against ground targets.
Such airborne fortresses nicknamed as "ball lightning" were truly like countless balls of lightning being condensed. When they unleashed the most terrifying electric arcs, it was definitely a nightmare for any target on the ground!
The metal explosions just now, on the other hand, were the sounds that all the turrets and the honeycomb-type cabins were opened.
The cannons on board extended out of the gaps of the armor, like the sharp tusks of a beast that had just been bared. More than fifty firing points were glowing in fatal mystic rays at the same time!
"Slay the national thief and protect the Imperium!"
A devastating roar suddenly came from the square array that was striding past the podium. Dongfang Tuo looked at the source of the roar, only to discover that dozens of soldiers and bottom-level officers lunged at the podium like crazy devils with hideous faces, bloodshot eyes, and foams on their lips.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The assault warship opened fire while accelerating the dive. A hundred snakes of fiery bullets interwoven into the torrents of magma that drowned the entire podium immediately!
The podium was naturally surrounded by defense rune arrays.
However, as the counterattack pushed forward in the past decade, the Green Wind Sector was sort of the Imperium's rear right now, and it was thousands of lightyears from the frontline of the war.
In the past few years, the Covenant Alliance had never performed any large-scale attack, which made the defense of the place sloppier and sloppier after each day. Besides, even the most whimsical person wouldn't have thought that the Covenant Alliance would attack such a tiny podium!
As one of the five hundred elders of the Imperium, the CEO of the Imperial Expedition Bank, and a big shot of the Dongfang family, Dongfang Tuo naturally had an immeasurable level. He was an experienced expert in the Divinity Transformation Stage.
However, he was a specialist in finance and economics and a pure research-type Immortal Cultivator. His entire Cultivation had been dedicated to his brain and turned into all the formulas and algorithms. Besides, having lived for almost four hundred years, he was now old and weary and would be no match for a common battle-type expert in the Nascent Soul Stage in terms of combat ability.
The assault warship had obviously been planning for it for a long time. After the crazy bombardment, the defense shield of the podium was shattered like glass. All the important officials of the government and the military there were swept over. Dongfang Tuo, as the primary target of the enemy who shouldered all the barrages, was so heavily wounded on the spot that his guts were running out.
It all happened too fast. In the meantime, dozens of crazy soldiers had dashed onto the podium, which was now already a mess.
Dongfang Tuo and the officials naturally brought a lot of guards with them. Also, many of the officials were themselves experts at battle skills. They were immediately engaged in a fierce fight with the crazy soldiers.
However, the crazy soldiers were all determined to die together with the enemy. They had hidden tremendous crystal bombs in their crystal suits, and whenever they were stopped, they would immediately activate the crystal bombs and be blown into pieces together with their stoppers under the roars of "long live the Imperium".
The assault warship in the air was diving at a higher and higher speed and showed no intention of stopping at all. It appeared to be determined to crash into the podium!
In the capital of the Green Wind Sector, almost a million people had gathered around for the triumph ceremony.
The abrupt change immediately overwhelmed all the people. Everybody was running in panic and tears.
The supposedly magnificent battle anthem of the Imperium was also disrupted by the explosions on the podium and the cries of the crowd.
At this moment, the soldiers from quite a few other squares also left the group and squeezed into the crowd, tossing a tremendous amount of flyers at the same time.
On the assault warship that was accelerating the dive, a tremendous amount of flyers were tossed out, falling above the heads of the million people like snowflakes.
The so-called flyers were a kind of small, thin paper slips that were painted with many words to disseminate certain news or illustrate a certain idea.
In the present day when the Spiritual Nexus had covered the entire universe and everybody could trigger dozens of light beams easily at any minute with their mini crystal processor, such an obsolete notion as "flyer" had been erased from the heads of a lot of people.
Many people had never seen a flyer. They had never even heard of such a clumsy, outdated, and slow way of information dissemination before.
However, under certain special circumstances, "outdated" and "advanced" might be reversed.
The authorities of the Imperium had abundant experience in dealing with the riots, the large-scale demonstrations, and the rumors on the Spiritual Nexus.
If the rebels were promoting the recalcitrant ideas through the Spiritual Nexus, the authorities of the Imperium could cut the dissemination of the "virus" within a minute and trace it back to the source, until all the marks were cleaned.
In the most extreme case, the entire network could be paralyzed, and nobody would be able to send a single word.
However, the millions of flyers that were thrown away were not so easy to be stopped and destroyed.
Many panicked people somehow picked the flyers from the sky while they were running away.
When they observed carefully, they found a big, shocking title on the crimson little paper.
"CRUSADE!"
Then, it was a declaration that was teeming with iron and smoke.
"Slay the national thief. Protect the Imperium!"
Then, it was narrated in a very reader-friendly way, if not the unrefined tone of the uneducated soldiers, that the brave and fearless soldiers of the Imperium were fighting through bloody battles in the frontline, hoping to seize greater glories for the Imperium, for their patriots and for the civilization of mankind. But while they were devoting themselves and risking their lives in the front, there was a bunch of national thieves and fat rats in the rear, who secretly intercepted the supplies that were supposed to be delivered to the frontline, replaced them with inferior goods, and made a fortune by selling the original supplies. They were simply watching the precious blood of the men of the Imperium to be shed for nothing, and they were the greatest obstacles for the Imperium to recover the three thousand Sectors.
Among them, Dongfang Tuo, the CEO of the Imperial Expedition Bank and the manager of the logistics of the expedition army, was the fattest rat of all.
It was exactly because of his inactions and even hamstringing in the delivery of supplies that the invincible army of the Imperium suffered multiple setbacks and a lot of soldiers died for nothing.
To make things worse, the patriotic soldiers in the frontline had received confirmed news that Dongfang Tuo was a shameless capitulator who was planning to negotiate peace with the Covenant Alliance and stop the war by force!
"The invincible light of the Imperium's army has radiated to the entire universe. The most sacred war of mankind has been pushed to the most critical point. One little step ahead, and we will conquer the entire universe! Whoever asks for a truce at such a moment will be buying the time of rest for the enemy. They are the most shameless traitors of the Imperium and the civilization of mankind!"
The flyers said as such.
With that in mind, the patriotic soldiers in the frontline who knew the actual situation had been united and formed an alliance through blood oaths. They were determined to execute the traitors and the thieves to defend the Imperium even at the cost of their own lives or being cursed as "rebels". They wanted to see the end of the sacred war and fight until the Covenant Alliance did not have a single habitable planet left!
"We will not stop the war until the blood of the last person of the Covenant Alliance runs dry!"
At the bottom, the signature was "Blood Oath Alliance of the Imperium's Army"!
Chapter 2186: Shocking Tide! |
The local guards of the Green Wind Sector finally came.
But at this moment, the turmoil of the million people was already beyond any measure.
The assassins of the Blood Oath Alliance, although not all involved in the scheme, were still expanding the chaos intentionally or unintentionally to disrupt the reactions of the local guards under the stimulation of more than ten years of life-and-death comradeship.
"No one from the logistics department is a good guy!"
"It is exactly because of the sloppiness of supplies that we failed to make greater accomplishments in the war!"
"The soldiers in the frontline are all good guys. The officials at the back are all idiots!"
It was almost a consensus of all the troops in the frontline.
Even the troops that were directly under the commander of the four Kurfürst families would think so intuitively after a decade of bloody battles.
By the time the exasperated local guards finally rushed to the podium, the assault warships that were obviously determined to die together with the enemy had already crashed into it.
While the anti-air magical equipment could leave thousands of holes on the assault warship, it was impossible to completely obliterate the metals weighing almost ten thousand tons.
The broken, burning assault warship smashed on the podium like a shrieking shooting star. The blast blew the soldiers who came for aid to almost a hundred meters away. They could see nothing anymore in the middle of the rising flames and smoke!
To this moment, Dongfang Tuo, the elder of the Imperium, had not died yet.
His loyal personal guards were all blocking the assassins on the podium. Some of them even exhausted their lives and weaved powerful defense shields with their souls and spiritual energy, helping the elder of the Imperium to resist the damage caused by the collision of the assault warship.
"Protect the elder. Get the elder out of here now!"
A team of local guards of the Green Wind Sector escorted Dongfang Tuo, who had been heavily wounded, to leave the area.
They patted a piece of oval-shaped magical equipment on their waists, and a translucent, arc-shaped shield appeared behind each and every one of them. When ten or so shields overlapped, they sheltered Dongfang Tuo without a single gap, like a solid turtle shell.
Before that, however, one of the flyers drifted and found its way through the shields onto Dongfang Tuo's face.
Dongfang Tuo managed to raise his head on the floating stretcher and concentrate his attention on the content of the flyer despite his wounds. He was already infuriated, with his face pale and blood flowing out of his mouth, when he was only halfway through it.
"Those a*sholes are truly insubordinate and lawless!"
The elder of the Imperium gnashed his teeth. "The army… has been infiltrated to such an extent. It's really… It's really—"
Before he was able to finish his remark, he heard the thick and disordered panting behind him.
Slightly stunned, he turned around, only to discover that a local guard of the Green Wind Sector was staring at him. The man was also sweating hard with bloodshot eyes and nervously cramping lips.
Dongfang Tuo's pupils immediately constricted to the size of needles. "… Wait. This is not true!"
"Slay the national thief and protect the Imperium!"
The local guard of the Green Wind Sector roared and ripped apart his own crystal suit brutally, revealing the terrifying body below where most of his internal organs had been replaced by destructive crystal bombs through surgeries. He lunged at Dongfang Tuo and embraced the elder of the Imperium tightly before the rest of the soldiers realized what was going on.
"Long live the Imperium!"
The guard laughed and shouted desperately.
BOOM!
A dazzling crimson fireball burst out from within the halo of spiritual shields. Dongfang Huo, who had been heavily wounded in the first place, was killed on the spot.
The enemy's crystal bombs seemed to have adopted unique designs and very sordid formulas that targeted the soul.
When the situation was finally under control, and the local guards sent Dongfang Tuo's broken, burnt body to the hospital for resuscitation, it was already impossible to rescue a single part of his soul. The man had been completely obliterated.
It was exactly "Incident of the Blood Oath Alliance" that took place three days ago, and this would soon shock the entire Imperium.
The vast Imperium of True Human Beings included hundreds of Sectors, but there were only five hundred elders in total in the entire territory.
It was not hard to imagine the position and the value of every elder of the Imperium.
Before, cases were not rare where assassins from the Covenant Alliance tried to kill the elders of the Imperium.
However, it was indeed an unprecedented event since the establishment of the Imperium that an elder of the Imperium was assassinated by his own army in broad daylight in a triumph ceremony under the witness of a million people.
Although the crystal bomb embedded in the member of the Blood Oath Alliance only blossomed for 0.5 seconds, the blast it raised did not stop there at all. After it killed Dongfang Tuo, it spread out at a speed faster than light in the entire Imperium, causing heated reactions in all the worlds, forces, fleets, sects, and planets.
Three days later, the blast rendered the bridge of Dragon Abyss, the flagship of the Deep Sea Fleet, into dead silence. Queen Li Linghai stared at the intelligence on the light beam, unable to say anything for a long time.
"How did this happen? It essentially disrupted my whole plan. The reformists have been pushed to the center of attention and on the verge of doom!"
Li Linghai's fury almost burned several holes on the light beam. Then, she began to stare at Li Yao who was standing next to her.
"This really has nothing to do with me," Li Yao shrugged and said.
Pausing for a moment, he said again, "Was it not done by your people? The slogan of this Blood Oath Alliance sounds a lot similar to the ideas of the reformists!"
"Of course not. We have not been prepared to completely declare war on the four Kurfürst families. Why would we do such a serious thing as to assassinate an elder of the Imperium?"
Narrowing her eyes, Li Linghai gnashed her teeth angrily. "The Blood Oath Alliance is a radical organization established by the young officers in the frontline spontaneously. There are a lot of similar organizations in the dozens of Sectors in the frontline, such as 'True Dragon Union', 'Pioneers' Society', etc. Just like what I said a few days ago, they are the products of the infuriated young officers who cannot see any light in their future and who have a strong sense of injustice.
