Forty Millenniums of Cultivation, page 1507
Now that there were already established ideas, the believers of Nepenthe were naturally unnecessary to create a new path, nor were they capable of doing so. Under the deception of the spies of the Covenant Alliance, it was only natural that the doctrine of Nepenthe became a simplified version of the Path of Ultimate Benevolence.
If the things were left alone, it wouldn't take long before the so-called "Nepenthe" became a branch and an advance base of the Covenant Alliance in the Imperium.
Li Yao suddenly thought of something as he listened. "So, there are still spies from the Covenant Alliance in Nepenthe right now, who are authentic natives of the Covenant Alliance?"
Long Yangjun shook her head with a smile and said that Li Yao mistook "spies of the Covenant Alliance" for "spies from the Covenant Alliance". It was true that there were some spies of the Covenant Alliance in Nepenthe right now, but they were all natives of the Imperium who were born and raised locally, even if they had been brainwashed by the Path of Ultimate Benevolence.
On the other hand, those who brainwashed them were not necessarily authentic "spies from the Covenant Alliance" but also the believers of the Path of Ultimate Benevolence who were born and raised in the Imperium.
The war between the Imperium and the Covenant Alliance had lingered for a thousand years. The people of the Covenant Alliance had already worked hard to infiltrate the Imperium from seven to eight hundred years ago. After hundreds of years and dozens of generations, they had completely rooted themselves in the Imperium and became part of the country.
"You should not consider 'Alliance of the Holy Covenant' purely as a hostile country on the outside."
Long Yangjun thought for a moment and said, "Let me make a metaphor with the Ancient Sages Sector. You should regard the Covenant Alliance as a combination of an invasive, hostile country and the uprising peasants within. If the Imperium is compared to the Great Qian Dynasty, the Covenant Alliance will be the Ghost Qin plus the White Lotus Cult plus the Heaven Battering Army. That is why it is extremely difficult to get rid of the Covenant Alliance."
Long Yangjun told Li Yao that, after discovering that certain sleazy guys approached the miners whom she had enlightened, she captured and interrogated a few of them in curiosity, but she did not find much useful information.
It was not because the spies of the Covenant Alliance were too organized. On the very contrary, they were too unorganized, to the point that they were almost acting on their own. So, it was impossible for Long Yangjun to track their leader.
"The Covenant Alliance's activities in the Imperium are not based on any 'organization' but on the ideas of the Path of Ultimate Benevolence. Organizations can be detected and uprooted, but ideas can barely be extinguished."
Long Yangjun said, "The Path of Ultimate Benevolence haunts the sky and the earth of the Imperium like a ghost, alluring a lot of people to 'awaken' on their own. The spies of the Covenant Alliance that I caught were merely common workers, farmers, and students in the beginning. They had all abandoned everything and embraced eternal peace voluntarily because they could not endure the cruel oppression and the dark life anymore. What could I have done with them?
"Even if I found out the 'mentors' who taught them the methods of telepathy and the ways to repress feelings, those people would only be another bunch of common workers, farmers, and students. What could I do with them? As for their mentors, those people were very likely to have been executed by the Immortal Cultivators. What could I do except to simply watch?"
Faced with such a complicated situation, even Long Yangjun was in a dilemma.
But of course, she was not the most lenient person in the world, and she would certainly do something when other people were corrupting her followers or even snooping on her secrets.
She had been focused on intelligence collection and her own training in the beginning. By the time she noticed it, Nepenthe had already grown to a certain scale with its own ideas. Quite a few spies of the Covenant Alliance were even asking about her, wondering if this "Serenity Seraph" was a senior spy from the Covenant Alliance who had come to guide them to disseminate the Path of Ultimate Benevolence and purge the Imperium.
Long Yangjun was immediately mired in a cold sweat. The last thing she wanted was to be involved in the war between the Imperium and the Covenant Alliance. If the leaders of the Imperium was misled into thinking that a senior spy from the Covenant Alliance named "Serenity Seraph" appeared in the capital, wouldn't she be killed in no time?
Long Yangjun took care of the talkative spies of the Covenant Alliance quickly and then took over Nepenthe. She then established certain rules to restrain the believers.
With her experience of running the "Ghost Character", wasn't it more than easy for her to handle a tiny Nepenthe?
All the rules could be summoned into one sentence. Whatever the Nepenthe believers did would be fine, provided that they kept it a secret and a low profile. Most importantly of all, they should not leak the identity of the "Serenity Seraph" and that they should not ask her to clean their messes for them!
Long Yangjun had thought that Nepenthe was just a nuisance.
However, when Nepenthe grew active below the ground, she discovered that it was not entirely devoid of merits.
First of all, Nepenthe was like a huge magnet that attracted the spies of the Covenant Alliance all the time.
Through the interaction between those people and Nepenthe, Long Yangjun was able to study the origins of the Covenant Alliance. She was very suspicious that the Covenant Alliance was developed slowly and exactly like Nepenthe at the beginning.
If she could truly figure out the origins of the Covenant Alliance, it would be much more convenient for her when she snuck into the Covenant Alliance one day in the future. That was exactly what she meant by "social experiment".
Also, the believers of the Covenant Alliance all possessed certain brainwashing and telepathic techniques. While those techniques were crude and incomplete, they were of the same origin as Long Yangjun's techniques after all and could make up for the shortcomings of her fuzzy knowledge that she awakened from her genes.
What was most unexpected of all was that some Nepenthe believers gradually expanded their influence to the fifth class below the ground, namely the five-digit towns like the 10,084th district, and helped her locate a lot of secret primeval relics!
Chapter 2365: The Supervillain This Time! |
The Empyreal Terminus Sector had been the capital of the Demon Beast Empire and the human civilizations later for tens of thousands of years. It was the main battlefield of the battle between the Supreme Emperor and the Blood God ten thousand years ago, and it was also the last battleground during the collapse of demons more than ten thousand years ago. But furthermore, it was also an important location in the primeval wars hundreds of thousands of years. Naturally, abundant relics were hidden below the ground. Many of them had been discovered by the underground hominoids.
However, the hominoids had suffered a lot in the past. When they accidentally leaked the messages about the relics, the ferocious Immortal Cultivators would often come and demolish their towns.
After being taught lessons hundreds of times, all the underground hominoids became dummies who cherished their words as gold. They would never leak any information to the outsiders. Whoever had a big mouth would be cut by the people of their town until they ran out of blood.
Therefore, it had been almost a hundred years since the Immortal Cultivators excavated any valuable relic below the ground. They thought that most of the relics had been emptied.
After Nepenthe reached the forgotten corners fifteen thousand meters below the ground, its believers soon won the trust of the locals. It was quite ironic that in the underground worlds, the locals trusted the believers of Nepenthe and even the spies of the Covenant Alliance more than they trusted the Immortal Cultivators.
The intelligence that the believers of Nepenthe further collected regarding the relics was a great treasure for Long Yangjun.
She had been highly sensitive about the primeval relics because of her gifts in the first place. Based on the new information, she soon discovered dozens of primeval relics in a row.
Most of the relics had decayed, corrupted, and melted into fossils, but some of them were still perfectly preserved because of the fortuitous conditions. She found plenty of rarely-seen treasures in them, including, for example, the Colossus "Heavenly Crystal" that she was using right now!
"Under the guidance of the Nepenthe believers, I discovered quite a few valuable relics in a row and got a Colossus and some other magical equipment for self-protection. I also had a deep understanding of my heritage. Finally, I was prepared to travel in the cities of the Immortal Cultivators on the surface of the planet."
Long Yangjun said, "Besides, Nepenthe was already quite influential at that time. Worrying that it would catch the attention of the Immortal Cultivators as it developed, I was in a hurry to get away from the trouble. Therefore, I insisted on leaving the underground worlds despite the persuasion of the believers and returned to the surface of the planet.
"Later, I ran into some Immortal Cultivators of the Dongfang. After a series of events, I snuck into the royal palace as 'Dongfang Mingyue'. The rest is history.
"This is about everything. All in all, after I returned to the surface of the planet, and especially after I snuck into the Dongfang family, I barely contacted the Nepenthe believers below the ground. After all, they could develop however they wanted, and whatever trouble they caused would be none of my business. For Prime Minister Dongfang Wang, it was perhaps not a big deal if someone who practiced the tenebrum energy was working for him, but it would be rather scary if I was suspected to be a senior spy of the Covenant Alliance!
"Therefore, I did not have any long-term plan in the beginning. The situation has become what it is today only because one thing led to another. If it weren't necessary, I wouldn't have thought to come back to 'guide' the Nepenthe believers at all. It can't be helped. Who could've known that Blackstar the Great would suddenly come back to life and even control the surface of the capital? I had no choice except to bring you and Li Jialing to this place! After all, there were no surveillance cameras here, and some of the people here were more or less of use.
"It was not until I returned that I discovered that Nepenthe was ten times larger than when I left, and that it was planning a shocking uprising. If it worked out, it would likely help the residents of hundreds of towns to eliminate their pain, purge their soul, and return to eternal peace. I swear that none of those were my plans. They did everything on their own. I never thought that they would go so big, and I'm having a headache myself!
"Fame often leads to disasters. When hundreds of underground towns are on a rampage together, it will be impossible even if the 'Serenity Seraph' intends to keep a low profile! I will certainly be deeply remembered by Blackstar the Great, Queen Li Linghai, and the brutal men of the four Kurfürst families who will hate my guts. Even the experts of the Covenant Alliance will learn my existence. I haven't decided whether I should join the Covenant Alliance or just be a happy devil yet! What a headache!
"Come on, Monster Li, I have confessed everything. All in all, I have been innocent and unfortunate in the whole incident, and I've got into so much trouble uncannily. Please help me come up with an idea to fix the mess!"
Long Yangjun crossed her hands and looked at Li Yao cutely and pitifully.
Li Yao's goosebumps were almost falling when he was stared at by her. Taking a deep breath to keep his head calm, he analyzed every word Long Yangjun said carefully before he shook his head. "That's not right."
"What's not right?"
Long Yangjun bulged her eyes, with water rolling in them. She bit her lips softly and trembled in self-pity. "I offered to tell you everything because I considered you a friend. I almost cut my heart and showed it to you, but you still don't trust me? Didn't you say that you would treat me as a friend in the beginning? Or maybe, are you still holding on to the idea that 'people of not my own kind always think differently', and you reject me because I'm a 'monster'?"
"Cut the crap. Nobody is a better actor than myself. Nobody."
Li Yao's eyes were like two deep wells, one red and the other black. His face was extremely calm and thoughtful as he considered for a moment and said, "Perhaps everything you said was true, but the same truths, if combined in different orders and different ways, may result in different and even opposite conclusions.
"Do you know my greatest suspicion of your whole theory? Your passiveness. You were almost led by the possessed miners, the Nepenthe believers, and the spies of the Covenant Alliance, and you could not stop the situation from escalating at all.
"Such passiveness, blindness, and weakness are not in line with the Lead Eunuch Wang Xi who could manipulate the 'Three Saints, Four Rapscallions, One Monk, and One Emperor' like toys, nor Long Yangjun who tricked me and the entire federation and who did not confess that she was a 'spy of the Pangu Clan' until the last moment!
"Therefore, is what you said really the truth? Did you really want to save lives in the emergency out of sheer kindness, not expecting that things would gradually go out of control? Or maybe, are there invisible strings behind the possessed miners, the Nepenthe believers, and the spies of the Covenant Alliance, and all those strings eventually end in your hands after twists and turns?"
Long Yangjun rolled her brilliant eyes again and again. "Why would I do that intentionally? Could I gain anything by gathering such a bunch of people?"
"Yes, you could."
Li Yao nodded his head and extended three fingers. "Firstly, you could use them to conduct your 'social experiment' to explore the origins of the Covenant Alliance and consider if you should take the Covenant Alliance's side. Secondly, you could attract the spies of the Covenant Alliance with Nepenthe and learn their techniques, which could significantly make up for the shortage of your knowledge from the hereditary memories. Thirdly, only by establishing Nepenthe could you infiltrate the forgotten areas and win the trust of the residents of the five-digit towns, thereby locating the primeval relics that were buried twenty to thirty thousand meters below the ground in the shortest amount of time!
"I do not know if you have any deeper purposes yet, but the three benefits alone were enough for you to risk establishing Nepenthe!"
Long Yangjun listened in silence and remarked without showing any emotion, "It does sound reasonable. Too bad that everything is just your speculation. You do not have any proof."
"No, I don't. I have no doubt that I can't find any proof either."
Looking at Long Yangjun, Li Yao said solemnly, "So, I can only ask you as a friend—is my speculation correct?"
Long Yangjun bit her lips softly and stared at Li Yao poignantly, to the point that her tears were almost rolling down like pearls. But suddenly, she burst into laughter, her pensiveness gone, while she kicked crazily and clapped her hands. "Monster Li truly deserves to be Monster Li. Even such disguises cannot fool you? As I expected, your usual stupidity is just your camouflage, and your appearance right now is the real you.
"Assuming—listen closely, I'm saying that it's just an assumption—that your guess is correct, and I did slightly 'enlighten' and 'push' somebody in the beginning to make the whole incident develop toward the direction in my favor, what will you do, and what can you do?
"Fight me and even kill me? Can you solve the problem by killing me? Besides me, thousands of spies of the Covenant Alliance are secretly establishing 'Nepenthes' large and small in the entire Imperium of True Human Beings!
"Admit it, Li Yao, the battle you are faced with this time is different from any of the battles in the past hundred years!
"In the past, you were faced with specific enemies. However ferocious, powerful, and overwhelming they were, problems would be solved and the world would be saved as long as they were taken down!
"In the Flying Star Sector, you killed Xiao Xuance and stopped his 'Grand Illusionary Plan'. In the Blood Demon Sector, you killed Elder Nether Spring and won Jin Tuyi's support, shattering the 'Spore Stratagem'. After you returned to the Star Glory Federation, you killed Lu Zui and Zhou Zhengdao, hehe, saving the federation yet again and facilitating the birth of the New Federation. In your second return to the federation, you defeated Extraterrestrial Devil Mo Xuan and killed Heiye Ming and Extraterrestrial Devil Lu Qingchen, haha, saving the world at the critical moment once again!
"It's always like this. It's been simple and straightforward every time. It's almost like a virtual game where a supervillain is standing at the deepest part of every level, and you will solve all the problems after the supervillains are defeated.
"But not this time, Vulture Li Yao. It is not so simple this time.
"Even if you kill me, you will not settle the problems of 'Nepenthe'. Even if you kill Blackstar the Great, a second ambitious schemer who is greedier and more brutal than him will show up. You may be able to completely destroy the four Kurfürst families, but it's impossible for you to destroy all the warlords and nobles. You may sneak into the Covenant Alliance on your own, crawl in the ventilation tubes and the sewers a hundred times, and eventually execute the master of the Covenant Alliance, but, hehe, you can never completely eradicate the soil from which the Covenant Alliance is born.
"Perhaps what Prime Minister Dongfang Wang said before his death was right. This time, your enemy is no longer a specific schemer, tyrant, or dictator, but the boundless universe itself and the dark side of the civilization of mankind that is illuminated by the stars of the infinite universe.
"I'm very curious and looking forward to the result. Can you really defeat the cold sea of stars and the dark side of humanity?"
Chapter 2366: Attack the Great Iron Plants! |
