Forty Millenniums of Cultivation, page 979
Graveyard! Bug eggs! Wine tanks! Mist! Monster!
Wu Suiyun's few words brought the ten Nascent Soul Stage Cultivators to a mysterious, suffocating world.
Short-tempered, Ba Xiaoyu scratched his face and asked earnestly, "What was the place exactly? Was it really the burial ground of the primeval creatures? What was inside the 'wine tanks'? Were there really monsters inside?"
"We don't know," Wu Suiyun replied bitterly, "because we were assaulted right before we planned to break a 'wine tank'!
"What assaulted us were monsters the size of a basin that looked like both spiders and crabs with a particularly long bone tail behind them!
"Meng Chixin and I had travelled in the Ancient Sages Sector for many years and left our footprints in the most dangerous lands in the world. We had seen too many cruel and brutal animals, beasts, and monsters, but never had we seen such a weird and disgusting thing before.
"The monster was extremely fast. It could also envelop itself with the vague mist that it spurted out from the ten or so protruding holes on its back to hide itself and its scent. We could barely lock onto them despite the senses of the Divinity Transformation Stage.
"Also, there was a great number of them. Almost twenty of such monsters jumped out from everywhere in the graveyard at us. Caught unprepared, my body and Meng Chixin's were both stung by their bone tails heavily many times!
"We both sensed that they had injected something into our bodies through the tails!"
"Was it poison?" Ba Xiaoyu widened his eyes as he exclaimed. "Was it lethal poison that killed you both?"
Wu Suiyun sighed softly and shook her head. "It would've been acceptable if the thing was just an incurable poison. I wouldn't be whining about it after a hundred years if so.
"At that time, Meng Chixin and I both thought that we had been poisoned and were about to die.
"At the time of life and death, the two of us both grew ruthless. We summoned spiritual energy without considering anything else and went through quite some trouble to finally annihilate and obliterate the long-tailed monsters that looked like hybrids of spiders and crabs!
"However, the 'wine tanks' that were densely distributed in the black swamp seemed to have sensed the immense spiritual waves. They exploded one after another.
"New monsters were being bred from inside!
"Seeing that it was no good, Meng Chixin and I fought to retreat. Then, at the cost of some damaged magical equipment, we blew up the pathway from the graveyard to the upper floor. We also collapsed the few floors above later in order to completely bury the 'graveyard'!
"While we were sabotaging the building, both of us felt that our head was dizzy and our soul was unsteady. Even our limbs seemed to be leaving our control. We knew that it was a sign that the poison was attacking.
"The poison was extremely weird and had never been seen before. No matter how many antidotes we devoured and however hard we tried to suppress it with massive spiritual energy, we failed to hold back the indescribably odd feeling.
"Meng Chixin and I did not dare linger in the devils' palace any longer. We fled all the way back to the deities' warship and sealed the barrier to the devils' palace again without leaving any gaps. We even added another twenty or so new barriers with our own techniques before we were finally relieved.
"At that time, we both felt that the world was shaking and that our soul was falling apart. Some sort of strength that had been restricted for hundreds of thousands of years seemed to be trying to burst out of our body!
"Expand. Expand. Expand. We both felt that our internal organs, limbs, veins, nerves, and everything on our body was expanding nonstop!
"We knew that it was not an illusion due to the poison but something happening in reality because we could see each other clearly. We were both expanding crazily like balloons being blown up!
"Our skin was ripped apart, and our flesh and blood bloated. Even new bones and veins had grown out of our bodies!
"In the blink of an eye, we grew from the normal size of a human being to giants more than ten meters tall at a visible speed!
"Not only did we grow larger in size, we also had brand-new organs that we had never seen before!
"I felt that my head was aching terribly, and my skull was producing cracking noises as if it had been pierced through by a flying sword. Only a moment later, a new eye grew out at the center of my forehead!
"I have thought about the colors and pictures that the new eye saw for a hundred years, but I still can't describe them to you today!
"Meng Chixin was the same. He grew two thick horns on his head, and his eyes expanded to ten times their normal size. His pupils were encircled by more than ten dark gold rings that were fluctuating nonstop. The brilliance beaming out of his eyes seemed enough to burn a hole in the hardest rock!"
Chapter 1508: Devil-Sealing War! |
Wu Suiyun's voice was shaking. She could not help but extend her hands of pure spiritual energy toward her translucent head, as if she still could not forget the weird, excruciating pain even though she had been a ghost for a hundred years!
Ripples were spreading out from Meng Chixin's soul, too, making it as unpredictable as smoke billowing in the wind. He said coldly, "Wu Suiyun and I both observed each other's changes. We were both tortured by the flowing magma inside our bodies! Expanding from less than two meters tall to almost twenty meters tall in just one moment was an extremely gruesome process that drained all the strength in our flesh, blood, and soul. We couldn't have felt more exhausted, drained, and hungry!
"However, the changes to our bodies were not the scariest part.
"The weirdest changes took place in our souls and feelings!
"We felt that a poisonous fire was burning blatantly in our soul, destroying our feelings and corrupting them little by little!
"You will not be able to understand the feeling unless you experience it in person. All in all, we gradually lost our sense of delight, hatred, panic, fear, anger, and all other emotions. They were all replaced by tranquility. The most extreme tranquility!
"Logically, after discovering that we had ended up becoming horrible giants, we should've felt panicked or desperate and even counterattacked!
"However, except for the initial struggle, the two of us somehow gradually accepted everything later. All of a sudden, we lost the notions of 'fear', 'panic', and 'desperation'. We felt that we were sinking to the bottom of a deep blue ocean, where we were enshrouded by seaweed and jellyfish into an enormous cocoon. When the cocoon broke apart, we would be reborn into something new!
"Our memories and self-awareness of the past were fading away. A new 'will' and 'destiny' was gradually blossoming in the deepest parts of our souls!
"We were about to be completely transformed into a new life form by the venom!"
Everybody felt creepy as they listened to the story.
The weird liquid that altered someone's body and turned them into another life form was indeed ten thousand times more dreadful than the most lethal poison!
After a moment of deep thought, Master Bitter Cicada observed, "According to what you have just said, the effect of the mysterious poison sounds like the arts of 'possession' adopted by the evil Cultivators.
"However, if it were 'possession', there should've been two souls that were even more powerful than yours, which was apparently not the case. It doesn't make sense."
"It was definitely not 'possession'!" Meng Chixin replied affirmatively. "Wu Suiyun and I were both Divinity Transformation Stage Cultivators. We naturally knew a thing or two about the secret arts of possession. During a 'possession', the victim's body will be occupied by the intruder, and the soul of the victim will probably be eliminated forever!
"However, the mutations that happened to our body did not eliminate our soul but caused weird changes to it. We were transformed into something that boasted our own will but did not appear to be ourselves. We were a different life and a different species!"
"Your experiences are truly unbelievable, seniors!" Ba Xiaoyu the Beggar widened his eyes and asked, "What happened later? Were you transformed?"
The answer to the question was obvious, but nobody had the time to nitpick. They simply waited for the two Divinity Transformation Stage Cultivators to answer while holding their breath.
Embarrassed, Meng Chixin said, "At that time, we were both in peril. I knew that some sort of tough primeval devils must've invaded our bodies in ways that we couldn't understand!
"They had been sealed beneath the snow field for more than a hundred thousand years perhaps exactly for that moment, the time of their reincarnation! If we couldn't stop them, they were certainly going to escape and savage the world of human beings!
"With the Cultivation of the Divinity Transformation Stage, and the terrible enhancement of the primeval devils, it would be practically impossible for anybody to stop two such dreadful monsters!
"Also, thousands of 'wine tanks', in which the monsters that contained the venom were stored, were in the 'graveyard' at the bottom level of the devils' palace. There was no telling how many human beings they could transform into primeval devils!
"In such a case, chances were that the entire Ancient Sages Sector, both the Great Qian Dynasty and the prairies, would be destroyed because of the recklessness of Wu Suiyun and me!
"Hell would descend upon the human world, and devils would walk the earth. All the living creatures would either turn into devils or end up as food and slaves for the devils!
"I knew that I had made a huge mistake and couldn't have regretted it more, but there was nothing that I could do to stop the mutations inside my body.
"Right then, Wu Suiyun suddenly roared and crashed into me, showing the sign that she was going to kill me!
"I was knocked against the wall, and a bloody hole in my abdomen had been made by her sharp claw. My internal organs were broken apart, but the excruciating pain finally refreshed me and awakened my self-awareness. The irritating feeling caused by the mutations inside my body was gradually suppressed, too!
"Looking at Wu Suiyun's burning eyes, I immediately understood what she was thinking.
"The two of us had been invaded by the devils, which we definitely couldn't get rid of on our own.
"Once we lost control of ourselves, the devils would certain manipulate our bodies to break the seals and unleash the rest of the monsters.
"Or rather, the devils would simply go to the prairies or the central plateaus to kidnap some of the strong Cultivators and send them to the bottom level in the devils' palace, thereby establishing an army of devils!
"Right then, there was only one way to stop them!
"The two of us would die together and seal the only two devils that had lunged out of the devils' palace in our corpses!
"Although Wu Suiyun and I were fighting for the interests of the Great Qian Dynasty and the Dark Cloud Prairies on different sides, the Ancient Sages Sector was our mutual home. Our families and successors were on both the prairies and the central plateaus. There was absolutely no way that our world could be reduced to a paradise of the devils!
"Since it was our fault, we should correct it with our own hands!
"Eventually, we managed to control our continuously expanding and mutating bodies with the last bit of self-awareness to attack each other until we both died!"
Meng Chixin talked very briefly about their death.
However, the ten Nascent Soul Stage Cultivators including Li Yao could totally imagine the most soul-stirring and yet unknown battle that had taken place under the ice a hundred years ago!
On the surface, it was a battle between two Divinity Transformation Stage Cultivators, but in fact, they were attacking the mysterious devils to save the world with their life as a weapon based on their pride and dignity as human Cultivators!
Li Yao, who knew part of the truth and understood that the devils belonged to the 'Pangu Clan', felt that his heart was pounding and his blood was boiling after hearing the story!
The pride of humanity was never to be conquered!
Even in such a secluded place as the Ancient Sages Sector, some human Cultivators had still been fighting against the Pangu Clan in their own way a hundred years ago!
"We are here," Wu Suiyun said in a low voice. "Ahead is the place where Meng Chixin and I died. It is also the place where the underground palace is sealed. For the convenience of research, we haven't touched anything here over the past hundred years!"
Li Yao was refreshed and glanced around.
He found himself in an enormous cone-shaped building that looked like the inside of a hollow horn.
Li Yao had once seen similar structures at the front ends of some warships of the Nuwa Clan on Kunlun.
It was a mobile cabin specifically designed for boarding battles and assaults. They were like extensible 'tusks'. Hollow in the middle, they could accommodate a large amount of magical equipment for close-distance battles such as crystal suits, Colossi, and various kinds of weapons.
When engaged with the enemy, if the warship had the advantage in close-distance battles and hoped to break into the enemy's warship for such battles, it was possible for the warship to attract the hostile warships and fortresses with the immense force triggered by the magnetic units around the warship or pull the warship itself over to the enemy!
When the two parties were attached to an extremely short distance, such 'assault fangs' would pierce out. With the super alloy structures and the attack rune arrays carved on the surface, they would tear apart the spiritual shield and other defenses on the enemy's warship. Then they would penetrate into the interior part of the enemy and even reach the most vulnerable key part!
The front ends of the assault fangs would blossom like flowers, and the waiting warriors would march forward without any hindrance and launch a strike on the enemy's core directly!
Everything made sense now.
This particular Nuwa warship had been aware that there was a secret laboratory of the Pangu Clan deep below the ice and that some terrible experiments were being conducted there.
However, due to the lack of sufficient orbital attack approaches, the warship could only adopt the most simple and straightforward approach by smashing itself into the ground and drilling through the rocks. It hit the shell of the Pangu Clan's secret laboratory directly and even pierced through the laboratory's defenses into its core with the 'assault fangs'!
That was why the warriors of the Nuwa Clan and the Pangu Clan had fought fiercely on the Nuwa warship and in the laboratory of the Pangu Clan simultaneously!
The ten Nascent Soul Stage Cultivators and the two Divinity Transformation Stage Cultivators seemed to be walking in the middle of a cone-shaped cave. The further they walked forward, the narrower the path became. At the front end of the cone stood a round, bronze gate on which countless helical runes had been carved and were swallowing and releasing light like tides.
The bronze gate was almost forty meters tall. As splendid and magnificent as a gate that truly led to the deities' realm, it was broad and high enough for the strongest warriors of the Nuwa Clan and the super large Colossi to pass through quickly.
After the rusting of more than a hundred thousand years, the runes on the gate were somewhat obscure, and the tide-like brightness looked rather lackluster.
Li Yao suddenly had a weird feeling.
The 'gate' was slowly dying, and the barriers attached to the gate were getting weaker and weaker.
There was no telling whether it was simply because of the passage of time or because something was attacking and corrupting the gate from the other side.
On the right side of the bronze gate, two tall, huge corpses were leaning against the wall. They were both in weird shapes and utterly deformed because of their fierce battle.
Chapter 1509: Mutation of the Junk Genes |
The two corpses were exactly as Meng Chixin and Wu Suiyun had described.
One of them was around thirteen meters tall, shorter but plumper. A third eye that had already dried protruded out of the forehead. The arms of the corpse were particularly long, and long bone spurs were growing out of the two sides of the arms like long blades. Even the joints on the legs had contorted to bend forward instead of backward.
The other corpse was about sixteen meters tall. It was a healthy, muscular male. A circle of horns rose up from its head like tumors. There were also two horns rising up from the temples like two sabers. Moreover, tremendous bizarre-looking appendages were growing on the shoulder blades, elbows, and hips. The appendages on the shoulder blades were particularly delicate and connected, as if they were a second pair of arms that had grown out.
The two enormous bodies were very similar to the bodies of the Pangu Clan that were everywhere to be seen on the Nuwa warship. Yet, their flesh and blood appeared rather 'fresh' and did not explode into dust when new air flooded in all of a sudden.
Although their faces had been extremely twisted, some of Wu Suiyun and Meng Chixin's features could still be vaguely distinguished on the parts on their faces that were not blocked by scales and bone spurs.
Also, on their hands, feet, and some other body parts, except for the expansion in size, traces of the Pangu Clan had not been revealed. It was like combining the body of an enormous human being with the body of a member of the Pangu Clan. Those parts must have been on the verge of mutation but never completed the process.
The stomachs of both dead bodies had been cut open, and their guts had been ripped apart and burnt up into ash by the fire of spiritual energy.
The broken bodies were still silently telling the goriness of the battle a hundred years ago!
After hearing the astonishing changes that had happened when the two Divinity Transformation Stage Cultivators visited the place, and witnessing their bloating bodies in person, all the Nascent Soul Stage Cultivators were caught in a prolonged silence. They could not have been more stunned by the shocking facts!
Li Yao was also greatly disturbed!
The Pangu Clan!
