by <unknown>
He stored enough food for a hundred years. Then, it was unfortunate of him to have perished and turned into a spectral Cultivator. Spectral Cultivators do not need food or water and can be sustained with crystals only. Therefore, a huge amount of food has been left in this place.
Air, water, and food were all sufficient. Li Yao was greatly relieved. He began to search for a second exit.
Yan Xinjian prepared to live here for decades. The garbage and the defecations had to be dumped in a certain way. So, there must be a certain exit in this place!
Li Yao examined the training room carefully and finally found the channel for garbage and defecations an hour later.
However, the channel gave him a headache.
It did not lead to the outside world but an incinerator nearby.
The garbage and defecations would be burnt into ash in the incinerator, and the ash would be blown away by the rune arrays of the wind class later.
There were nine tubes to discharge the ash, all of which were the size of fingers. There was no way that a human being could crawl out through them.
This is a dead end. I have to leave through the front door.
There are only two ways to leave through the front door. Firstly, I can blow up the door with strength that is even higher than that of a minor apocalypse.
Or secondly, I have to find out what exactly the Dream Breaking Arts is.
Li Yao found almost twenty crystal processors in the training room.
However, except for the mainframe crystal processors controlling the various rune arrays inside the training room, which boasted tight defense rune arrays that blocked them from the mice, the other crystal processors had been mostly deformed by the mice.
But it was not a problem for Li Yao. He unplugged the storage chips of the broken crystal processors and studied the structure of rune arrays for half a day to determine the storage mechanism.
Then, he assembled a small convertor and connected the storage chips to the crystal processor of the Mystic Skeleton Battlesuit.
Let me see what Yan Xinjian has left in his crystal processors!
Li Yao rubbed his hands. His telepathic thoughts rushed into Yan Xinjian's storage chips along the crystal processor.
Chapter 765: Yan Xinjian's Training Log |
The storage chips did not have any passwords or barriers. Li Yao's trouble in cracking them was saved.
Several storage chips had been left with a few holes by the mice. The information contained in them was incomplete.
However, the remaining ocean of information was already a great eye-opener for Li Yao, who felt that he had climbed on a mountain of treasures.
Most of the jade chips recorded Yan Xinjian's training notes. They were the detailed explanations, suspicions, and reflections based on his own understanding after he studied thousands of techniques profoundly.
Not only did he explain the Cultivation arts in great detail, he had also recorded the changes in his body and soul. Besides words, there were also pictures, videos, and data detailing his training after he grasped the techniques!
This is indeed invaluable treasure!
A Cultivator in the peak of the Nascent Soul Stage had analyzed every detail in his training process and summarized his lifelong training, including his experience during the breakthrough toward the Divinity Transformation Stage. Every event had been elaborated on!
Li Yao browsed through it quickly. He felt that he had fallen into a giant kaleidoscope. He felt that every word in the notes was as precious as gold. His eyes glimmered, and his heart was racing while he read on!
Since Yan Xinjian lived below the ground for more than a hundred years, he had left too many notes for Li Yao to finish reading so quickly. Therefore, Li Yao put the notes aside and checked other things.
Soon, a document named 'training log' caught his attention.
He vaguely sensed that Yan Xinjian's secret must have been kept inside.
The training log was not a journal but a work record like a logbook for sailors where the status of Yan Xinjian's daily training was noted down.
Yan Xinjian seemed to be a taciturn, meticulous man. The training log in the first few years was very brief. The subjects were mainly his body status and the training arrangements for the day. The several years of records were all alike. They were boring, dull, and as precise as machines.
However, several years later, short comments appeared in the log. His feelings and his remarks on the Cultivation arts were involved.
"I haven't made any progress in the 'Upper Clear Flame Manipulation Arts' for three months. What a headache."
"'Truth Returning Technique' is purely garbage. It was really a waste of time for me to eliminate two pirate gangs in order to get it!"
Li Yao speculated that, to live in solitude ten thousand meters below the ground and be secluded in such a narrow space with only mice as companions, the mental pressure must have been very high.
Even a Nascent Soul Stage Cultivator might suffer from mental illnesses when they lived alone for several years.
As Li Yao expected, when he got to the later chapters of the log, Yan Xinjian became more and more depressed and agitated when he could not find an approach to break into the Divinity Transformation Stage more than ten years later.
Sometimes, there were two words in the log for months—'Same old!'
Sometimes, he would be berating many Cultivation arts and ancient classics for days, claiming that they were not worth practicing at all.
Sometimes, he gnashed his teeth, cursing some people who must've been his enemies.
Sometimes, he kept repeating the name of a woman, 'Yun Suoyu'. He swore that the woman was a haunting witch that would not rest in peace even though she had died but kept showing up in the room every day.
Based on the context, Li Yao inferred that Yun Suoyu was his wife who was killed by him. She was also the 'Xiao Yu' that the white mice repeated.
After twenty years of mental crisis, the log was suddenly written in a different style. It became positive and even started bragging about Yan Xinjian.
Yan Xinjian had finally found a way to enter the Divinity Transformation Stage.
"The last step. I'm about to succeed. The entire Flying Star Sector will kneel before me!"
It was the last chapter of the log that was in continuity with the previous ones.
The next chapter jumped to a month later, which was written in an extremely crazy style.
"You sick bi*ch!
"Why? Why did you have to show up and stare at me at the crucial moment when I was about to break into the Divinity Transformation Stage?
"Why were you smiling? What was so funny?
"How did you crawl into the place anyway? How? Speak. Speak!
"Don't smile. Don't smile! I'm going to kill you! I'm going to kill you!
"You made my breakthrough into the Divinity Transformation Stage fail. You made me mentally deranged and heavily wounded. I'm going to die in this wretched place!
"You made me end up like this, a ghost hiding in scrap iron and copper!
"I failed. I have failed!"
Although hundreds of years had passed and Li Yao was merely reading the log on the light beam, he could still read intense hatred and regret between the lines.
It seems that…
In order to find an excuse to get out of Heavenly Saints City, Yan Xinjian killed his wife before he left.
Maybe his wife had not cheated on him at all. This is certainly a story with a lot of twists and turns. But the bottom line is, Yan Xinjian felt sorry for his wife and was ashamed when he thought of her.
When he finished the arrangements for everything after decades and finally escaped to the underground, preparing to break into the Divinity Transformation Stage, the shame in the bottom of his heart gradually emerged because of the long solitude and let him see his wife's illusion occasionally.
Moreover, at the crucial moment when he was about to break into the Divinity Transform
ation Stage, the wife he killed long ago reappeared in his brain, which made him lose control over his mind and got him killed because of mental derangement.
After he perished, his soul transformed into a spectral Cultivator and hid in an artificial body. The vacant one month must be the period in which he turned from a normal Cultivator into a spectral Cultivator.
Li Yao read on patiently.
The log that followed proved his deduction.
The focus of Yan Xinjian's training suddenly shifted from regular techniques to methods to build up soul power for spectral Cultivators.
However, training in the form of a spectral Cultivator was only Yan Xinjian's backup plan after all. Most of the techniques he knew were for living persons, and he did not know much about the training of the spectral Cultivators.
Therefore, in the more than a hundred years that followed, he could only stop his soul from retrograding but could not recreate his formidability in the old days.
He could not even return to the peak of the Nascent Soul Stage, not to mention breaking into the Divinity Transformation Stage.
Two hundred years passed. In the last fifty years, Yan Xinjian's training log became more and more disordered and was barely readable. In the messy lines, about five different characters were narrating from their perspective at the same time.
Are you serious? Yan Xinjian, the old ghost, suffered from schizophrenia after living alone for two hundred years below the ground?
Judging from the tone and the style of writing, Li Yao distinguished five different characters that were composing the log, or rather, five facets of Yan Xinjian's mind that turned into his clones and stated everything on their own.
One of the clones were still dreaming about breaking into the Divinity Transformation Stage and uniting the Flying Star Sector. It kept repeating that it would cultivate to the ultimate level, rush out of the underground, unite Spider Den, and sweep the Flying Star Sector with the strength of Spider Den.
Another clone was grasped by desperation. It chewed on Liu the Prier's Dark Forest Theory all day and put forward a lot of assumptions and deductions. It also came up with several possible social structures of alien civilizations and the means of war that those civilizations would resort to against humankind.
Many civilizations were as vivid as real things in the deductions. Their strange means of attack made Li Yao scared and soaked in sweat, too.
One other clone was living in regret and completely abandoned training. It grieved over everything in the past and only hoped that the wheel of time could be reversed to the day when his wife was killed. It would extinguish all the ambitions and schemes and simply live a peaceful life with his wife.
Only one of the clones remained absolutely calm and pondered brand new Cultivation arts.
One of the Cultivation arts could compress the soul to the minimum into the shape of a needle before darting it into the brain of the prey so that the control over the prey's head would be taken over.
In short, it was a secret art of 'possession'.
The second Cultivation art was a domineering Cultivation art based on his experience in Cultivation and more than ten techniques that he had grasped. It was named 'Dream Breaking Arts'!
However, there were back doors in the Dream Breaking Arts. The Cultivation art was authentic, but when the trainer practiced to between the fourth level and the fifth level, their brain would endure a fierce storm, and their soul power would be greatly weakened!
From the general logic of the Dream Breaking Arts, it was not exactly a backdoor, because the brain storm was necessary to purge and cleanse the brain so that further training could proceed.
Yan Xinjian was indeed up to something!
Li Yao thought through Yan Xinjian's scheme very quickly. He immediately felt creepy and applauded Bai Xinghe's wisdom.
Yan Xinjian's scheme was quite sordid. He knew that he could not live forever as a spectral Cultivator and that he could not regain his previous Cultivation no matter what.
Besides, the electromagnetic environment of the outside world was complicated and far less stable than ten thousand meters below the ground. He could live hundreds of years in this place, but if he left and was exposed to sunlight, he might really kick the bucket thirty or fifty years later. That was if his hordes of enemies had not come looking for revenge first.
Therefore, Yan Xinjian decided to keep hiding below the ground and practiced the art of 'possession' in secret.
After all, he had left some bait outside.
As long as somebody found the Star Prier's House and his message, they would certainly be tempted to explore the training room of the 'best expert of the Flying Star Sector'.
Once somebody entered the secret training room, if they were not capable enough, Yan Xinjian could possess them on the spot and reappear with a brand-new body.
If the newcomer was strong, Yan Xinjian would trick the prey into practicing the Dream Breaking Arts. When the prey reached between the fourth level and the fourth level and suffered from a brain storm, Yan Xinjian would suddenly attack them while their soul power was at its weakest. Odds were quite high that he could occupy a new body!
Thankfully, it was Bai Xinghe who discovered Yan Xinjian's training room. Boss Bai is truly Boss Bai. He held back his desire for decades and ignored Yan Xinjian's training room!
If it were anybody else, they would have been possessed by Yan Xinjian already!
Chapter 766: Ironic Truth |
Li Yao wiped the sweat off his forehead and kept reading.
Yan Xinjian had unhurriedly implemented his great plan of possession step by step.
As time went by, Yan Xinjian's secret art of possession had become more and more sharp and brutal, and the Dream Breaking Arts were gradually perfected, too. Except for the brain storm that everybody had to experience when they were between the fourth level and the fifth level, it was indeed a powerful super technique.
The data had reached around a hundred years ago. But the training journal came to an abrupt halt.
When new chapters appeared, it was already more than half a year later.
The first new chapter had only two words.
"Mice! Mice!"
The second chapter did not appear until three months later. There was only one inexplicable paragraph in it.
"There are no other solutions. This is the last resort. Thankfully, I have many mice."
Li Yao swallowed and read through all the remaining log patiently in the next hour.
Although he had been prepared, he was still dumbfounded when he learned everything that happened later.
He glanced at the squeaking mice around him. The mice had all learned of his toughness and did not dare get too close to him.
The red mice were gritting their teeth in clattering noises. They glared at him with their tails straightened like spears.
The green mice were rolling their eyes nonstop. There was no telling what kind of schemes they were concocting.
The blue mice had deep eyes. They stared at him pitifully and told in silence the desperation that had echoed for five hundred years.
Li Yao sighed and suddenly felt truly sympathetic for Yan Xinjian.
No matter what crimes he had committed years ago, his ending seemed a bit too miserable.
Li Yao imported Yan Xinjian's training log into his mini crystal processor. Then, he brought the log to the meditation chamber at the bottom of the training room.
Li Yao took a deep breath and entered the deep meditative state amid the prolonged humming sounds.
The information that he had collected just now was all glittering inside his brain. The general picture of everything and the portrait of Yan Xinjian's life gradually took shape.
…
Five hundred years ago, Yan Xinjian used to be most famous genius in training of the Flying Star Sector.
He was born in a middle-class family and revealed his talents when he was very young. He was carefully educated by the six sec
ts of Heavenly Saints City and advanced into the Nascent Soul Stage when he was only a hundred years old. During the battles to eliminate space pirates, he made a lot of contributions and was promoted to the vice commander of the coalition fleet of the six sects of Heavenly Saints City. He was responsible for the safety of Heavenly Saints City and the core area of the Flying Star Sector.
At that time, Yan Xinjian's rise was an out-and-out miracle. Many civilians considered him to be their role model.
However, his rise ended there, because his supervisor was also a rarely-seen genius in training. The two of them were of similar ages and Cultivation, but their backgrounds were vastly different. His supervisor was born in a noble family with parents who were both celebrities of the Flying Star Sector.
If things went on like that, his supervisor could live another two hundred years with his Cultivation. The 'vice' in Yan Xinjian's title would never be taken away.
It was not hard to guess how depressing it must have been for Yan Xinjian, the super genius who had been used to leading the vanguard and making the call in everything, to work as the deputy of somebody else for hundreds of years!
A long time later, Yan Xinjian, who had lost his mind by then, left a lot of criticism about his supervisor in his training log. Jealousy, depression, hatred, fury… All the feelings were written between the lines.
In Yan Xinjian's opinion, his Cultivation, capability, and charisma were all better than his supervisor's, and the sole reason why his supervisor was commanding the coalition fleet of the six sects of Heavenly Saints City was the man's background!
Envy could tie up a person like a viper. Even the expert in the Nascent Soul Stage could not free himself from it after decades.
Then, one day, Yan Xinjian received a detailed map of the underground fortress of Spider Den, as well as part of the permissions that were known as 'Spider Key', by accident.
It was the duty of the coalition fleet of the six sects of Heavenly Saints City to deal with the space pirates. Naturally, Yan Xinjian knew everything about Spider Den. He was aware that a lot of secret treasures of the Star Ocean Imperium were probably hidden inside the underground fortress.