by <unknown>
However, her real appearance was much plainer than he had expected. Her hair was somewhat yellow, her skin was rough, and her facial features were unattractive. Other than the scarlet mole on the top left corner of her lips, there was absolutely nothing about her that called for attention.
She was wearing male clothes and a pair of thin-skinned boots. Her waistband was tightened, and her shoulders were broad, but she was not covering her breasts at all. Her garment brought an unusual handsomeness to her.
After blinking, Li Yao felt that he was already forgetting what Special Agent Long looked like.
On second thought, such an image did befit a super assassin from the Ghost Character. Only such a face could allow her to hide in the crowd without alarming anyone.
As for the mole above her lips and her large breasts, they were obviously features that she had intentionally exposed in order to leave a deep impression on the observers. When she was obliged to hide herself, she only needed to cover the mole and bind her breasts in order to change into a completely different person!
Li Yao could not discern the Cultivation of Special Agent Long and Qi Changsheng's representative yet.
However, by simple analysis, those qualified to participate in the secret meeting on behalf of the two unparalleled rapscallions were certainly their most trusted subordinates, just like Han Yuantai had been sent by Han Baling, the Regent of Cloud Qin.
How weak could their trusted subordinates possibly be?
Han Yuantai was in the middle level of the Nascent Soul Stage. The two representatives who stood for Wang Xi and Qi Changsheng should be at least in the beginning level of the Nascent Soul Stage.
Two in the beginning level of the Nascent Soul Stage, one in the middle level, and Wan Mingzhu, who was a mysterious super Nascent Soul Stage Cultivator. This place also happened to be Wan Mingzhu's home field, with countless skeletons and zombies lurking nearby deep inside the undersea city. Li Yao discovered that he was no match for them.
"Let's begin."
Inside the palace, Wan Mingzhu spoke to Special Agent Long.
Special Agent Long observed the size of the palace, as if she was trying to find a suitable place. Then, she walked to the center of the palace and fell on one of her knees. The four Cosmos Rings that she was wearing on her hands were glittering nonstop as she retrieved dozens of components and tossed them onto the ground in crisp sounds.
Li Yao's eyes suddenly shone. The components could obvious be divided into two parts according to their different styles. Some of them seemed to be made of red copper. They were relatively crude and shabby. It appeared that they had been crafted manually a long, long time ago.
The other components, in comparison, were glittering and showed the flawless, errorless features on the surface, indicating a high capability in fashioning!
It meant that if the component was a right-angle one, the angle of the component would be absolutely ninety degrees without the slightest slant. If it was a straight rail, the component would be absolutely straight, and there would not be the tiniest error however it was measured!
Such magical equipment had obviously been crafted through with technology far more advanced than the technology of the Ancient Sages Sector!
They were either from the Pangu civilization or the Nuwa Clan!
Chapter 1453: Divine Palace! |
Li Yao observed the flawless components carefully and scanned the spiritual stripe and the runes on them.
After staying on Kunlun for five years, he had gained a preliminary understanding about the rune systems of the Pangu Clan and the Nuwa Clan. Although he could not figure out the exact meaning of all the runes yet, he knew about the subtle differences between their styles.
The Pangu Clan's runes, just like their buildings, were so strict that it bordered on rigidness. Right angles and straight lines were used to form the delicate objects. Arcs and circles were barely adopted.
The runes of the Nuwa Clan, on the other hand, had a lot of twists and turns. Stripes resembling the clouds and actinomorphic lines were often used, which in many occasions made the runes seem disordered. They seemed to be filled with boundless vigor that could not be vented elsewhere.
On the 'core' that Special Agent Long had retrieved from the Cosmos Ring, rune circles in the shape of waves were blossoming, which was an obvious feature of the rune system of the Nuwa Clan.
It meant that the Ancient Sages Sector, which was hidden in the dark nebula, did not escape from the search of the coalition army of the Nuwa Clan and human beings in the God-Sealing War hundreds of thousands of years ago, and a great battle had once taken place there, right?
It did make sense. The so-called Twelve Gold Statues of Cloud Qin were obviously Colossi, the super magical equipment that the Nuwa Clan specifically crafted for human beings so that human beings would be capable to compete with the Pangu Clan.
If this place had never been discovered by the coalition army of the Nuwa Clan and human beings, it would have been impossible for the Twelve Gold Statues of Cloud Qin to show up.
Pondering, Li Yao focused his attention on observation.
The entire ground was filled with the components. The components that were crafted in the primitive and crude ways adopted a lot of mortise-and-tenon-like structures with many arced and straight-lined rails on which countless sophisticated rune arrays had been carved.
It was obvious that the runes had been left by human beings of later generations. Li Yao could tell that their function was to decompress certain highly focused information. They were similar to the parsing rune arrays carved on jade chips, except that they were a hundred times more complicated.
On one of her knees, Special Agent Long assembled most of the components unhurriedly into a circular rail about five meters in diameter. There were four bizarre-shaped units that looked like toads opening their mouths to the ceiling around the rail. They appeared to be where the crystals were inserted.
As expected, Special Agent Long retrieved four crimson crystals the size of a fist from the Cosmos Rings and placed them into the four metal toads' wide-open mouths respectively. Half of the crystal fitted in every mouth perfectly.
Hum…
The circular rails shivered for a moment, and the runes shone one after another. Not only were they flashing on the rail, they even floated into the air, yielding a half-round shield of light where thousands of runes were rotating.
Special Agent Long bit her lip hard, her face solemn. There was obscure expectation in her eyes as she piled the highly delicate components on the fusiform 'core' one after another, combining them into an octagonal, glittering device that looked like a crystal.
Han Yuantai and Qi Changsheng's representative both held their breath as they gazed at the device in Special Agent Long's hand.
Wan Mingzhu did not have any breath in the first place, but two frozen ghostly flames were also beaming out of her eyes, indicating that she was quite anxious.
There was no need to mention Li Yao, whose teeth had cut deep into his lips.
Holding the device with both hands, Special Agent Long slowly carried it to the center of the shield of runes. Then, she loosened her hands bit by bit, and the device floated in midair!
Hiu! Hiu! Hiu! Hiu!
Dozens of silver rays of light shot out of the circular rails and hit the different facets of the device.
After they were refracted inside the almost transparent device, they turned into ripples of shimmers that gradually became a panoramic operation menu!
Impressive! Li Yao raised his thumb for the pioneer refiners of the Ancient Sages Sector in his heart.
He finally understood what the device was for. The item that was addressed by Special Agent Long as a 'core' should be a storage unit from a mainframe crystal processor of the Nuwa civilization like the storage chips on the crystal processors of human beings.
Although there was no telling exactly how the storage unit had fallen into the hands of human beings, it was obvious
that the corresponding mainframe crystal processor and operation menu were already gone by the time the gadget was discovered.
The circular rail around was obviously a convenient, understandable operation system for human beings that the offspring crafted to retrieve the information from the storage unit by rewriting a whole set of parsing and analyzing runes! Such an operation system was certainly no match for the mainframe crystal processor corresponding with the storage unit. Perhaps, it could only trigger one percent of the information stored inside.
However, for the ancient people who did not know the first thing about crystal processors, their achievement was already awe-inspiring!
Special Agent Long stared at the operation menu in a daze for a while. Her hands were frozen in midair for a moment before they touched the thousands of runes like flowing water.
Shua!
The halo around the device drowned the entire palace like ocean water. The image gradually turned clear, which was apparently an extremely delicate 3D map that was as complicated as a labyrinth. Judging from the appearance, it should be the guide of a large military base.
The light and shadow brushed the faces of Wan Mingzhu, Han Yuantai, and Qi Changsheng's representative, as if it were bringing their souls away.
Despite the high Cultivation and the resolution of the natives of the Ancient Sages Sector, they could not help but feel astounded when faced with the extraordinary views that were eons ahead of their generation.
But Special Agent Long appeared to be more confused than shocked. She was looking at the map in a particularly weird and thoughtful way. Silently, she tapped on the operation menu softly.
Shua! Shua! Shua!
The 3D map was shrunk in size until it was reduced to a tiny point.
What replaced it was continuous mountains and a broken shoreline, then the outline of a whole continent, and then the transparent representation of a planet as well as the relative position of the planet in the entire galaxy.
It felt like the camera depicting the map was drawn far, far away, with the plotting scale reduced incessantly, until it stopped at the depths of the universe.
Endless complicated data was floating in midair like a bunch of crazily jumping fish. They were the mathematical expressions of the fundamental information of the Ancient Sages Sector, including the features of the star of the Ancient Sages Sector, the number of planets and satellites, and the stable areas in space that were suitable as jump points.
"This is the Ancient Sages Sector!" Han Yuantai exclaimed.
For those in the Nascent Soul Stage, as long as they held their breath and flew upward on their flying swords nonstop, it was possible for them to break through the atmosphere and observe their world from the universe.
Therefore, even the most idiotic ancient Cultivators knew that the planet was not flat. They had come to the realization that their species lived on giant spheres that were surrounded by a boundless universe a long time ago.
It was the same in the Ancient Sages Sector. The natives knew that the world was round and had even painted many rather detailed global maps by surveying from the space.
Therefore, Han Yuantai and the rest of them soon recognized the world on the map.
Special Agent Long smiled. She was slow and rigid when she operated first, as if she was learning how to use it for the first time. However, she soon became more and more deft and smooth as if she was already familiar with it. Her hands gradually turned into two clusters of gray mist, as more and more runes were compiled into a series of instructions by her. Eventually, she smashed the set of instructions consisting of hundreds of runes. After a bam, the global map of the Ancient Sages Sector broke apart, replaced by brand-new 3D structural designs that looked like enormous metal puppets of different models!
His eyes bulging out, Li Yao almost shrieked.
They—they were the designs of dozens of different Colossi!
Although they were only the rough, general designs, many of which were lackluster and incomplete because not all the information had been successfully retrieved, the incredible spiritual energy circulations and the magical equipment accommodation patterns still dumbfounded Li Yao. He felt that hundreds of peals of thunder were bursting out in his head at the same time.
That was not the end of it. As if she was planning to scare everybody on the spot to death and Mother White Lotus back alive, Special Agent Long displayed a series of different animated pictures.
On the pictures were tiny human beings who crawled into the spiritual residence in the Colossi, sat cross-legged, and mumbled spells to themselves, while the spiritual energy circulation in their bodies underwent fantastic changes.
Li Yao immediately realized that they were the tutorials of the Colossi for the human soldiers to learn how to pilot the dozens of different Colossi!
Allowing the shadows of the dozens of Colossi to keep performing unbelievable movements in midair, Special Agent Long casually asked, "What do you think, everybody?"
Wan Mingzhu, Han Yuantai, and Qi Changsheng's representative had not recovered from their shock yet.
It was not until he was in a daze for one minute that Han Yuantai took a long breath and mumbled to himself, "It's real. The legendary deities and devils in the primeval era are real, and… and they even boasted such magnificent power!
"Some magical equipment and such techniques are indeed not something that the Cultivators who struggle to survive in the mortal world can create. This—this is the field of the deities and devils!
"We thought that there were only twelve Gold Statues of Cloud Qin, which have been destroyed one after another after a hundred thousand years of battles. It never occurred to me that there would actually be dozens of them!
"So to speak, even if the original Twelve Gold Statues of Cloud Qin are gone today, it is still possible for us to find more intact, undamaged gold statues?"
Special Agent Long smiled. "It may be even better than you think. According to the scattered information that Lord Wang has collected from the unofficial records and the notes of the previous dynasties, the Divine Palace hidden in the eternal night in the northern reaches is definitely much more than a place where a batch of Cloud Qin Gold Statues are buried. It is possible that the place is a Cloud Qin Gold Statue factory!
"As long as we get control over the Divine Palace, we can produce as many Cloud Qin Gold Statues as we want!"
Chapter 1454: Path to the Deities' Realm! |
Qi Changsheng's representative was glittering because of her words. He could not help but step forward and ask in such a hoarse voice that his throat might be fuming, "Is it even possible for us to produce the Cloud Qin Gold Statues on our own?"
"Of course it is!" Special Agent Long replied confidently. "Based on the motion pictures here and the records of the previous dynasties, it should be easy to guess that the Cloud Qin Gold Statues were magical equipment designed for us in the first place. The empty cabin inside them is not very spacious. It is impossible for the prehistorical deities and devils whose body we have found in the wilderness to have crammed into them!"
"That's true." Han Yuantai and the rest of them nodded, deep in thought.
"Since the magical equipment is designed for us, the deities and devils would have taught us the extraordinary techniques so that we can produce them on our own."
Looking at the three of them, Special Agent Long threw out yet another bomb unhurriedly. "Moreover, according to Lord Wang's speculation, other than being a factory where the Cloud Qin Gold Statues can be manufactured, this Divine Palace can even reach out to the real deities' realm. There is even a mysterious Heaven's Path that allows people to ascend to the deities' realm directly!"
"What!"
This time, Wan Mingzhu, Han Yuantai, and Qi Changsheng's representative were more shocked than ever. Han Yuantai's voice was utterly twisted as he bulged his eyes and demanded, "Why didn't you tell us such an important secret earlier?"
Special Agent Long smiled and said,
"The prophecy of ascension is too groundless after all. You wouldn't have believed it even if I told you in advance, would you?
"Only after witnessing the incredible views that definitely do not belong to the human world with your own eyes will you believe in Lord Wang's assumption. The Divine Palace is actually a station between the world of humans and the realm of deities!
"Tens of thousands of years ago, Lord Wang received the scraps of a notebook that should've belonged to the owner of this Thousand Stars Tray. He recorded his experiences in the Divine Palace. According to him, he was enlightened by the deities in the Divine Palace and appreciated the infinite mysteries of other worlds that could never be seen in the Ancient Sages Sector. What else can the places be if not the deities' realm?
"It is said that the deities' realm is thousands of times larger than the Ancient Sages Sector. The Ancient Sages Sector, which we think to be the whole world, is but a drop in the bucket in front of the real deities' realm!
"Also, there's amazing magical equipment hidden in the Divine Palace which allows the passengers to shuttle between the mortal world and the deities' realm free at will. One does not have to train oneself to the ultimate level in order to 'break the void'. As long as they know the trick, even ordinary people without the slightest spiritual energy and their pets can ascend to the deities' realm safely.
"How about it, Mother White Lotus? Is it a fair deal to trade your army of ghouls for the core of the map of the Divine Palace?"
A hint of greed flowed out of Wan Mingzhu's frosted face. She stared at the map for a long time before she squinted and coldly said, "The deities' realm is too groundless after all for anyone to pursue after through great trouble. Let's talk about the Cloud Qin Gold Statues first!
"Your Lord Wang made the Divine Palace out to be second to none in this world. Judging from the motion pictures here, he was not exactly exaggerating!
"However, no matter how many mysteries there are in the Divine Palace, they are only useful to us if we have the place under control and can develop it on a large scale!"