by <unknown>
Li Yao's eyes were so red that blood seemed to be dripping. Spiritual energy flowed out of his every pore and covered the entire starship like an invisible air mass. It equaled a defense layer of spiritual energy for Jingle Bell, and it also increased the cohesion of the internal components.
On one hand, Li Yao was now in the Divinity Transformation Stage, which guaranteed the intensity and stability of his spiritual energy output.
On the other hand, "Jingle Bell" was a lightweight starship, and it was no more than thirty meters long from head to toe. That was why Li Yao could support it on his own.
Otherwise, Li Yao wouldn't be able to stand the shots at all under the scourge of such vehement bombardment.
"Let's go! Let's go! Let's go!"
The bloodiness in Li Yao's eyes was bursting out, and Jingle Bell grew out two black wings of spiritual energy like a crystal suit or a Colossus. Every feather on the wings was spurting out waves backward crazily, accelerating Jingle Bell to the highest speed as it charged at Li Lingfeng and the Immortal Cultivators' starships!
The mystic rays and electromagnetic bullets that the Immortal Cultivators' starships shot out smashed over and exploded around Jingle Bell nonstop. They were like the hellish claws extending out of the void trying to snatch Jingle Bell, only to be blocked and parried by Li Yao's defense time and time again.
Even so, Jingle Bell was still shrieking hard in quakes, as if it might completely fall apart in the next second.
Li Jialing was so scared that his face turned pale. Despite all the terrible monsters he had seen in the Li family and the beehive prison, the young man had never imagined that there could be such an insane man as Li Yao!
Li Lingfeng's Tempest God also turned into a streak of azure light rushing at Jingle Bell. Should it hit the starship in a head-on clash, even a god would not be able to rescue the stealth exploration starship!
Crazy, demonic laughter burst out of Li Yao's chest. His eyes and his lips were ripped apart, and his skin was breaking too, as if his body of flesh and blood was already incapable of stopping the outbreak of the simmering spiritual energy inside his body. Jingle Bell's speed had been accelerated to higher than ever when it confronted the Tempest God, Li Lingfeng's Colossus!
"Catch me if you can, idiot!"
Li Yao condensed his wild laughter into a telepathic thought and sent it to the enemy. In the meantime, he smashed the control panel hard. "Space jump, activated!"
In the next moment—
The thousands of saber auras triggered by the Tempest God slashed at Jingle Ball overwhelmingly and unstoppably.
Almost a thousand destructive rays also spurted out of the Immortal Cultivators' starship, blocking all the possible ways of escape for Jingle Bell in all directions.
However, before the saber auras, the mystic rays, the space torpedoes, and the electromagnetic bullets reached it, fuzzy ripples already appeared right in front of Jingle Bell. Ripping apart the three-dimensional universe, they formed a mysterious round gate, which seemed to be a hole that had been dug out by a worm.
Jingle Bell dived into the hole and disappeared, as if it had submerged into an invisible swamp!
All the attacks from the Immortal Cultivators missed their target, only managing to tear apart the shadows that Jingle Bell left behind.
When the fireballs perished, the gate of ripples had vanished into the vacuum too.
Li Yao and Li Jialing had successfully jumped out of the siege of the Immortal Cultivators and escaped from the Martial Meritocrats Sector!
"Go after them!"
Looking at the empty space before him, Li Lingfeng roared with the utmost fury. His voice was completely twisted as he roared, "Even if we have to go to the edge of the cosmos, the two of them must be caught. I will rip them apart in person!"
…
Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!
Zhi! Zhi! Zhi! Zhi! Zhi! Zhi! Zhi!
Du! Du! Du! Du! Du! Du! Du!
All the magical equipment units that could ring or sound were shrieking.
All the magical equipment units that could not sound were also screaming, moaning, and crying in the most earsplitting frequency.
However, even the orchestra of exclamations of the magical equipment units could not eclipse the roars from Li Yao and Li Jialing.
It was truly the most dangerous space jump that Li Yao ever had in his entire life. It was ten times more dangerous than when he crashed into Skeleton Dragon with Sparkle years ago and jumped to an unknown land together with the creature.
At the very least, there were few damages on the shell of Sparkle, and it was still relatively stable in structure.
He felt that he was a fly that had been thrown into a toilet and was being flushed into the abyss of the universe along with the turbulent water currents.
He was being minced apart into pieces a hundred times in every second, and every second felt as long as a hundred years.
His muscles, his bones, his neural network, and even his every cell had collapsed. Even the mitochondria and the cell cores were ripped apart by force and jumbled randomly after squeezing and kneading. He seemed to be pressed into a giant cell himself.
There was no telling how long the excruciating feeling lasted, but they suddenly felt their bodies becoming lighter, and they were thrown from the four-dimensional space back into the three-dimensional universe like wasted paper that had been crumpled into a cluster.
Just like leaping to the surface of an ocean all of a sudden from twenty thousand meters down below, although he was finally able to breathe in the fresh air, the inadaptation in the shift still almost made him vomit his internal organs out.
Li Yao was in relatively good condition.
He heard Li Jialing gagging so hard that the young man seemed to be throwing out his heart, livers, kidneys, lungs, and spleens.
But Li Yao had no time to take care of Li Jialing, because he already heard the automatic navigation and landing system of the mainframe crystal processor uttering the most devastating shrieks, and he saw the gigantic planet that was next to the starship.
The good news was that the automatic navigation and landing system of Jingle Bell proved to be trustworthy, and the star map of the Imperium from more than a hundred years that Di Feiwen, the deputy commander of the Black Wind Fleet, gave him still worked. The two of them had truly been brought to the closest world to the Martial Meritocrats Sector.
The bad news was that the automatic navigation and landing system of Jingle Bell was too damn trustworthy. Instead of jumping to the zero-gravity vacuum in space, they had directly jumped into the gravity sphere of an enormous planet!
The strong gravity immediately captured the tiny Jingle Bell.
Also, because Jingle Bell suddenly appeared from the void and did not have a relatively stable inertia with the gravity of the planet, the tidal forces immediately ripped Jingle Bell apart. Even the shell had been removed one piece after another!
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Enormous fireballs burst out from the bottom of Jingle Bell, declaring the doom of all the power units. Having lost all the impetus, Jingle Bell fell from an altitude of tens of thousands of meters like a heavy block of iron!
At any other time, Li Yao and Li Jialing could've summoned their crystal suits easily, flown in the sky, and landed softly like feathers.
However, they had just been through a highly dangerous space jump, and they were suffering from the sequela caused by the raging space ripples. Their bodies were now an utter mess. How much spiritual energy could they possibly condense?
By the time Li Yao managed to focus some of his attention and a cluster of spiritual energy appeared, they were only a few hundred meters away from the ground in a starship that was more like a shooting star!
"Ahhhhhhhhhhh!"
Li Yao blew out spiritual energy crazily and built nine buffer layers in front of the broken Jingle Bell while hinting Li Jialing to put on his crystal suit.
BOOM!
&n
bsp; The moment the two of them put on their crystal suits, Jingle Bell finally crashed into a devastatingly huge fireball in the middle of a deafening explosion. The remnants and the components burned furiously and were sprayed to dozens of square kilometers nearby like dandelions by the wild wind, never to be seen again.
Jingle Bell had been completely wasted, including the set of magical equipment units that could assemble a super-remote information transmission base in space to contact his hometown.
Li Yao woke up half a minute later.
After realizing the fact, he repeated "f*ck" for another half minute.
As he struggled to breathe in the stinky air, the stinging feeling in his lungs reminded him of how bad the air of the planet was.
Looking at the horizon and observing his surroundings, Li Yao couldn't help but gasp hard.
What a harsh "habitable planet" it was!
There was no telling what kind of weird materials were contained in the atmosphere here, but the sky seemed to be covered in dark clouds and black fogs all the time. Crazily dancing bolts of lightning were everywhere among the clouds. Now and then, some of the bolts of lightning would dive down from the sky and smash the ground into tides of electric arcs.
It was almost like an extremely weird forest of lightning that did not disperse at all after a long time.
Under the gloomy sky, Li Yao could not see any plateau or signs of human development. Folds that rose to the sky could be seen everywhere. The terrain of the place was similar to that of Boneyard, except that it was even more rugged than on Boneyard. At the very least, the folds on Boneyard were patterned and in circles, while the folds here, or the apophysis, were wry, interconnected, and disordered, like the tusks of the underground beasts that had been bared out of the ground!
Bolts of lightning and sandstorms were happening in all places. Measuring the wind speed with the probe magical equipment on his crystal suit, Li Yao discovered that even in the relatively steady area where he was at, the wind speed had surpassed the "level-three strong wind" in the federation. In the meantime, in the areas far away from where the giant rocks were rolling all the time, the wind must have reached the level of "hurricane" or "super hurricane". It was needless to say that the tornadoes were standing on the horizon. They were moving slowly, swallowing the thunders and bolts of lightning, like giants whose heads reached the sky.
"What a wretched place it is. Is this really a 'habitable planet'?"
Li Yao saw with his own eyes that a giant rock hundreds of meters in diameter was absorbed by a tornado surrounded by bolts of lightning and broke into pebbles enshrouded in electric arcs. He couldn't help but remark in amazement.
He immediately retrieved the data of the few Sectors near the Martial Meritocrats Sector and compared them to the hellish view.
Then, he frowned even harder.
"This is… the Sand Primitive Sector!"
Chapter 2128: Sand Primitive Sector! |
When Li Yao found Li Jialing in the mess of debris, half slithering and half crawling, the young man was trying to move away from the garbage on him.
Huala!
Li Yao waved at the garbage, and the broken remnants flew away immediately, freeing the young man from the cage.
"This is—"
Looking at the rough environment around, Li Jialing was more or less stunned too. Pondering for a moment, his voice somewhat shivered as he asked, "Have we jumped to the Sand Primitive Sector?"
"Yes. I have found the mainframe crystal processor from the debris just now and checked the automatic navigation and landing system again. We have indeed jumped to and landed on the only habitable planet, and the home planet, of the Sand Primitive Sector."
Li Yao said, "How much do you know about the Sand Primitive Sector?"
The Martial Meritocrats Sector and the Sand Primitive Sector were two deeply-involved worlds that were similar to the Heaven's Origin Sector and the Blood Demon Sector.
Of course, they were not as close as the Heaven's Origin Sector and the Blood Demon Sector, which were a pair of "twin worlds". But the distance between them was still much shorter than the regular distances between Sectors.
Otherwise, the first exploration fleet sent out from the Martial Meritocrats Sector wouldn't have discovered the Sand Primitive Sector first or introduced the natives of the Sand Primitive Sector, which led to the destruction of the Martial Meritocrats Civilization and the birth of the Immortal Cultivators.
Therefore, when Li Yao commanded Jingle Bell to automatically search for and lock onto the nearest world to the Martial Meritocrats Sector according to the star map, it was only natural that they jumped to the Sand Primitive Sector.
The intelligence about the Sand Primitive Sector that Li Yao knew of was all from Su Changfa and Di Feiwen. It was the outdated information from more than a hundred years ago, and their descriptions about the Sand Primitive Sector were mostly quite obscure.
Li Jialing, however, knew more about the issue. Pondering for a moment, he said, "Li Lingfeng once told me something about the Sand Primitive Sector. By the time Blackstar the Great returned to his hometown with infinite wrath, the Martial Meritocrats Sector and the Sand Primitive Sector had already been highly integrated. They even had a coalition government and were sort of the same civilization.
"Therefore, when the Martial Meritocrats Sector suffered the attacks of the Imperium's fleets, the same thunderous blows happened to the Sand Primitive Sector too. The civilization was completely destroyed, and the planet was reduced to a scarred land of nothingness.
"No, that is not entirely accurate. The Sand Primitive Sector had been a land of nothingness in the first place. It was a great desert where the environment was terrible and life was highly difficult. Otherwise, the people of the Sand Primitive Sector wouldn't have tried so hard to immigrate into the Martial Meritocrats Sector with all their wisdom!
"The Sand Primitive Sector was not very suitable for the survival of human beings in the first place. According to the evaluation of habitable planets in the Imperium, it was at the worst and most unacceptable level, and its 'Index of Human Survival and Development' was close to zero.
"The strikes from the fleets of the Imperium only made the situation worse. It completely became a lifeless land of silence and death.
"Later, the Imperium seemed to have turned the Sand Primitive Sector into a gigantic laboratory of magical equipment too. But different from the 'Land of Sins', the place was used for the experiments of massive destruction with no consideration for the survival of human beings at all.
"After hundreds of years of experiments, the natives of the Sand Primitive Sector completely went extinct. The place has been completely forsaken since then.
"After all, the experiments of massive destruction could be conducted in any random desolate planet. There was no reason why they had to come here after a long journey for the experiments, right?
"The Sand Primitive Sector right now is exactly an abandoned and forgotten world whose values have been fully exploited.
"In the thousand years of war between the Imperium of True Human Beings and the Alliance of the Holy Covenant or in the universal war earlier between the Star Ocean Imperium and the rebellions of the Blood God, the extraterrestrial devils and the remnants of demons, it wasn't rare for vigorous, prosperous worlds to be entirely blown up and reduced into desolate worlds. The Sand Primitive Sector does not have anything unusual."
Li Yao nodded his head thoughtfully. Then, he asked somewhat curiously, "If it does not have anything unusual, why do you appear scared just now?"
While the environment of the Sand Primitive Sector was harsh, it was only so for the ordinary people.
Li Yao had the apocalyptic body that had been modified by the mental devil. His primeval cells had all been activated, and the organs inside his body were much more strengthened than general Cultivators.
Li Jialing, in the meantime, had also been through multiple procedures and could turn into a ferocious an
imal as hideous and aggressive as Wuying Lan at any moment.
The two of them were both out-and-out monsters. Although the air of the planet contained tremendous lethal elements, they could not cause any harm to the two strangers.
Besides, Li Yao carried abundant water, food, and crystals in his Cosmos Rings. There wouldn't be a problem at all if they were to lurk here for a while.
Li Jialing, however, replied rather worriedly, "However, the Sand Primitive Sector is still slightly different from other abandoned worlds. I'm told that a lot of 'apparitions' live here."
"Apparitions?"
Li Yao blinked his eyes, "What is that?"
"They are like the extraterrestrial devils of the lowest level, except that they are much more brutal."
Li Jialing explained, "The Sand Primitive Sector was the territory of the Sand Primitive natives at the beginning, and the unique training system of the Sand Primitive Sector was different from the mainstream hierarchy of the Refinement Stage, the Building Foundation Stage, the Core Formation Stage, the Nascent Soul Stage, and the Divinity Transformation Stage of the outside world. The natives of the Sand Primitive Sector worshipped the Chiyou Cult. When they practiced the techniques to the best, they could summon 'God Chiyou' into their bodies, which would grant the unparalleled combat ability to even the ordinary people.
"According to the studies of the Imperium, it was some sort of 'berserker' technique that involved psychological hints and self-hypnotization to activate the forces deep inside the brain. The natives of the Sand Primitive Sector who practiced such a technique would have weird changes in their souls, and it was very possible that tremendous 'apparitions' would be left after their death."
Li Yao had once communicated with "Mother White Lotus Wan Mingzhu", an expert spectral Cultivator, in the Ancient Sages Sector. He had some basic understanding of the arts of the spectral Cultivators and the difference between "ghosts" and "apparitions".
All the intelligent creatures had a soul in the world of Cultivation. If a person's soul and will remained after their death, it would turn into a "ghost".