Forty Millenniums of Cultivation - Chapter 1332
Chapter 1332: Firefly in the Darkness
At this moment, in the Heaven’s Origin Sector, the Blood Demon Sector, and the Flying Star Sector, too many friends, foes, family, teachers, seniors, competitors, enviers, and even haters were reciting Li Yao’s name to themselves.
But Li Yao certainly could not hear any of it.
He had experienced many space jumps by breaking the void, but this journey was certainly the most violent, powerful, and dangerous one of all!
Although he was hiding deep inside Spark and soaking inside deep blue buffer nutrition liquids, he still felt such great shock that the world seemed to be falling apart for him.
All the rune arrays on Spark that could utter a sound were shrieking, only to be dwarfed by the friction from Spark’s air resistance. However, the sound of friction, which resembled a volcanic eruption, was suppressed by the interference of the force fields before it had the chance to savage for a few seconds!
Spark hovered inside the enormous light ball triggered by the Heaven’s Artillery at a higher and higher speed. Drawing a spiral trace, it gradually flew to the center of the light ball.
Li Yao felt that he was a moth darting toward the fire, only to be rushing into the sun directly.
“Ahhhhh!”
Even such a tough man who had experienced countless bloody battles was roaring at the top of his voice when he was faced with the hotness and the pure brilliance.
The ear-splitting sounds outside made him unable to hear his own roars. He could only roar louder and louder, until his throat was in such pain that somebody seemed to be scratching it with a dagger, before the uneasiness in his heart was more or less dispersed.
At this moment, Spark had reached the exact central point of the enormous light ball that was dozens of kilometers in diameter!
The crazily flashing dashboard and the light beams that were filled with streaks and snowflakes came to a sudden stop.
Even the deafening fulminations outside turned into absolute silence in just 0.01 seconds. It was so quiet that he even felt weird.
It was like the concepts of time and space had all frozen. Li Yao seemed to have become a small mosquito that was sealed inside a ‘time-space amber’.
However, the weird feeling lasted only 0.01 seconds.
With the exclamations of tens of billions of spectators from the three Sectors, the force field that the Heaven’s Artillery triggered suddenly collapsed inward.
Like a star at the end of its life collapsing into a black hole because its mass surpassed the tipping point, the light ball that covered almost a hundred kilometers collapsed into the size of a mustard seed in only a blink of an eye.
The immense force ripped apart an invisible gap in the flawless space, creating a super-tiny, super-long wormhole!
The formidable attraction force from the wormhole immediately grabbed Spark, which was very next to it. Then, the wormhole turned into a cluster of brilliance, spurting out like fireworks in the daylight.
When the brilliance vanished, Spark and Li Yao had been gone from the world!
A brand-new adventure had thus begun!
Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!
All the units on Spark were sending out alarms.
Creak! Creak! Creak! Creak! Creak! Creak! Creak!
Every metal component was moaning as if they were about to be ripped apart, too.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
Li Yao’s face was so twisted that he could not tell whether it was he who was roaring or his every bone, every muscle, every cluster of nerve endings, and even every cell.
Ahead of him was the infinite, boundless universe, where the stars were coming at him like a sandstorm and hitting the spiritual shield of Spark like raindrops.
It was not an illusion but a fact that was taking place in the real world because he could both hear the spluttering sounds when the spiritual shield was crashed into and saw the glamorous, fascinating, yet dangerous flowers blooming on the spiritual shield caused by the starry dust.
In the dark universe, the stars were raining like a sandstorm. A tiny spark was marching forward alone and difficultly in the overwhelming sandstorm!
Li Yao did not know how long the sandstorm of stars lasted.
While he was passing through the wormhole, time had lost all significance.
He was dwelling so much in the splendor and wonderfulness of the sandstorm of stars that he was entirely awed by the magnificence of the universe.
An extremely strong sense of ambition occurred to him while he was stunned.
He did not wish to unravel all the mysteries of the whole universe once and for all.
But even if he could simply appreciate one hundredth, one thousandth, or even one millionth of its beauty, he would be content with his life as a Cultivator!
In a trance, Li Yao felt that his body was being stretched by an invisible force. When he lowered his head, he discovered that the tip of his foot was hundreds of kilometers away.
He was like a high-speed crystal train that was rushing into a long tunnel.
The sandstorm of stars came to a halt without him realizing. There was not a single light spot to be seen. The only thing left was absolute darkness.
Inside the darkness, however, some colors, or entities of energy, that were even deeper than the notion of ‘black’ stared at Li Yao’s teleportation coldly without blinking on the two sides of the ‘tunnel’, like countless magnificent devils.
Li Yao could not speak or turn his neck. His body was rigid. It was impossible for him to tell whether they were figments of his imagination or real existences. He could only grit his teeth and continue sprinting forward.
After who knew how long, many hands and tentacles extended to Spark from various directions and pierced through Spark’s spiritual shield and shell without any trouble. They penetrated Li Yao’s skin, muscles, skull, and brains, reaching his soul.
Li Yao felt that his soul was going to be split apart.
He could only recite the spells in silence and recall the fierce battles in the past. He reflected on the family and friends who were waiting for him in the hometown and also the Vulture Plan, which was still hidden in the mist and had yet to be accomplished by him!
“I have a great many battles to fight, a great many things to do, and a great many places to visit!
“Ding Lingdang is waiting for me. My three disciples are waiting for me. The Star Glory Federation is waiting for me. Even the mysterious place called ‘Earth’ must be waiting for me somewhere, too!
“How can I be lost in this place?” Li Yao bellowed, with brilliance shooting out of his brain. The tentacles made of dark materials retreated after ear-splitting shrieks. Spark moved faster and faster. Not far away in the front, at the end of the ‘tunnel’, a translucent light ball could vaguely be seen!
BOOM!
Spark shivered violently. It went through the state where time and space were temporarily frozen exactly like when it fell into the wormhole, before it was ‘spat out’ by something!
Spark gradually slowed down. The parameters on the dashboard, the rune arrays, and the light beams all returned to normal.
According to the parameters, he had reached a brand-new world unseen before.
“Hu—”
Li Yao took a long breath in relief. He felt that every muscle in his body was sore and that he was like a floating corpse that had been soaked in a river for three days and three nights.
Have I reached the destination precisely?
Li Yao struggled to activate the probe magical equipment on Spark, but the indicators of the star’s direction and coordinates did not change at all.
It meant that Spark did not detect the existence of a single star.
Observing with his bare eyes, Li Yao found nothing, either. The universe appeared to be absolutely pure darkness, without the slightest sign of a star.
No stars meant no references. Spark seemed to have been embedded into the darkness. There was no sign that it was still flying at all.
It was a trepidation a hundred times more intense than death.
The universe seemed to have been destroyed, and Li Yao was the only survivor.
Taking a deep breath, Li Yao tried to calm himself down while he tapped quickly on the light beam.
It seemed that he had come to the right place.
Of course, the universe there could not have zero stars.
Even if there were no stars nearby, Spark should still be able to receive the light of the stars from billions of years away in various directions.
It was like he would always be able to see the brilliant stars in the night sky when he was on the Heaven’s Origin Planet in good weather.
The only plausible explanation was that he had already jumped into the depths of the dark nebula and that some sort of weird elements inside the dark nebula could absorb the freely-travelling light in the universe. Like a ubiquitous cloud, they blocked all the stars.
The situation had been within the tech team’s expectations.
It was also the reason the observatory in the Star Prier’s House could not lock onto the coordinates of the place directly and why a starship had to be sent on a field trip to explore it.
Dense as the ‘cloud’ might be, one would still be able to peek at what was behind it as long as they were close enough to the cloud.
It was like when you could not see your own fingers in the absolute darkness, you would still see them again as long as you touched the end of your nose.
On Spark, a navigation map of the Pangu civilization from hundreds of thousands of years ago had been installed, which recorded all the details about the depths of the dark nebula.
Therefore, as soon as he located one or two stars and positioned him precisely with the stars as the references, he would be able to find out where he was and how to get to the mysterious place that had sent a signal to them.
Li Yao typed in the search conditions and the automatic navigation information quickly.
For a long time that followed, he would be in the hibernation state, while Spark would cruise automatically in the sub-light speed.
Li Yao had set the wake-up conditions on the mainframe crystal processor of Spark. Every time a new star was discovered, he would be woken up from the hibernation state.
Of course, he had to take the worst case-scenario into consideration.
The diameter of the dark nebula could be almost a hundred lightyears. If he was too unlucky to find any star in the next hundred years, the mainframe crystal processor would still wake him up.
By then, he would find a random place where the dark nebula was relatively thin and unfold the star beacons to send the coordinates to the federation so that he could be brought back home to cope with the expedition fleet of the Imperium of True Human Beings to come.
I can’t be that unfortunate, can I?
Li Yao took out a crystal in which a photo of grinning Ding Lingdang was embedded and held it in his hands. He then quietly performed the Great Dream Tortoise Hibernation Arts that Gui Suishou had taught him and activated Spark’s hibernation system.
The deep blue fluids were getting thicker and thicker, colder and colder, turning into a form that was between liquid and solid. Li Yao’s face gradually became relaxed, confused, and tranquil.
A tiny firefly, in flickering light, moved forward in the infinite darkness, searching for the unpredictable brightness.
