Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

“Wait, wait, let me see…”

Li Yao blinked his eyes quickly and asked in suspicion, “Why do the ideas of this Nepenthe sound so much like the approaches of the Covenant Alliance? It’s almost like a small replica of the Covenant Alliance!”

“Yes, you’re absolutely right!”

Long Yangjun nodded her head heavily and said, as if she had been greatly wronged, “That’s why I said that I was innocent. Nepenthe was not founded by me at all, and their core ideas did not come from me. It was the spies of the Covenant Alliance who were behind everything!”

“The spies of the Covenant Alliance?” Li Yao suddenly grew alert.

Li Yao was told that the Immortal Cultivators’ tyranny on the underclass naturally raised the intense resentment and resistance of the underclass. Since the ideas of the Cultivators had declined a thousand years ago, the spies of the Covenant Alliance had a perfect opportunity to occupy the vacuum.

The Imperium today was teeming with spies of the Covenant Alliance everywhere. They had a set of solutions that could perfectly simulate feelings to help them pass the “Ring-Tu Test” of the Imperium that was supposed to distinguish human beings from “demi-humans”. They had been spreading the ideas of the Covenant Alliance blatantly in the Imperium, exactly like what was described just now, including the philosophies that desires were the greatest enemy of a civilization, and only by completely purging and erasing the possessed Immortal Cultivators could a civilization live in peace with the universe, etc.

Such ridiculous thoughts would have absolutely no market if they were in countries like the Star Glory Federation, where the nation was thriving, the society was in order, and the people boasted independent will and a healthy mind.

However, under the cruel governance and suppression in the Imperium, countless people including a lot of Immortal Cultivators were living in the deepest agony, and they could not see the future of the country where everybody brutalized each other like beasts in a jungle. As a result, some of them did abandon the true path of immortality and shift to the Path of Ultimate Benevolence that gave up personal desires for the beliefs.

Li Yao once encountered a colonization team of the Imperium in the Kunlun relic. Tang Qianhe, the navigator in the team, was a spy of the Covenant Alliance who betrayed the true path of immortality and joined the Path of Ultimate Benevolence.

Of course, Tang Qianhe, who was at the peak of the Core Formation Stage, was a rarely-seen senior spy. They would not expose themselves easily. Instead, they would lurk like ghosts in a deep ocean. Only when they were involved in great events such as an opportunity to bring a member of the Pangu Clan back to life would they rip their masks and reveal their true appearances.

But there were still tremendous low-level spies, as well as chess pieces who did not know that they were being manipulated in their ignorance, who disseminated the Path of Ultimate Benevolence in the territory of the Imperium inexorably and fearlessly.

Their feelings being highly repressed, they naturally did not have any fear for death but only had infinite loyalty for the Path of Ultimate Benevolence. They were absolutely not scared of death no matter how the Immortal Cultivators suppressed them. Even if ten thousand of them were killed today, they would pop up again tomorrow like wild grasses that could never be burnt up.

The Empyreal Terminus Sector was a power vacuum where the four Kurfürst families checked and balanced each other. The Immortal Cultivators’ reign over the bottom-level people was relatively feeble. Naturally, the underground worlds here were the best places of activities for the spies of the Covenant Alliance and the believers of the Path of Ultimate Benevolence.

In the meantime, the Covenant Alliance’s techniques were of the same origin as Long Yangjun’s heritage. They were highly exchangeable and complementary. Some of the spies of the Covenant Alliance were also aware of the tricks similar to the Serenity Arts, except that theirs were errored and incomplete and not as good as Long Yangjun’s.

The methods of telepathy were the same. The people of the Covenant Alliance could communicate via telepathy, but their methods of telepathy had been misinterpreted far too many times and were naturally not as good as Long Yangjun’s first-hand techniques.

In any case, after the underground hominoids practiced the Serenity Arts and the methods of telepathy under Long Yangjun’s tutelage and organized themselves, they immediately attracted a lot of spies of the Covenant Alliance and believers of the Path of Ultimate Benevolence like magnets.

The governance of the Imperium of True Human Beings on the bottom level was messy and corrupted, but the spies of the Covenant Alliance had been deeply rooted at the bottom level, dedicated to solving the practical problems of the poor folks. When the problems were unresolvable, they were still willing to comfort people’s traumatized minds. Therefore, the spies of the Covenant Alliance were quite popular at the bottom level. However the Imperium brainwashed the people, there was always a group of people who sympathized with or even supported the spies of the Covenant Alliance, which made it the best soil for the Path of Ultimate Benevolence to bloom and fruit.

Now that there were already established ideas, the believers of Nepenthe were naturally unnecessary to create a new path, nor were they capable of doing so. Under the deception of the spies of the Covenant Alliance, it was only natural that the doctrine of Nepenthe became a simplified version of the Path of Ultimate Benevolence.

If the things were left alone, it wouldn’t take long before the so-called “Nepenthe” became a branch and an advance base of the Covenant Alliance in the Imperium.

Li Yao suddenly thought of something as he listened. “So, there are still spies from the Covenant Alliance in Nepenthe right now, who are authentic natives of the Covenant Alliance?”

Long Yangjun shook her head with a smile and said that Li Yao mistook “spies of the Covenant Alliance” for “spies from the Covenant Alliance”. It was true that there were some spies of the Covenant Alliance in Nepenthe right now, but they were all natives of the Imperium who were born and raised locally, even if they had been brainwashed by the Path of Ultimate Benevolence.

On the other hand, those who brainwashed them were not necessarily authentic “spies from the Covenant Alliance” but also the believers of the Path of Ultimate Benevolence who were born and raised in the Imperium.

The war between the Imperium and the Covenant Alliance had lingered for a thousand years. The people of the Covenant Alliance had already worked hard to infiltrate the Imperium from seven to eight hundred years ago. After hundreds of years and dozens of generations, they had completely rooted themselves in the Imperium and became part of the country.

“You should not consider ‘Alliance of the Holy Covenant’ purely as a hostile country on the outside.”

Long Yangjun thought for a moment and said, “Let me make a metaphor with the Ancient Sages Sector. You should regard the Covenant Alliance as a combination of an invasive, hostile country and the uprising peasants within. If the Imperium is compared to the Great Qian Dynasty, the Covenant Alliance will be the Ghost Qin plus the White Lotus Cult plus the Heaven Battering Army. That is why it is extremely difficult to get rid of the Covenant Alliance.”

Long Yangjun told Li Yao that, after discovering that certain sleazy guys approached the miners whom she had enlightened, she captured and interrogated a few of them in curiosity, but she did not find much useful information.

It was not because the spies of the Covenant Alliance were too organized. On the very contrary, they were too unorganized, to the point that they were almost acting on their own. So, it was impossible for Long Yangjun to track their leader.

“The Covenant Alliance’s activities in the Imperium are not based on any ‘organization’ but on the ideas of the Path of Ultimate Benevolence. Organizations can be detected and uprooted, but ideas can barely be extinguished.”

Long Yangjun said, “The Path of Ultimate Benevolence haunts the sky and the earth of the Imperium like a ghost, alluring a lot of people to ‘awaken’ on their own. The spies of the Covenant Alliance that I caught were merely common workers, farmers, and students in the beginning. They had all abandoned everything and embraced eternal peace voluntarily because they could not endure the cruel oppression and the dark life anymore. What could I have done with them?

“Even if I found out the ‘mentors’ who taught them the methods of telepathy and the ways to repress feelings, those people would only be another bunch of common workers, farmers, and students. What could I do with them? As for their mentors, those people were very likely to have been executed by the Immortal Cultivators. What could I do except to simply watch?”

Faced with such a complicated situation, even Long Yangjun was in a dilemma.

But of course, she was not the most lenient person in the world, and she would certainly do something when other people were corrupting her followers or even snooping on her secrets.

She had been focused on intelligence collection and her own training in the beginning. By the time she noticed it, Nepenthe had already grown to a certain scale with its own ideas. Quite a few spies of the Covenant Alliance were even asking about her, wondering if this “Serenity Seraph” was a senior spy from the Covenant Alliance who had come to guide them to disseminate the Path of Ultimate Benevolence and purge the Imperium.

Long Yangjun was immediately mired in a cold sweat. The last thing she wanted was to be involved in the war between the Imperium and the Covenant Alliance. If the leaders of the Imperium was misled into thinking that a senior spy from the Covenant Alliance named “Serenity Seraph” appeared in the capital, wouldn’t she be killed in no time?

Long Yangjun took care of the talkative spies of the Covenant Alliance quickly and then took over Nepenthe. She then established certain rules to restrain the believers.

With her experience of running the “Ghost Character”, wasn’t it more than easy for her to handle a tiny Nepenthe?

All the rules could be summoned into one sentence. Whatever the Nepenthe believers did would be fine, provided that they kept it a secret and a low profile. Most importantly of all, they should not leak the identity of the “Serenity Seraph” and that they should not ask her to clean their messes for them!

Long Yangjun had thought that Nepenthe was just a nuisance.

However, when Nepenthe grew active below the ground, she discovered that it was not entirely devoid of merits.

First of all, Nepenthe was like a huge magnet that attracted the spies of the Covenant Alliance all the time.

Through the interaction between those people and Nepenthe, Long Yangjun was able to study the origins of the Covenant Alliance. She was very suspicious that the Covenant Alliance was developed slowly and exactly like Nepenthe at the beginning.

If she could truly figure out the origins of the Covenant Alliance, it would be much more convenient for her when she snuck into the Covenant Alliance one day in the future. That was exactly what she meant by “social experiment”.

Also, the believers of the Covenant Alliance all possessed certain brainwashing and telepathic techniques. While those techniques were crude and incomplete, they were of the same origin as Long Yangjun’s techniques after all and could make up for the shortcomings of her fuzzy knowledge that she awakened from her genes.

What was most unexpected of all was that some Nepenthe believers gradually expanded their influence to the fifth class below the ground, namely the five-digit towns like the 10,084th district, and helped her locate a lot of secret primeval relics!