Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

Qi Yuanbao was cramping so hard that he was almost vomiting fuel. He cried, “No, I do not blame the Black Wind King. It was all my own fault…”

“It’s good that you have such an understanding personality. You’re improving very fast!”

Li Yao quickly restored Qi Yuanbao’s artificial body into the normal mode. Jabbing his head so hard that his iron skull was almost cracking, Li Yao demanded, “Confess now. Are you behind the accident, or is there anything else that you have been hiding? Did Blackstar the Great give you any other secret orders?”

“No! It wasn’t me! It really wasn’t me!”

Qi Yuanbao felt so wronged that he was almost shedding lubricant. He whined, “I really don’t know anything. I confessed all the arrangements I made in the Seven Seas Grand Market a long time ago. Blackstar the Great did not give us any other secret orders either. He merely asked us to undermine Jin Yuyan’s power, but he told us not to kill Jin Yuyan unless it was absolutely necessary. Even if we had to take care of Jin Yuyan, we should at least wait until the battle of Seven Seas was won.

“It was I who acted recklessly because of my greed. If Wuying Qi had given us other secret orders, I wouldn’t have been bold to kill him at such a moment at all!”

“It does make sense.”

Li Yao considered for a moment and felt that Qi Yuanbao really did not look like a mastermind with his wisdom. The main reason was that the guy jumped out too soon and had been on the stage all the time, which was not expected of a schemer in the dark. Shouldn’t a real schemer be keeping a low profile all the time, always ignored by everyone even if they were observed all the time?

His heart palpitating, Li Yao suddenly thought of someone. “Where is your sister, Wuying Qinxin?”

“I-I don’t know.”

Qi Yuanbao looked confused. “She and I were caged separately. It was impossible for us to communicate with each other. I have no idea where he is, too.”

“Let me ask you something else. It is a very critical question. You must answer it honestly!”

Li Yao demanded, “Was it you or your sister who came up with the whole plan of assassinating Jin Yuyan with the help of the ‘Soul Transfer Technique’?”

“About that…”

Stunned for a long time, Qi Yuanbao replied in uncertainty, “I can’t tell.”

Li Yao said in a hurry, “What do you mean by ‘you can’t tell’? You don’t know who came up with the idea first?”

“I was the one who proposed the complete plan, but the technological feasibility was come up by my sister, which triggered my ambition.”

Qi Yuanbao said, “In the first place, Wuying Qinxin is a very excellent Meditation Healer. She even grasped many bizarre tricks that even I had never heard of in terms of soul training. One day, she told me excitedly that she had made breakthroughs in the training of ‘Soul Transfer Technique’, allowing her to exchange the souls of two people without any damage or trace. Even the experts above the Nascent Soul Stage could be swapped too. I was piqued and came up with the idea.”

“Wait—”

Narrowing his eyes, Li Yao grasped the key point quickly. “Known as ‘Hanged Man’, you were the most mysterious ace assassin at the peripheral worlds of the Imperium because of your remarkable expertise in soul techniques, whereas Wuying Qinxin had been spending the last hundred years in the Business Alliance of Ten Thousand Sectors and next to Jin Yuyan. She was a talent in the business world. How on earth could she have known more soul training tricks than you did? Weren’t you of the same origin?”

“I don’t know about that.”

Qi Yuanbao said helplessly, “Although my sister and I both had the heritages of the family, we were separated for decades after our family was massacred, and only the two of us escaped. We did not meet again until we both had made minor achievements. Naturally, she did not tell me her experiences, like whom she met, what techniques she practiced, or which relics she visited.

“We were both Immortal Cultivators. It was perfectly normal for two biological siblings to keep certain secrets from each other. I did not tell her some of my ultimate techniques either!”

Li Yao couldn’t have looked more awful. “In that case, why did she tell you that she had grasped the new ‘Soul Transfer Technique’?”

Slightly stunned, Qi Yuanbao said, “That’s right. Come to think of it, it was indeed rather strange. Usually, my sister and I simply trained on our own. Even if we grasped any unparalleled technique, we hardly told each other. Only when we encountered obstacles or needed external protection in training would we talk to each other.

“I-I did not think too much at that time. I only thought that she told it accidentally when she was too excited…”

Gnashing his teeth, Li Yao asked, one word after another, “Therefore, without Wuying Qinxin’s breakthrough in the ‘Soul Transfer Technique’, your ambitions wouldn’t have burst out, and the assassination against Jin Yuyan wouldn’t have been activated. In other words, while you were the main perpetrator on the surface, she was actually the mastermind behind the curtain. Everybody, including you, was led by her with extremely subtle psychological hints!”

Stunned for a long time, Qi Yuanbao said, “Now that I think of it, it is possible.”

Li Yao shouted angrily, “Why didn’t you say it sooner?”

With a bitter expression, Qi Yuanbao said, “I didn’t realize it until now. Besides, would the Black Wind King have believed me even if I had said it sooner? Wouldn’t you have believed that I was assigning all the blame to Wuying Qinxin and understating my responsibility, and therefore despised, loathed, and tortured me even harder?”

Lost for words, Li Yao took a deep breath and searched for Wuying Qinxin’s prison with telepathic thoughts.

To localize the few important persons, other than leaving a mark on Qi Yuanbao’s artificial body, he had also put a neck ring on Wuying Qinxin that released waves of a special frequency every second. Li Yao should be able to detect it as long as it was within several thousand meters.

However, Li Yao’s scan had no result at all.

It was impossible. Li Yao’s tracing neck ring was extremely solid, and it was fully charged with spiritual energy yesterday. Even if Wuying Qinxin had been blown into smithereens or crumpled by the collapsed building, there was no reason why the tracing neck ring would lose effect.

The only possibility was that Wuying Qinxin had escaped with the tracing neck ring, after killing all the guards next to her the moment of the explosion.

Li Yao cursed himself hard in his heart again, wondering why he hadn’t learned any lesson from all the setbacks. A guy who jumped out and caused trouble openly since the beginning like Qi Yuanbao must be a lackey or a scapegoat. Wuying Qinxin, being so low-key, should’ve been treated with more attention!

“I’m going to believe you one more time. If I ever find that you’re lying, I’ll rip your soul apart and drink wine with it!”

Li Yao grabbed Qi Yuanbao by his neck and threw him to the midair before he kicked him right out of the window at an altitude of almost a hundred meters. He also sealed the guy’s artificial body by the way, simply letting him drop while screaming.

The man was a ghost after all, and the artificial body was sturdy enough. Even though it wouldn’t be the most pleasant experience, the fall would not kill him.

It was the fastest way to get him away from the burning plaza.

Next, Li Yao stomped on the floor, breaking it and descending to three floors below, before he dashed to the room where Wuying Qinxin had been held in custody.

As he expected, the corridor and the room were empty. There was nothing except for the dead bodies of almost ten guards. Wuying Qinxin had vanished.

On one of his knees, Li Yao examined the corpses of the guards. The more he examined, the more scared he became.

The guards were not knocked out by the blast of the explosion or smashed by the falling ceiling, but blown up by somebody, who crumbled their skulls, squeezed their brains, and shattered their souls into pieces.

Everybody’s head was nothing more than an empty balloon. Not the slightest remaining soul could be found inside. No gods in the entire universe could save them now.

Two guards summoned their crystal suits in time. Their heads were protected by the hardest helmet, but they were still killed.

Judging from the clear marks of fists on the helmets, the attacker was not even wearing a crystal suit but still managed to kill the muscular men in crystal suits barehandedly.

Li Yao compared his own fist to it, only to discover that the fist mark on the helmet was much smaller than his own. It was obviously a woman’s fist.

It was Wuying Qinxin.

Li Yao’s heart sank into a bottomless abyss.

All the files stated that Wuying Qinxin was a pure Meditation Healer who was between an admin-type Immortal Cultivator and a research-type one. Her combat ability was not very tough.

Jin Yuyan also told Li Yao that he had barely seen his wife attack anyone in the past hundred years. Wuying Qinxin preferred to use her brain than her fists.

Li Yao had performed a full examination on Wuying Qinxin himself before she was locked and did not notice any anomaly.

If she had hypnotized the guards through the unique mental attacks of the Meditation Healers, forcing them to brutalize and die with each other, Li Yao would have found it more acceptable.

However, punching so many guards to death with her own fists, with a strength that pierced through two crystal suits as if they were just paper—how was it possible?

Pondering for a moment, Li Yao suddenly thought of something. His whole face was almost blackened, and he hurried to go to the other side of the corridor to check.

Before he broke into the room, he already discovered another body on the corridor, the body of another woman.

It was a woman who had a rising cheekbone, huge eyes, and long arms that reached her knees.

Her eyes were still open after her death. Inside the frozen eyes were questions and fear. Her mouth was wide open, as if she were about to exclaim in disbelief.

However, her chest had been deeply dented, and her spine could almost be seen.

There was also a tiny hole on her forehead, which pierced to the back of her head. All the brain tissues in between had been burnt up by the flames of spiritual energy.

She was Red Lady, one of the four “gods of death” on par with Qi Yuanbao, leader of Bloody Skull, and one of the strongest snipers in Imperium.