Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

"Let me go, Lei Qi! Let me go!"

"I hate you, Lei Qi. I hate you to death. I don't want to talk to you anymore. Let go of me now!"

"How did you end up like this? How did you and my father end up like this? You are completely unrecognizable. I don't even recognize you anymore! Are you really my brother and my father? You haven't been possessed by some alien species, have you?"

"Please, brother. You can't do this. Shanuya is innocent. It did not do anything wrong. On the contrary, it has been protecting us and even sacrificed its limbs more than once! It needs us, and we need it, too. We cannot treat it so cruelly!"

"Brother, think about it. Didn't you like Shanuya when we were kids, too? I remember that you dreamed of becoming a Dream Maker earlier than me. You liked Shanuya more than I did. You often went to tell stories to Shanuya. Both Shanuya and I were your loyal listeners. Why has everything changed now? Everything has changed since you grew up!"

The girl struggled hard on her brother's shoulder, kicking and scratching, but she could not stop her brother from carrying her to the hospital of New Hope City like an emotionless, cold statue.

This place used to be a large comprehensive hospital. Not to mention the people living on Shanuya, even many residents who were mining in the asteroid belt would come here for treatment when they were seriously ill. But just like everything else around them, it was a thing of the distant past. Nowadays, people had built medical ships with advanced facilities and beautiful environments. The vast majority of people went there for treatment. Only some Meditation Healers and psychiatry specialists of the Dream Control Bureau were still stationed here.

In the past, Peipei didn't understand why the psychiatrist was still here.

Now she knew.

Her brother locked her in a white room that was full of sponges on all sides. She could not do anything even if she wanted to hit the wall. Licking the scratch on her arm, he remained silent.

The girl was still angry. She glared at her brother and said brutally, "Lei Qi, you've changed!"

"Of course."

His brother was like a mini father. He said calmly, "Everyone, no, all life will grow up and change. I will change, and so will Shanuya."

For a moment, Peipei was lost for words. She was stunned for a long time before she managed to say, "No. I will always be like this with Shanuya. We will never be as… dark as you and Dad!"

"Yes."

His brother smiled. "The reason why we are so dark is that we hope that the people we protect will always be bright and never become like us."

Peipei opened her mouth, but she didn't know what to say. No matter how angry she was, she didn't know what to say. She could only plead weakly, "Brother, do we really have to do this? Is there no other way? Can you go and plead with Dad again? Either—or you let me go and let me talk to Shanuya? There's always a way. We can always come up with a solution that doesn't hurt anyone."

"Let you go so that you can tell Shanuya that we are ready to kill it?"

His brother asked calmly, "Can you predict how Shanuya will react when it hears the news, and how many people it will kill, including the people who are still living on it and the fleet around it—five million, ten million, fifty million, or even more?"

"Yes, Shanuya is kind and pitiful. Of course, its life is precious. For an innocent and kind girl like you, it is perfectly normal that you cannot bear to watch it die in ignorance.

"However, our compatriots, the five million, ten million, fifty million, and even more human beings, including all your companions, are innocent, kind, and pitiful, too. The newborn babies who know nothing have the right to continue living, too.

"If you are determined enough to disregard the lives of billions of people in order to save Shanuya, I don't think it is a kind of kindness. Maybe, from the perspective of all mankind, it is the greatest evil.

As if struck by lightning, Peipei was rendered speechless.

His brother sighed and squatted down.

"Don't blame me for my ruthlessness. There's nothing I can do about it. You know that a lot of things are not decided by the Dream Control Bureau, not even by our small fleet.

The brother continued. "Both my father, as the director, and the commander of our fleet, are nobodies in front of the 'Supreme Coordinated War Meeting'. Monitoring every Void Hunter has always been a great responsibility for all the fleets of mankind. When the Void Hunter raised the question 'who am I?', the hundreds of fleets under the command of the Supreme War Meeting received warnings through the gravitational waves and paid close attention to what we were going to do with the Void Hunters. According to the 'Emergency Preparedness', if the worst-case scenario, which was that the Void Hunters lost control and destroyed or even enslaved the entire fleet, the rest of the human fleets were free to attack us and destroy us together with the Void Hunters who lost control!

"What?"

This was the first time that the girl had heard such a shocking 'Emergency Preparedness'. She could not understand it at all. "How can you do this?"

"If that is not the case, what is? Are we going to watch the Void Hunters swallow the fleet of human beings and analyze all the secrets in the fleet and the human brain so that they can further develop into terrifying kings that we cannot imagine?

His brother sighed again and said, "In fact, in regard to the attitude of the Void Hunters, Dad and our commander are both very conservative. They both like the Void Hunters and their traditional lifestyles. They hope that human beings and the Void Hunters can live in peace and maintain the symbiosis that they need. Really!"

"How is that possible?"

"Dad was going to kill Shanuya!"

"Explosion was meant to be reborn. Killing Shanuya was meant to stop the 'anti-void hunters' in the supreme council from finding a reason to annihilate the Void Hunters.

His brother said, "With the advancement of the technology of starship refinement and the exploitation of a lot of natural paradises, the structure of human civilization has undergone tremendous changes over the past thousand years. A thousand years ago, most human beings established their own towns and fleets with the Void Hunters as the core. But right now, of the hundred human fleets, fewer than twenty still have the Void Hunters as the core. The remaining fleets have either found new habitable planets or become a civilization of starships. In short, the rising new human civilization does not need something like the Void Hunters at all.