But he already couldn’t tell whether it was from Li Jialing; his wife, Ding Lingdang; or his friends whom he had been fighting together with on his journey.
His crystal suit was on the brink of destruction, his spiritual energy had basically been exhausted, his veins were running dry, and his every bone seemed to have been broken into twenty pieces that were only stuck together through his willpower.
The scraps of dozens of blades and cannonballs were embedded into his body in various ways. The debris of several battle puppets was even holding on to the handles of their sabers that had been stabbed into his body. Clinging to Li Yao, they made Li Yao’s every movement like a rotation in a mincer. His blood was not flowing but spurting to five meters away!
He could not feel any pain anymore. His body was as inert as if soaked in the consolidated magma. His self-awareness was also enshrouded in the midst of death, getting more and more blurred.
I never saw this coming… Is my life going to end in such a way?
Dragging his heavy body mechanically, Li Yao slashed at the running iron torrents again and again, until the last two sabers were broken and could not unleash the slightest aura anymore.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The stormy barrage completely blew apart the front side of his crystal suit. He lost balance and exposed his bleeding body.
While the world was swirling before him, the bloody battles in the old days recurred quickly in his eyes.
Xiao Xuance, Bai Xinghe, Elder Nether Spring, Jin Tuyi, Lu Zui, Zhou Hengdao, Extraterrestrial Devil Mo Xuan, Blackstar the Great Wuying Qi… The soul-stirring and atrocious battles were back to him again. Almost all the experts boasted strength that far exceeded his own, but none of them succeeded in killing him. Instead, he reversed the situation and secured triumphs all the time!
Now that he thought of it, he had been truly unbelievably lucky.
In the meantime, having been knocked over by such a minor pawn as himself, those great men of the time must’ve died in hatred when they lost their cause and their reputation was gone, didn’t they?
Had their hatred been haunting him all the time, making him finally end up in the last place he expected to die in today?
Half a month ago, Blackstar the Great failed to kill him and was scared away by his unexpected shot. That was the ancestor of the Immortal Cultivators and theoretically the strongest Immortal Cultivator!
It was probably the most glorious battle of his life. He had it all planned out on how he was going to brag about it after he was back to the federation.
Little did he know back then that he would be devoured by a bunch of lifeless machines with the sheer advantage in number.
Examining the past in retrospect, Li Yao had no regrets. Walking from the magical equipment graveyard in Floating Spear City to the center of the cosmos, he felt that his splendid life was certainly worth it.
However, he hadn’t found Earth yet, and he hadn’t solved the puzzle why he had to destroy Earth. It was truly somewhat… unrelieved to kick the bucket just like that!
But there was nothing he could do now.
After tearing apart a battle puppet with the last bit of his strength at the cost of three new wounds, he could only watch another two battle puppets raise their sharp blades that were full of sawtooth.
His brain had issued the orders to resist or dodge, but his body could not perfect any effective movement. He could only watch the blades cutting at his head.
Right then—
The two crossed blades that could’ve cut off his head in one attack came to an abrupt halt after they dropped for only half an inch. They shivered slightly in the midair.
The two battle puppets holding the sharp blades cramped so hard as if they just had a seizure. The brilliance in their man-made eyes was dimmed and intermittent, as if they were hacked by something, and two opposite strengths were fighting in an impasse in the iron shells.
Half 0.1 seconds later, the two battle puppets were stabilized again.
But the cold man-made eyes had additional temperatures now, changing from the gloomy blue to the merry red and green.
Shua!
The sabers chopped down again brutally in aggressive and graceful curves, not at Li Yao’s neck but another two battle puppets that were going to attack Li Yao—their own kind!
The two battle puppets whose eyes became red and green had a performance ten times higher than before. Cutting off ten or so claws extending at Li Yao in the blink of an eye, they rolled to Li Yao’s front and back and ripped apart all the puppets within five meters in dazzling movements!
Li Yao’s pupils constricted violently, and he couldn’t have been more shocked. “What’s going on?”
As the most excellent refiner of the federation, and having served Queen Li Linghai of the Imperium, he had touched thousands of kinds of spiritual puppets, but he had never seen such an agile model before!
Even Fist King Lei Zonglie, who boasted a super artificial intelligence, seemed not as good as them in terms of fluency!
Besides… What were the two puppets doing? Why were they not killing him but helping him?
While Li Yao was confused, the two battle puppets that had just finished a spectacular slaughter bowed at him at the same time, and the supposedly cold, mechanical sounds from their chests somehow became cute.
The two battle puppets said sweetly and crisply at the same time, “Dad!”
Dumbfounded, Li Yao used all his last strength to raise goosebumps all over his body before he passed out. “… What the heck!”
…
Long Yangjun stood at the high place for a long time. The hot wind raised by the fire stirred her long hair into a mess.
Her eyes were as deep and gloomy as an ocean; there was no telling whether it was one of ice or one of fire.
“Those idiots, those fools, those hopeless human beings! How could the Pangu Clan and the Nuwa Clan procreated such—such—such unreasonable offspring?”
Long Yangjun cursed in fury, “So many primeval civilizations in the past billions of years have all failed. Pangu and Nuwa failed. Everybody failed. And you think you are the only capable ones, and that you are exceptional enough to succeed? Impossible. It’s impossible! You can never break the dark and cold universe! You are just self-righteous dummies who don’t know what you are doing. You are just a bunch of ignorant, fearless, and extremely childish morons.”
She cursed for a long time, but her eyes never left Li Jialing and Li Yao who were surrounded by countless battle puppets and Immortal Cultivators. Her curses were lighter and lighter, but her breath was getting more and more hasty and heavy.
“I’ll be damned!”
Long Yangjun covered her head and shouted, “Is idiocy really contagious? Have I contracted it, too? The way for mankind to become the only survivor of the primeval wars is to transform everybody into an idiot?”
She stomped on the ground and swooped to the above of the battlefield in a streak of silver brilliance, turning from the “Serenity Seraph” to the “War Goddess”!
“I’m very angry right now. Come on and be killed quickly! Don’t waste my time!”
…
BOOM!
While Li Jialing was fighting dizzily in the iron forest, he heard a thunderous roar before a massive tide of spiritual energy ran close and paralyzed the dozens of battle puppets around him.
The stormy attacks he suffered came to a halt. Li Jialing breathed heavily, only to discover that his crystal suit was full of damage. Many of the previous attacks had even reached his bones. There was no part on his body that did not hurt.
Looking at the source of the explosion, he saw that Long Yangjun who had put on her crystal suit was thudding over aggressively.
“Sister Long!”
Overjoyed, Li Jialing almost cried in tears. “You’re finally here to save Brother Yao!”
“Cut the crap!”
Long Yangjun interrupted him in a bad mood, “Where is Li Yao? Is he dead yet?”
“He was fighting next to me a moment ago. How did he vanish all of a sudden?”
Li Jialing was greatly shocked. “Has Brother Yao… perished?”
The two of them were both flabbergasted and hurried to release their senses to search, only to be too surprised by what they saw to believe their eyes.
They discovered that two weaselly, stealthy battle puppets, one clearing the path and the other carrying the unconscious Li Yao, had reached the edge of the battlefield and were running to the forsaken tunnel in the corner!
At first look, the two battle puppets should’ve been on Li Minghui’s side because they still had the logo of the Black Iron Group on them!
But their combat abilities were unbelievably high, and they were fighting in a completely different way from regular puppets. They both had the cruelty and heartlessness of machines and the agility and keenness of human beings, making them look like machines that had been given a life!
Catching the enemy unprepared, the two battle puppets had already carried Li Yao into the forsaken tunnel before the Immortal Cultivators realized what was going on.
After a huge explosion, the tunnel was collapsed by them, temporarily blocking the pursuit of the Immortal Cultivators.
The heated battlefield a moment ago fell into a rather awkward silence.
The Immortal Cultivators looked at the collapsed cave and then at Li Jialing and Long Yangjun at the center of the battlefield.
The Nepenthe believers looked at the cave and at Li Jialing and Long Yangjun too, waiting for them to give an answer eagerly; what exactly was going on?
Looking at each other in bewilderment, Li Jialing and Long Yangjun discovered that the situation was as followed:
They were beleaguered by thousands of iron warriors and Immortal Cultivators, who looked ferocious and were obviously not in their best mood.
On the other hand, the guy, who had been showing off for such a long time, who had delivered a soul-stirring speech in dazzling sound and visual effects, as if he was about to sacrifice himself as a martyr to give other people courage, and who seemed to be the absolute hero of the battle… had escaped.
Li Jialing and Long Yangjun, who had been observing the battle, somehow became the heroes of the battle and had to wipe Li Yao’s a*s for him.
His face pale, Li Jialing stammered, “How is it possible? Why is this happening? Brother Yao does have more trump cards. This… This… This is impossible. This is… unreasonable!”
Long Yangjun opened her fingers and covered her face tightly, unwilling to let Li Jialing or anybody else see her look right now. “Therefore, my little buddy, you should understand why Sister Long asked you not to be rash a moment ago, and you should have a profound understanding about Li Yao’s personality right now, shouldn’t you?”
Li Jialing: “… I was wrong, Sister Long. I was too childish and naïve! I-I… From today on, I will definitely follow Sister Long’s every word. I will only trust you!”
“That’s right. Names can be given wrongly, but nicknames are always accurate. Do you think Vulture Li Yao is known as ‘Monster Li’ for nothing?”
Heaving a long sigh, Long Yangjun glanced at the thousands of warriors who were staring at them and then at the collapsed cave through which Li Yao fled in a hurry. She couldn’t hold back her fury anymore but cursed aloud with one hand on her hip and the other pointing at the direction in which Li Yao was carried away. “Li Yao, you monster! Just wait for it! I will not let go of you even if I die and become a ghost!”
