At the same time, in a military hospital in the Empyreal Terminus Sector at the center of the cosmos…
Before Li Yao met Li Linghai again, he never thought that the queen of the Imperium would be painting butterflies in a small garden under the warm sun.
Judging from her vivid work, she seemed to be as good as a professional painter.
Her body had been greatly weakened, but she did not look very fragile. Instead, warmed by the sunlight, even her white hair and her transparent skin did not seem as chilling as before.
“Well…”
Standing behind Li Linghai for a long time, Li Yao watched her dye the wings of a butterfly with glamorous colors, not knowing what he should say. He finally said, “Your Highness, have you decided to get rid of this body and turn into a spectral Cultivator? If you have, I can make an artificial body for you in person. After all, I’m still your special refiner, haha!”
“Thank you…”
Li Linghai finished the last stroke and smiled. “… For everything.”
“Everything…”
Li Yao was even more embarrassed, feeling that his head was itchy.
When he fought Wuying Qi, he was too focused on his enemy to feel anything wrong. But several months later, after he calmed down, when he thought about what happened in retrospect, displaying Wuying Qi’s porn videos and singing “Mom Is the Best” were both humiliating.
Even Vulture Li Yao did not love losing face. This battle was the greatest taint of his glorious life. He was not brazen enough to accept Li Linghai’s gratitude.
Noticing his awkwardness, Li Linghai smiled and continued, “Believe it or not, no matter how I feel about the emperor and the four Kurfürsten, this is my homeland, and I never meant to destroy the Imperium. Thank you for stopping me and Wuying Qi. Thank you for saving the Imperium!”
“It was nothing. As long as you still believe in renewing the Imperium and fulfill your earlier promise, I would save the Imperium again if I have to.”
Li Yao paused for a moment and couldn’t help but ask, “I’ve been curious about one thing. Were you threatened by Wuying Qi, allured by power, or deceived by the bright future that Wuying Qi painted? That day, I said to Li Jialing that Wuying Qi threatened you with your other kids. Am I right?”
“Threat, deception, or allurement… Who can tell it precisely?”
Li Linghai smiled and murmured at the dancing butterflies, “Admiration in Wuying Qi, resentment at my family and the emperor, love for my kids, lust for power, and the curiosity about the universe beyond our universe… I think they all played a part.”
“Fine.”
Though Li Yao was not entirely satisfied with the answer, he knew that it was probably the truth. Taking a long breath in relief, Li Yao asked again, “Your Highness, there’s another question that’s more private. You can refuse it if you would rather not answer it. Did you… really fall in love with my foster father? Or rather, how did you awaken an emotionless person of the Covenant Alliance and turn him into a normal man?
“Please don’t misunderstand me. I just think that your answer will be helpful for us in resisting the Covenant Alliance’s attack.”
“I loved him.”
After such a long silence that Li Yao thought that she would not reply, she finally said, “Also, you’re wrong. Even the people of the Covenant Alliance have feelings and desires, except that their feelings and desires are suppressed. However, feelings and desires are in the nature of human beings. How can they be completely suppressed?
“On the contrary, if you find an appropriate way to provoke their feelings and desires, it will be like a starving man who finds delicious food or a desert that has rain after decades of drought. It’s so unforgettable that even Blackstar the Great could not completely wipe it out!”
“So, it’s like the harder you press a spring, the higher it will bounce back later?”
Li Yao mumbled, “If we find the trick, we may be able to finish the Covenant Alliance without any soldier by waking up their feelings and desires…”
“How could it be so simple?”
Li Linghai was amused. “If it were so simple, the Covenant Alliance wouldn’t have been the Imperium’s headache for a thousand years. I was able to wake up your foster father because of many fortuitous factors and even Blackstar the Great’s unspoken help. It’s hardly duplicable.”
“It does make sense.”
Seeing that Li Linghai was in a good mood, Li Yao pressed further and asked, “Your Highness, can you tell me my foster father’s real name and the details when you were together in the Supreme Emperor’s mausoleum?”
“No.”
Li Linghai shook her head and let the gentle sunlight gather into a butterfly on the back of her hand. She smiled. “It’s a memory that only belongs to me. I won’t tell it to anyone, especially not to you.”
“You can keep it a secret.”
Li Yao said, feeling embarrassed, “But why ‘especially not to me’?”
“I do not want to tell you my privacy, but as compensation, I can tell you something else.”
Li Linghai smiled. “You’ve known a thing or two about the coordinates of the Supreme Emperor’s mausoleum and its secrets from Wuying Qi 3.0, but do you want to know more?”
“Of course I do!”
The Supreme Emperor’s mausoleum was an important location for Li Yao in the next phase. He pricked his ears and said, “Please, Your Highness. I’m all ears!”
“In the past thousands of years, the Supreme Emperor’s mausoleum has been a top-secret for all the experts. Everybody tried to find it, but until a thousand years ago, nobody had any success.”
Li Linghai introduced, “The reason is very simple. That’s because the entrance to the Supreme Emperor’s mausoleum is not fixed but moves randomly.
“To put it simply, the world fragment where the Supreme Emperor’s mausoleum is located is not entirely in the three-dimensional universe. Instead, it’s floating in the 3.5 dimension between the three-dimensional universe and the four-dimensional one.
“If we break the void luckily and place us between the three-dimension and the four-dimension, we may be able to see the Supreme Emperor’s mausoleum and its trajectory accurately, but from the three-dimensional perspective, it will always be wandering among dozens of Sectors without any pattern.
“Years back, your foster father and I were blown to the entrance of the Supreme Emperor’s mausoleum by a space storm by accident, but Wuying Qi had a special equation that he learned from the Blood God, which allowed him to calculate the location of the entrance of the mausoleum in every cycle.
“Later, Wuying Qi taught the equation to me, and I’m teaching it to you today. Then, in a few special time windows in a year, you’ll be able to find the entrance to the mausoleum and enter the mysterious world fragment!”
“That sounds amazing.”
Li Yao was astonished. No wonder nobody had ever found this world fragment in the past thousands of years. Its entrance turned out to be unpredictable!
“However, there won’t be any use even if you can go to the world fragment.”
Li Linghai suddenly said, “Because most of the valuable things in this world fragment have been excavated by me in the past decades as resources to unite the reformists. There can’t be better treasures in the world fragment than what you’ve already seen in my base.”
“What?”
Shocked, Li Yao realized what she meant. “Are you saying that we cannot get the real secret until we open the core of the Supreme Emperor’s mausoleum and find out the Supreme Emperor’s remains?
“Right, the key! The key that is divided into two parts can open the core!”
“Yes and no.”
Li Linghai said, “The key can open the core, but the core is not a simple tomb but probably another world fragment. The Supreme Emperor’s mausoleum is like a cave within a cave. The world fragment on the outside is only a platform to the internal world fragment, which is a mausoleum of gods.”
“A mausoleum of gods?”
Li Yao keenly sensed Li Linghai’s different choice of words. “What do you mean? Isn’t it the Supreme Emperor’s mausoleum?”
“It’s both the Supreme Emperor’s mausoleum and a mausoleum of the gods.”
Li Linghai’s eyes turned sharp. She grabbed her painting and declared resolutely, “It’s the Gods’ Mausoleum!”
