“Well…”
Li Yao scratched his head for a long time. He hadn’t changed his old habit although his level was much higher than before. He thought for a moment and said, “It’s not hard to explain. What the eyes see is the light signals on the retina that are passed by optical nerves and processed by the brain. When I was training, I accidentally boosted my vitality field and disrupted the natural magnetic field nearby because of the enhancement of the Gold Crystal Pyramid, which affected everybody living in the area. If some of them had similar brainwave frequencies to mine, it was possible that certain images, such as butterflies, would be displayed on their optical nerves without going through the retina due to reverberation.”
Xiaoming and Wenwen were rather stunned.
“Besides…”
Xiaoming quickly added, “During the seven days, the ordinary people who awakened their spiritual roots within the coverage of the butterflies than those outside had more than doubled, and the chances for the experts to enter new stages were significantly increased too. However, the consequences of their failure were much severer too. Was it because of you as well?”
Li Yao thought for a moment and offered a reasonable explanation.
“When someone gets in touch with the ultimate mysteries of the universe, his vitality field will inevitably interact with the natural magnetic field and lead to great changes in it.
“The great changes in the natural magnetic field will certainly influence the people within the range and activate their spiritual roots.
“As for the severe consequences of their failure, I think it’s probably because the one who caused the changes was a Cultivator, and the beliefs of the Immortal Cultivators were not compatible with mine.
“I didn’t mean to do that. Actually, I didn’t know that I would cause any of those things. I’m sure that the emperor, Lei Chenghu, and the empress dowager must’ve been anxious, right?”
“They were more than anxious!”
Xiaoming said, “Dad, you know that this is the most critical moment for the reformists. Lei Chenghu had just gathered the elite troops of the reformists as the general commander and was about to eliminate the remainder of the four families when such an appalling change took place in the capital!
“The authorities announced as soon as possible that it was simply a test of a powerful weather weapon that the reformists recently developed. They also secretly spread out that the clouds were auspicious because they meant that Emperor Yongjia had won the approval of Blackstar the Great and the Supreme Emperor. However, none of the high-level Immortal Cultivators were deceived by those bulls*it. They all knew that you were training in seclusion and the anomalies were caused by you. Naturally, they were frightened.”
“Hey…”
Li Yao said, “What’s to be frightened about? An unparalleled expert like me definitely needs some splendid sound and visual effects when I’m training. Didn’t the new emperor show a golden lion in the sky when he was crowned? They shouldn’t have been surprised at all.”
Xiaoming and Wenwen looked at each other and continued, “All in all, Lei Chenghu and the empress dowager almost went crazy, fearing that you were corrupted by Wuying Qi 3.0 and would activate the Gold Crystal Pyramid to destroy the sun again. Long Yangjun and Boss Bai were nervous too. We also searched the files we knew but found no information on your status!
“Lei Chenghu and the empress dowager sent a troop to surround the Gold Crystal Pyramid and even wanted to check up on you. But since this is a demilitarized area, we certainly couldn’t allow them to come in. However, it didn’t seem right to leave you alone in the weird state either. So, we reached a compromise and let Boss Bai, the Fist King, and Long Yangjun in to save you.”
Li Yao blinked his eyes. “Where are they? I don’t think I can detect them.”
Xiaoming said, “Boss Bai focused his spiritual energy and tried to wake you up by force, only to be knocked away by your power. He vomited blood for half a minute and seemed like a dead person. He didn’t recover until he rested for three days in the medical cabin. When we checked him in the morning, he still couldn’t walk steadily yet, and he cursed you really badly.
“The same happened to the Fist King. He tried to stimulate your brain to wake you up or at least to communicate with you. However, hardly had the neural network he simulated reached your temples when the thirty-six super crystal processors that provided computation ability for him crashed simultaneously. Thankfully, we made backups for the Fist King, or the Fist King might’ve been killed for good!”
“Well…”
Li Yao was stunned for a long time. “Are you serious?”
“Eventually, it was Long Yangjun. Better than Boss Bai and the Fist King, she was neither knocked away nor collapsed, but she couldn’t wake you up either.”
Xiaoming said, “She stood before you for a long time, and her face became so weird that I can’t describe it. It’s like…”
“It’s like her soul grew old by a hundred years during that moment.”
Wenwen said, “Her body did not decay, but her soul aged by a hundred years. The changes in her vibe and her mental status were obvious!”
“Then, Long Yangjun asked everybody out except me and Wenwen, and she left too.”
Xiaoming said, “She said that they could never wake you up, and it was up to you whether or not you would wake up. If you still had feelings for this universe, chances were that you would wake up in a few days, but it was also possible that you would never wake up, or even…”
“Die?”
Li Yao frowned.
“No, Aunt Long did not exactly say ‘die’.”
Wenwen said, “She said that you might turn into countless butterflies, or a splendid rainbow, or just some regular quicksand. Anyway, you would return to the Higher Truth in some way.”
“Return to the Higher Truth?”
Li Yao subconsciously touched his cheeks and spat. “I certainly will never return to the Higher Truth, whatever it is!”
“But you did look creepy and weird back then. It seemed that you would collapse into thousands of butterflies at any point!”
Xiaoming showed a new picture. “Look!”
It was the picture when Li Yao was still in deep meditation.
While his soul was swimming in the river of life that spanned millions of years, his body turned gray and brown as if he were a fossil that had been sealed in rocks for a long time.
“That was me?”
Li Yao was so shocked that his jaw almost hit the ground.
“Yes, you were exactly like this six days ago. Based on your fossil-like look, it’s not ungrounded to say that you might collapse into grains at any moment, right?”
Xiaoming said, “If you hadn’t looked so terrible, Boss Bai, the Fist King, Long Yangjun, and we wouldn’t have been so desperate to wake you up, would we?”
Li Yao coughed awkwardly.
He had never felt scared until this moment.
He knew that he had awakened too many things that shouldn’t have been awakened and swallowed too many heritages that shouldn’t have been swallowed so quickly.
Evolution was bound by natural laws. Perhaps the pictures that Li Yao saw and the heritages that he found should’ve been inherited and absorbed by mankind and mankind’s offspring in the span of a hundred thousand years.
However, Li Yao had seen everything in only seven days.
No wonder his body and his soul were almost reduced into nothingness under the heavy pressure!
Water was the source of life, but even a Cultivator could not have half a ton of water at one time. It was the same for heritages. Li Yao was incapable of inheriting the heritages from billions of years ago and exploring the future billions of years later.
Getting to the bottom of it, from the perspective of the universe, he was really just an ordinary human being and a normal carbon-based life.
However…
One day—maybe a long, long time later—he, or his offspring, or his offspring’s offspring, would break this narrow and dark universe and unravel the mysteries about themselves as well as the universe, wouldn’t they?
Li Yao looked at himself in the picture.
On the seventh day, rainbows flowed out on the surface of the gray and brown fossil like a river and completely enveloped the fossil. By the time all the colors of the rainbows were absorbed into the fossil, Li Yao’s original look was restored.
Everything was the same as seven days ago, but everything was also different now.
Li Yao rose with a smile.
“Let’s go…”
He said to Xiaoming and Wenwen, “It was a nice sleep, but it’s time to go to work!”
