Li Yao took a deep breath. His own eyes were more or less moist too.
It was because while the background of “Firefly” was made up, everything else, including the struggles in the magical equipment graveyard, the shimmers in the dark, and the father-and-son relationship between him and his pop, was all real.
So real that… they couldn’t be any more real.
“I don’t know why I rescued my pop in the spur of the moment, and I don’t know what motivated my pop to adopt me who was disobedient, aggressive, bigoted, and brutal. At that time, I already had my nickname as ‘Vulture’, and I certainly wasn’t the most popular person in my place.”
Taking a deep breath, Li Yao tried to stay calm as he went on, “Other than the arts of refining, he also taught me a lot of lessons about life. He showed me the light in the dark for the first time and made me realize that ‘survival of the fittest’ shouldn’t be the only truth in the entire universe. He also let me taste the most sincere feelings between human beings for the first time.
“Perhaps—
“Many times, I saw him getting himself drunk to cover the tears in his eyes with the stink of alcohol all over his body. Then, he would pick up one of the metal roses that he carved carefully and bury his head in it to smell it, as if he could really smell the fragrance of flowers from the other side of the sea of stars.
“Sometimes, he would look at me in a very weird way. His eyes were even piercing through me, through the magical equipment graveyard, and through the shackles of time and space, reaching a place far, far away.
“There was no telling if I was overthinking, but I could vaguely tell that he truly wished that I were his real son and the fruit of love between him and a certain woman. Then, if our whole family could live in peace and happiness together, it would be the most beautiful thing in the entire universe.”
“Stop it! Stop it!”
The queen muttered before she suddenly had an outburst of emotions.
“I told you to shut up!”
Huala!
The land below the queen’s feet fell apart. Countless bolts of lightning were blown into the ground from her feet and rose to the sky along the thick chasms, tearing apart the sky like thousands of flying swords!
Even the storm and the thunder were shuddering in fear under the queen’s catharsis.
Li Yao and Li Jialing’s facial organs were almost blown out of place when the queen lost control!
“Stop talking about… the useless things.”
Covering her chest, the queen gnashed her teeth. “Tell me what happened later. How did you advance into the Divinity Transformation Stage, and how did you get a Colossus?”
Li Yao said, “Under the help of my pop, my expertise in refining soared. Firefly, which had wandered for a thousand years, might be short of many things, but the broken fragments of ancient magical equipment were certainly not among them. Together with my pop, I repaired abundant magical equipment and jade chips, from which I gathered some techniques and training methods. With that as the foundation, I grew up step by step.
“Firefly had already sailed to the edge of mankind’s expanse in its tens of thousands of years of history. It was a dim, barren, and lackluster area where resources were not available through regular approaches. Only by exploring the few world fragments and forsaken worlds could it be possible to gather some leftovers.
“We had an organization named ‘Occult Orbs Fellowship’, which was dedicated to the exploration missions.
“I joined the Occult Orbs Fellowship and adventured in countless world fragments and forsaken worlds, including ‘Boneyard’ where a great demon from the primeval age was hibernating, ‘the Nether World Sector’ that had been scarred by war with nothing but some foul spectral Cultivators left, etc. Through the dangerous adventures and the fortuitous incidents, I picked up a lot of heritages and luckily survived while I reached the peak of the Nascent Soul Stage step by step.
“As my combat ability grew higher, my position in the Star Ocean Republic rose steadily too. I was promoted all the way until I was nominated as the special emissary of the Speaker as well as the captain of ‘Team Red Lotus’, a team of secret guards for the Speaker. I could more or less be called the top expert on Firefly, and I was quite appreciated by the Speaker of the Star Ocean Republic. So, it shouldn’t be surprising at all that I got to use the ‘Tartarean Skeleton’, the only Colossus on board, right?”
“Huh…”
Pacing back and forth, the queen thought for a moment and said, “No wonder you are adept at stealth and sabotages and were even able to crush ‘Manjusaka, the City in the Sky’. So, you have received professional training before and once worked as the captain of a secret squad?
“But your story does not make sense again.
“Since you are ‘the top expert on Firefly’, ‘special emissary of the Speaker of the Star Ocean Republic plus the captain of his guards’, and ‘the user of the sole Colossus’, you are definitely very powerful and influential. However uninterested in politics you may be because you are more familiar with fighting and refining, you are at the center of power at all, and many people should be dependent on you.
“Then, how exactly did the government-in-exile of the Star Ocean Republic allow such a super expert like you to leave Firefly with the only Colossus they had for the Imperium to join me? Did it not raise any suspicion of… defection at all?”
With a bitter smile, Li Yao said, “I already said it earlier. Perhaps you didn’t catch it, Your Grace. I said that I was the last Cultivator from Firefly of the Star Ocean Republic. So, there is neither a ‘Speaker’ or a ‘captain’ right now.”
The queen was slightly dazed. “What do you mean? What happened to your starship?”
This time, it was Li Yao who was caught in a trance. After a moment of hesitation, he grunted and vomited a mouthful of black blood, and he couldn’t have looked more lackluster.
“Brother Yao!”
Li Jialing hurried to give him a hand. “What’s wrong?”
“His belief is shaking.”
The queen said coldly, “I sense that your soul is very unsteady and is on the verge of collapse. You are not far away from mental derangement. Why? Something so terrible happened on Firefly that you are almost losing your belief?”
Half narrowing his eyes, Li Yao wiped the blood at the corner of his mouth and struggled to say, “Yes. Firefly was destroyed, the Star Ocean Republic was gone, and I was the only survivor who ran to the Imperium to look for you. Could you please not dive into the details?”
“No.”
The queen snapped, “You will have to confess it dutifully even if you are mentally deranged, or I will kill the both of you immediately!”
“You—”
The blood all over Li Jialing’s body flowed to his head. For the first time, he summoned the courage and glared at his own mother, or to quote him, his “gene provider”. “The collapse of beliefs and the mental derangement can possibly result in death!”
“So what?”
The queen sneered, “Do you not deserve to die?”
“Then, do it now!”
The young man who had been containing himself so far finally could not hold it any longer but burst into fury. Coldly-shining claws ejected from both of his hands, and his teeth protruded like the tusks of a ferocious beast. He glared at the queen and declared, “Do it as you will, but I will definitely not sit and be killed. I’ll fight a bloody battle with you to the end!”
“You think that I do not dare to kill you?”
As the queen looked at Li Jialing’s mutations in disgust, her lips trembled nonstop. “Look at what a monster the two b*stards Li Lingfeng and Wuying Lan have turned you into. I really shouldn’t have let the pig die so easily!”
“I have always been a monster, ever since the moment I was born!”
Li Jialing shrieked, “But I never asked anyone to give birth to me. It was your mistake that such a monster like myself was created!”
“Indeed.”
The queen narrowed her eyes. “I am going to correct the ‘mistake’ now.”
Don’t!
Li Yao secretly shouted that it was not good and hurried to cut off Li Jialing and Li Linghai’s eye contact, while he put on a more and more complicated and painful look.
The queen retreated her eyes that were stabbed at Li Jialing. With a smile of mockery, she spoke to Li Yao casually, “I know what happened even if you don’t tell me. When the resources on Firefly ran out, did the so-called ‘Cultivators’ all completely rip apart their pretentious masks and brutalize each other to fight for the last chance of survival until all of them died together?”
Li Yao’s body trembled hard, and he stared at the queen in disbelief.
“Don’t look at me like that. This is the only reasonable outcome by common sense. What is there to be surprised at?”
The queen remarked disdainfully, “Countless specialists of the Imperium have run the most detailed deductions and inferred that Firefly would collapse from the inside after it wandered the sea of stars for a thousand years at most. The reality truly fitted their vision. Your hypocritical Cultivators are truly not surprising at all!”
Rendered speechless, Li Yao was at a loss for a long time, before he finally lost his vigor like a balloon whose air was emptied. He muttered, “Yes. After a thousand years of roaming, we still failed to find a Sector that was fit for survival. The resources of all the world fragments and forsaken worlds had been exploited, and our population had soared to five hundred million.
“The hibernation cabins and the recycling system on board were seriously damaged. Food, clean water, and even air were growing thinner each day. They were not enough to support five hundred million people.
“At that time, our Speaker Cui Lingfeng—who coincidentally had the same name as your brother—proposed a ‘Rebirth Plan’, planning to kill 80% of the people with a randomly attacking biochemical virus. If the population was reduced to a hundred million, the ecological system of the whole starship would keep functioning.
“In fact, it was not exactly Speaker Cui Lingfeng’s idea. I learned later that the parliament always had such an ’emergency plan’. The lethal virus had been sealed for hundreds of years.”
“It’s perfectly normal.”
The queen said casually, “In such a closed and desperate environment, it was perhaps the only way to continue your civilization, although only by another few hundred pitiful years.”
Li Yao said with a pained expression, “However, there was another faction in the leadership of our government, led by Tang Zhengdong, captain of Firefly. They were the fundamentalist Cultivators who believed that no innocents should be killed under any circumstances.”
“Idiots.”
The queen gave a short remark.
After a brief hesitation, Li Yao said, “Captain Tang Zhengdong discovered Speaker Cui Lingfeng’s plan and had to stop the latter. The two factions had a fierce fight. Later, the issue somehow got leaked, and everybody on Firefly learned it.
“Everybody knew the existence of the ‘Rebirth Plan’ and the fatal virus. They also knew that the resources on board were bordering on bankruptcy. The doom arrived in almost less than one day, and Firefly turned into a living hell of dead bodies and blood!”