Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

It was the sixth day of the ultimate test.

“It suddenly occurred to me that something is wrong with this test.”

As usual, Chu Zhiyun was chewing a lollipop in a fancy dress and watching soap operas from the Imperium with Tang Ka when she made the unexpected remark.

“W-What?”

Tang Ka was almost scared out of his wits. He looked around subconsciously, fearing that someone would show up and arrest them. “What’s wrong? What have you found?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t feel very well. We, the Children of Holy Light, have the best instincts. Have you felt anything wrong?”

Chu Zhiyun was sitting on an indoor swing. She said, “Many students who entered the town with us were gone in the past two days. This town is now awfully quiet.”

“It’s because they’re eliminated, right?”

Tang Ka thought for a moment and said, “The elimination rate in this ultimate test is very high in the first place!”

“That’s exactly the problem.”

Chu Zhiyun said, deep in thought, “If only one in a hundred people can become a Purger, how can we have so many purge troops?”

“Well…”

Tang Ka blinked his eyes. “That does seem to be a problem.”

“Of course it is. Just think about it. A thousand students participated in this ultimate test. Now that more than half of them have been eliminated, only one or two hundred of them can become Purgers. However, the purge troop nearby alone has more than three thousand soldiers.”

Chu Zhiyun counted her fingers and calculated for Tang Ka. “Also, this is just a tiny proportion of the purge troops. It’s impossible for all the Purgers to come to watch the ‘noobs’ like us, right? Most of the Purgers are still busy purging this planet. How many of them must be out there?

“If the purge troops are exclusively made of the Children of Holy Light, they wouldn’t be enough at all!”

Chu Zhiyun was better and better at impersonating an Imperium native. She could even say things like “noob” naturally now.

“Seems so…”

Recalling what Li Yao told him before, Tang Ka smiled both sadly and awkwardly. “There are probably other Children of Holy Light that we don’t know.”

“Oh? Really?”

Tapping her nose, Chu Zhiyun mumbled, “But everything just feels weird to me. I don’t like our current life and the world we grew up in.

“The world we grew up in was just a tiny starship, and all the ‘facts’ that we received were images and pictures. We accepted orders from mentors and directors through our portable crystal processors, and the mentors and directors accepted orders from the captain of the starship, and the starship then accepted orders from the Ultimate Benevolence Masters on another starship.

“But nobody has ever explained the meaning of those orders to us. Nobody told us how we can fulfill our destiny of awakening the gods. We’re only carrying out the uncanny orders from uncanny places in our ignorance. Is that really piety to the gods?

“Let’s just talk about the recent twenty years.

“Ever since we were born, a voice that claimed to be an Ultimate Benevolence Master has kept telling us the will of the gods, that we should unconditionally worship and obey the gods, and that we would conquer everything in the universe as the sharpest blade under the favor of the gods!

“But is it the truth? Both of us know that it is not. Before we were born, the Imperium of True Human Beings had taken almost a hundred Sectors from us in only twenty years. A hundred Sectors!

“If we’re really favored by the gods, why would we have suffered such a grave setback?

“The people above us, on the other hand, destroyed all the facilities on hundreds of planets just in order to stop the troops of the Imperium of True Human Beings from pressing forward!

“Isn’t it more outrageous than the people of the Imperium?

“The prosperous lands that took generations of people hundreds of years to work on were our best gifts for the gods. Those lands belonged to the gods. Were we really qualified to burn them to the ground?

“Ever since we were born, the Covenant Alliance’s fleets have been retreating, retreating, and retreating. We moved from one starship to another, but our living space got smaller and smaller and we had fewer and fewer resources, until we finally made a counterattack and reoccupied the Thick Soil Sector.

“However, you’ve seen the tragedies on this planet yourself. 99% of his planet is now contaminated, not by the Imperium but by ourselves. What is this for exactly?”

“You’re thinking too much.”

Naturally, it was not a question that Tang Ka could answer. He could only say, “The Ultimate Benevolence Masters decide the strategies in the war. It’s not our place to intervene.”

“I don’t believe it. I find it more and more impossible to believe the Ultimate Benevolence Masters, whom we have only heard but never seen.”

While speaking disobediently, Chu Zhiyun suddenly leaped off from the swing. “I’m starting to think that you may be right. The Ultimate Benevolence Masters might not want me to point out their mistakes. They may be infuriated.”

“Well…”

Tang Ka thought for a moment and asked, “What do you plan to do?”

“I don’t know.”

The seemingly mature girl was at a loss for the first time. She mumbled, “If the gods’ mission for me is to point out the Ultimate Benevolence Masters’ mistakes, I have to fulfill it whatever it takes. I can’t be purged in the holy temple in any case.”

She paced back and forth anxiously.

Tang Ka was even more desperate than she was.

Right when the young man and woman were in a trance, something unexpected happened.

In a huge noise, a row of shelves suddenly fell, and the items on the shelves were rolling on the ground.

The noise was as shocking as thunder.

Naturally, the shelves couldn’t have fallen unless someone accidentally touched them.

However, Tang Ka had locked the only gate, and they should be alone in this supermarket.

“Who’s there?”

Tang Ka and Chu Zhiyun looked at each other. Picking up their daggers and their storm bolters, they rushed to the shelves.

Both of them were fully aware of the consequences if someone else saw them in their current appearances, which were definitely not unnecessary for the recognition of dangerous items.

The person was running fast toward a corner in the supermarket while more shelves were falling.

It was not a shopping area but a cold room where the goods were stored.

Because the power for the supermarket had been cut off, the ice in the cold room had melted, and the frozen food inside was rotting and reeking of stink. Neither Tang Ka nor Chu Zhiyun was willing to stay here for long, so they hadn’t completely searched the cold room yet.

It was not until this moment that they realized someone was hiding in the cold room!

“Get out!”

Tang Ka roared, before he aimed his storm bolter at the gate of the cold room and pulled the trigger.

Boom!

Although he had set the storm gun to minimal power, the gate was still seriously deformed, and it was impossible to close it anymore.

The person tried to close the gate, but no matter how she exerted her strength, the door simply squeaked and wouldn’t budge, while cans and bottles of water were dropping from her clothes.

“Don’t move, or we’ll kill you!”

Tang Ka tried to look ruthless.

“Don’t… Don’t shoot! There’s a baby here! A baby!”

The woman shrieked in desperation and opened the gate of the cold room helplessly.

Both Tang Ka and Chu Zhiyun aimed their flashlights at the stranger, only to see that she was a filthy middle-aged woman, who was sweating so hard as if she had just been picked up from a swamp.

“Wa! Wa! Wa! Wa!”

From the cold room behind her, the cries of a baby were coming!

Both Tang Ka and Chu Zhiyun were greatly shocked, not knowing what to do at all.

“Don’t kill us. Please. We’re not soldiers. No soldiers are here. Only me and my daughter. Please let us go. Or you can capture me and let go of my daughter!”

The panicked and hideous woman suddenly knelt at Tang Ka and Chu Zhiyun!