Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

“What are you looking at? ”

Li Yao was stared at by Li Jialing, his husband and monk couldn't touch his head. “Why did I read the strong meaning of ‘caring’ from your eyes? What is this! ”

“Nothing.”

Li Jialing glanced at me and solemnly said, “I just want Brother Yao to know that whatever avenue I eventually choose and whatever person I will become, I will not forget that you are mine... Relatives, in my heart, your weight is even heavier than Her Majesty's, I sincerely think of you as a big brother, I hope that you will always be safe, uh, and healthy. ”

“Really?”

Li Yao felt Li Jialing's sincerity, grinning, “I really think of you as a little brother, anyway, don't be tempted by Longyang Jun's demon head, don't encounter some little darkness and difficulties and drill the horn tip. Anyway, let's save the world one step at a time and let it go. Learn to help with the unbridled knife first. It's also good that Yiyi Yung helps you weaken for strength. In short, Yiyi has confidence in you, and believes that one day you will experience the essence of the cultivation avenue and become a better cultivator than Yiyi! ”

“Perhaps. ”

Li Jialing Dao, “I have to walk more, look more, think more before I can choose the final path - only then can I run all the way on my own avenue without going back! ”

The two men said that they had unwittingly reached the deepest part of town.

It's a hundred meters high rock wall, but it's filled with hive-like caves, and each cave is about three or five meters in diameter, and the fence is woven outside with vines, and there's the sound of "humming."

Countless underground men carrying huge amounts of moss, vines and mushrooms, even a barrel of finely shattered ore, penetrating the cave, can see that the amount of pressure on them is extremely heavy, pressing them against the skeletal clash, the blues are revealed, the expression is both dull and painful.

At times, the people deep in the cave emptied moss and vines, carrying out a barrel of smelly stool, the burden finally eased a little, the original face, appeared the usual numbness.

Li Yao and Li Jialing were guests here. The underground people did not stop them from entering the cave. They even dared not look at each other. One by one, they lowered their heads and hurried past them.

The two entered a cave at will and saw dozens of raised rock worms.

Rockworms don't really look like insects, more like fat, white pigs, just slightly thinner, three or four meters long, and about two meters in diameter, like an elliptical meatball.

Instead of calling them “rockworms," it would be more appropriate to call them "rock pigs.”

Li Yao didn't know if the rock worm had legs or claws. At least now he can't see the organ to act on. Perhaps it's covered in overlapping fat.

It is a very slow moving beast, like a lazy beast, curled deep in the cave like a statue, and Li Yao highly suspects that they do not even have the ability to feed themselves.

The “humming” sounds, it turns out, are not their screams, but the breathing sounds coming from the exhaust holes above their heads, these silly, lazy spiritual beasts who are lazy enough to make half a sound.

The underground man chopped up a lot of moss, vines and mushrooms, then mixed them together with fine powdered ore, stirred evenly, and threw them into the feed trough. A few rock worms slowly clustered them together. The round roll could not see the cracks in the “head” of the eye, spraying white threads of wire, wrapped the food into a snow-white sphere, rolled into the cross gap, which was counted as completing a feeding exercise.

While the rock bugs were eating, the underground people bypassed them and went deep into the cave to collect their inky green faeces, scratching every corner carefully, without letting go of a scratch.

There are also some underground people, holding a long handle brush, brushing hard on the rock worm, Li Yao thought he was going to brush clean and then kill them to eat, but it's not right to look carefully, it turns out that the underground people are massaging the rock worm to relax!

It can be seen that rock worms are almost the only means of production for all the inhabitants of the 10084 district, and that they are extremely bothered to raise and care for rock worms.

Li Jialing told Li Yao that the rock worm was 10,000 years old in the era of the Star Sea Empire, a fairly good edible spiritual beast with a lot of genetic conditioning. The earliest research was even carried out during the Empire of the Demonic Beast, which specializes in biochemical technology.

Rockworms can devour up to tens of thousands of the most coarse ingredients, including ore containing a large amount of trace elements, transform into a large amount of fat and protein and supply the energy necessary for human survival in the harshest environments.

Rockworms are full of treasure, and they blend special spider and silkworm genes to wrap the silk threads of food, and they are also good textile ingredients, and they peel off once a year, and the skins they take off can also be made into lightweight, warm leather coats.

Moreover, the manure of rock worms hardly needs refining, that is, natural fertilizers, suitable for the nourishment of the vast majority of plants, even mushrooms and mosses, to enable wild plants to be domesticated by humans into soaring crops.

It can be said that in the expansion of the human exploration of unknown areas, as long as the rock worms are brought, the two key problems of "clothing” and “food” are solved and, by the way, a solid foundation is laid for agricultural development.

However, there has been too much genetic modification in terms of "omnivorousness” and “availability”, and the consequence of the rock worm's desperate growth of fats and proteins has been a significant reduction in mobility and predatory capacity to near zero.

This is a life born in a laboratory. It is extremely difficult to adapt to the harsh life of the wild while maintaining the existing traits. It can only be honestly kept in the breeding room and fed and raised by humans.

10,000 years ago, the Star Sea Empire, when designing these underground shelters, naturally had an extremely advanced and sophisticated set of automated feeding equipment that ensured that this “meat factory” source of energy was constantly exporting products, from mated rock worms at the outset to ready-to-eat meat packaged in a box in a can, with little manipulation by workers and breeders.

But with years of erosion, old automated feeding equipment had long run out of energy, broken apart and ceased to exist, and the knowledge of first-breeding rock worms had long been lost, and today's underground people could only raise them in the most primitive way.

Since rock worms can grow so much meat and naturally eat so much that they cannot go out to feed themselves, they rely on the underground people to collect moss, rip the vines, cut the mushrooms, dig the ore, then strangle the mixture and put it into the feed trough - it is a very heavy physical labor, three or five strong men dry late in the day to barely satisfy the appetite of a rock worm.

And in order to ensure that so many mosses, vines and mushrooms can grow in the underground world, it is necessary to constantly throw the manure of rock worms into the stone seams, and carefully serve various crops. The underground world would not have been suitable for crop growth, even the smallest cluster of mosses, are poured out by the underground people with blood and sweat.

Because a true fully automatic feeding trough has long been destroyed and the rock worm does not adapt to the deep environment of the cave, they need to be massaged and forced to exercise day and night. Otherwise, the black spots will soon grow on the rock worm. The meat system inside is broken and cannot be eaten.

These jobs, which account for 99 per cent of the underground population, 99 per cent of the time, can be said to be around “rock worms” throughout the 10084 district.

Li Yao quickly calculated the ratio between the number of rock worms and the number of inhabitants on the rock wall based on the number of shoots, bell milk and caves just seen, and found that the number of rock worms seems to be too much compared to the population of district 10084. Even if we all kill meat, we won't be able to eat so much. If we can raise a few fewer heads, won't it be easier for people?

Li Jialing shook his head and said that he knew nothing but one of them. As he had just said, although the underground people worked hard to raise so many rock worms, they usually couldn't help but eat large chunks of meat. Every few days, a small piece of meat can be chopped and mixed in porridge.

The vast majority of the rock worms have been skinned three times and, when fully matured, carried to the towns above, the "four-digit area” numbered between 1000 and 9999, in exchange for valuable energy, civilian magic treasures and weapons.

Underground residents of the 10084 region, after all, are not completely ignorant savages, they retain basic language and culture, a small fraction of Pharaoh and Dahui are still functioning, and they are eager to know what the world looks like - large quantities of supplies and fuel have to be exchanged by rock worms, deviating from the various synthetic foods of the world above, rock worms are not too expensive to sell, and three or five rock worms are not necessarily able to replace a standard crystalline box.

Even if they bite the teeth off, they don't want any treasure or energy, at least one essential item, that must be purchased in the town above, which is fresh compressed air, as well as components to repair the air circulation and filtration system.

Tens of thousands of metres of underground towns, even with the largest and most efficient ventilation systems, continue to bring fresh air to the ground, a highly repressed and dull world filled with deadly gases.

Humans breathe out too much exhaust gas, which, once accumulated, also leads to life and death for all.

So, underground residents can scrap all sorts of treasures, not even the lighting arrays above their heads, and become ghosts in the dark, but never abandon air circulation and filtration systems.

Once the air cycle and filtration system fail, also release ultra-high compressed fresh air in time for valuable repair time.

No air, more terrible than no sunshine, is a real extinction disaster.

Residents of the four digit towns ate the fatal weakness of the five-digit townspeople, and the lions opened their mouths, driving the price of the associated pharmacopoeia and compressed air so high that dozens of rock worms could be replaced by tiny cans of compressed air.

Therefore, the inhabitants of the 10084 area struggle every day to cultivate and raise not only what they wear and eat in their mouths, but it is also vital to survive and not lack the air for a second!