797 The Great Mortal Catastrophe

The flying ship suspended in space, and hundreds of thousands of miles ahead of it was a massive blue planet.

Wu Qi put away his Dark Yin Celestial Tower, then carefully craned his head out from under a feather.

When he saw the planet, he frowned. The distribution and the shapes of the continents and islands on the planet looked almost identical to that on Earth. Moreover, even its moon appeared no different from the one he knew, with the familiar few large craters on its face.

The only difference was that it was much larger. Its surface area was about a thousand times that of the Earth, and its gravity was about three times greater. When he scanned it with his divine sense, he discovered that the human population on this planet was about 1,300 times the current population of Earth.

When Wu Qi left the Earth through the teleportation formation, it had a population of about seven billion. However, this planet here had a total population of a trillion. With such a massive population, one could only imagine how congested it was.

The moon was densely packed with numerous steel bases. Just as Wu Qi was observing them, countless soldiers in protective suits dispatched by different bases were attacking each other. It was obvious that they came from seven major powers, and were divided into two sides. A fierce battle was going on between them. From time to time, weapons similar to nuclear warheads were used, which caused severe damages to those bases.

In the atmospheric layer of the planet, millions of fighter jets were chasing and attacking one another. Countless strange-looking jets zoomed across space, unleashing missiles that took the lives of their enemies. On the ground, billions of foot soldiers were fighting in mountains, rivers, plains, and forests. They were armed with weapons much more advanced than that on Earth, but were engaged in trench warfare. All kinds of rapid-fire weapons were frantically claiming lives. With each passing second, a large number of soldiers were killed.

In the sea, huge carrier-sized platforms of fighter jets cruised about, and massive formations of large warships with heavy-caliber artilleries were bombarding each other. It was unknown as to what kind of explosive was filled in their shells; whenever a few-tons heavy shell exploded, it released a lethal force that was not weaker than a kiloton nuclear bomb. Once hit by one of those shells, a small fleet of warships would immediately suffer heavy damage.

Off one coast, a small fleet of thirteen warships was mercilessly bombarding a coastal city with a population of nearly ten million. One skyscraper after another came crashing down, and the underground bunkers built a hundred meters below the surface were burst open by specially designed armor-piercing bullets, which killed many innocent civilians who were seeking shelter there. When the people fled the city in various vehicles, thousands of fighter jets came flying by from all directions and carried out a massacre.

The whole planet was at war. There were no front line or rear defense, because highly developed technology ensured all-round strikes. Everywhere there was fighting; everywhere there was smoke; everywhere there was killing. Steel and explosives reaped lives to their heart's content. Wu Qi made a rough calculation that in a war of this size, more than ten million people would die every day.

The flags the two warring sides carried looked interesting enough. On one was drawn a Vidyā-rāja with a pair of glaring eyes, shrouded in a raging flame and stepping atop a red lotus platform. The soldiers of this camp always murmured the name of some Bodhisattva whenever they made the charge. The flag of the other camp bore a middle-aged immortal who sat cross-legged on a jade lotus throne with three plumes of white smoke rising from the top of his head, in each of which stood a war god clad in golden armor. When the soldiers of this camp were fighting their enemies, they always intoned a Daoist scripture that could calm their mind.

'Interesting! This is a war between the believers of Buddhist League and Daoist League,' thought Wu Qi. What was more interesting was that just as Liu Bang's flying ship halted in space, a bright light flashed over it. In the next instant Buddha Futu walked out of the void with eighteen fat Bodhisattvas, his face smiling.

Liu Bang walked up to the deck as he cupped his fist and said, "Is everything in order, Buddha Futu?"

Having not seen Liu Bang for 'a dozen years', Wu Qi felt a queer strangeness as soon as he heard his voice. But soon, he managed to drive that feeling away with his powerful divine will. Silently, he shook his head and smiled wryly. He knew he had to get used to it, for in the future, no matter he was cultivating with Dark Yin Celestial Tower or having a secluded meditation, he could not avoid the same feeling of alienation.

He patted himself on the face and fixed his eyes on Buddha Futu.

The smiling Buddha Futu returned the salute, then gave Ji Tao a glance from the corners of his eyes, who stood on the bow with a sinister look on the face. While nodding, he said, "Everything is ready. In a matter of days, these exhausted ants who have run out of ammunition and food supplies will use their most powerful weapons to launch a doomsday attack. When the attack begins and two to three billion ants are killed or wounded, it will be the time for King Tang Qiu to intervene."

He calculated for a moment while bending his fingers, then smiled and said to Ji Tao, "There are about 1,135 billion people on this planet. If we round down the number, and take out those who will be killed in the doomsday attack, King Tang Qiu can probably save the lives of at least 800 billion people. As these people think they are facing inevitable death, once they are saved, the enormous power of faith they contribute to King Tang Qiu will be equivalent to the magic power an ordinary Buddha spends a hundred periods to cultivate."

Liu Bang chuckled and said, "Also, after saving so many people, the Heavenly Dao will bestow you an immense virtue, which will certainly push your cultivation level to the Third Pangu Heaven. You will be as strong as the Buddhas and Primordial Immortals."

Frowning at the planet where the war was at its peak, Ji Tao gave a cold laugh as he shook his head and said, "It seems too easy. The price you pay is too little compared to what my father and I have to pay. King of Han, don't you think you should give me more compensation?"

Liu Bang's face stiffened, while Buddha Futu jumped up as if he had been stabbed in the buttocks. "It seems too easy? Do you have any idea how much time and effort it had taken us to cultivate such a planet?" The Buddha growled, "Do you have any idea how much cost it had taken us to cultivate such a planet in the mortal worlds that is ready to harvest?"

As Buddha Futu went on with his grumble, Wu Qi finally learned how these immortals and buddhas operated in the mortal worlds.

Keeping humans in captivity to harvest the power of faith and virtue was a hard job. First of all, one must make the people on the planet believe in oneself. This was not difficult for the immortals and Buddhas, as all they had to do was destroy the civilization on a planet and send the people back to the primitive state. They would then show miracles to the people as often as they could, and naturally acquire the people's beliefs.

After that, one had to grow the population. More people equaled more faith and virtue. But, during the process, one had to keep a close eye on them, and never let their progress get out of control. If the members of a certain population suddenly awakened their bloodlines and obtain their bloodline memory, as happened on Earth, then that entire population must be wiped out.

If most humans on a planet awakened their bloodlines in a certain period of time and obtained a power they should not have, then it was up to the immortals and buddhas who controlled the mortal world to execute the extermination plan, which would destroy the planet's civilization and let it start to develop from the primitive state again. The population on the planet which Wu Qi was born on had been exterminated at least ten times in just a million years. Of all the mortal worlds, it was a rare case.

Because they had to set off natural disasters and slaughter a large number of human beings, the immortals and buddhas who carried out the extermination plan were always confronted with the fierce counterattack of the Heavenly Dao. They had to face all kinds of heavenly tribulation, which was a great burden. Once, a Primordial Immortal had carried out an extermination plan on a planet whose population suddenly experienced a mass awakening. He had used a great flood that lasted seven days and seven nights to kill over a trillion mortals. In the end, he was visited by a heavenly tribulation which smashed his immortal body to bits, forcing him to enter transmigration and start his cultivation all over again.

One needed to take good care of the people of a planet, making sure they followed the path set by the immortals and buddhas. One had to make them extremely technologically advanced but extremely corrupted in morals, turn them into a materialistic world and yet still retain a little faith in immortals and buddhas. This was the most ideal development model. According to the experience of the immortals and buddhas, in such a society where the technology was highly developed but the morals and faith was highly corrupted, few people could awaken those things passed down in the human bloodline.

When humans on a planet entered such a virtuous cycle, the immortals and buddhas would step in quietly. They would carefully extract energy from other mortal worlds to expand the size and surface area of the planet. In fact, the planet in front of Wu Qi was about the size of Earth; but as the immortals and buddhas had been supplementing it with natural energy over the past tens of thousands of years, it was now a thousand times larger.

When the size and population of the planet reached a certain point, one had to wait for the humans on the planet to use up all the resources, and then launch a devastating war for the remaining resources.

To achieve this, the immortals and buddhas had to make sure that humans could not develop very sophisticated spaceflight technology. They had to confine them to the surface of the planet, or at the most, to the moon. Only then would the humans fight each other for resources.

It must be said that this was a huge and complex project. Many times, the immortals and buddhas who secretly interfered with the development of human society were punished by the Heavenly Dao. Therefore, it usually took an average of half an eon to succeed in cultivating a mature, perfect, and ready to harvest mortal world like the one in front of Wu Qi. In this half an eon, in order to interfere and guide the development of the human society, making sure that the progress followed the plan they set, the immortals and buddhas had to pay a very heavy price and effort.

As Buddha Futu was explaining, a pillar of fire suddenly burst up from the moon. In just the blink of an eye, the steel buildings within a radius of a thousand miles were reduced to ashes silently, while more than 10 million soldiers were engulfed by the flame, vanishing into nothingness.

Buddha Futu was taken aback, then he immediately cried out.