Stealing The Heavens

The flying ship suspended in space, and ahead of it, about hundreds of thousands of miles away, 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, and even its moon appeared no different than the one he knew, with the familiar few large craters on its face.

Only 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. This planet 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 ongoing 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 through 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 the Earth, but were engaged in trench warfare. All kinds of rapid-fire weapons were frantically claiming lives. With each second passed, a large number of soldiers were killed.

At 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 filled their shells, as whenever a few-tons 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 seek shelters there. When the people fled the city with 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. Steels 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, Wu Qi found. On one drew a Vidyā-rāja with a pair of glaring eyes, shrouded in a raging flame and stepped 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 rose 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 Buddhism 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, and 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, cupped his fist and said, “Is everything in order, Buddha Futu?”

Having not seen Liu Bang for ‘a dozen of 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. 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, 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 could 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 contributed to King Tang Qiu will be equivalent to the magic power an ordinary buddha spent 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 the Buddhas and Primordial Immortals.”

Frowning at the planet where the war was at its height, Ji Tao gave a cold laugh, 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?” growled the buddha, “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 is a hard job. First of all, you must make the people on the planet believe in you. This is not difficult for the immortals and buddhas. All they have to do is destroy the civilization on a planet and send the people back to the primitive state, show miracles to the people as often as they could, and naturally they will acquire the people’s beliefs.

After that, you have to grow the population. More people equals more faith and virtue. But during the process you have to keep a close eye on them, and never let their progress go out of control. If the members of a certain population suddenly awaken 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 awaken their bloodlines in a certain period of time and obtain a power they should not have, then it is up to the immortals and buddhas who control the mortal world to execute the extermination plan, which will destroy the planet’s civilization and let it start to develop from primitive state again. The population on the planet which Wu Qi was born had been exterminated at least ten times in just a million years. Of all the mortal worlds, it was a rare case.

Because they have to set off natural disasters and slaughter a large number of human beings, the immortals and buddhas who carry out the extermination plan are always confronted with the fierce counterattack of the Heavenly Dao. They have to face all kinds of heavenly tribulation, which is 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.

You need to take good care of the people of a planet, making sure they follow the path set by the immortals and buddhas. You have to make them extremely technologically advanced but extremely corrupted in moral, turn them into a materialistic world and yet still retain a little faith in immortals and buddhas. This is the most ideal development model. According to the experience of the immortals and buddhas, in such a society where the technology is highly developed but the moral and faith are highly corrupted, few people can awaken those things passing down in the human bloodline.

When humans on a planet enter such a virtuous cycle, the immortals and buddhas will step in quietly. They will 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 reach a certain point, you have to wait for the humans on the planet to use up all the resources, and then launch a devastating war for the last few remaining resources.

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

It must be said that this is a huge and complex project. Many times the immortals and buddhas 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 have 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, then vanished into nothingness.

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