Su Huaizhen was currently on board the flagship of the interstellar pirates.
To be honest, it wasn’t difficult to get in touch with these interstellar pirates who committed all kinds of evil as long as there was profit to be made, but to make the pirates believe him was another matter entirely.
By now, Su Huaizhen had already advanced to the Golden Core stage in secret. He could split out ten projection souls, and all ten were successfully “lodged” in other people’s bodies, infiltrating important departments and powerful sects without being detected to this day.
He didn’t know top-level secrets, but he was familiar with plenty of less critical ones. For example, Hua Country’s government still adhered to the principle of “develop low-key, then amaze everyone.” On the surface, during this era of spiritual energy revival, Hua Country didn’t seem remarkable, but in fact, Hua Country had already deployed surveillance satellites and unmanned exploration ships to the edges of the solar system. So, when the interstellar pirates stormed into the solar system, they were noticed by the officials at once.
However, the pirates didn’t believe they’d been discovered, because in their eyes, Blue Star was just as they’d expected: spiritual energy had just revived, the living creatures on the planet hadn’t fully adapted to its presence, and technology was still at a pitiful, surface-level stage, unable to communicate with the underground world or even leave their own system.
Su Huaizhen didn’t resist at all, hoping that his apparent willingness to cooperate would make the pirates take his warnings and suggestions seriously.
But the pirates clearly had their own plans. They thought Su Huaizhen was Blue Star’s number one cultivator. Based on their experience in conquering so many worlds, the top expert on a planet would never surrender at the outset, especially before the pirates had revealed their strength and true origin.
Su Huaizhen was locked up for two whole days without ever seeing the pirate leader. Finally, he realized the truth: these pirates must think he’d risked his life to spy on them!
He almost had a heart demon outburst right then and there.
The projection soul technique was extremely strong. Cultivated to later stages, a single person could be an army. But just as blessings come with curses, the major weakness of this technique was that at every breakthrough, there was always a heart demon tribulation.
He had barely gotten past his most recent heart demon, but this time… he sensed he probably wouldn’t survive it, which was why he made a desperate move and sought out the interstellar pirates, sure that the root of this heart demon was—Xiao Jingzhou!
If he faced Xiao Jingzhou directly, he’d definitely be instantly obliterated.
He’d tried every roundabout tactic he could think of. He’d changed bodies countless times, attempting to make a move via Xiao Jin and Xiao Wan, but all his schemes ended in failure. Even when he switched to second-best and plotted against Xiao family members or the half-brother born to Han Lin, his plans always fell through, since those people saw Xiao Jingzhou nearly every day.
If he hadn’t failed so many times, would he have resorted to such an underhanded approach as reaching out to interstellar pirates? As for the foster father of the Xiao siblings that he had in hand, it was useless unless used during their crucial breakthroughs.
Now, caught in this predicament, his only hope was that the activities of the pirates on Blue Star would run into a solid wall.
Speaking of which, the pirates landed right in the White Eagle Federation’s territory, openly announcing to all of Blue Star who they were and why they’d come—they blatantly stated they intended to extract Blue Star’s resources and enslave the planet’s humans.
The White Eagle Federation lived up to expectations, holding out for three days. Even the Westerners’ so-called “superior” mystic transcendent users suffered heavy losses, but—no one surrendered.
Ling Jing even commented, “Not bad, all things considered.” She looked at the player group from the White Eagle Federation who were fully prepared at a moment’s notice to fight off the invaders. “If they managed to beat the interstellar pirates back on their own without your help, they’d have completed about half the mission.”
Qin Jingzhou replied, “Yes.”
However, with only about a hundred players at cultivation stages ranging from early Golden Core to mid Foundation Establishment, they basically had no chance of driving off these invading pirates.
Once hostilities broke out and they saw the true strength of the enemy, the players would confidently call for reinforcements.
It had to be said, most of these hundred or so White Eagle Federation players had good connections. When they urgently called for help, every one of them got a response.
Within a single day, out of the pirate commando of a hundred that had gone deep into the Federation, twenty-five died.
The pirate leader sensed trouble. He left an aide in charge and personally led trusted subordinates to Blue Star… Different from the raiding party in the White Eagle Federation, he set foot directly in Hua Country—and had the “honor” of glimpsing a mere tip of Hua Country’s true strength.
Even with a mecha that granted him Nascent Soul level combat power, he barely escaped back to the flagship outside Blue Star, and his subordinates all got left behind in Hua Country. The commando in the Federation heard the news and immediately retreated to their own ships.
The result stunned the whole world—everyone except Hua Country.
It was worth noting that all of the initial hundred players stayed in the rear, and none of them rushed up to the front in this moment.
The pirate leader, having slammed hard into an unyielding force, finally remembered Su Huaizhen: so he hadn’t been lying after all!
However, even knowing Su Huaizhen hadn’t lied didn’t mean he trusted him. He was just stalling for time until the boss arrived… In fact, “delaying tactics” was a concept he had learned from Su Huaizhen.
The people of Blue Star only enjoyed a few days of triumph before a new pirate proclamation left them in shock: the announcement stated that Su Huaizhen had decided to embrace the interstellar future wholeheartedly.
Any Blue Star citizen with a functioning brain knew exactly what that meant—the guy had decided to become a turncoat! And this was when the pirates were openly declaring their intent to plunder and enslave humanity!
The market value of Su Huaizhen’s businesses all over Blue Star evaporated instantly.
Even so, Su Huaizhen managed to find amusement in his misery, glad that he’d had the foresight to keep most of his valuables on his person.
To be fair, the pirates only paraded out Su Huaizhen as a means to divide the people of Blue Star, especially since they’d already proved, with their own blood and lives, that Blue Star’s people were capable of fighting back.
With nearly ten billion people on Blue Star, there were bound to be plenty who doubted the planet’s future and the power of its own cultivators.
Supported by the pirates, these turncoats who had no faith in their homeland or kin all staked out territories for themselves, each “ruling as king.” The group of players chosen by Qin Jingzhou were not lacking in ambition either. Seeing him adopt a “take care of it yourselves” attitude, the players seized the chance to found sects or establish schools for transcendents and cultivators modeled on his example.
Though it was all in resistance to an external invasion, Blue Star’s situation somehow shifted into a fantasy-novel scenario of warring sects and noble families. The planet entered a strange new era of divided factions and regional warlords—except, overall, things stayed peaceful, and in Hua Country, the populace just kept on living their lives, gossiping occasionally but otherwise unaffected.
After all, thinking of Hua Country’s government as a fusion of super-sect, noble family, and academy wasn’t exactly wrong.
When the pirate boss finally arrived in a hurry, he found that all over the planet, sects and schools were springing up fast, and achieving remarkable results—these players, students under Qin Jingzhou online, would immediately pass on what they’d learned as teachers to their own disciples offline… In the end, it wasn’t just ordinary citizens of Hua Country who could now recognize, select, and use spiritual tools.
It was worth mentioning that while the pirate boss seemed reckless, he was actually cautious.
He “chatted” with Su Huaizhen for a long time, finally gleaning that Blue Star actually had a super-expert guarding it. At this point, he was already having doubts about staying any longer. But when he used his innate talent to hypnotize Su Huaizhen and probe deep into the man’s memories for hidden fears—he started cursing out loud: So you want to use me to get rid of the nightmare haunting your heart!
But, though he’d fallen into a pit, he didn’t come out empty-handed: Su Huaizhen’s projection soul technique was extremely compatible with him, perhaps enough to let him break through to a higher level!
So, this pirate lord, who went by the nickname “Puppet Master” in the star sea, experimented with Su Huaizhen a few more times. But as Blue Star’s Fate’s Son, Su Huaizhen could only possess others—how could he possibly let a pirate boss replace him so easily…
And so the two of them wrestled in a stalemate for quite a while, until eventually, they ended up sharing a part of each other’s spirit: each one now held a fragment of the other’s soul.
Qin Jingzhou and Ling Jing eyed the whole thing coldly from the sidelines, and when they saw this outcome, both felt rather moved: well, everyone got what they wanted.
At this point, Qin Jingzhou decided not to wait any longer. He summoned his cheap son and daughter, the An siblings, Xun Qiushui, Yan Tongwei, and the rich heiress who in the original story was Su Huaizhen’s wife, informing them it was time to launch a full assault, but cautioning them not to be reckless.
Xiao Wan jumped to her feet, so excited she bounced in place. “Finally, I can get moving for real! I was about to suffocate from all this waiting!”