Chapter 58: Cyber Cultivation Is Not Advisable

Gu Chen’s eyes snapped open.

“If the old man wanted to use me as a sacrifice…”

“Then I’ll go send him off personally.”

The Maybach drove through the blood-tainted water on the ground, speeding wildly into Beijing’s deepest night.

Behind them, in the drainage ditch.

The abandoned monster head’s unfocused pupils suddenly turned in a bizarre circle.

A line of bloody tears flowed from the corner of its eye.

In the muddy water, it slowly transformed into a twisted symbol.

The Maybach came to a steady stop outside the Gu family’s old mansion.

The heavy rain had just let up.

Night wind swept through the treetops, producing a damp, cold rustling sound.

Gu Chen pushed open the door and stepped out.

His pale, bare feet stepped onto the bluestone slabs, shattering the reflection in the puddle beneath him.

The entire mansion was unnaturally quiet.

No insect chirps. No dog barks.

Qin Hongyi walked over holding her Desert Eagle, her military boots splashing through several puddles.

“It’s too quiet. Not a single living person breathing, let alone standing guard.”

Gu Chen didn’t reply.

He raised his head, his gaze passing over the tall vermilion gates.

After unlocking the second genetic lock, he could see the bio-electromagnetic fields floating in the air.

No living people.

Not a trace of human presence.

Only the foul stench of cheap incense wafted up from deep underground.

“Break the door,” Gu Chen said.

Su Rou moved at the command.

The S-rank monster dropped to all fours and charged straight at the heavy solid-wood gate.

Wood chips flew everywhere. 

The two copper-reinforced doors were overturned by brute force and slammed heavily into the courtyard, splashing mud and water.

The three of them stepped over the threshold and entered the front courtyard.

The ground was covered with withered yellow fallen leaves.

Gu Chen headed straight for the ancestral hall in the inner courtyard.

He knew this place too well.

In the past, during festivals, those self-proclaimed noble old bones who held power in the Gu family would sit above and talk grandly, setting rules and dividing the spoils.

Now, the offering table in the center of the ancestral hall had been pushed aside, and the shrine was shattered.

A bluestone passage leading downward had cracked open in the floor.

Emergency lights emitting a sickly green glow lined both sides of the stairs.

The deeper they went, the lower the temperature dropped.

Gu Chen walked at the front. Su Rou crawled along the wall like a gecko, suppressing extremely excited whimpers in her throat.

Qin Hongyi brought up the rear with her gun.

At the end of the passage was a half-open lead-steel blast door.

It wasn’t locked.

Pushing it open.

There was no anticipated hail of bullets, nor any mysterious traps or mechanisms.

What appeared before them was an underground chamber the size of half a football field.

The air was filled with the pungent, sour stench of fermented nutrient solution.

Hundreds upon thousands of transparent soft tubes hung from the ceiling, interwoven like a spiderweb, all converging at the center of the hall.

There, painted with dark red pigment, was a massive and eerie magic array. 

It depicted an ouroboros with an extra bleeding eye in the middle—the totem of the Mo family.

Around the array, densely arranged, were over a hundred cylindrical glass cultivation tanks.

Floating inside each tank was a human head.

Gu Chen stopped in his tracks.

He had come prepared to run into Old Master Gu’s airtight net or witness the desperate counterattacks of his elders. 

He had even mentally prepared himself for a massacre.

And this was the result?

He walked up to the nearest cultivation tank.

Inside the murky green nutrient fluid, a head floated with its eyes closed. 

Complex electrodes and infusion boards were connected to the severed neck.

Bubbles gurgled upward through the tubes.

He recognized this head.

His eldest uncle, Gu Hai.

The vice president of the Gu Group who had been issuing orders in the family chat group not long ago was now reduced to a head soaking in water, serving as a biological motherboard.

His lips opened and closed like a fish, chanting something.

Gu Chen leaned closer to the glass and read the lip movements.

“All suffering, all beings shall cross over… Flesh is weak and bitter, gods live forever…”

They were all reciting the Mo family’s brainwashing scriptures.

These people were no longer noble elites.

They were nothing but a bunch of large biological batteries forcibly drained of their mental energy!

Gu Chen continued deeper inside.

Eldest uncle, Third Granduncle, cousins… those upper-class figures who once stirred storms in Beijing’s circles and could force blood relatives into desperate situations for a few million in profit were now neatly lined up inside glass tanks.

The entire Gu family, from top to bottom, had long been physically sliced up and turned into this power supply system.

Gu Chen let out a cold laugh.

He had come here full of murderous intent to settle the score, ready to personally skin alive these vampires who treated him as experimental material.

But now, even the need to vent that resentment was gone. 

Instead, it turned into a ridiculous absurdity.

The clowns were them all along.

“Save… kill…”

Extremely faint electrical static came through the speakers outside the tanks.

Gu Chen stopped in front of a larger cultivation tank.

Inside floated Third Granduncle Gu Zhen.

The old bastard who had leaned on his cane at the funeral, arrogantly trying to expel him from the family.

Right now, the old man stared at Gu Chen through the glass with bloodshot eyes.

He recognized this devastatingly beautiful face.

It was Subject 001.

All the former stubborn pride in the old man’s eyes was gone, replaced by utter despair and pleading.

Two lines of bloody tears seeped from the corners of his eyes and dissolved into the green fluid.

“Kill me…”

The voice from the speaker was intermittent, filled with the torment of having his skin peeled and tendons pulled.

His brain was forcibly kept active by machines, day after day, while his life potential was extracted.

This living hell where one could neither live nor die was a hundred times more cruel than lingchi.

Gu Chen looked at him.

The secular hatred that had once festered in his heart—resentment over family assets, schemes, and betrayal—suddenly seemed utterly ridiculous at this moment.

They were merely seasoning on someone else’s dining table, low-grade rations for the Mo family to feed their monster.

The ultimate move Gu Chen had prepared instantly lost its desire to be unleashed.

All that remained was a cold, enlightened pity.

His perspective had completely opened up.

“Su Rou,” Gu Chen spoke, his voice completely flat.

The monster on the ground lifted her head.

“Go bite the main control console to pieces.”

Upon receiving the order, Su Rou turned into a white blur and smashed straight into the control console in the center of the hall.

The sound of metal tearing rang out as high-voltage sparks flew everywhere.

The emergency lights in the underground chamber began flashing violently.

Gu Chen walked up to Third Granduncle’s tank and grabbed the thickest main power supply tube.

The tube wall was extremely thick, about the width of an adult’s wrist.

He casually tightened his five fingers.

And exerted force.

Crack.

The tube was crushed and exploded.

Nutrient fluid gushed out, spilling across the floor.

Third Granduncle’s head lost its buoyancy and slammed into the bottom of the tank. 

He looked at Gu Chen; a trace of relief finally appeared in his dead-fish eyes before they closed forever.

Gu Chen didn’t stop.

Like the Grim Reaper pulling plugs, he walked row by row, violently ripping out main lines and disconnecting all the life-support networks.

With every tube he pulled, one more head drew its last breath.

The glass tanks fell into darkness one after another.

When he reached the very core of the magic array, Gu Chen stopped.

There stood the largest double-layered custom tank.

But it was empty.

The nutrient fluid had turned black and foul. 

Only some bone residue and fingernails remained at the bottom.

On the metal plaque outside the tank, several words were laser-etched deeply: First Node · Gu Zhengnan.

Old Master Gu’s name.

Gu Chen looked at the empty tank, his brows slightly raised.

There was no shock.

Only a sudden, clear understanding.

No wonder.

No wonder that old fox with his insanely strong desire for control had allowed the Mo family to wipe out the entire family.

He hadn’t been tricked.

He had volunteered.

Gu Zhengnan had sacrificed himself as the First Node to ignite and activate the entire energy-draining array.

The old man understood better than anyone that the Gu family was nothing but a fart in the face of true power.

So he went all in.

He bet the lives of the entire clan in exchange for the Mo family’s promise to preserve Subject 001.

He wanted to create a god.

Even if the price was having his own bones picked clean and marrow sucked dry first, he would still deliver Gu Chen—the perfect vessel—to the divine throne.

“Old madman,” Gu Chen cursed, but there was surprisingly no hatred in his tone.

Seeing things from a different height truly gave a different view.

This was the ultimate law of the jungle.

Unfortunately, Gu Chen had no intention of following the old man’s script.

He was no one’s vessel, and he refused to be anyone’s backup ration.

“Let’s go.” Gu Chen turned around and glanced at Su Rou, who was still frantically tearing apart the scrap metal.

Qin Hongyi holstered her gun and walked over. She swept her eyes across the miserable scene and chuckled softly. 

“These old geezers died quite artistically. You’re just going to smash everything like this?”

“Garbage belongs in the trash can.” Gu Chen casually grabbed a exposed high-voltage cable.

Sparks were still flying wildly.

With an expressionless face, he tossed the end of the cable directly into a pool of leaked, high-concentration nutrient fluid.

This liquid, rich in biological lipids, was an excellent accelerant.