I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 752: The Multiracial Alliance
Rewind the clock a little.
Outside the plane barrier, Jie Ming and Viola floated side by side above that pale blue curtain of light.
Looking down from the outer void, the whole continent was wrapped tight inside that plane barrier, and the light patterns drifting across its surface plated the hems of their robes with a cold sheen.
Viola still held her hand with its five fingers spread.
Gray-white law tendrils extended from beneath her feet and rested lightly against the surface of the barrier, going no further with the infiltration.
Her pale green eyes narrowed slightly, and the curve at the corner of her mouth was something not quite a smile, the look of someone considering a dessert she had assumed would be ordinary and had turned out unexpectedly exquisite.
Jie Ming looked down through the field of vision she was sharing with him.
Now that the two of them had been spotted, he could dimly make out through the barrier the metal warships scrambling up off the continent’s surface, along with the octopus-face warriors scattering through the air like startled insects.
He had never seen this race before, but the way those warships arrayed themselves, the style of their energy coatings, and the obviously coordinated tactical rhythm of the launch were all enough to prove this was no native civilization that a small plane could have produced on its own.
“No wonder you said it was an unexpected bonus.” Jie Ming pulled his gaze back and looked at Viola. “Somebody has already claimed this plane. And these octopus-faces don’t look weak.”
“There was no sign of any of it when I scanned from a distance.” For once there was an undercurrent of delight in Viola’s voice. “Neither the metal warships nor the octopus-faces were anywhere in that detection data.”
She paused, a thoughtful glint crossing her silver-gray eyes.
“Most likely a time turbulence in the Endless Chaotic Void caused it. This plane’s own position may sit right on a void belt where the flow rate of time is unstable. When I ran the scan, the time nodes didn’t match up, which is why I found nothing at all.”
Jie Ming nodded lightly.
In the Endless Chaotic Void, time and space were the least reliable things there were to begin with.
Once an elemental turbulence broke out, plane coordinates, the flow rate of time, and spatial structure could all shift.
A plane that was newly born one moment might have drifted tens of billions of years through the turbulence by the next.
It was hardly remarkable for detection results to diverge from present reality.
Otherwise wizards would never have gone to the trouble of building dedicated cannon-fodder units, or even of cultivating specialized combat wizards to fight the opening skirmishes.
Her gaze soon settled on an emblem that showed faintly on the hulls of those warships.
The body of the emblem was a cluster of stars encircling a single glowing point, the stars arrayed radially, as though the point at the center were drawing them all inward toward itself.
A single glance was enough to thin the amusement in Viola’s eyes, and a trace of cold took its place.
“It seems our luck is good. These aren’t some ordinary multi-plane civilization. They’re the Multiracial Alliance.”
At that name, Jie Ming’s pupils contracted slightly.
The Multiracial Alliance was one of the three principal enemies of wizard civilization, ranked alongside the Sentience Calamity and the Reflection Dimension.
He had gone head-to-head with a creature of the Reflection Dimension, and he knew how troublesome those things were.
And he had in fact met the Multiracial Alliance before as well. That dragon. It had been quite a troublesome fight.
He had never imagined he would run into them again today, while helping his senior sister take an “ordinary plane.”
“If they’re the Multiracial Alliance…” He frowned. “Then why does it look like they’re enslaving those plant-people?”
Going by what Viola’s Pain Law had sensed a moment ago, the plant-people were clearly not laboring willingly; they were being forced to harvest some kind of life energy. According to the description he had been given of the Multiracial Alliance, these were supposed to be a bloc that fanatically collected every civilization it came across.
“The Multiracial Alliance is only a blanket term. They like collecting civilizations. That doesn’t make them a league of justice.”
There was a faint note of mockery in Viola’s voice.
“The strong eat the weak. That is the rule that actually governs the Endless Chaotic Void. Multiracial Alliance or not, the underlying logic is the same. Those octopus-faces are most likely some minor race within the Alliance, posted to a backwater plane like this one to collect resources. To them, enslaving the local natives is the most ordinary thing imaginable.”
When she had finished, she drew her eyes back from the mass of warships and settled them on Jie Ming again, the smile at her lips deepening rather than fading. “And they don’t look particularly weak, either.”
Her tone was breezy, as if she were judging whether a dish was ready for the pot.
“Worth a try. If we’re lucky enough to take a few alive and dig the coordinates of their civilization’s headquarters out of them, that would be a real windfall. Coordinates for a Multiracial Alliance stronghold are worth a great deal to an eighth-level wizard. Sell them or trade them for a favor, either way it pays handsomely.” Then Viola’s tone shifted, still light as air, delivering the cruelty of the second half with perfect ease.
“And if our luck is bad and we can’t clear them out quickly, we withdraw fast. Those people aren’t without reinforcements of their own, and if we drag it out too long, the two of us may well be the ones left lying here.”
“In any case, even if we pulled out this instant, the intelligence that these people exist would sell for a good price on its own.”
Jie Ming ran the numbers quietly in his head, and found that he too thought it was worth a try.
Win or lose, the trip did not look like a loss.
Provided, of course, that they first established exactly how much the other side had, and whether the risk was worth taking.
Viola tilted her head and pointed her chin toward the plane barrier.
“So… you charge out front and open the plane barrier.”
As she said it, the curve of her mouth tipped up a little further, and a flash of mischief went openly through her eyes.
“Huh? Me?”
Jie Ming’s eyes narrowed.
He had known Viola for several hundred years, and whenever his senior sister was sitting on some idea that boded ill for him, this was more or less exactly the face she made.
Still, Jie Ming was willing to trust her judgment.
He knew her temperament. That expression meant at worst that he was in for some suffering; it would never get in the way of the real business.
So he said nothing more and simply flew obediently forward.
In the next instant, dark golden light surged out from inside him.
His thousand-meter true body unfurled abruptly in the void. The broad-shouldered dark golden giant rolled its shoulders, and both faces opened three eyes at the same time, the dark golden pupils cold against the void.
Immediately after, the Second Layer Dharma Form condensed into shape behind him.
A golden apparition five hundred kilometers tall rose slowly out of the void, its outline more solid than the last time he had faced Suoyuan, like a giant god that had truly walked out of some ancient myth.
The Dharma Form raised both hands, all ten fingers spread, clamped them onto the surface of the plane barrier, and then bore down with sudden force!
Creeeak… BOOM!!!
The sky seemed to be torn bodily open by that terrifying strength.
The pale blue plane barrier let out a shrill wail beneath the Dharma Form’s palms, the light patterns on its surface flashing and struggling wildly before caving inward inch by inch. The spatial structure of the entire plane was instinctively resisting this violent pressure from outside, as though a whole continent were lodging a silent protest. Crack!
Along with a crisp sound of breaking that rang straight through the soul, a thin gap split open in the blue plane barrier.
The muscles of the Dharma Form’s arms bulged high, and dark golden light seeped through the gaps between its fingers into the depths of the barrier, dismantling the load-bearing nodes inside it layer by layer. The crack raced outward to either side from where the fingertips touched, and within a few breaths it had widened to the size of an entire continent.
It was as though a hideous wound had been ripped across the sky, running from one horizon all the way to the other, its edges spraying out great volumes of blue-white spatial arcs that lit half the continent below in a blinding glare.
Jie Ming’s true body flew out from the Dharma Form’s chest and sank downward along that torn fissure.
He hooked both hands onto the two sides of the tear, kept forcing the barrier open wider, and eased his entire upper body slowly into the interior of the plane.
That refined face leaned out of the ripped-open sky, the vertical eye between its brows sweeping calmly over the dense mass of warships below, dark golden pupils reflecting the flicker of countless ship cannons.
The plane barrier was still struggling desperately, squeezing inward again and again in an effort to push this intruder back out.
But the light patterns surging against him broke on the surface of his Return to Ruins Armor without raising even a ripple.
At the same moment, inside the command cabin of the flagship “Iron Curtain,” the tendrils of every octopus-face stiffened in the same instant.
On the screen before them, the head leaning in through the fissure was larger than the entire flagship.
The dark golden vertical pupil was sweeping slowly across their fleet formation, and there was not the slightest emotion in that gaze. It was as cold as if it were surveying a row of specimen jars on a shelf.
The octopus-man commander was the first to come back to himself.
His tendrils shuddered a few beats longer than his comrades’ did, and then his fist came down on the command console with a heavy, muffled thud.
“Attack!”
“All units! Tactic Number Three!”
The instant the order left his mouth, the cannons of over ten thousand warships lit up together.
Energy beams, particle cannons, high-energy lasers… the octopus-man fleet threw in every weapon it could bring to bear, all of it hammering as one at the enormous head protruding from the fissure.
Countless firing trajectories wove together in the sky into a torrent of light several hundred kilometers across.
The blast wave thrown off its outer edge scattered the surrounding cloud layers outright.
At that same moment the flagship’s main gun finished charging.
A thick dark red beam mixed itself into the torrent of the salvo and drove straight at the center of the fissure.
As it flew, that dark red beam went on absorbing the energy attacks fired by friendly units around it, steadily and without pause.
Yet for all the energy it swallowed, the beam itself did not change. If anything, it seemed to grow slightly thinner.
The next instant.
BOOM!!!
An earth-shattering roar detonated across the sky of the entire plane.
Jie Ming, who had only just eased a small part of his body through the plane barrier, took that torrent, the massed firepower of over ten thousand warships, squarely head-on. His enormous true body was actually blasted bodily back out of the plane barrier!