I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 753: Tearing It Open

The torrent punched through the golden light at the Dharma Form’s chest, punched through the chest and skull of his true body, blew a hole the diameter of a small town clean through Jie Ming’s upper half, and only then vanished into the depths of the Endless Chaotic Void.

Viola floated at a safe distance, watching quietly as that true body of his was blasted away with its head smashed to ruin.

She raised a hand to cover the corner of her mouth and laughed out loud without the slightest attempt to hide it.

The laugh was crisp and bright, with a streak of malice running through it, and it carried over clearly on the encrypted channel between them.

“Well?”

Only once she had laughed her fill did she speak, unhurried, the aftertaste of the show still lingering in her voice.

“Did you get a good look at what type of attack that was?”

Jie Ming’s ruined true body steadied itself in the void.

Less than half his head was left. The stretch of forehead holding the vertical eye had come through intact, but most of his face was simply gone, leaving only dark golden tissue writhing rapidly underneath.

Below the neck, his chest had been blown open with a hole that ran clean through front to back.

The flesh at its edges was regrowing and reshaping at a rate visible to the naked eye.

New muscle fiber wove itself together layer by layer like cloth on a loom, and the shattered bone recondensed into shape from the broken ends with a low, faint grinding sound. In almost the blink of an eye, most of the damage to Jie Ming’s body had closed.

Grimacing through the repairs to his true body, he was at the same time rapidly analyzing the data from that strike inside his spiritual sea.

“I got it. What they used was a pure high-compression energy attack.”

Jie Ming spoke slowly, a note of genuine respect for the attack in his voice.

“No special attributes to it. They simply compress stellar-grade energy into an extremely small cross-section, then put it all out at once. The power is real enough. A conventional seventh-level creature’s frontal defenses wouldn’t necessarily hold against it either.”

He worked the shoulder that had just finished regrowing, testing how the new bone meshed with the old, and raised an eyebrow slightly. The force behind that strike really had exceeded what he had anticipated.

The method was crude, without a single flashy property to it.

But the salvo from those ten thousand-odd warships had clearly been focused with extremely precise coordination, and then that dark red beam had forced all the scattered energy together onto one single point, driving the energy density up to a genuinely terrifying level in an instant.

Given Viola’s physical constitution, if she had been the one to take a hit like that, she really would have been hurt.

After all, even with no special effect whatsoever, once raw energy intensity passed a certain threshold it could still do serious damage to the soul. So going by what had just happened, his charging out in front really had been the optimal solution.

Which did nothing to change the fact that Viola had well and truly “set him up.”

Jie Ming straightened up again and worked his newly healed jaw lightly in midair, the bones clicking faintly where they ground together. He turned his head toward Viola, who was still laughing beside him, wearing an expression somewhere between exasperation and resignation.

“Senior sister, that nasty streak of yours really hasn’t changed one bit.”

At that, Viola’s smile only grew brighter, with no apparent intention of denying anything.

Jie Ming could not be bothered to hold it against her any further.

He first sorted quickly through the data he had picked up while being hit, there in his spiritual sea, and only then delivered his report.

“During that salvo just now, I sensed their complete troop deployment inside the plane.” Jie Ming narrowed his eyes, still arranging the collected data in his mind. “Sixth-level creatures and sixth-level warships numbering in the tens of thousands, which you saw as well. But inside that mass of sixth-level units there are also over a hundred seventh-level creatures, and eight eighth-level creatures.”

He paused there, the vertical eye between his brows turning slightly.

The seventh-level creatures were not much of a problem, in truth. It was the eight eighth-level ones who had hidden themselves well, tucked entirely inside the warships and masking their own presence by every means available.

Unfortunately for them, Jie Ming’s True-False Void-Piercing Pupil had swept their existence up all the same.

“That should be just about the entire force they have stockpiled on this plane. Do we fight or not?”

Jie Ming said it calmly. Excessively calmly, one might even say.

After all, numbers like “over a hundred seventh-level, eight eighth-level” landing in the ear of any normal fifth-level wizard would have been enough to make retreat the first thought in their head.

If it had truly been Jie Ming alone, he would have had to think it over carefully. But with Viola there as well, he was not overly worried.

Sure enough, Viola did not so much as blink. She even curved her lips slightly.

“Naturally, we… continue.”

The answer came clean and quick, without a shred of hesitation.

Jie Ming sighed. He had seen this coming a long way off.

Viola’s strength spoke for itself. Against creatures that possessed the concept of “pain” in the first place, her Pain Law was absurdly lethal.

So long as the enemy could not delete her in an instant, she would only grow stronger the longer she fought, a perpetual motion machine turning fiercer with every exchange.

And though he himself was only fifth-level, his defensive side had long since been reinforced layer upon layer by round after round of iteration in his body forging method.

One of them attacking and one defending, if it truly came down to it, they were not necessarily without the strength for a fight.

What was more, those seventh- and eighth-level creatures still had not shown themselves.

Which suggested that these creatures were most likely even more afraid than the two of them were.

Brief as Jie Ming’s earlier probe into the plane had been, he had picked up more than one signal of fear.

The only inconvenience was that if they really did carry on fighting, he would certainly be on point once again.

“Fine.”

Jie Ming turned around with the air of a man accepting his fate.

The Second Layer Dharma Form condensed into shape in the void once more, dark golden light reassembling swiftly behind him into a golden apparition five hundred kilometers tall. This time he deliberately reinforced the chest and head of the Dharma Form, so that another salvo like the last one could not blow straight through it.

The Dharma Form’s outline straightened slowly in the void, and its huge palms hooked once again onto the edges of the fissure, which had shrunk considerably by now. Then it wrenched.

BOOM!!!

The tear was forced open to both sides once more, and the terrifying strain on space drew a low wail out of the entire reach of void.

Immediately after, Jie Ming’s true body squeezed slowly into the interior of the plane again.

This time he did not settle for pushing half his body through as he had before. He sank his whole upper body into the fissure bit by bit, both arms braced hard against the barrier on either side, still widening that forcibly torn wound in the sky.

The octopus-man fleet inside the plane was of course not going to sit and watch him stroll in so brazenly.

Inside the flagship’s command cabin, well over half of the octopus-man commander’s tendrils had already gone white.

He stared fixedly at the huge dark golden figure forcing its way slowly into the sky on the screen, and his orders barely paused for breath.

“Launch the spatial annihilation missiles!”

Dozens of silver-white missiles shrieked out of the launch tubes of ship after ship, trailing long exhaust flames like a flight of meteors ripping open the night, and bore straight at Jie Ming’s Dharma Form.

The warheads detonated in unison in midair before they had truly closed the distance.

But these were not explosives in the ordinary sense. They were strategic-grade weapons that generated continuously collapsing zones of spatial subsidence directly at the point of impact.

The golden light around the Dharma Form was savagely dragged at along the edges of those collapse zones, and several cracks were actually torn visibly open in it, the glow at their edges guttering in the warped space as though it might go out at any moment.

Jie Ming glanced down at the collapsing spatial vortices, but his hands did not slow in the slightest.

Spatial annihilation?

Set against the impact of a Reflection Dimension passage, which simply erased everything it touched, an attack on this scale counted as a miniature version at best.

He had taken far worse!

So Jie Ming neither dodged nor evaded, and simply kept up the pressure.

“Fire the strategic-grade singularity oscillation cannon!”

Another order came down.

From the bow of an exceptionally massive battleship, a gravitational wave visible to the naked eye abruptly thundered out.

Everywhere that wave passed, air was crushed outright into plasma, and the structure of space deformed violently under the pull of the gravitational tide, as though an entire corridor of void had been wrung into a twist of dough.

BOOM!

The oscillation cannon struck the Dharma Form squarely in the chest.

A vast depression tens of kilometers across was hammered into the golden protective layer in an instant, the golden light around its rim surging wildly as though it might rupture at any second. Jie Ming’s true body was rocked inside the Dharma Form as well, though it steadied itself again quickly.

He gauged the extent of the damage and made a swift note of it in his spiritual sea.

The force behind that strike was considerable, enough to punch through the Dharma Form’s local defenses.

But set against the high-compression energy attack from that ten thousand-ship salvo earlier, its energy density still fell some way short.

“Deploy the dissociation fields!”

Pale green force fields spread out from the shield generators of ship after ship and swiftly enveloped Jie Ming’s Dharma Form.

For that instant it was as though the whole reach of void had been draped in a dull emerald film.

Inside the field, the strong and weak interactions between particles were forcibly weakened, and fine cracks immediately surfaced across the golden light of the Dharma Form, like a single sheet of golden glass on the verge of shattering.

Jie Ming looked down at those cracks, the vertical eye between his brows turning slightly.

The principle of a dissociation field was to destroy the binding energy of matter at the molecular level, and on first contact the effect really was quite good.

But that was as far as it went.

His body forging method began to circulate almost on instinct, making adaptive adjustments against the frequency band of the dissociation field.

Within a few breaths the cracks stopped spreading, and then began slowly to close.

Seeing that the attacks remained useless, the tendrils on the octopus-man commander’s face had gone so pale that hardly any color was left in them.

His orders kept coming, but the conviction behind his voice was draining away at a rate anyone could see.

“What else do we still have…”

“Every last card we’re holding, throw all of it at him!”

For a while, every method they had kept at the bottom of the chest came pouring down on Jie Ming without pause.

Particle storms, phase tearing, entropy fields, dimensional cutting…

Any one of them on its own would have been enough to make an ordinary sixth-level wizard give way before it.

But landing on Jie Ming, the best any of them managed was a limited effect.

Used a second time, the power fell off noticeably; by the third it was almost entirely useless.

Only that pure high-compression energy salvo from the very beginning managed to hold onto anything like stable lethality.

And that required ten thousand-odd warships charging in synchrony; firing it repeatedly was simply impossible.

Somewhere in the fleet, an octopus-face operator’s fingers shook wildly over his control console while his tendrils kept adjusting parameters in front of the screen, trying to find in the detection data some logic that could explain the absurdity in front of him.

He failed.

He turned to the comrade beside him, and found that his tendrils were trembling exactly like his own.

“So this is an Apostle of the End?”

He asked it at barely more than a whisper, and the fear in his voice was too thick to dissolve; he could not hold it down himself.

His comrade did not answer.

But every octopus-face around them heard it.

For a moment, silence spread like a tide into every corner of the command cabin.

Quite a few of the octopus-faces present had in fact heard the name of that calamity, the “Apostles of the End,” before.

Within the Multiracial Alliance’s intelligence system, the term surfaced occasionally in the highest-level alert bulletins.

But those bulletins tended to be vague, offering only fuzzy parameters and exaggerated descriptions.

Most people assumed they were nothing more than peculiar monsters spawned by strange, unknown rules.

Immensely powerful, certainly, but still merely savage and primitive things.

Some had even privately mocked the units posted to the front lines to defend against the Apostles of the End.

They were only facing a pack of primitive creatures. Was all that tension really necessary?

But today, for the first time, they had met the terror of that calamity face to face.

The data on the screens was still refreshing, and the target’s energy level was still holding steady at fifth-level.

One small fifth-level creature was carrying the entire firepower of a whole expeditionary fleet while tearing the plane barrier open layer by layer, the way a man shells a nut.

Strategic-grade weapons capable of vaporizing a small plane had left some mark the first time; by the second they neither hurt nor itched.

Dissociation fields, spatial annihilation, singularity oscillation… every one of them a top-level offensive method fit to be written into a textbook, and in front of him they were like snowballs a child had thrown.

Their entire view of the world was being pounded to powder, blow by blow.

More and more octopus-face operators found their fingers no longer obeying them, their minds pressing up against the edge of collapse.

Quite a few of the octopus-men had tendrils shaking like a sieve.

Their respiratory organs sat at the roots of those tendrils, after all, so the harder they tried to draw a deep breath, the harder the tendrils shook.

And Jie Ming was bearing down into the interior of the plane with his full concentration.

His body forging method was evolving adaptively, and quickly, under the unbroken stream of attacks.

Every attack that landed on him prompted his body to automatically run one round of iterative optimization against that class of attack.

Before long, apart from the high-compression salvo that gathered the full energy of ten thousand-odd warships, which could still push him back some distance, every other showy special attack struck him like raindrops on a flagstone, barely raising a ripple in the Dharma Form’s golden light.

He could feel that the seventh- and eighth-level creatures hidden deep within the fleet were still keeping themselves concealed.

He made no effort to go looking for them either.

At this rate, a few more hours would see him force the entire plane barrier open regardless.

And by then, they would not be able to stay hidden however much they wanted to.