I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 754: The Play Is Like Life

Jie Ming’s Dharma Form was forcing its way into the plane barrier inch by inch.

Dark golden light ground violently against the sky blue patterns on the barrier’s surface along the edges of the tear, throwing off great sprays of fine energy sparks, as though two utterly different orders were biting at each other in the void.

The octopus-man fleet’s firepower was still pouring down in a frenzy.

Attacks of every kind hammered against him without a break, and apart from the high-compression energy salvo that took ten thousand-odd warships charging in concert, which could still drive him back some distance, nothing else that landed on him could truly move him any more.

At this pace, a few more hours would see him break through the plane barrier for good.

But at that moment, an attack came at him soundlessly from deep within the fleet.

Its appearance was extraordinarily abrupt, with no warning sign and no energy fluctuation whatsoever.

Its shape was that of a transparent thread drawn to its absolute limit, so fine that the naked eye could not catch it at all.

Yet everywhere it passed, space itself was cut cleanly and neatly in two.

Jie Ming’s True-False Void-Piercing Pupil caught that thread the instant it appeared.

But by the time he caught it, it was already right in front of him.

Too fast.

Some force had compressed the interval between launch and impact down to nearly zero, leaving him no time to dodge or to bring the Dharma Form’s defenses around. In the next instant, a layer of gray-white light unfolded in front of him.

It was a solidification domain woven from countless Pain Law runes, thin as a cicada’s wing, and it held steady directly in the path of that transparent thread.

The moment the thread struck the gray-white light, it dissolved without a sound.

Jie Ming’s head snapped around.

Viola stood not far behind him, the five fingers of her right hand spread, her palm facing the direction of that gray-white light.

Her posture was exactly the same as when she had been infiltrating the plane barrier earlier.

Only now, the habitual smile at the corner of her mouth, the one that always carried a hint of watching a show, had changed flavor entirely. It had become the satisfied smile of a hunter whose prey has finally stepped into the trap.

“Finally done.”

She spoke slowly, a note of smugness in her voice that she could not quite suppress.

“Thanks for the hard work. The invasion of one portion of the plane origin is complete.”

At that, Jie Ming’s eyes lit up at once.

And in that same instant, the expressions of the eighth-level octopus-men who had stayed hidden deep in the fleet changed drastically.

Jie Ming knew perfectly well what Viola had done.

The moment they discovered the Multiracial Alliance had claimed this plane before them, the two of them had held an extremely brief tactical exchange through mental energy. The first problem in front of them had never been how many troops the enemy had. It was this: since the other side already commanded that much combat strength at sixth-level and above, they must already have completed a preliminary grip on the plane origin.

What did it mean when a plane’s origin lay entirely under enemy control?

It meant they could trigger the plane’s self-destruction at any moment and take every invader down with them.

To force a way in under those conditions, even if the enemy were all flattened in the end, could still leave them with nothing to show for it.

So the first thing the two of them actually had to do was not to fight, but to seize control of the plane origin.

At the very least, they had to make certain the enemy could not so much as manage a self-destruct.

Taking Viola’s earlier long-range detection results together with the reality in front of them, then even allowing for the drift caused by the time turbulence, the octopus-men could not possibly have held this plane for very long.

A short occupation meant their control over the plane origin was not yet fully consolidated, which left it open to infiltration and to having authority wrested away. And the moment the two of them had chosen happened to be the best one of all.

Jie Ming and Viola had only just begun their invasion of the plane; they had not truly entered its interior yet.

Even if the enemy were pushed into wanting to blow the place up, the first units to take the damage would be their own, not the two people who had yet to go in deep.

So from the very beginning, Jie Ming’s seemingly brutish breakthrough had been a carefully designed feint.

The enormous Second Layer Dharma Form.

The thunderous spectacle of tearing the barrier open bare-handed.

Standing unmoved while taking the full weight of their firepower.

All of it was “performance,” pitched as extravagantly as it could be, in order to fix the octopus-men’s attention firmly on him.

The fleet was firing at him, the commander was watching him, and the seventh- and eighth-level creatures hidden in the dark had their guard trained on him.

While every eye was fixed on the golden giant overhead tearing the sky open, no one would notice the single gray-white law tendril on the outer face of the plane barrier, creeping soundlessly toward the depths of the plane like a vine.

Viola had been standing behind him the whole time.

On the surface, she was only grinning at the sight of him getting hit.

In truth, her Pain Law Solidification Domain had already begun extending toward the plane origin, bit by bit, back during the stage when she was infiltrating the plane barrier. When it came to contesting control of a plane origin, the Pain Law held no natural advantage.

The Pain Law was better suited to knowledge of emotion, perception, pain and resonance than to matter and energy.

For contesting a plane’s recognition head-on, it was far less direct than the elemental laws.

But Viola had a method of her own.

She borrowed strength from the pressure that Jie Ming’s brutal breakthrough was generating.

The more the octopus-men feared, the more they despaired, the more they suffered, the more those negative emotions became fodder for her Law.

She gathered that fear and pain together layer by layer, then turned it back around to interfere with the octopus-men’s own manipulation of the plane origin.

Emotional fluctuation affects mental energy.

Fluctuating mental energy affects the precision of control.

And once precision drops, an opening appears.

It lasted until that moment just now, when the eighth-level octopus-man could finally hold back no longer and struck, and Viola seized the chance.

The strike had come extremely fast, extremely hard and extremely precise, but that also meant the one who released it had poured far too much of his attention into it. And precisely because of that, the attention of every octopus-man converged in that instant on that transparent thread—including those maintaining the grip on the plane origin.

Once attention shifts, control over the plane origin slackens by an imperceptible degree.

That was the instant.

Viola released every scrap of fear and pain she had stored up in one breath, using their own force against them, shattering a portion of the enemy’s authority outright while driving her own Law Solidification Domain deep into the plane origin like a wedge.

That sliver of authority might have been negligible measured against the whole plane origin.

But measured against the share of control the octopus-men held in their hands, it was already fatal.

At the very least, it was enough to stop them from setting off the plane’s self-destruction.

Looking at the steadily shrinking plane barrier in front of him, Jie Ming curved the corner of his mouth into something cold.

Then, still smiling coldly, he dismissed the Second Layer Dharma Form.

The golden apparition five hundred kilometers tall dissolved soundlessly into the void, revealing the true face of the thousand-meter true body inside it.

The octopus-man fleet’s detectors erupted into frantic alarms in that same instant. “Warning! Warning! Enemy energy readings are climbing rapidly!”

Seeing it, the octopus-man commander could not help but stare wide-eyed.

On the detection instruments, the target’s volume was shrinking sharply, yet its energy density was rising rather than falling; the more tightly it drew itself in, the more dangerous it appeared. Jie Ming stretched his body luxuriously. He no longer needed to keep up the act.

Unfolding such an outrageous Dharma Form earlier and tearing open such a broad fissure had been for drawing attention and nothing else. It had never been about actually “squeezing” himself in through it.

His true body was only on the order of a kilometer across, and even counting the protective layer of the Return to Ruins Armor it came to no more than a few kilometers. He had never needed a rift spanning an entire continent torn into the plane barrier.

All of it had been to make the octopus-men believe that a monster vast enough to blot out the sky was trying to break in through the shell.

Now the threat of the plane origin self-destructing had been removed.

There was of course no need to keep maintaining that absurdly exaggerated bulk in order to draw fire.

In the next instant, Jie Ming’s thousand-meter true body drove straight into the plane fissure he had torn open earlier.

The golden figure went through like a red-hot knife into butter, passing without the least obstruction through the fleet that was still firing wildly, and settled steadily inside the atmosphere.

And then he unfolded the Second Layer Dharma Form again.

The golden apparition five hundred kilometers tall rose straight up out of the very center of the octopus-man fleet’s array, unfolding out of thin air directly above their entire formation.

The detectors of every warship let out an ear-splitting alarm in the same instant.

With Jie Ming no longer concealing his own energy fluctuations, the target parameters on the scanning interface burst through the fifth-level ceiling on the spot and went tearing upward toward a seventh-level energy reading.

Inside the command cabin of the flagship “Iron Curtain,” the octopus-man commander stood before the command console, staring fixedly at the golden giant now practically on his doorstep, the tendrils on his face gone so white that not a trace of their original color could be found.