I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 757: Ending It

Just before the seventh-level octopus-man combat swarm could finish closing its encirclement, Jie Ming had already crashed into the outer edge of their fleet a step ahead of them.

In that instant his figure turned into a streak of dark golden light, the Great Void Step and the Light God Transformation driven at once, and he swept past all but scraping the edge of the warship formation.

The few seventh-level octopus-men at the head of the chase reacted with extreme speed, the vents of their armor spitting fierce exhaust flame as three energy beams sealed off the way ahead of him at the same moment.

Jie Ming’s eye twitched. Instead of pulling back, he pressed forward, cutting sharply upward on the diagonal.

Boom!

The first beam flew past grazing his shoulder and punched straight through the flank of an escort ship behind him.

The second landed on the surface of the Return to Ruins Armor, bursting into a small patch of ripples, and was just barely swallowed by the stabilization field.

The third followed the second’s line of attack and broke through the Return to Ruins Armor, but he wrenched himself clear of it with a shift of position, and the backwash only shaved a corner off the hem of his robe.

And he himself had used the momentum to reach a point directly in front of that escort ship.

It was a sixth-level standard-issue warship, its hull long and narrow, its surface laid over with a deep blue energy coating, with a dense ring of shield runes inlaid around the bridge.

Jie Ming gave it a single sweeping glance and completed a preliminary assessment in his spiritual sea.

The materials leaned toward high-density alloys, the outer layer of the hull carried multiple layers of energy buffering structure, and neural-linkage control circuits were embedded inside. Compared with the warships of the wizard civilization, this kind of ship was more like a product of living control, energy technology and racial consciousness kneaded together. The technical approach was not especially brilliant, but it won on structural stability, which suited mass production and long campaigns.

The thought had barely flashed through his mind before his body had already moved a step ahead of it.

Jie Ming raised an arm, the dark golden light on the surface of the Return to Ruins Armor contracted in an instant, and the whole fist dragged a heavy afterimage through the void and smashed into the escort ship’s bow.

Crack… boom!!

First came a sound of tearing metal that set the teeth on edge, and then the whole warship abruptly buckled upward along a vicious split running from bow to stern.

The shields had only just lit up before the Return to Ruins Armor’s energy-absorbing property tore them apart outright. The energy conduits inside the hull blew all at once, and blue-white flame gushed wildly out of the breach.

The whole escort ship shuddered violently in midair, then rolled thunderously backward like an iron plate struck by a giant hammer. “After him!”

Several seventh-level octopus-man warriors behind him blanched together and immediately pulled their bodies up.

But they were still a step too slow.

That punch of Jie Ming’s had not been a simple blunt strike. He had used the instant of impact to unleash a close-range penetration of Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light.

A dark golden beam burst from his palm and drove straight into the interior along the crack in the hull.

The next moment, a chain of secondary detonations began from the warship’s midsection.

Booooom!!!

An enormous fireball burst open in the void, the shockwave shoving the escort ship’s wreckage apart in every direction and dragging in three low-level octopus-man warriors who had only just charged up alongside it.

Those three sixth-level octopus-men had no time to raise a complete shield before the explosion tore them into several pieces. Armor fragments and severed limbs tumbled through the void like black paper shredded by a gale.

Jie Ming had no intention of stopping.

Even as he used the blast wave to keep opening the distance, he twisted back and casually loosed several more beams of Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light.

The dark golden beams flashed once through the void and punched with precision through the chests of two low-level octopus-men trying to flank him.

The two never had time to scream before their bodies burst under the impact of that hyper-compressed energy into two scattered clouds of blood mist. At the same time, the All-Purpose Eye and the True-False Void-Piercing Pupil were running at full speed.

He used the brief crossing to sweep quickly over the blown-open fragments of armor and the outer hull structure of the warships nearby.

These octopus-men’s armor followed a biological-cooperation approach far more closely than he had expected.

The combat armor was not simply an external piece of protective gear. It was semi-parasitic equipment.

The energy conduits inside the armor adjusted their output frequency band automatically according to the wearer’s neural signals, and there were hidden energy-resonance circuits linking the shoulder pieces, breastplate and vambraces. Once several of them fought shoulder to shoulder, they could temporarily raise the efficiency of the whole shield array.

Which was to say that these octopus-men’s equipment determined what they were best at: group coordination.

Taken one at a time they might not be dazzling, but once they formed a battle array, both shield stacking and coordinated firepower rose several times over.

Small wonder the power of that salvo of hyper-compressed energy earlier had been so absurd, and small wonder his Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light had had no effect at all.

Jie Ming reached his conclusion quickly.

He stopped watching those low-level octopus-men and turned the focus of the All-Purpose Eye’s scanning onto the warship formation behind them instead.

A warship’s energy core was not in the bridge. It was distributed among six auxiliary energy wells embedded along both sides of the hull.

The output of each ship’s main gun had to pass through at least three layers of energy rectification before being released in unison through a focusing array at the ship’s stern.

The advantage of that arrangement was stability. The disadvantage was that charging took far too long and was extremely easy to interrupt with outside force.

The octopus-men’s combat armor, by contrast, was more like an extension of their own will to fight.

Relying on the True-False Void-Piercing Pupil and the All-Purpose Eye, Jie Ming could make out a few details from those corpses:

These octopus-men’s tendrils drew in instinctively under high pressure, and the bioelectric signals at the base of the tendrils strengthened noticeably, which meant that in a state of fear they transmitted emotional fluctuations through their tendril responses.

In other words, their nervous systems were more easily disturbed by emotion than an ordinary person’s.

That also explained why Viola’s Law had such a powerful suppressive effect on them.

He went on flying while he analyzed.

Just as he swept beneath a large warship, the ship’s secondary guns suddenly swung around, and dozens of energy beams spat out of its flank like a vast blue-white net thrown open all at once, dropping over his head.

Jie Ming’s eyes went cold and his figure dropped abruptly in midair, sweeping past almost against the ship’s underside.

The next instant, he raised a foot and stamped.

The shields on the warship’s lower hold gave a dull, mournful wail, the hull lurched sharply to one side, and its flank crashed straight into a cruiser beside it that was still adjusting its heading.

Boom!!

The two warships slammed viciously together in midair, their outer hulls twisting into a single mass, circuits shorting out over huge areas inside, explosions chaining outward from the point of contact. Several low-level octopus-men who had only just rushed out of a hatch, their armor not yet fully deployed, were blown clean away, tumbling through the shockwave into the distance, only to be harvested all together by a backhanded Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light from Jie Ming.

In the space of a few breaths, the outer edge of the battlefield had already dissolved into chaos.

And Jie Ming’s analysis was growing clearer by the moment.

These octopus-men were not weak as individual soldiers, and the fleet was large enough.

But their combat system depended too heavily on coordination and formation. Once the front rank was torn open, an obvious lag in coordination appeared in the fleet behind it. In other words, as long as he could throw their rhythm off in the shortest possible time, the threat this fleet posed would immediately drop by a whole level. “Knowing the flaw is not enough. I still need a concrete method.”

“In that case… find more material to study!”

Jie Ming’s eyes flashed. After dodging another salvo from the octopus-men pursuing him, he deliberately adjusted his posture and hurled himself at another warship! The fighting between the two sides had already gone on for several days.

The cloud layer had long since been torn to shreds by pass after pass at high speed. Above the vault of the sky, dark golden light and metal-colored exhaust flame flickered across one another without pause, spanning the whole sky of the plane.

Jie Ming’s figure flickered constantly between those rents.

The Great Void Step combined with the light-speed movement of the Light God Transformation meant that, hemmed in and hunted by more than fifty seventh-level octopus-men, he had not once been genuinely trapped.

But the state he was in was genuinely wretched. The Return to Ruins Armor had been beaten down more times than he could count, and the edge of his robe had been sliced into long thin gashes by a few passes of spatial cutting, the runic light along the tears curling gently in the wind pressure.

Fortunately, after the Dao Integration Realm his control over the Light God Transformation state had risen another large step.

Even while moving at the speed of light, he could still turn nimbly.

Under ordinary physical law, no attack could catch a light-speed target that agile.

However dense the octopus-men’s firepower, however vicious their encirclement, they could only occasionally scrape him in the gaps of his evasion, and could do no substantive harm at all. And while he was running for his life, Jie Ming had not been idle either.

The corpse of a sixth-level octopus-man he had scooped up along the way was being scanned over and over by the All-Purpose Eye and the True-False Void-Piercing Pupil, stripped for every scrap of useful information it could yield.

From skin tissue to organ structure, from the signal-transmission mode of the nerve synapses to the layout of the energy circuits inside the combat armor, all of the data was fed simultaneously into the Five Aggregates Rainbow Mirror, rapidly constructing a complete physiological and equipment model of the octopus-men deep in his spiritual sea.

The results of the analysis came quickly as well.

The energy frequency bands of octopus-man armor, the modulation cycles of their shields, the physiological response characteristics of their nervous systems… even the bioelectric signal by which their tendrils instinctively drew taut under stress was annotated precisely, item by item.

Jie Ming did not hesitate for an instant. He fed the data straight into the Five Aggregates Rainbow Mirror and used the spirituality of his life-bound treasure to run tactical deductions. Then, taking as his base the optimal solutions the Entropy Brain talent organized automatically, he began working out two brand-new spells built specifically for this enemy.

The first was for locking onto the energy frequency band of their armor.

As long as the elemental fluctuation hedged against that band precisely, an octopus-man’s shields and energy coating could be made to fail at the same time.

The second was for locking onto the octopus-men’s nervous systems, using their physiological characteristics to trigger a directed reaction of physical revulsion and distress. Jie Ming did not expect this spell to do any killing. It was enough if the octopus-men’s bodies produced an instinctive rejection.

The underlying rune structures of both spells were assembled at speed inside his spiritual sea.

And in that very instant, Jie Ming abruptly stopped running.

The cloud layer beneath his feet shattered under one stamp, rolling white mist bursting outward in every direction. His whole body wheeled around to face the more than fifty seventh-level octopus-men still pressing him from behind.

The pursuing octopus-men clearly faltered for a moment. But it was only for a moment.

The next instant, every attack they had poured toward him at once.

Jie Ming raised a hand.

The first spell, only just built, spread outward from him as its center, forming an almost soundless spherical ripple.

As that seemingly ordinary ring of energy fluctuation swept over the battlefield, the armor coating on the octopus-men’s bodies faded and flaked away as fast as if acid had been poured over it. Shield generators blared shrill overload alarms one after another, then went dark together.

Even the energy weapons hanging at their waists disassembled themselves in the fluctuation, components clattering away toward the ground.

More than fifty octopus-men looked down at once at their own armor scrapping itself, their tendrils frozen in midair.

But this was still only the beginning.

The second spell was released right on its heels.

It too was a spherical spreading fluctuation of energy, but without any visible light effect at all, quiet to the point of being frightening.

The fluctuation passed through the octopus-men’s bodies and acted with precision on their nervous systems.

The next moment, an uncontainable revulsion and distress came surging madly out of every nerve ending.

It was a pure, purely physiological rejection reaction… much the way a human finds the high-frequency sound of nails on a blackboard unbearable.

The eyes of the lower-level octopus-men lost focus all at once, their bodies, stripped of armor protection, curling up instinctively in midair as their tendrils drooped one by one without strength.