I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 797: Hot War

Jie Ming had not finished speaking.

Augusta had already struck again.

Boom!!!

Rock fists vast as mountain ranges came howling in from every direction, electromagnetic fields flowing across their surfaces.

That enormous force ionized the air around them, dragging trails of azure energy flame behind.

Several hundred giant fists broke the sound barrier at very nearly the same instant, and space was pressed into layer upon layer of ripples by the high-speed impact, as though all of heaven and earth were collapsing inward.

This time, however, Jie Ming did not use the Void Ash Return to Origin Hand. Dark golden divine light surged abruptly out of his body.

At the same time the Return to Ruins Armor came fully online, its stabilization field covering him entirely.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The rock fists slammed down, impacts thick as a downpour, every collision enough to shatter a continent.

But the instant those fists struck Jie Ming’s body, it was as though they had struck a bottomless abyss.

All that kinetic energy poured madly in, and the Return to Ruins Armor absorbed the shock layer by layer, converting it into force to drive him.

Riding that impact, Jie Ming became like a meteor rising against the current, climbing steadily higher on the storm of fists.

Faster and faster, higher and higher, until he had left the rocky planet entirely.

At the same time, the dark golden divine radiance about him began swelling madly.

A hundred meters.

A thousand meters.

Ten thousand meters.

The light spread outward like a newborn star coming into being.

With every expansion, the space around him rang with the sound of unbearable strain.

Spatial cracks spread out from the edge of the light, and closed again under the repairing power of the arrays.

The rock fists still pursuing him drove into that golden light and, without even time to explode, were crushed to dust by the terrible pressure.

Augusta finally stopped attacking.

She slowly raised her head, and for the first time genuine gravity surfaced in those black pupils.

…

The next moment the golden light dispersed, and the two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-kilometer Third Layer Dharma Form stood slowly at the far edge of the starfield.

It loomed over the cosmos, magnificent beyond imagining.

The ruined rocky planet beneath it was no more than a pebble it might idly toy with.

Dark golden divine radiance flowed slowly across the Dharma Form’s surface like liquid molten gold.

The only pity was that this Dharma Form of Jie Ming’s still carried an obvious roughness.

The proportions of shoulder and back were slightly stiff, the two arms differed a little in length, and the lines of the torso were more like an unpolished blank.

Both faces remained wrapped in a haze of golden mist, their features indistinct.

Only the six eyes across those two faces were brilliant as six blazing suns, looking quietly down over the whole starfield.

On the strength of his sharply raised spiritual aptitude, Jie Ming had forced his way across the threshold of the Third Layer Dharma Form.

But his comprehension of law was insufficient in the end. He could condense the form, yet was nowhere near genuine completeness.

Jie Ming did not mind.

Whether the Dharma Form was refined made no difference to whether it could throw a punch.

For the fight at hand, this Dharma Form was enough!

In the distance, Augusta looked up at that golden giant blotting out the whole star region.

After a long moment, the corner of her mouth lifted bit by bit into a smile that could fairly be called radiant, an excitement that came from the heart.

Those black eyes, always still as a frozen lake, burned for the first time with genuine fighting spirit.

She bared two pointed canines. “This—this is the you I want to beat!”

Jie Ming did not answer. He only raised his right hand.

The Dharma Form matched the motion, raising its own right hand slowly.

From that single motion, the whole ruined planet fell into shadow.

That palm pressed slowly down, and before the five fingers had truly closed, terrible gravity had already begun tearing the ground apart.

Augusta’s gaze sharpened abruptly, and both her hands rose at once.

Booom!

The entire rocky planet shook violently, countless rock strata were torn up by the roots, and crimson magma shot into the sky.

Then, under electromagnetic force, those countless strata began collapsing and fusing madly.

In the space of a few breaths, the whole planet had been compressed into a jet-black stone spindle several thousand kilometers long.

Dark red tracery like molten lava flowed across its surface, and the metallic sheen of electromagnetic reinforcement flashed without pause.

Watching that giant palm all but reach the top of her head, Augusta swept a hand out, and the spindle vanished, then drove straight toward the palm.

Boom!!!

The Dharma Form’s palm accelerated abruptly into its strike, and two terrible forces met head-on.

Dark golden divine radiance and deep blue electromagnetic force interwove madly, and space shattered in layers like a mirror.

A visible energy storm swept outward, shaking every drifting meteor nearby into particulate dust.

And as the storm slowed, the Dharma Form’s five fingers closed slowly.

Crack, crack.

Sounds of breaking that set the teeth on edge came one after another.

That spindle, enough to run a planet through, was crushed bodily.

Countless glittering mineral fragments poured out between the fingers, spreading a brilliant galaxy across the starfield.

At that moment, Jie Ming’s expression suddenly changed.

Because he could feel clearly that an invisible force had quietly wound itself around the entire Dharma Form.

Its momentum was weaker than the earlier attacks, and yet it was more dangerous than any of them.

Because that force acted directly on the Dharma Form’s most fundamental energy structure, attempting to destroy its internal architecture outright.

Under that attack, the Dharma Form itself began to distort faintly, as though a pair of invisible hands meant to wring it into a knot.

Jie Ming looked into the distance, a smile surfacing at the corner of his mouth. “Trying to twist the internal energy structure directly with electromagnetic force?”

“That really is a troublesome method. But as you said yourself. Given enough power, these techniques—”

Jie Ming’s gaze sharpened, his shoulder gave a slight shrug, and the two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-kilometer Dharma Form abruptly erupted with blinding golden light.

Boom!

Power pure to the utmost burst every binding apart in an instant.

Arcs of lightning exploded across the sky, and the remaining electromagnetic field was scattered outright.

“—mean nothing at all!”

He said it lightly, but Jie Ming knew perfectly well that breaking free had taken him several full seconds.

And precisely because of that, it had given Augusta no small amount of time to prepare.

Augusta had by now withdrawn to beside the star, and that star, which had been burning peacefully, was now churning violently.

Its corona was being stripped away layer by layer, and infinite plasma converged continuously under the compression of an invisible force.

In the space of a few breaths, the whole star had begun reshaping itself.

Head, torso, limbs—

A giant composed entirely of a star rose slowly out of the starfield.

Watching this, Jie Ming was genuinely shocked for the first time.

What surprised him was not that Augusta could manipulate a star, but the speed and precision with which she manipulated the whole of it.

Manipulating the rock fists earlier had been electromagnetic force.

But compressing an entire planet, and reshaping an entire star in the space of a few breaths—electromagnetic force alone could never manage that.

Only gravity and electromagnetism working together could constrain both neutral matter and charged particles at once, and shape a star into any form desired.

And thinking back to the way the rock had spiked in hardness earlier, which had plainly involved reinforcement at the level of fundamental particles—

Jie Ming finally understood.

“Not just electromagnetism.” He spoke slowly, a note of admiration in his voice. “You have mastered gravity as well. And the strong and weak interactions you used to reinforce the matter.”

“It seems you have mastered all four fundamental forces.”

Before the star giant’s brow, Augusta hung quietly, golden-red flame lighting the side of her face.

Hearing that, she gave a light laugh. “You are right. A pity I have not genuinely unified them yet.”

She took a step, and her whole body merged into the star giant.

The next instant, a pair of pure white eyes condensed out of the corona opened slowly.

The moment those white pupils lit, the whole simulated cosmos shuddered.

Hmmm—

A gravitational field terrifying to the point of being nearly physical spread abruptly. Countless rock fragments scattered through the void were the first to leave their orbits, flying toward the star giant like a downpour.

Then the stone spindle Jie Ming had crushed.

Then the other three planets beyond their orbits began to shake as well.

Continents split, mountain ranges collapsed, and each planet slowly left its orbit, drawn by an invisible hand toward the star giant.

Hundreds of millions of tons of mineral reaggregated, compressing and smelting continuously in the gravitational field, becoming part of the star giant’s pauldrons and breastplate.

All that matter rearranged itself under the combined action of the four fundamental forces, forming an ever more enormous body.

In the space of a few breaths, the star giant’s presence surged again.

Looking up at his ever-larger opponent, Jie Ming only grew more excited, and the six eyes across the Dharma Form’s two faces lit together.

He slowly clenched both fists.

Boom!

The two fists struck one another, and dark golden divine radiance burst apart.

The shock of that collision shattered space for tens of thousands of kilometers, black cracks spreading in every direction before the training ground repaired them automatically.

“Heh heh heh heh—now this is interesting!”

With that, the two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-kilometer Dharma Form took a hard step forward.

There was no purchase of any kind in space, but the instant the Dharma Form’s foot came down, layer upon layer of space twisted and formed a point capable of bearing its force.

At the cost of shattering space across who knew how vast a radius beneath its feet, the entire Dharma Form drove like a dark golden meteor, carrying a terrible momentum that tore the cosmos, and threw a punch straight at the star giant’s face.

That straight punch held no technique at all. Only the purest force.

Augusta showed no intention of dodging either. The star giant raised its left arm and met the blow head-on without hesitation.

Boom!!!

Fist met fist, and a ring of searing white shockwave swept instantly across the entire stellar system.

Everywhere it passed, every drifting fragment and mote of dust was annihilated.

Even space itself was briefly compressed under that force into a thin transparent membrane.

The star giant’s body swayed slightly, and the Dharma Form’s fist stalled for the first time.

Judged by that first exchange, the two of them were evenly matched.

The next instant, the star giant’s right fist had already drawn a searing arc, driving hard at the Dharma Form’s flank from the side.

Jie Ming did not pull his fist back to defend at all. The Dharma Form’s left knee snapped up.

Boom!

Knee and fist struck at once, and violent tremors spread madly along the bodies of both giants.

But Jie Ming immediately noticed something wrong.

Too hard!

That blow did not feel like striking a star. It felt more like striking a neutron star compressed without limit.

His knee drove only a few hundred meters before it could advance no further.

Just then, the corner of Augusta’s mouth lifted slightly.

The star giant’s abdomen abruptly split open, and dozens of enormous tendrils condensed from high-density stellar matter shot out without warning.

Accelerated continuously by electromagnetic fields inside its body, every tendril had a burst speed approaching that of light, like a golden rainstorm covering the whole starfield.

Jie Ming’s pupils contracted sharply, his arms crossed instantly, and the Return to Ruins Armor deployed in full.

Boom boom boom boom boom—

Countless tendrils hammered madly into the Dharma Form’s chest, dark golden divine radiance shaking violently, shockwaves bursting one layer after another.

Even with the Return to Ruins Armor absorbing the force without pause, what remained still drove the Dharma Form bodily back tens of thousands of kilometers.

Great swathes of space along the way were shattered by the Dharma Form’s body, and swiftly repaired by the combat chamber’s arrays.

Jie Ming had barely steadied himself before the star giant was on him again.

This time it abandoned a fixed human shape entirely.

Its shoulders split, and two new arms grew out. Its back split, and two more arms grew.

In the blink of an eye the star giant had six arms.

Six fists came at him from six entirely different directions, each carrying force enough to run a planet through.

The shadows of those fists interwove until they blotted out the heavens.

Jie Ming drew a deep breath, and the Dharma Form exploded into motion.

Its dark golden fists became two meteors, meeting the oncoming fists head-on.

Boom!

The first punch smashed one arm outright into a sky full of stellar flame.

But the next moment, that flame reconverged and grew a brand-new arm.

Boom!

The second punch broke another fist bodily.

But the star giant’s shoulder immediately grew again, as though it had limbs without end.

At the same time, the remaining fists had already landed on the Dharma Form.

Augusta had entirely given up maintaining a human shape. Wherever she needed to attack, a new arm grew!

Chest, waist, back all split open continuously, new arms swinging madly.

The whole star giant seemed to have become a thousand-armed monster made of a star.

The shadows of its fists blotted out the starfield.

For the first time, Jie Ming felt genuine suppression.

His Dharma Form had, in the end, only two arms.

Even though every punch was enough to shatter one of the enemy’s arms, the remaining attacks still landed on him from every direction.

Bang!

A fist struck his shoulder.

Boom!

Another landed on his chest.

Then a third drove into his back.

The dark golden divine radiance flickered violently without pause, and the Dharma Form’s enormous body was driven back again and again, yet never genuinely collapsed.

The Return to Ruins Armor kept dispersing the overwhelming majority of the shock, and what remained Jie Ming simply bore.

At the same time, his counterattacks grew heavier and heavier.

Every swing of his fist could shatter great masses of stellar matter, and vast sheets of golden-red flame burst continuously through the void.

But that scattered stellar matter would soon reconverge under Augusta’s control.

By this point in the fight, both of them had realized one thing.

Close-quarters slaughter at this level was not going to settle anything for either side.

One of them had a Dharma Form like indestructible divine iron.

The other had a stellar body that regenerated all but without limit.

This battle had, beyond any doubt, been dragged into a war of attrition once again.

Whoever could hold out longer would be the winner.