I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 811: The Reason

Inside the transport ship, the largest of them, the captain snail, slowly raised his head.

Several of his slender eyestalks swayed gently, fixed on Jie Ming in the distance, who still had not moved at all.

Jie Ming’s overlong silence seemed to have led him into some misjudgment.

“Apostle of the End…” the snail said, the sound oozing slowly out of him. “What troublesome creatures they are!”

The few snails beside him exchanged glances, their expressions gradually turning uneasy.

After all, their original plan had been to use the Reflection Prism as bait and fish out every target hiding nearby.

But now there was an Apostle of the End on top of it, and the man had simply stood there this whole time, neither leaving nor attacking, which kept magnifying the snails’ sense of danger.

The captain snail did not know what Jie Ming was waiting for, but he did not dare go on waiting himself.

His gaze went abruptly cold. “We cannot drag this out any longer! Strike first and gain the advantage!”

With that he opened his huge maw and a massive suction force erupted at once!

At the same time, fine cracks split open one after another along the edge of his shell.

And within those cracks, densely packed clusters of milky-white eggs the size of fists were spread throughout, rolling steadily out from inside the shell.

The moment those eggs rolled free they were drawn by that immense suction into the snail’s mouth, and swallowed down in one gulp!

Crunch, crunch…

The captain snail’s fine mouthparts, set with tens of thousands of teeth, opened and closed without pause, producing a chewing sound that made the scalp crawl.

And as the eggs were devoured one after another, the aura of life about him began to swell wildly.

Boom!

A terrible life pressure abruptly swept the whole region, and the captain snail rose rapidly from the fifth level he had shown before, reaching the seventh level in short order!

At the sight, every snail aboard the transport changed color at once!

“Captain, what are you doing?!”

“Have you gone mad?!”

“Those are your children…”

For these were genuine living eggs, which meant that a moment ago their captain had devoured thousands of his own young.

One of the older snails seemed to remember something, and his eyes went wide with terror.

Because he had suddenly recalled a secret art he had once read within the clan, an art that could disperse one’s own power among one’s young.

For one thing, the power so dispersed was genuinely gone, so the user’s own strength fell in proportion, making it an excellent means of disguising one’s energy fluctuations.

And when necessary, one could gain an increase by devouring the young the power had been distributed to.

What frightened this snail most, though, was that he remembered clearly how the secret art had described its principal method of use: disperse the power, then let the young grow to adulthood.

Whatever power the young trained and built up over that time would likewise be absorbed on collection, letting the user of the secret art raise his own capability rapidly.

“Birthgiver…” Something dawned on the old snail, and his voice shook a little.

The snail race is hermaphroditic, so it has no concept of father or mother. The so-called Birthgiver is simply the kin who brought them into being.

And aboard this ship, the captain was the “Birthgiver” of every crew member!

The captain glanced at him without expression, and opened that huge maw again without hesitation.

Whoosh!

This time the surging suction even became a devouring vortex visible to the naked eye.

The snails around him had no time even to struggle before their bodies were swept up by the gale and flew screaming into the captain’s mouth.

“No…”

“Captain!!!”

Dozens more snails further off tried in terror to flee, but it was already too late.

As the vortex expanded sharply, great numbers of snails were sucked steadily into that mouth, screams rising one after another.

Even the transport ship itself shook violently, its alloy-cast hull giving out an ear-splitting shriek before it began to peel away piece by piece and was swallowed whole by that ever-widening maw!

It takes long to tell, but in fact the snail captain devoured at speed.

In very nearly the blink of an eye, the several-kilometer transport ship before them had vanished without a trace. Only the fully sealed cargo hold at its center had not gone down with the rest.

And having devoured that much energy, his body began swelling wildly.

In a short time he was already several times larger than the transport ship had been.

Seen from a distance, he was like a mountain range of flesh with an enormous shell on it, laid across the void.

The giant snail abruptly shot out several thick, dark red tentacles that wound tightly around the cargo hold not far off, and great quantities of milky slime sprayed steadily out, wrapping the whole hold layer upon layer.

And the snail’s move was as though some button had been pressed: very nearly the instant he transformed, the pirate fleet not far away moved as well.

All three warships opened at once above, and three bizarre creatures shaped very much like great masses of tripe flew slowly out of their interiors.

They were covered all over in dark red folds, their bodies squirming ceaselessly, like so many enormous breathing organs of flesh and blood.

And as they appeared, their auras were revealed as well: two at the seventh level, and the largest one at their head had reached the eighth level of life!

Boom!!!

The life pressure of an eighth-level being descended abruptly, and a great expanse of the nearby void began to distort violently.

But this was only the beginning. Faced with such terrible force, the snail merely sneered and spat out from his mouth a device flickering with red light.

As the device came free of the slime, the space that had been shaking without pause suddenly flattened out.

Right behind that, spatial ripples spread outward one after another—the sign that a spatial teleport was coming!

Borrowing the temporary flattening of space from that unknown device, someone had forced a spatial jump through!

Crrrack!

As the spatial ripples surged to their limit, spatial fissures were torn violently open one after another, and a group of figures of every different shape walked slowly out of them.

These creatures took every kind of form: some humanoid, some mechanical life, some skeletal beings burning all over with black fire, some crystalline life with hundreds of eyes.

Their one common feature was that every last one gave off energy fluctuations at the sixth level or above.

And standing at the head of them was a humanoid creature very nearly ten thousand meters tall, clad in silver-white armor.

This one’s aura… was plainly at the eighth level as well!

These creatures of every different shape took up position beside the giant snail with practiced understanding, and the momentum of the two joined into one in an instant. The whole void seemed to grow heavier!

Seeing this, the three tripe-creatures showed not the slightest surprise. If anything, they laughed together.

The eighth-level “tripe” at their head let out a low, muffled laugh. “So you have finally deigned to come out? I was starting to think you meant to keep hiding forever!”

The silver-armored creature regarded it coldly. “So it was you lot after all. You have some nerve, daring to set your sights on a Multiracial Alliance joint transport convoy!”

The silver-armored creature took one step forward, its surging pressure unfolding with a roar and bearing down on the other side. “Today, not one of you leaves!”

The tripe leader unfurled its own momentum without hesitation and pushed the other’s back.

At that, it let out a burst of ear-splitting laughter. “Multiracial Alliance? You? Hahahahahaha…”

It laughed until its body was heaving, and only when it had apparently laughed its fill did its tone turn abruptly cold:

“You worthless things do not even have a ninth-level ancestor, and you presume to represent the Multiracial Alliance. Stop gilding your own faces!”

Hearing that, the Multiracial Alliance people present all changed color, but none of them argued.

Because they knew perfectly well that what the other side said was fact.

The silver-armored creature sneered. “And what if you did have a ninth-level being? Surely you do not imagine the Multiracial Alliance would permit you to decline an invitation?”

“The Multiracial Alliance is certainly beyond our means to provoke…”

The tripe leader swept its gaze slowly over the situation opposite. “But so long as we kill every one of you here today, who is going to know what happened in this place? Dead men do not leak secrets!”

At that, the atmosphere between the two sides dropped instantly to freezing!

Eighth-level pressures collided, and great expanses of space kept breaking apart.

A great battle was one spark from breaking out.

And yet in an environment that tense, someone entirely out of keeping with it was standing in the middle of the battlefield.

Jie Ming, positioned at the center of it all, had silently watched the whole process play out.

From the two sides’ conversation, he had in fact worked out how the matter stood.

It was far simpler than he had imagined. Put plainly, the snail’s side, representing the Multiracial Alliance, had deliberately used the Reflection Prism as bait.

Their real aim was to draw these “tripes” out and net them all at once, then keep the treasure that was the Reflection Prism for themselves.

And the “tripes” were obviously no fools either. They had probably known from the start that this was an ambush.

So they had simply gone along with the scheme, meaning to turn the opportunity around and draw out every reinforcement behind the snails so they could deal with them in one go, and achieve their own aim that way.

“Simple enough, then…”

At that thought, the corner of Jie Ming’s mouth could not help twitching.

The good news was that this arrangement really was not aimed at him.

The bad news was that he was now, for no reason he could name, standing dead center in the middle of it.

Looking at the two sides with their swords drawn and bows bent, Jie Ming, standing in the middle of the battlefield, suddenly felt rather awkward.

The two sides were about to start fighting, and standing here he seemed, by any reckoning, somewhat surplus to requirements.

And so, in that tense atmosphere, Jie Ming slowly raised a hand.

“Er…”

Through an exquisite elemental resonance, Jie Ming’s voice carried across the entire battlefield.

In a flash, dozens of gazes turned on him at once.

The killing intent both sides had condensed to its utmost paused for an instant on account of that sudden voice.

Seeing that both sides had noticed him, Jie Ming nodded very politely. “Everyone, it appears there is nothing here that concerns me, and I have no wish to get mixed up in your business.”

With that, Jie Ming pointed at both sides. “I have no quarrel of any kind with either of you in any case, so… is there still time for me to leave?”

“…Huh?”

Apparently finding what Jie Ming had said somewhat beyond comprehension, the forces on both sides could not help wearing expressions of confusion.

For a moment, the whole void fell into a deathly silence.