I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 845: Doubts and a Slowly Changing Battlefield

Elsewhere, inside the mushroom-men’s plane.

Faced with the disturbance in the sky, the response from within the plane was extraordinarily dead.

Time in the Endless Chaotic Void is distorted; to the wizards outside the plane barrier it may have been only a few short seconds of waiting.

But for the creatures inside this plane, the time that had passed outside had probably amounted to several months, or even several years.

And yet across so long a time, the great upheaval in the sky had drawn no response whatsoever.

Not until the wizards’ cannon-fodder host came pouring in.

The moment the cannon-fodder units squeezed into the plane, the dormant mushroom-men nearby shot abruptly upright.

They had not been woken by the noise of battle, but by the smell of food.

The flesh-and-blood bodies of the cannon-fodder units gave off a rich organic scent they had never smelled before.

To mushroom-men who had gone hungry for untold years, that smell was like catching the fragrance of water in a parched desert, and it set them trembling all over.

Over a hundred thousand mushroom-men wrenched their bodies out of the sand and rock, the tendrils at the rims of their gray-brown stone caps writhing wildly with hunger.

Like a swarm of locusts surging up out of the earth, they hurled themselves at the cannon-fodder legion’s vanguard.

However, their average level was simply too low.

Most were ordinary civilians of the second or third level, and having lain dormant through famine too long, their internal energy reserves had long since fallen to their lowest point.

Against close to a million cannon-fodder units carefully cultivated by a wizard legion, the charge of these hundred-odd thousand mushroom-men was like a wave striking hard reef.

The cannon-fodder legion’s line very nearly did not waver at all, and the whole battlefield fell into an entirely one-sided slaughter.

Jie Ming hung at the edge of the rift in the plane barrier, the power of the Incense Fire Divine Dao spreading steadily inward along the rift with him as its medium.

The formless power extended, soon permeated the plane barrier, and wedged itself quietly into this plane.

Augusta stood at his side, arms folded, those black eyes looking down quietly on the battle below.

A few minutes later, two cannon-fodder units flew up carrying a still-living elite mushroom-man between them.

That mushroom-man was a size larger than an ordinary one, its stone shell covered in mottled wounds, and even the rim of its cap had a large piece shorn away.

Gray-green fluid soon seeped from the cut surface of the wound, and the moment this fluid met the air it congealed rapidly and sealed the wound.

The congealed fluid gave off a mineral smell rather like stone dust.

Even gravely wounded, its tendrils still writhed unconsciously, trying to reach for the two cannon-fodder units escorting it.

Jie Ming put out a hand, opened both the True-False Void-Piercing Pupil and the All-Purpose Eye, and scanned this elite mushroom-man’s bodily structure from head to foot.

Just so: a creature half elemental and half living.

Rock element formed its outer shell and skeleton, granting it defensive power far beyond creatures of the same level; while the flesh tissue of a living body filled the interior of that elemental frame, forming an extremely efficient energy circulation system.

Two forms of existence that ought to have been mutually exclusive had been forcibly fused together by a structure he had not yet fully analyzed.

The stability of that structure made even Jie Ming look twice, and a faint interest in researching it rose in his mind.

But why did its intelligence look so low?

Judging by these creatures’ behavior, rather than the main race of a civilization, this was more like a gregarious creature driven by survival instinct that happened to possess transcendent power.

Jie Ming withdrew the mental energy he had been using to analyze it and cast the Soul Search spell directly.

The elite mushroom-man’s memories unfolded layer by layer within his spiritual sea.

Jie Ming soon discovered something wrong: the memories in this mushroom-man’s mind were far too scattered and broken, with a great deal missing.

So these mushroom-men behaved with such low intelligence because their souls had long since been shattered?

Unable to reach a conclusion, Jie Ming passed an order down to the wizards below, and soon several mushroom-men of differing levels were brought up.

After examination, Jie Ming confirmed that all of these mushroom-men’s souls were shattered.

As for the cause of the shattering, that remained unknown for now.

There was no telling whether it was shattering by external force or a collapse of the soul brought on by prolonged dormancy.

“This…” Jie Ming fell to pondering.

Augusta came over beside him. “What is it?”

“It is a little strange… why did your family’s reconnaissance wizards say this was a civilization rather than a race?” Jie Ming asked after explaining what he had found.

Augusta thought back a moment. “Because from analysis of the elemental radiation spectrum, the elements in quite a few regions of this plane bear traces of artificial influence.”

Jie Ming nodded at that. “That would indeed take a civilization of considerable degree to do.”

Artificially influencing the elements meant the race on this plane ought to possess wide-area environmental modification technology.

But…

Jie Ming instinctively looked downward.

The mushroom-men’s plane was a typical continental plane, round of sky and square of earth, with no question of a horizon.

And Jie Ming stood high enough that, with his vision, he could see very nearly the whole state of the plane’s surface.

Beyond doubt, the entire plane was withered rock and camouflaged mushroom-men, with no trace whatever of artificial construction.

“It seems this plane is not so simple after all…” Jie Ming stroked his chin.

Augusta laughed, though. “Is that not a good thing?”

At that Jie Ming laughed too. “Heh heh heh heh… just so, it is a good thing.”

So long as one’s strength suffices, “the unexpected” generally equals “an additional gain.”

And at the same time, the situation on the battlefield below was quietly beginning to turn.

The young Augusta family wizards had relaxed completely.

“Ha! These fellows are far too weak!”

“My squad has advanced over ninety kilometers already!”

“Only ninety kilometers?”

“My cannon fodder has broken a hundred!”

“It seems first place is mine this time.”

They directed their legions forward while comparing results with one another.

The young Augusta family wizards had relaxed entirely from their initial tension and vigilance, and undisguised arrogance and self-satisfaction surfaced on their faces.

As they saw it, facing so low and backward a civilization gave them a sheer thrill of total control.

Their cannon-fodder legions swept all before them, elemental bombardment scouring everything away.

Every volley blasted whole swaths of mushroom-men to pieces.

That feeling of controlling the battle, of holding life and death in hand, left a good many of them rather intoxicated.

They even began competing over kill efficiency, comparing whose cannon-fodder units advanced faster, a certain recklessness peculiar to the young in their tone.

Jie Ming and Augusta stood above the firmament looking down on it all, and both let out a very faint cold laugh at the same moment.

Both of them had noticed that subtle change on the battlefield.

As the mushroom-men died in great numbers, more and more mushroom-men were waking from dormancy further out.

The reason was simple: the corpses of the slain mushroom-men were themselves food.

Fresh corpses gave off a richer scent of biological matter than the cannon-fodder units did.

To a hungry mushroom-man, the corpse of its own kind was equally nutrition that could be devoured.

Every mushroom-man that died was silently releasing a ring of food signal to its surroundings, prompting mushroom-men further away and deeper down to open their eyes from dormancy.

The more fiercely these young wizards attacked, the more mushroom-men woke, and the wider the range of waking spread.

Before long, this region would become an enormous tower broadcasting a food signal.

That would wake every mushroom-man within a far greater range.

“Shall we stop them?” Jie Ming turned his head toward Augusta, a note in his tone that could have been curiosity or amusement.

He was genuinely somewhat curious, for these young wizards’ reactions were far too green; they had none of a battle-hardened wizard’s keen nose for the shape of a battlefield.

Yet by their levels they ought long since to have been through enough wars.

Augusta was silent a moment, then sighed lightly:

“This is the flaw of family-line wizards. Because there are many companions protecting one another from the very start, they grow used to following the main force and fighting battles that are already going their way, growing up slowly under the family’s shelter, well practiced at coordinating with one another.”

“But the ability to judge a battlefield for themselves is quietly weakened by that very shelter.”

At that point her tone carried a note of helplessness hard to put into words:

“Did you imagine every wizard could go on being a lone traveler like you? The overwhelming majority of wizards simply lack the ability and the standing for it, and even non-family wizards will find a squad of their own over the long course of war.”

Hearing that, Jie Ming nodded with an odd expression.

Understood.

Always following behind the main force in battles that were already going one’s way, one naturally had never truly experienced war’s cruelest face.

He said nothing more, nor did he intend to intervene.

Augusta was plainly letting these youngsters take a loss on purpose.

Some lessons cannot be taught by preaching; they have to be bought on the battlefield, by hand, with one’s own mistakes.

And as for Jie Ming… this behavior of the youngsters actually suited him very well.

He had originally intended to get the location of this region’s leader out of an elite mushroom-man’s mind, but unfortunately those souls, shattered for reasons unknown, had made his plan fail.

The place where Jie Ming had chosen to tear open the plane barrier was no random pick; this was one of the positions marked in the earlier intelligence as showing a seventh-level reaction.

But without a way to obtain a precise location, finding a target across so vast a region was far too troublesome.

That being so, let these youngsters make their racket.

With their capabilities the impact they could cause was limited in any case, and they would not provoke too many enemies all at once.