I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 847: Information
As Jie Ming issued his new order, the legion behind him began to dive.
The black giants fell first.
Like so many meteors, they came crashing down from high altitude, blasting over a hundred huge impact craters into the ground.
The violent shockwaves flung the mushroom-men still struggling nearby straight into the air, and in a moment severed limbs and remains of mushroom-men lay everywhere.
The black giants leapt out of the craters without pause, the vertical maws in their chests curved in excited arcs.
They searched the surrounding caves at speed, charging straight into any entrance or cavern the moment they found one.
Before long a string of violent collisions came out of the darkness below, along with the shrill, piercing shrieks of mushroom-men.
Up in the sky, the Tentacle Tree Civilization’s fleet kept wiping out the mushroom-man reinforcements pouring from the surrounding cave mouths or waking on the surface, letting not one slip the net.
The three-dimensional assault formed by five hundred thousand black giants and over a million Tentacle Tree warships turned this wasteland into a cage sealed against every gap.
And Jie Ming hovered at the very highest point of the battlefield, quietly waiting for his army to bring him results.
…
…
Some ten minutes later, several leaders of the black giant legion flew up out of the underground caverns.
Each of them wore a delighted look, and each carried on his shoulder an enormous mushroom-man some tens of meters tall.
They were dumped heavily onto the open ground before Jie Ming, their stone shells knocking a few shallow pits into the earth.
Five mushroom-men, all sixth-level creatures.
Even freshly and violently woken from long dormancy, the aura about them was still quite substantial.
Around them, over a hundred somewhat smaller elite mushroom-men were being closely guarded by the black giants; these too were the black giant legion’s haul from those ten-odd minutes.
The elite mushroom-men huddled on the gray sand and stone, their tendrils pressed tight against their own stone shells in fear, the rims of their caps twitching faintly beyond their control.
The moment the newly captured sixth-level mushroom-men raised their heads, they found Jie Ming standing before them.
Jie Ming’s attire was utterly unremarkable; only those silver pupils stood out sharply beneath the gray-yellow firmament, watching this group of sixth-level creatures calmly.
Every mushroom-man that silver gaze passed over felt an uncontrollable shudder rise from the depths of its soul.
As though what stood before them were not a humanoid creature from another world at all, but a demon lowering its head to select its food.
“Strong one from another world… do not waste your time on me. We have nothing here that you want.”
Suddenly one of the mushroom-men spoke with a cold laugh, its voice hoarse:
“The race will be woken soon enough by the smell on you. And then…” It let out a string of low grunts.
Glancing at the elite mushroom-men trembling beside it, this sixth-level mushroom-man felt a surge of rage.
Bang!
The tendrils at the rim of its cap burst outward abruptly, releasing a powerful force that annihilated on the spot several of the elite mushroom-men cowering prone beside it.
Jie Ming glanced at the mushroom-man remains crushed to fragments; his expression did not change in the slightest.
Just as this mushroom-man had said, he had indeed failed to obtain any intelligence of value from the minds of the elite mushroom-men around them.
These fellows did have considerable intelligence, but beyond that he had gained very nearly no information.
So whether these elite mushroom-men lived or died made little difference to Jie Ming.
Seeing no reaction at all from Jie Ming, that sixth-level mushroom-man’s laughter gradually stopped as well.
Jie Ming paid no mind to their reactions and simply walked toward the several sixth-level mushroom-men, his pace even and unhurried.
At that, the mushroom-men began to panic somewhat.
The several sixth-level mushroom-men instinctively tried to back away.
But because of their attack a moment ago, the several black giant leaders around them had already suppressed them completely in the space of an instant.
Vexed at their own earlier lapse, the black giants used their energy-absorbing talent to pin the mushroom-men hard against the ground, leaving them unable to lift so much as a tendril.
Watching Jie Ming draw nearer step by step, they could not help shrieking aloud at last:
“What are you going to do?!”
“Stop!”
“Do not come near!”
Seeing them struggle desperately, a black giant leader split open the huge vertical maw in his chest and let out a string of strange laughter in the purest villain style:
“Heh heh heh heh… abandon your ignorant resistance! Feel the greatness of the wizards with your souls; offer up your souls, offer up your knowledge!”
Another black giant leader snarled with laughter too. “Our lord is willing to read your souls in person. That is the greatest honor you will ever have!”
“No… stop!!!”
Unfortunately, nobody paid them any attention.
Jie Ming came before the several mushroom-men and raised his right hand.
The Soul Search spell triggered, his mental energy pouring straight into the depths of the mushroom-men’s souls and peeling their memories apart layer by layer.
A moment later he withdrew his mental energy, a trace of surprise flashing in his eyes.
“So that is it…”
These mushroom-men’s intelligence was not poor at all; you could even say they were far cleverer than he had first assumed.
From the very moment he had torn open the plane barrier, they had already sensed the invasion through something like a collective consciousness.
Only, these mushroom-men had not chosen to resist at once.
Because after so many years of development and mad breeding, the mushroom-man race had eaten their whole plane into a wasteland.
The plane’s resources were exhausted and its elements in decline.
Add to that the fact that the mushroom-men were not good at flight, and they were trapped to death inside their plane.
This civilization was eking out its last on the brink of collapse.
Under those circumstances, the wizards’ arrival had instead given them an opportunity.
And the mushroom-men’s upper ranks intended to turn this invasion to their own use.
The sixth-level mushroom-men before him, and the colonies under them, had been pushed out to die from the very beginning; they were discarded pieces.
The true seventh-level mushroom-men had long since quietly left their dormancy sites and gathered with one another deep in the wasteland.
They meant to recover their own power rapidly by devouring other mushroom-men.
After all, across so many years of dormancy, even a seventh-level mushroom-man had fallen far in strength from extreme hunger.
And the task of these discarded pieces was to use their own deaths, and the destruction of their whole colony, to slow the invaders down and buy the upper ranks time to recover.
Jie Ming tossed the several now-unconscious sixth-level mushroom-men offhandedly to the black giants behind him. “Watch them. Do not let them escape or die.”
This plane war was rather more interesting than he had expected.
But no more than that.
Having instructed the black giants and the Tentacle Tree fleet to go on assisting the young wizards below in clearing the remaining mushroom-men from the plain, Jie Ming then took the several unconscious sixth-level mushroom-men and flew toward that rift in the plane barrier in the sky.