I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 848: Missions and Artificial Constructs

With their leaders captured, the remaining mushroom-men were no longer any threat.

As this plain was thoroughly cleared out, the battlefield settled back into a brief calm.

As far as the eye could see, the gray-yellow earth was crisscrossed everywhere with gullies and the charred black marks left by explosions.

The mushroom-man corpses, vast in number, had long since been swiftly collected by the young wizards’ cannon-fodder units.

As for the flesh and fragments that could not be collected, the wizards called up cannon-fodder units with searing or high-temperature abilities to burn them away, making as certain as they could that no organic matter would be left behind.

For a time the whole plain was thick with the stench of burning.

Jie Ming stood in midair, his gaze sweeping across the whole battlefield. “That is about enough. In this state there is no need to worry about the mushroom-men drawing supplies from the surface.”

Augusta flew to his side, her own gaze likewise turned to the distance.

“There is no life activity left; this area is confirmed clear. But going by the memories those few sixth-level mushroom-men left behind, there should still be several colonies of no small size nearby. I think we can start issuing missions.”

Jie Ming nodded. “Good timing. Let them go and temper themselves.”

The two of them had arrived at the same thought without discussing it.

Since the true seventh-level mushroom-men had already hidden themselves away, there was little point now in keeping everyone gathered in one place.

Better to seize the opportunity and let these young wizards carry out missions independently.

On the one hand it would build up real combat experience; on the other, it would keep intelligence coming in.

At that thought, Jie Ming raised his right hand.

Boom…

With a trembling of the atmosphere, spatial gate after spatial gate opened across the sky.

The next moment, heavy breathing rolled like thunder through heaven and earth.

Several black giant legions came striding out of the gates.

Each of those legions was of much the same scale as the black giant legion that had assisted in the fighting earlier.

The legions covered the sky, their vast shadows cast down over the gray-yellow earth, bringing a suffocating pressure with them.

Watching the legions welling endlessly out of the sky, the young wizards of the Augusta family found the corners of their eyes twitching faintly beyond their control.

They had seen the combat power of that one black giant legion before, and had assumed that legion was already absurd enough.

Everyone had thought it was the whole of Wizard Jie Ming’s holdings.

Only now did they know… that had not been anywhere near Jie Ming’s full strength!

One fifth-level wizard could not help sighing under his breath. “Wizard Jie Ming… just how much power does he actually command?”

Beside him another young wizard shook his head with a bitter smile.

“It really is absurd. Are we truly only one level below him? Or is this simply the gap between us and a true genius?”

Hearing that, the rest of them broke into bitter smiles as well.

Reserves of this kind had long since passed beyond the range an ordinary wizard could comprehend.

Jie Ming, for his part, paid no mind to the astonishment on these youngsters’ faces. He raised a hand and spread out a light-screen map, and several red markers promptly surfaced upon it.

“These are the positions of several mushroom-man colonies nearby. You will each head to one and investigate. If you have the means, wipe them out directly. If you find sixth-level mushroom-men, take them alive and bring them back where you can. I want to keep gathering intelligence.”

Every face turned solemn at once. “Understood!”

“Rest easy, I am not sending you off to die.” Jie Ming looked down at the wizards below. “Divide yourselves into groups. Each squad will be issued one black giant legion.”

“They will handle the fighting head-on; you will handle command and the gathering of information.”

That said, he looked to the black giant leaders. “Obey their orders.”

Several black giant leaders went down on one knee at once.

“As you command, my lord!”

Jie Ming nodded and gave what followed no further attention.

With the missions handed down, the young wizards quickly sorted themselves into squads.

They arranged among themselves where each would go, then flew off at speed in different directions with their mighty black giant legions in tow.

The battlefield, lively enough until then, soon fell quiet.

Once she had seen them off, Augusta looked toward that dim gray land farther out and nodded to Jie Ming.

“I will go take a look a little farther afield. If it really is as you say, those seventh-level mushroom-men are bound to have left some traces behind when they moved.”

“Understood. Remember to keep in contact.”

“All right.”

The words fell away.

The magnetic field around Augusta’s body shifted at her will, and with a boom she launched herself away.

Her whole figure turned into a streak of flowing light, gone from the horizon without a trace in the blink of an eye.

Jie Ming drew his gaze back, then looked down at the several sixth-level mushroom-men sealed inside the cage beside him.

“Now it is your turn.”

Gathering the mushroom-men into his inner world, he let his own consciousness sink slowly into that inner world as well.

…

…

Inside the inner world.

The vast experimental zone blazed with light.

Several hundred experimental platforms ran ceaselessly at high speed, while a great many black giant priests moved busily among them with the Tentacle Tree researchers in their charge.

The puppet Jie Ming had left here had only just woken when several black giant priests responsible for the research work came forward to meet him.

“Master, the experimental platforms are fully prepared.”

Jie Ming nodded. “Begin.”

Before long the several unconscious sixth-level mushroom-men were fixed one after another onto enormous experimental tables.

At the hands of the Tentacle Tree researchers beside them, dense detection arrays unfolded layer upon layer and began analyzing the condition of each mushroom-man in turn.

Those already scanned were shifted aside by the research teams, and experiment after experiment was rapidly set in motion.

Time slipped past; five days went by in the blink of an eye.

Great volumes of data were continually compiled and filed, and with them Jie Ming’s understanding of the mushroom-men grew deeper and deeper.

“Life-cycle efficiency… thirty-seven percent higher than ordinary elemental life, no less.”

“Between the elemental frame and the flesh tissue there exists a special connecting layer of force.”

Leafing through the experimental results, Jie Ming kept revising the judgment he had made at the start.

This half-elemental, half-living life form of the mushroom-men was far more complete and ingenious than he had first supposed.

In these mushroom-men, two utterly different forms of life had been perfectly fused into one.

Suddenly, one of the priests gave a violent start.

“My lord! Something here… does not seem right.”

“What is it?” Jie Ming walked over at once.

On the experimental table, an elemental structure magnified countless times was projected out.

He needed only one glance for his pupils to contract slightly.

“This structure… is wrong!”

He reached out and began working at the light screen.

Drawing on his own knowledge and computational power, Jie Ming rapidly put the tangled elemental structure on the light screen in order.

As the analysis went deeper and deeper, more and more information came to light.

These elemental structures connected to one another, forming an arrangement that was extraordinarily regular and at the same time extraordinarily complex.

Put simply, the elementalized portion inside a mushroom-man had its internal elemental construction modeled on the organic construction of a living body, which was precisely why the two could sustain each other.

But a coupling as perfect as this… a structure like this could not possibly be a product of nature!

The light in Jie Ming’s eyes grew brighter and brighter. A full ten-odd minutes later, he finally slowed to a halt, a smile lifting the corner of his mouth.

“Interesting. Truly interesting.” Jie Ming tapped lightly at the experimental table.

“The mushroom-men’s life structure really did evolve naturally. But…”

He studied that elemental structural frame on the light screen. “This part of it has been artificially modified.”

Which was to say, this half-elemental, half-living mushroom-man was not a complete species produced by natural evolution.

At the very least, the elementalized part of them had once been interfered with by the hand of some “person.”