I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 850: Reinforcements and an Anomaly
With that sudden surge of excitement, the black giants even pushed the battle line back out again.
But the wizards no longer had time to care about the battle line, because when they raised their heads the cavern roof above them abruptly flew away, and dim sunlight came spilling straight down.
Watching that roof torn off as easily as the lid off a pot, every wizard looked without thinking toward the figure treading the empty air above.
Jie Ming's robes snapped and cracked in the wind, and his silver eyes were as calm as still water.
The Law Solidification Domain beneath his feet expanded without pause, its dark golden radiance covering the whole sky.
And Jie Ming himself, borne up by that Law Solidification Domain, came drifting slowly toward them.
Every living thing present could feel it clearly: that suffocating pressure was radiating from him!
The young wizards gazed at that figure, and the hearts that had been hanging in their throats finally settled.
For some reason, though the enemy before them was as endless as ever, the moment Jie Ming appeared every trace of unease in their hearts seemed to vanish like smoke.
Jie Ming hung high in the air, his gaze sweeping slowly across the whole battlefield.
He had used a partially manifested Dharma Form to lift the earth above the cavern clean away, and now he could see the situation clearly.
Below his feet the gray-yellow sea of fungus rolled and heaved, and in the distance mushroom-men still came charging in an unbroken stream; at a glance there was no end to them.
And within that sea of fungus, the mushroom-men who had been swarming the black giants' leader detached more than twenty sixth-level mushroom-men, which rose into the air and closed in on Jie Ming.
They did not charge recklessly, however. They spread out into separate positions and drew in on Jie Ming with caution.
Jie Ming watched what was happening below, and a flicker of appreciation crossed his eyes.
“They are only a pack of bait left behind to buy time, yet they did not choose to sit still and wait for death. Instead they seized on the information gap created once word of the bait got out, massing their forces without pause, ready to catch their opponent completely off guard.”
At that Jie Ming gave a small nod, expressing his approval. “Not bad! Really, quite well done!”
“Your will is tougher than I imagined, and your intelligence higher than I expected…”
“Hearing” the message Jie Ming sent across through his mental energy, the sixth-level mushroom-men gave no reaction at all, only stared at him fixedly.
But although they had him surrounded, not one of them dared be the first to attack.
Because they could feel it clearly: this man before them… was extremely dangerous!
They did not know where the danger came from, but every inch of instinct in the depths of their souls was screaming a warning.
Looking at these wary mushroom-men, Jie Ming merely raised a hand and lightly snapped his fingers.
Snap!
The sound was very faint, yet it was as though some enormous switch had been thrown.
Space split open at Jie Ming's side, and a spatial gateway several kilometers across yawned wide!
Then breathing as heavy as thunder came from the far side of the gateway, and one after another, sixth-level black giants hundreds of meters tall walked slowly out of it with heavy weapons in hand.
Before long a hundred and more sixth-level black giants had formed their ranks, standing silently behind Jie Ming like a forest of steel.
At the sight of that squad and the sheer momentum pouring off it, the mushroom-men who had been faintly tightening their encirclement froze on the spot.
And the young wizards below were left utterly dumbfounded.
They could feel it clearly: even at the same sixth level of creature, these black giants were far more dangerous than the sixth-level cannon-fodder leaders of their own legion!
This one squad alone was already enough to crush every one of them!
Jie Ming raised his head, looked at the sixth-level mushroom-men ringed around him, and gave his order in a flat voice.
“Take all of these alive. As for the rest…”
Jie Ming's gaze passed slowly over the boundless sea of fungus below, and at last a trace of cold entered it. “…kill them.”
“By your command, my lord!”
A hundred and more sixth-level black giants roared as one, and the terrible wave of sound shook the whole of heaven and earth.
…
…
A short while later, Jie Ming returned to the rift in the plane barrier.
He left those hundred-odd newly arrived sixth-level black giants on the battlefield below, to go on with the young wizards and clear out the remaining mushroom-men settlements.
He himself took the several dozen captured sixth-level mushroom-men and put them all into his inner world.
The batch of black giants he had summoned earlier had advanced to sixth level only recently, and this was a fine chance to let them work themselves in properly through real combat.
The mushroom-men had no shortage of sixth-level units, and though their strength was fairly ordinary, they were fierce and unafraid of death, which made them ideal sparring partners.
He sat down cross-legged at the edge of the rift in the plane barrier, let his consciousness sink slowly into his inner world, and began searching the memories of these mushroom-men one by one.
Judging from the memories of the mushroom-men captured earlier, none of these sixth-level ones should know exactly where the seventh-level mushroom-men were.
But several dozen sixth-level mushroom-men must have been mustered in from different directions.
Even if no single mushroom-man knew the precise position of those seventh-level ones, he could still work back along their movement routes, step by step, to the points from which they had set out.
Then, combining the spatial distribution of those different starting points, he could rule out region by region the places where the seventh-level mushroom-men could not possibly be.
However, as the memory fragments went on fitting together, it was a detail within those memories that first caught Jie Ming's attention.
“That can't be right. What do you mean, every high-energy substance in this plane has already been devoured to the last scrap?” Jie Ming frowned and began searching the souls of the other mushroom-men for related memories.
At last Jie Ming confirmed it: in the memories of these mushroom-men, every high-energy substance in this plane had indeed been devoured to nothing.
It was not only the organic matter and biomass on the surface; even the minerals and energy crystals buried deep underground had not been spared.
Before the whole civilization sank into its final slumber amid the famine, it had already consumed utterly clean everything that could be eaten, absorbed, or wrung of one last trace of energy.
Yet the pre-war reconnaissance data the Augusta family had provided showed plainly that the elemental spectrum of this plane contained a great many mineral characteristic lines, that the earth element concentration far exceeded the standard value, and that the mineral reserves were quite abundant.
The two sets of information were in complete contradiction.
The mushroom-men's memories had no need to lie; after all, from the look of things now they were hungry enough to eat their own kind, and if there had truly been an ore vein lying before them, there was no chance whatever they would have turned a blind eye and left it untouched.
But the Augusta family's professional reconnaissance teams would hardly commit so elementary an error either.
“If it is not that there are still other hidden energy crystal veins in this plane, then the elemental spectrum itself must be in error…”
Jie Ming thought it over for a moment and did not rush to a conclusion.
Through the magical network terminal he issued a new order to the several young wizards resting on the battlefield, telling them to spare some hands to investigate the geological structure and mineral distribution of this plane.