I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 851: Information

Having sent the assignment down, Jie Ming went on sorting through the intelligence gathered by Soul Search.

In his earlier cursory search of the mushroom-men's memories, Jie Ming had also discovered that a fair number of these sixth-level mushroom-men had been nothing but fifth-level individuals until quite recently.

At the very moment Jie Ming began tearing open the plane barrier, they had started devouring other mushroom-men in a frenzy on the orders of the seventh-level mushroom-men, and in an extremely short time had forced their way through to sixth level.

“So the mushroom-men's upper ranks were not unprepared once they sensed the invasion. It is only that all of their preparations were buried deep underground.” Jie Ming turned it over in his mind.

The transmission of information between slumbering settlements, the secret food reserves, the rapid advancement of the fifth-level elites… all of it had been quietly completed during the stretch of time while he was arraying his forces outside the plane barrier.

Seen in that light, the intelligence of the mushroom-men's leadership was certainly not low. It was in fact quite high.

More importantly, though, this ability of theirs to force an advancement simply by devouring enough of their own kind really was rather frightening.

Eat enough and you could level up, with no bottleneck to speak of at all.

Such a trait, in the eyes of any normally developing civilization, was a shameless gift enough to throw one's whole state of mind off balance.

Fortunately, even these forcibly elevated sixth-level mushroom-men had been elite individuals back when they were fifth level; only those whose basic qualities were sufficient to bear the shock the advancement brought had been fit to be chosen.

And judging from the state of their souls, this method of rapid advancement through devouring clearly carried no small side effects.

The stability of their soul structures was markedly lower than that of creatures of the same level who had advanced naturally, their intelligence almost entirely lost, leaving only the two instincts of obeying orders and devouring enemies.

“Hm? That isn't right.”

Something suddenly occurred to Jie Ming, and he called up again the memories of that earlier batch of sixth-level mushroom-men whose intelligence had been normal, and even brought out the memories of that batch of fifth-level mushroom-men that had possessed intelligence.

Relying on his own enormous computing power and the assistance of the Five Aggregates Rainbow Mirror, Jie Ming ran through these mushroom-men's memories at an absurdly exaggerated speed.

At last, having obtained a definite result, Jie Ming broke into a satisfied smile. “So that's how it is… it is the same type of intelligence-enhancing structure as the plant-people have.”

The greatest characteristic of the plant-people under Jie Ming's command was that as the numbers of their race increased, the intelligence of the entire group rose enormously as well.

Which was why, to this day, Jie Ming could not bring himself to let them take part in any fighting.

After all, the more plant-people there were, the higher their intelligence, and the deeper the research they could support.

These mushroom-men were in fact a similar case.

Where they differed, though, was that with the mushroom-men it was not the whole race that brought about a rise in every individual's intelligence. Rather, the descendants born from the spores a given mushroom-man had scattered would each strengthen that particular mushroom-man's intelligence.

Because of this piece of intelligence, Jie Ming quickly grasped something that had puzzled him before.

“No wonder… no wonder that even when the mushroom-men had reached a state of extreme material scarcity, they only put their subordinates into slumber rather than devouring one another.”

And working from that, together with the condition of this batch of forcibly advanced mushroom-men, Jie Ming very soon found another piece of intelligence in their fragmentary memories.

“So for this race, advancement by devouring is not a matter of devouring just anything. They can only devour mushroom-men grown from spores they themselves have hatched.”

“Which means the consequence is that if one's own descendants are too few in number, intelligence will drop enormously after a forced advancement… hss!”

Jie Ming's eyes went abruptly wide. “Hold on! Don't tell me every last mushroom-man shares one common progenitor!”

Unfortunately, judging from the intelligence he had drawn out of the mushroom-men's souls, that was exactly the case!

“If all of the seventh-level mushroom-men share a common ancestor, then… have those seventh-level mushroom-men been nourishment from the very beginning rather than fighting strength?!”

Which was to say, the reason those seventh-level mushroom-men had gone missing was not to mass fighting strength for one vicious blow at him, but to serve as feedstock, to raise that unknown leader to eighth level as fast as possible?!

That also explained why there had been no trace of any seventh-level mushroom-man during the earlier ambush.

After all, if the ambush had truly been laid with the primary aims of whittling down the wizards' fighting strength and concentrating force to overwhelm a smaller number, then rather than lining up so many sixth-level units, it would have been better to send a few seventh-levels in together.

With the fighting strength of a seventh level, those young wizards would never have held out until Jie Ming arrived to reinforce them.

The thought of that possibility made Jie Ming's head throb. “Damn it, can I not get one proper planar war to fight for once!”

Whether it was simply his own bad luck or whether planar wars were all like this, Jie Ming could not say, but he felt that apart from the trial he had run as an elite combat unit back then, he had never once fought a genuine, by-the-book planar war.

The enemies of every single plane had some trick up their sleeve.

“Haah… in any case, the earlier decision to annihilate them was the right one. We clear out every mushroom-man we encounter, as far as possible. Even if it only whittles them down a little, we cut into the reason and the intelligence of the enemy's upper ranks as much as we can.”

Jie Ming pinched the bridge of his nose. “The rest comes down to finding that unknown leader, and quickly.”

Working from the information gained through Soul Search, he built a three-dimensional memory map within his spiritual sea, marking out one by one the movement routes of the several dozen mushroom-men and of the legions under their command.

Ruling out every known point of origin in these mushroom-men's memories, then ruling out the regions the black giant legion had already swept, the blank zone that remained could only be the direction in which those seventh-level mushroom-men were most likely hiding.

Jie Ming raised his head and looked off along the direction he had calculated.

The gray-yellow horizon stretched slowly out at the limit of his vision into a blurred and desolate wasteland.

And then his expression turned somewhat strange.

That direction… if he remembered rightly, was precisely the direction Augusta had left in.

Several days ago she had gone off that way alone, saying she meant to search out the traces of the enemy's powerful ones.

“Information being withheld… no, the Augusta family shouldn't be that stupid, so is it simply battlefield instinct?” Jie Ming stroked his chin, ruling out the possibility that the Augusta family meant to set him up.

As things looked now, Berta Vera Augusta had probably just picked a direction at random on instinct.

To have hit on the correct direction by instinct alone: it seemed a combat-type wizard who could rise to sixth level did have something special about them after all.

Jie Ming drew back his gaze and began once more to sort through the other information Soul Search had yielded.

He intended to send this news over first, and to arrange his next deployment after word came back from Augusta's end.