I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 853: Other Intelligence and Finding the Target

The fighting was over, and five enormous seventh-level mushroom-men lay sprawled where they had fallen.

The rock shells covering their bodies were webbed with cracks, their caps battered past repair, and the life fluctuations that had once been as deep and solid as mountains had by now guttered down to the last of a candle in the wind.

Jie Ming slowly drew back his mental energy, and as the final sealing pattern lit, the seventh-level mushroom-man before him was suppressed once and for all.

Hmmm…

The mushroom-man’s entire body shrank rapidly and was drawn into his inner world.

Having finished the sealing on his side, Jie Ming looked over at the other.

Augusta had just completed her last seal as well.

She raised her right hand and closed it gently, and the blue-white cages of thunder wrapped around the two seventh-level mushroom-men contracted all at once, resolving at last into two sealing crystals the size of a palm that settled steadily into her hand.

She put the crystals away into her spatial equipment without ceremony, the deep blue arcs left on her fingertips crackling and leaping a few times before slowly guttering out.

A great battle had passed, and Augusta looked considerably the worse for it.

Several rents had opened in the black robe she wore, and beneath the torn hem showed a layer of close-fitting silver-gray combat undersuit.

Her breathing, though, was as steady as ever, and even her mental fluctuations were scarcely disordered at all.

Plainly the battle just fought had come nowhere near forcing out her true limit.

Jie Ming spoke first. “Going by what the Soul Search just turned up, all five of these seventh-level mushroom-men were promoted on a temporary basis.”

Augusta, who had been deep in thought, raised her head at that. “You’re certain?”

“Mm.” Jie Ming nodded. “I examined their souls. The structures are shattered almost exactly the way those sixth-level captives were. They should all have been forced up to seventh level from sixth-level elites.”

As he spoke he waved his palm lightly, and a mental projection rose into being.

Within the projection, two soul models turned steadily.

One belonged to a sixth-level mushroom-man he had Soul Searched earlier, the other to a seventh-level mushroom-man just captured.

Structurally the two looked very much alike; the greatest difference was simply that the latter was the larger in build.

Jie Ming reached out and touched a finger to it, and on the seventh-level mushroom-man’s soul model countless fissures at once swelled into view.

“Judging by how badly these soul fragments have broken up, the souls of these mushroom-men have no foundation capable of supporting a seventh-level life level at all.”

“Given what these mushroom-men are, they must have devoured a great many of their own kind and piled their life level up by main force, in the crudest way there is.”

Augusta raised an eyebrow. “Forcibly promoted mushroom-men, with fighting strength like that?”

“It isn’t quite that simple. This batch of mushroom-men is special.” Jie Ming shook his head.

“Judging from the memory fragments left in them, these were not the only ones advanced to seventh level at the same time. To raise their fighting strength as far as possible, they even devoured one another.”

“Otherwise, on the strength of their innate devouring alone, there is no way these mushroom-men could have fortified their bodies to this degree.”

Augusta’s gaze sharpened slightly at that. “Devoured one another?”

“That’s right.”

Jie Ming went on with his deduction. “It seems there was still a hole in my earlier extrapolation of the mushroom-men’s racial traits. It isn’t only their own offspring these mushroom-men can devour in order to advance.”

“From what’s in the memory fragments, the offspring of a single mushroom-man can devour each other as well. The effect is far poorer, but it can raise their fighting strength to a certain extent.”

“Though I’d guess this method of devouring is very poor value for what it costs, which is why mushroom-men don’t normally use it to advance.”

Augusta looked down at the stretch of earth beneath their feet, now reduced to rubble, and let out a slow breath. “Put like that, we still underestimated this race’s fighting strength.”

She raised her head slowly to look at Jie Ming.

“The trouble now is that the mushroom-men have racial traits and fighting strength of this order, and yet the leader in that position still hasn’t shown itself.”

Jie Ming narrowed his eyes. “Which means that although the estimate of the mushroom-men was off, my deduction was correct.”

“You mean…”

“Mm.” Jie Ming’s voice was calm, and unusually certain. “It’s playing for time! These seventh-level mushroom-men are nothing but a shield it threw out on purpose.”

“Its real aim is to buy itself the time to advance to eighth level.”

“So we have to be faster than it is, and find it before it succeeds.”

Augusta did not contradict him. She simply fell silent.

Something else occurred to Jie Ming. “Come to that, how did you find this place?”

“That… wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, really. It just took rather more work than usual.”

Augusta lifted a hand, and a map woven out of mental energy unfolded swiftly before them.

She put out a finger and traced a path across it.

“At the very beginning I detected seventh-level energy fluctuations inside an underground cavern, so I went on searching along that lead.”

“At first everything went smoothly, but the further along I got, the more the problems mounted.”

At this point Augusta could not help frowning, plainly recalling the scene at the time.

“True intelligence and false kept alternating one with another. If I hadn’t been cross-checking every step of the way, I would very likely have been taken in.”

“It cost me several days to weed out all of the false leads bit by bit.” Her gaze drifted slowly down to her feet. “And then I tracked it all the way here.”

At that a thin, cold smile touched the corner of her mouth.

“And the moment I got close, these creatures came killing their way up out of the ground all together and gave me no chance at all to investigate further.”

Jie Ming nodded thoughtfully.

“It seems their preparations were quite thorough as well.”

Augusta made a small sound of agreement. “Those false leads didn’t look like something laid down on short notice. They looked more like something prepared a long time in advance.”

“Seen now, the purpose of it was exactly what you said. Only to stall for time.”

Jie Ming glanced without thinking at the marks of battle below. “Deliberately sending out fortified mushroom-men; apart from stalling for time and muddying the waters, I suspect these creatures also had it in mind to wear down our fighting strength.”

Augusta laughed softly at that. “Quite possibly. If the ones who had come today were those youngsters, then ambushed by five seventh-level mushroom-men they would not even have had the chance to call for help. The whole search party would have been eaten outright.”

“And judging by how those two mushroom-men earlier still had to keep themselves hidden, once they discovered that the one who had come was me, they decisively changed their aim to stalling for as long as they possibly could.”

Then Augusta added something further, with a rare frankness in her tone.

“With the fighting strength those mushroom-men showed, if it had been me alone, then even if I won in the end it would have dragged on for several days at least.”

At this point Augusta could not help frowning either.

“Which means that with the other side tying up my attention this thoroughly, there’s a very high chance of hitting the jackpot up ahead… No! Going by the intelligence these mushroom-men have shown, it’s more likely still that what lies ahead is only a decoy…”

“Tch! What a nuisance. There’s no end to this if it goes on. Which possibility do you think is the likelier?”

Jie Ming fell silent.

Truthfully, both possibilities were live, and once this kind of guessing fell into nested dolls there was simply no bottom to it.

He gave his head a slight shake. “There’s far too little intelligence right now to make any concrete judgment. There’s no hurry; let’s wait a while longer.”

Augusta was puzzled. “Wait for what?”

“For the other piece of intelligence.”

“The other piece? You have another source of intelligence?”

Augusta was about to press the question further.

Hmmm…

Suddenly the magical network terminal at Jie Ming’s waist vibrated faintly, and a blue light screen popped up of its own accord.

Jie Ming glanced down at it, and the corner of his mouth curved slowly upward. “Right on time. The other piece of intelligence is here now.”

So saying, he enlarged the projection of the light screen directly and turned it toward Augusta.

“This is it.”

Augusta looked at the light screen, her eyes going instinctively to the mission name at the top.

“This is… a planar mineral analysis?”

“Mm.” Jie Ming smiled.

“I believe I mentioned to you earlier that the intelligence on mineral reserves I found in the mushroom-men’s memories didn’t add up, so I had those youngsters go and investigate the mineral and geological situation of the whole plane?”

Within the light screen, an investigation report unfolded slowly.

The name signed to it belonged to an elemental spectrum analyst trained up by the Augusta family.

This person was also one of the young wizards on this trial.

Working to Jie Ming’s mission requirements, he had flown all the way out beyond the plane barrier and run a close-range, high-precision elemental radiation spectrum scan of the entire plane.

“So this is that result?” Augusta caught on quickly.

Before launching the planar war the Augusta family had indeed already collected the elemental radiation spectrum of this plane once.

The earlier scan results had confirmed that there were a great many mineral responses within this plane, and that they were distributed fairly evenly.

And from the results of this analysis, there were indeed a great many mineral responses within this plane.

But unlike the earlier report, this time it could essentially be confirmed that all of those mineral responses were concentrated in one place.

To be precise, they were concentrated in a plateau region of the mushroom-men’s plane.

Augusta’s pupils contracted sharply. “That’s where…”

Jie Ming nodded lightly. “When I ran the Soul Searches earlier, those mushroom-men’s memories told me that every mineral, energy crystal and piece of high-energy matter in the entire plane had long since been devoured by them, down to the last scrap. And if that’s so…”

His gaze dropped to the point of light marked out on the map.

“Then there’s only one thing left that could still be giving off an elemental spectrum on that scale.”

The two of them raised their heads almost in the same instant, and their eyes met.

The answer was already self-evident.

Jie Ming gave a small laugh. “Because they’re artificial creations, these mushroom-men aren’t quite like naturally born earth-element beings. When they’re underground, it seems they form an elemental spectrum around their bodies resembling that of a large mineral vein.”

“And a response of that size…” Augusta lifted her head, fighting spirit glittering in her eyes. “Means this is where those high-level mushroom-men have truly gathered.”

Jie Ming gazed out at that stretch of deathly still earth in the distance, and a slow, meaningful smile spread across his face.

“It seems… we’ve found our prey.”