I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 895: A Bitter Fight, and Fifty-Three Seconds

Jie Ming had long since lost count of how many times the barrage had blown him backward head-on.

Boom!

Another thick beam of energy struck him in the chest, and the Return to Ruins Armor, already close to its limit, shattered on the spot, the platinum divine light caving inward in an instant.

The Third Layer Dharma Form, two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers tall, was flung violently backward, knocking aside several silver-gray mecha that tried to intercept it along the way.

The vast body tumbled through the void several times over before it barely steadied itself.

Before he could find his footing, the second salvo had arrived.

Thousands of energy beams came crisscrossing in from every direction, sealing off every avenue of evasion outright.

Jie Ming’s gaze sharpened.

Great Void Step!

Space folded abruptly, and his vast Dharma Form shifted hundreds of thousands of kilometers sideways in an instant.

But it was still a step too slow. A dozen and more of the beams grazed past the Dharma Form’s shoulder.

Because the Return to Ruins Armor had not yet covered it, great swaths of platinum divine light were snuffed out on the spot, and three of the beams punched clean through the Dharma Form.

Three transparent holes at once opened in that huge dark-golden body, eighth-level energy lingering at their edges and eating steadily inward.

Jie Ming’s brows locked tight. The Return to Ruins Armor swiftly covered the wounds, and a formless, substanceless power of nothingness welled out of the force field to devour that residual energy bit by bit.

But Jie Ming could feel it clearly: his rate of recovery had begun to fall behind the rate of destruction.

“Troublesome.” Jie Ming let the word out under his breath.

The good news was that, with the battle carried this far, he had at last taken a thorough measure of his own limits.

The combat strength of his Third Layer Dharma Form, the Light God Transformation and the improved Return to Ruins Armor together did indeed come close to that of most elite seventh-level wizards.

Even facing several dozen eighth-level creatures acting in concert, he had the confidence to stand against them head-on.

The bad news was that he could not win.

What stood before him now was an eighth-level mechanical legion whose numbers were enough to drive a man to despair.

By this point in the fight, the mechanical host opposite him numbered in the tens of thousands, and with follow-up fleets arriving without pause, that figure kept on climbing.

These mechanical units might not count as complete eighth-level life in the true sense. They barely crossed the eighth-level threshold in the three respects of attack, defense and energy output alone.

But that was enough.

Once numbers reached such a degree, any deficiency of quality was smoothed away entirely.

Even an elite seventh-level wizard, meeting a fleet in such numbers, would be beaten into headlong flight.

Jie Ming drew a deep breath. “I have to find a way to cut their numbers down.”

As the enemy warships grew in number, Jie Ming could feel the pressure on him mounting rapidly, and only by reducing their numbers could that pressure be truly eased.

Before long his gaze fixed on a patch of silver-gray warships in the distance.

They were heavy warships more than several kilometers in length, their hulls carrying only a handful of colossal gun emplacements, with tightly packed eighth-level escort mecha around them.

Beyond any doubt, this was one of the firepower nodes of the fleet as it now stood.

A cold light flashed in Jie Ming’s eyes. “You will do!”

At a stirring of thought, Jie Ming, in his Light God Transformation, vanished with a rush.

The vast Dharma Form turned into a platinum rainbow and crossed the enemy line at the speed of light.

Several hundred eighth-level mecha along the way locked on together, their gun ports turning even as the energy beams fired, trying to run Jie Ming down.

At the standard of eighth-level technology, tracking something moving at light speed was naturally within reach.

But Jie Ming had no intention of turning back. The Great Void Step and the Light God Transformation ran together, and every fold of space carried him clear of dozens of attacks.

When a beam did land now and then, he merely angled his body slightly and let the Return to Ruins Armor take it head-on.

Crack!

As a great transparent hole was blown through his shoulder, Jie Ming frowned slightly. “What a nuisance. If these warships did not come with their own spatial lockdown, I would not have to go to all this trouble!”

Thinking this, Jie Ming had already broken through blockade after blockade to arrive before that firepower node.

The enemy had clearly seen his intent as well. The heavy warships were already coming about, prepared to flee and to shield themselves, while the escort mecha around them rushed in from every side.

Unfortunately, none of it meant anything to Jie Ming.

A transparent radiance gathered in his palm. Watching the swarm of mecha rush at him, Jie Ming gave a cold snort, and the Dharma Form raised its hand.

Great Annihilation Divine Light!

Boom!

A great sweep of transparent divine light rolled out, and where the radiance passed every machine collapsed like a sandcastle, then was swallowed utterly by the elemental storms of the chaotic void.

In a single instant, a brief emptiness had opened around Jie Ming.

Looking at the firepower node he had cleared away, Jie Ming let out a small breath, but then his face darkened. “Damn it, they have seen through it!”

In the distance, the fleet, until now arrayed in close order, had suddenly begun to spread out in every direction.

The distance between one warship and the next widened rapidly, and the dense fleet became a broad attacking network.

Beyond any doubt, the enemy had realized that the effective range of that move of his was far too short.

So long as they opened the gaps in the fleet and kept their targets from clustering, the move’s destructive power would be limited to the greatest possible degree.

“What a nuisance…” Jie Ming sighed.

Just then several more eighth-level mecha bore down on him from every side.

Jie Ming released the Great Annihilation Divine Light again without hesitation.

But against mecha that had prepared for it, only the one taken as the primary target was destroyed. The rest had already dodged the attack and come in from the flanks.

Jie Ming’s face turned stern, and he swung out the Dharma Form’s fist, wrapped in the Great Annihilation Divine Light, with a roar.

Bang!

One mecha was struck and burst apart outright.

Another lunged in from the side. Jie Ming brought a backhanded palm across, the power of the Return to Ruins Armor erupting, and in the instant the mecha touched that palm its whole frame dimmed rapidly as the energy within was forcibly drained away.

Boom!

Jie Ming kicked out, and the mecha became a burning wreck.

But more enemies were already rushing him, seemingly without end.

Kill ten and a hundred came up to fill their place; kill a hundred and a thousand more waited behind.

In the fury of the fighting, Jie Ming’s Dharma Form began to take wound after wound.

Both the Return to Ruins Armor and the Dharma Form were reconstituting madly, but the pace was gradually falling behind.

“Get back!”

Jie Ming roared, and the Dharma Form’s two fists hammered down together. With the release of the Great Annihilation Divine Light, more than a dozen mecha were reduced to ash on the spot.

But in that very gap, a group of silver-gray warships seized their chance, their main guns finished charging.

BOOM!!!

A vast mass of eighth-level energy beams struck him head-on, and Jie Ming’s whole Dharma Form was blown backward once again.

The Return to Ruins Armor shattered a second time, the platinum divine light dimmed, and dense cracks spread across the Dharma Form’s surface.

Things were going badly for Jie Ming, and the battlefield on the other side was every bit as brutal.

The Black Giant legion had become nothing but a black wall, one that kept giving ground yet stubbornly refused to break.

Numberless sixth-level Black Giants charged the eighth-level mechanical units. They knew they could not win, and charged all the same.

Boom!

One Black Giant was blown apart outright by an energy cannon. Golden light flared in that instant, and its remains were forcibly teleported back to the Infernal Sulfur Plane by the Dao Soldier System.

Almost in the next instant, another group of Black Giants pushed up from behind to fill the gap.

“Kill!” The vertical mouths opened, and terrible energy gathered in their chests.

And then… they detonated!

The eighth-level mecha was hurled away by the unbroken chain of explosions.

The Black Giants knew nothing of fear, because they knew that death did not mean the end.

So long as the Dao Soldier System remained, they could come back.

With their near-inexhaustible chances at resurrection, they slowed the enemy’s advance with reckless abandon.

Even so the line kept falling back, because the quality of the enemy was simply too high.

For the dragonblood mushroom-men it was more brutal still.

Group after group of sixth- and seventh-level mushroom-men swarmed the eighth-level mecha like a tide, hundreds of them, thousands, even tens of thousands, plugging the gun muzzles with their own bodies by main force.

Some were vaporized outright, some were cut to pieces, and others, on the point of death, clamped themselves fast to the legs of an enemy machine and then detonated, purely so that more of their own kind could close the encirclement.

“Tear it apart!”

Under the Dragonmen’s command, countless mushroom-men let out shrill howls.

One eighth-level mecha was wholly surrounded by several thousand seventh-level mushroom-men, its energy shield flickering wildly.

It swung its mechanical arms without cease, blasting mushroom-men away in swaths, but more swarmed in at once to replace them.

The shield broke, the armor was torn open, and in the end the whole mecha was dragged bodily down into the tide of mushroom-men and vanished completely.

The price was no less appalling. Of the several thousand mushroom-men that had made the assault, fewer than a few hundred were left.

And exchanges of this kind were happening countless times across the whole battlefield.

As the mushroom-men’s numbers dwindled rapidly, the line too was being driven swiftly back.

This was precisely why, for all that the mushroom-men bred and advanced with such extreme efficiency, Jie Ming had no intention of making them his main legion.

The intelligence of a single mushroom-man was simply too low. There was no way at all to connect one into the Dao Soldier System of the Incense Fire Divine Dao.

And being unable to enter the Dao Soldier System meant that however high their rate of reproduction, on the battlefield every one that died was one fewer, which was no comparison at all to a Black Giant legion that could be resurrected without limit.

“My Lord, the dragonblood mushroom-men are falling too fast. The line will not hold much longer!” The voice of a Black Giant priest came through the Incense Fire Divine Dao.

Jie Ming did not answer, because he himself was very nearly at his limit.

Reconstituting his Dharma Form and casting his magic countless times over had left his face pale.

Deep within his inner world, a great volume of spiritual power was pouring wildly in.

The cross-space energy transmission system was already running past its load, and the spiritual power of the Infernal Sulfur Plane rushed into the inner world like a flood, and still it was not enough.

Because beyond the drain on his spiritual power, his mental energy was falling rapidly too, until even his consciousness had grown somewhat blurred.

“It seems this is the limit…”

Jie Ming understood his situation perfectly. The moment he could no longer hold, the entire line would collapse outright.

And so, having driven back the enemies around him once more, he suddenly raised a hand.

Ash Return to Origin Hand!

In the gray radiance, time began to run backward.

The corpses of mushroom-men blasted utterly to pieces began to reassemble, and the damage and depletion on Jie Ming’s own body swiftly mended.

But before long his face darkened again.

Because in the void around him, at some point unnoticed, a great many pitch-black runes had appeared.

Those runes formed an enormous spacetime anchor, locking down the time of the endless chaotic void around them completely, and forcibly sealing even space itself.

“So it really was only the one chance.” A flicker of helplessness passed through Jie Ming’s eyes.

The reason he had held off on using the Ash Return to Origin Hand for so long was exactly this concern: any method he had once employed, the enemy would find a counter to.

So from beginning to end, he had only one chance to start over.

Boom…

Another salvo came sweeping in.

Jie Ming raised both arms to guard his front, and the Return to Ruins Armor unfolded at full strength.

Against salvos of ever-growing number, his Return to Ruins Armor held for barely any time at all before it reached its limit and broke.

The remaining force hammered into Jie Ming himself, and his whole body began to come apart across great stretches.

He did not hold out long before blood spilled from the corner of his true body’s mouth, and his vision even began to double.

“Damn it…” he swore under his breath without thinking.

Jie Ming knew perfectly well that at the enemy’s present numbers, the rate of his collapse would only grow faster.

Just then, with a roar, the Dharma Form came crashing down, endless golden fragments turning into a sky-filling rain of light.

Jie Ming’s consciousness shook with it, and although he swiftly rebuilt a new Dharma Form, he could already hear the sounds of breaking coming from deep within his inner world.

If this went on, he really was going to die…

Just as Jie Ming took another salvo head-on and began to consider whether to set off a self-destruct next, he suddenly felt the faintest trace of a fluctuation in the void off his flank.

Someone was approaching?

Jie Ming’s first reaction was to attack, his right hand rising in an instant.

But then a figure of no great height came into view, and Jie Ming’s whole mind eased.

The newcomer took one look at Jie Ming’s condition, then raised a hand casually, the broad sleeve of his robe sweeping forward.

Hum…

It looked an utterly unremarkable gesture, and yet it snuffed out another incoming salvo outright.

Then, across a range of several million kilometers ahead of them, every mechanical unit went still at once.

As the elements of the endless chaotic void began to corrode those units, those present realized that the enemies before them had been wiped out in a single instant.

“Fifty-three seconds… Wizard Noren, your strength has risen again.” Jie Ming smiled and let out a breath.

Naturally, the figure that had appeared was Wizard Noren, who had agreed earlier to come as support.

He had come a good deal faster than anyone had reckoned.

Noren shook his head with a smile. “For that you have yourself to thank. The commotion the lot of you were making here was so great that it let me fix the coordinates.”

On the other side, space shook again, and a short figure walked out of the void.

He had the look of a child, small in stature, the body beneath the black robe seeming almost tender with youth.

But when he raised his head, a savage grin surfaced on that young face, the kind to make a man shiver on the warmest day.

Grand-Mentor Anton Buchanan stared at the mechanical legion pouring in again in the distance in numbers that blotted out the sky, and licked his lips with a laugh. “Heh heh heh heh… quite a lot of them, aren’t there. Just right for me to have a proper play!”

Beside him, Wizard Noren stood calmly in the void and glanced at Jie Ming. “You have done well. It has been hard on you. Leave the rest to us.”

Grand-Mentor Anton spoke up after him. “Little Jie Ming, go and rest. Leave these things to us to deal with!”

As he spoke, the mecha not far off, still tangled with Jie Ming’s cannon-fodder legion, all shook violently at once, and then broke apart into fragments.

Jie Ming looked at the backs of the two of them, and the nerves he had held stretched to their absolute limit finally slackened.