I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 897: The Grand President

The enemy forces pouring out now were no longer confined to ordinary warships and escort mecha. There were also war machines of a still more colossal build, super-giant apparatus like mobile fortresses.

Each of them was greater in volume than a small plane, their surfaces studded thickly with countless blackened gun ports; their existence alone drew a groan of unbearable strain from the spatial structure around them.

One fortress machine that had only just completed its jump had not yet steadied itself before its main gun array finished charging, those blackened muzzles trained on the direction where Wizard Noren stood.

Wizard Noren merely raised his eyes and looked at it.

Boom…

Cracks like a spiderweb surfaced across the fortress’s exterior, spreading from the gun ports all the way to the core sections.

Then the whole fortress collapsed inward and became a spread of debris, its main guns never truly releasing their energy at all.

Before Wizard Noren and Grand-Mentor Anton, these behemoths remained just as meaningless.

“Master, all enemy units attempting to approach the singularity altar have been cleared away.” A somewhat mechanical voice spoke up abruptly.

Jie Ming followed the sound and saw that at some point more than a dozen strangely shaped puppet dolls had appeared at Wizard Noren’s side.

These puppets looked like the wizard puppets one commonly saw, yet their aura was entirely different; every one of them gave Jie Ming a sense of danger.

He could see that several of the puppets still carried the scorch marks and broken edges left behind by fighting.

And behind them drifted several dozen battered mechanical wrecks.

Plainly, the moment Wizard Noren had arrived on the scene, he had already dispatched his own fodder units to guard the mechanical altar.

Wizard Noren raised a hand, casually erased the capacity for resistance of a special robot captured on the battlefield, gave it a glance or two, and threw it toward Jie Ming.

“Little Jie Ming, count this as your reward. The technology on this thing looks quite good; you can study it a while.”

Jie Ming was startled, then overjoyed.

He hurried to catch the robot and carefully stored it away in the inner world within his body.

This was an intact trophy from that mysterious mechanical legion, and more than that, one an eighth-level wizard had allowed was “quite good technology.” Its research value went without saying.

Before long, though, the expressions of all three present changed slightly at once.

Because just then the whole of the Wonder had begun to fluctuate violently.

The elemental ocean churned madly, as though enraged, and even the Elemental Black Hole at its core trembled along with it.

“It seems they have found they cannot get the core, and mean to take us down with them,” Wizard Noren said mildly. “Honestly. Nothing but cheap cleverness.”

Jie Ming saw Wizard Noren lift a hand.

He could not tell what the man had done, because there was no glow of wizardry and no fluctuation of mental energy at all; it was as though he had simply raised his hand and nothing more.

Yet in the next second that violently surging elemental ocean was stirred as if by one enormous invisible hand, wrenched hard around, and hurled full in the face of the fleets encircling them.

Enemy ships in whole swaths struggled inside a tsunami composed of the Wonder’s own elements, and in the end could only vanish beneath that terrible elemental impact.

Those indestructible fortresses, those reinforcements that blotted out the sky, could not manage even one respectable resistance in front of Wizard Noren.

Soon the battlefield went quiet again, with nothing left but the still-churning elemental mist spreading through the void.

Not long after, Grand-Mentor Anton came flying back with an enormous mechanical head in his grip.

That head was dozens of times larger than the whole of him, and he carried it behind him in one hand with perfect ease, as if hauling along a piece of scrap iron picked up off the battlefield in passing.

Wisps of heat still rose off him, and his small face wore an unmistakable displeasure. The moment he flew up he started complaining at Wizard Noren:

“You, take a look where you are aiming when you fight! That last one of yours swept me up along with them!”

The corner of Wizard Noren’s mouth curved, then quickly returned to its usual placidity:

“It could not be helped. My analysis of that mechanical altar is not deep enough yet; most of what I understand rests on the intelligence Little Jie Ming and the others sent back. With that last one, in order to vent the elemental energy it had accumulated quickly, my control really was a little lacking.”

Grand-Mentor Anton, however, had caught the change on his face sharply, and could not help rolling his eyes. “You scheming wretch, you absolutely did that on purpose!”

Wizard Noren did not take up the remark, letting his gaze fall instead on the savage-looking mechanical head in Grand-Mentor Anton’s hand. “What is this?”

“The fleet’s captain.”

Grand-Mentor Anton tossed the head aside offhandedly. “Captain of one of the few command ships at the very center of this fleet, I should think. His strength was nothing much, but his head is hard indeed. He took that elemental flood just now and somehow kept his fighting capacity. I had to pull him apart for a good while before I could drag him out of the cockpit.”

Jie Ming drifted over and examined that skull carefully.

It was damaged past all recognition. A few threads of electric arc still leapt inside the broken metal eye sockets, exposing layer upon layer of mechanical fiber and biological tissue within.

That biological tissue was still contracting imperceptibly, like nerve endings stripped of their casing and twitching yet.

Sensing the mental residue on it, Jie Ming could not help knitting his brows.

This thing had been alive before.

Though that sounded like stating the obvious, the ruined mental fluctuations, faint as they were, still bore identifiable traits of a biological soul.

Which was to say that this captain, who appeared to be composed wholly of machinery, must originally have been a living creature.

At some later point he must have used some method to force himself into this mechanical shape.

Recalling the mecha he had smashed during his own fighting earlier, Jie Ming felt a measure of understanding settle in.

“Those mecha are not piloted either,” he thought. “I am afraid they simply remade themselves into mecha.”

Just then Wizard Noren, beside him, examined the mechanical head carefully and nodded as well:

“It seems this is as I guessed earlier. This should be a technology-side civilization that follows the mechanical road to an extreme.”

At that moment a broken, intermittent sound issued suddenly from the ruined mechanical head.

Wizard Noren reached over and picked up one of the robots taken as spoils, drew the corresponding language data out of its information core offhandedly, and then shared it with Jie Ming and Grand-Mentor Anton.

“The… the Grand President… will avenge us! You… wait for your deaths!”

“The Grand President?”

Grand-Mentor Anton raised an eyebrow and was about to say something more when he and Wizard Noren both suddenly lifted their heads toward the space above the Elemental Black Hole.

Jie Ming looked along with them without thinking, but found nothing at all; he only felt an indescribable palpitation run up his spine all the way to the crown of his head.

“What in the world…”

Jie Ming felt himself go briefly into a daze, the world before his eyes separating and rejoining in a single instant.

Then he saw it.

An existence the size of a planet, hanging there quietly above the Elemental Black Hole.

There was no telling when it had appeared. It was as though it had been there from beginning to end, and only now had his perception caught hold of it.

It was a mechanical celestial body beyond the power of words to describe. Complex patterning and energy lines like blood vessels covered its silver-gray shell, and countless small components moved across its surface, as if an entire planet had been remade into a living fortress.

By rights, large as this planetary fortress was, it was not especially conspicuous in the endless chaotic void.

Jie Ming’s Dharma Form, at the least, was a good deal larger.

Yet when Jie Ming extended his perception toward it, he felt his own puppet body coming apart beyond his control.

“Ninth level…”

Bearing up under that terrible pressure, Jie Ming all but squeezed the words out of his throat.

This had to be the Grand President the thing had spoken of.

It was the first time he had seen a ninth-level existence from the technology side, and judged by its presence, it seemed no different from a conventional ninth level.

That terrible presence spread out in every direction as though it were solid. Space was like glass struck by a hammer; with the mechanical celestial body at the center, fine dense cracks surfaced across it line by line.

Under that dreadful oppression even light began to bend, and the void underfoot, solidified by eighth-level wizards, was creaking.

Jie Ming felt like an ant under a dragon’s gaze; even breathing had become considerably harder.

The ruined mechanical head began at that moment to shout aloud in fervent exultation:

“Grand President! Grand President! The Grand President has come to save us!”

In the next moment, however, that shouting broke off short.

A shaft of gray-white light shot out from within the Grand President and fell without a sound on the mechanical head.

The head, together with the soul still lingering inside it, was wiped from the world.

“You were merely to recover a failed experimental product, and even that you could not do.” The Grand President’s voice sounded as though formed from the resonance of a hundred million pieces of metal. “There is no longer any need for you to exist either.”

Then its attention turned toward the three wizards.

Or rather, chiefly toward Wizard Noren and Grand-Mentor Anton.

“I had not expected two Holy Spirit level beings to be capable of this much,” the Grand President said slowly. “To hold such powerful combat capability within your own level, you have considerable research value!”

At these words Wizard Noren and Grand-Mentor Anton, without prior agreement, both showed a cold, grim smile.

“Thank you for the praise,” Wizard Noren answered with a smile. “As I see it, Your Excellency has considerable research value as well.”

“Oh?” The Grand President seemed somewhat surprised. “You perceive my power and do not flee, but are filled instead with the desire to fight?”

“A fine species indeed. A pity your experience is so narrow. You Holy Spirit level natives have no idea at all what the power of the Supreme level is.”

Wizard Noren did not argue; he only clapped his hands lightly:

“Come out. It seems your luck is good. The prey really did arrive.”

The words had barely fallen when Jie Ming saw three figures surface soundlessly out of the void, from three different directions.

They must have been hidden in the spatial interlayer long before, waiting only for this moment.

Jie Ming was not familiar with any of the three, but every one of them gave off a terrible aura in no way inferior to Wizard Noren’s or Grand-Mentor Anton’s, and that made their identity plain.

Three eighth-level wizards.

The instant they appeared they were sizing up that mechanical planet from afar, their tone easy.

“Who would have thought it. This time we really did wait out an actual ninth-level creature.”

“An unexpected haul indeed.”

“Noren, count this as us owing you a favor.”

“Think nothing of it.” Wizard Noren smiled.

The Grand President fell silent for an instant, then gave off a low vibration, like some sort of idle sneer.

“What a pack of unenlightened natives,” it said. “Surely you do not imagine that three more Holy Spirit levels will let you defeat me, a Supreme level?”

Listening to this, Jie Ming’s mouth twitched faintly.

Looking at that peerlessly majestic mechanical planet, he found a subtle pity rising in him after all.

He had, after all, seen how wizards went about surrounding and killing an alien ninth level.

T/N: