I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 922: World Clusters and the Central World

The Northwestern War Zone had a rich variety of terrain, with forests as well as wasteland.

And on one stretch of dry wasteland full of yellow sand and withered grass, a column of a hundred-odd people was running south for their lives.

Most of the column were old people, children and women; of the fighters who could truly fight, only a dozen or so were left.

Their clothes were in tatters, and many of them had even lost their shoes along the way, the soles of their feet a mess of blood blisters and cuts torn open by gravel. Every face was written full of fear and exhaustion.

Even so, not one of them dared to stop; they kept running, urging one another on.

Because out toward the horizon, something was chasing them.

From far off it looked like a moving black hill, and only once it drew nearer could one see that it was dozens of enormous insects.

Each of them stood three or four metres tall, their bristle-like jointed legs stabbing into the ground, and they moved at an astonishing speed.

The creatures’ dark brown shells gave off an oily gleam in the sunlight, and their huge compound eyes stared coldly at the crowd fleeing ahead of them.

The insect at their head was larger still: the front half of its body alone, reared upright, stood a full two storeys high, and each of its six arms gripped an absurdly oversized weapon.

“Damn it, those things have caught up with us. Run, faster!”

Seeing it, a middle-aged fighter roared hoarsely and hauled up a little girl who had fallen beside him.

His left arm was already broken, bound up roughly with nothing but a leather belt.

From the loss of blood and the drain on his strength, his face had already gone white.

But he did not dare to stop, because the moment he stopped, he would die!

At the very rear of the column, three fighters were desperately buying time.

They fought as they fell back; the weapons in their hands had gone blunt and turned at the edge, and their wounds were past counting.

Suddenly one of them was caught by a sweep of an insect’s foreleg. He flew dozens of metres, slammed heavily into the ground, and never got up again.

Looking at the comrade who had lost his life, a young fighter panted for breath, his face full of despair. “It is no good, Captain. We cannot get away…”

The captain gritted his teeth and said nothing. He knew as well as anyone that none of them could get away.

The insects were far too much faster than they were, and with a crowd of the old, weak, sick and injured on their side, however desperately they ran, it would not be long before they were caught.

He looked back once at the civilians still running for their lives, then at the terrifying enemy before him, and a wave of helplessness welled up in his heart.

And in that moment of distraction, the captain too was smashed flying by the enemy in front of him.

He had blocked with his weapon in time and so had not been killed on the spot, but looking at his broken weapon and at the enemy charging at him once more, the captain waited in despair for death to arrive.

Just then, a ray of dark golden light fell from the sky.

The unremarkable light flashed and was gone, yet it pierced straight through the giant insect charging at the front with ease.

The insect’s body burst apart from the middle, scraps of limb and green body fluid spraying in every direction.

Immediately after, dark golden beams poured down like a rainstorm, each one striking an insect with pinpoint precision.

Before those beams, shells that no blade or spear could pierce were torn apart as easily as if they were made of paper, and in the blink of an eye dozens of insects had become wreckage strewn across the ground.

Looking at the ruined insect carcasses in front of him, the captain’s brain stalled for a moment; the change had simply been too violent.

In the sky, a figure slowly descended.

It was a handsome man in a robe.

Seeing the dark golden halo still lingering about him, the survivors stood frozen where they were.

Behind him, nearly a hundred well-equipped human fighters came floating down as well, just as “ferociously,” all flailing teeth and claws.

These fighters wore matching combat uniforms and carried standard-issue weapons, their formation neat and their bearing steady; beside these refugees, they looked like people from another world entirely.

…It would have been better still if their posture on the way down out of the sky had not been quite so embarrassing.

“We are saved! We are saved!”

At last someone shouted it aloud, and the cheering burst out like a tide.

The fighters who had been in despair a moment ago collapsed onto the ground. Some of those present wept aloud, and some threw their heads back and laughed.

Jie Ming looked at these people without saying much, and only glanced back at the human fighters who had landed in all manner of strange postures. “Double the aerial flight training when we get back!”

The fighters who had just pulled themselves out of the sand all fell glum-faced at the words, but still reached out without thinking to touch the strange runes painted on their armour.

It was these things alone that let them fly at all; it was just that they were a good deal harder to control.

Once they had righted themselves, these men immediately went forward to count the refugees, hand out water and food, and give the wounded emergency treatment.

They went about it with considerable practice; this was plainly not the first time they had done this sort of thing.

Jie Ming stood to one side, watching it all calmly, but his attention had in fact already shifted somewhere else.

Where ordinary people could not see, his mental energy was reaching deep into the soul of the lead insect he had just slain, leafing through its memory fragments with a spell.

The soul structure of the insect-men was entirely different from a human’s. It was more like some kind of distributed network of nodes, with every individual a single terminal of the collective consciousness.

But the larger the insect, the more complete the information preserved in its soul fragments.

One like this lead insect, plainly a minor chieftain within its swarm, held a good many valuable fragments in its memory.

Jie Ming swiftly sorted through the information he had captured. Most of what was in this insect-man’s head concerned hunting routes and human strongholds; there was nothing special there.

Very soon, though, he found a cluster of information in the core region that had been stressed over and over again.

“What is this… world clusters and the Central World?”

Once he had pieced the relevant information together, Jie Ming’s pupils contracted slightly.

Just as different galaxies gathering together form a supercluster, when enough plane clusters gathered to a certain density and scale, they would spontaneously form a structure of a higher level.

And the insect-men… or rather, these advanced civilisations nearby, called it a “world cluster.”

A world cluster was structured much like a galaxy: all its plane clusters revolved around a center, forming a whole vast beyond imagining.

And as for this place, the one Jie Ming called “Jack’s plane,” those advanced civilisations believed it might hold a passage leading to the very centre of the world cluster.

The centre of that world cluster, meanwhile, they called the “Central World.”

Jie Ming went carefully through the rest of the memory fragments once more.

The concept of the Central World had been passed down among these invaders’ civilisations for a very long time, and every advanced civilisation flocked after it.

Legend had it that the Central World possessed a density of resources and a flow of time far beyond those of the outer worlds, and that it was the axis around which all the worlds revolved.

But no one had ever truly entered the Central World, because the mass of space-time around it was outrageously high.

Every attempt to approach it ended in failure. Now and then some powerhouse forced their way in, and none of them ever came out again.

So no one knew whether those people had really gotten in at all.

This world cluster had revolved around the Central World for countless years, and those advanced civilisations had all grown up within it.

The advanced civilisations held great numbers of plane clusters, and each civilisation had a system and a technology all its own.

And the reason they had now all turned their eyes on Jack’s plane at once, without any word between them, was that its space-time rules were at an extremely weak stage of evolution. Among all the plane clusters, it was one of the rare places where a passage to the Central World might be opened!