I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 941: Bulk Beyond Specification
Three years passed quickly in ceaseless purging.
In those three years, Jie Ming, Viola and Berta Vera Augusta made very nearly a full circuit of the entire plane, clearing out every parasite-beast horde they found.
From wasteland to forest, from mountains to ocean, the number of parasitised creatures far exceeded anything they had imagined.
The Black Giant legion’s losses were not small, and the dragonblood mushroom-men were expended at an even more startling rate; units numbering in the hundreds of millions fell over those three years.
Fortunately, the logistics system on Jie Ming’s side was quite good as well, and new legions were sent over in an unbroken stream.
It was a pity, then, that now they were about to face the parasite’s main body, Jie Ming and Viola had tacitly agreed not to bring any cannon-fodder units along.
After all, against an enemy that specialized in parasitism, cannon-fodder units might instead become a burden on their own side.
Still, parasitised creatures spread across so vast an area had convinced Jie Ming of one thing: this bug had definitely slipped in and begun its parasitism a very long time ago!
Thinking back on it now, the intelligence he had obtained from that group of birdmen at the Anvil base had probably been nothing more than cover laid down by the insects. The parasite had most likely crept into Jack’s plane long before that.
At this moment, the three of them hung in the air before an enormous mountain range that stretched across heaven and earth.
The range ran tens of thousands of kilometres from east to west, its highest peaks piercing the clouds, its cliff faces covered in grey-brown rock and sparse vegetation.
At first glance it was just an ordinary mountain range, no different in any way from the countless other ranges on this plane.
But Jie Ming’s True-False Void-Piercing Pupil could see through the strata, to the worm bodies packed densely inside the mountains like horsehair worms.
They ran through the whole range like blood vessels, each one as thick as a train, squirming slowly through the cracks in the rock.
It was fair to say that the entire mountain range was the parasite’s main body: a giant parasitic organism that had grown until it was one with the mountains.
“Oh? Looks like it has spotted us.”
The words had barely left Jie Ming’s mouth when the distant range began to shake violently.
Strata split and boulders tumbled as the whole mountain range slowly rose up from the ground.
The cliffs that had stretched out lengthwise stood upright, like a giant beast being roused from sleep.
The strata shed away in the tremors, laying bare the dense mass of worm bodies beneath.
The worms were knotted together into the giant beast’s muscle and skeleton, while the rock was only a carapace clinging to its surface.
“So this is the main body.” Viola’s voice sank.
Berta Vera hung in the air between the two of them, her long black hair stirring lightly in the turbulence thrown up by the rising mountains.
As a combat wizard, her senses were the sharpest of the three. “This thing is only seventh level? Then why does it feel so threatening to me?”
Jie Ming nodded beside her; he too could clearly feel the threat the parasite posed.
A mere seventh-level creature…
The three of them were geniuses even among wizards. Against an enemy of this level, by rights any one of them could have taken on a whole crowd single-handed.
Yet to their senses, that was not the case at all.
“Careful. Let’s feel it out first,” Jie Ming said.
Even as the three of them spoke, the worm bodies inside the mountains suddenly lashed out.
A dozen or more slender black worms shot out of the cliff face, cracking shrilly through the air as they whipped toward the three of them.
The force field of the Return to Ruins Armor gathered in front of Jie Ming, stopping the incoming worm whips in midair.
The instant the worm whips struck the field, a ring of dark energy shockwave burst outward, and ripples spread across the field’s surface.
Berta Vera and Viola each blocked their own worm whips as well: Berta Vera deflected hers with gravity, while Viola used the Law of Pain to blast greyish-white cracks across the whips’ surfaces.
Jie Ming did not hesitate either, and struck back with the Great Annihilation Divine Light.
The light welled out of his palm and swept soundlessly toward the mountain range’s main body.
Wherever the divine light passed, the very structure of space was simply erased, and matter was reduced to elementary particles.
But when the light touched the surface of the mountains, a shield made of pure energy surfaced and held the divine light off outside.
In what was almost the blink of an eye, the divine light had whittled the energy shield to the brink of collapse, but fresh energy immediately surged out from inside the mountains and patched the shield back to its original state.
“No wonder it felt like a threat to us.” Jie Ming drew back his hand, his brows knitting together.
“What’s going on?” Berta Vera asked.
“This thing’s energy reserves are far too deep!” Jie Ming said in a low voice.
The Great Annihilation Divine Light really could pierce its shield, but it replenished the shield faster than the divine light could eat it away!
The thing’s aura was plainly only seventh level, yet its total energy went far beyond that level.
With a first direction for his guess, Jie Ming’s True-False Void-Piercing Pupil soon finished its scan.
The energy density inside the worm bodies was absurdly high; every single worm was like an independent, highly compressed energy pool.
Added together across the whole mountain range, its total energy was probably more outrageous than that of a large plane!
After fighting for a while, Viola suddenly stopped.
She stared at the mountain range for a few seconds, and the look on her face changed from grave to a strange expression that mixed helplessness with a sense of the absurd.
“Say…” she began, “this parasite managed to take a third of the Plane Origin. It couldn’t be because it has actually devoured a third of the plane’s volume, could it?”
“You’ve got to be joking…”
Even as he said so, Jie Ming had without thinking already run a quick estimate in his head.
Jack’s plane was a super-large continental plane, nearly one light-year across.
A third of that volume… There was simply no imagining how much energy this parasite had in reserve!
No wonder a mere seventh-level creature could still pose a threat to them.
All three of them counted as geniuses among wizards, and each of them had combat strength equivalent to a seventh-level wizard.
Ordinarily, at the upper limit of their destructive power a seventh-level wizard could utterly destroy or manipulate multiple stellar-level celestial bodies, but only on the premise that those celestial bodies or planes did not fight back!
“Sigh… How is this any different from fighting a living plane?” Viola heaved a sigh.
Jie Ming, too, found himself thinking of the Flame-Frost Plane.
That living plane had given him and Viola no small shock at the time, yet the Flame-Frost Plane was not even one percent the size of the thing in front of them!
When a third of a continental plane one light-year across started moving, its destructive power was enough to make any seventh-level wizard’s scalp go numb.
“We should count ourselves lucky. This thing doesn’t have the mental energy to fully command a bulk this size, so it reacts sluggishly and can only marshal its energy to a limited degree. That still gives us a fight.” Jie Ming knocked away a few more worm whips with the Return to Ruins Armor.
“Put that way, this thing is steering a bulk this big on seventh-level mental energy, and the only cost is that it reacts sluggishly. Its mental will really is outrageous. No surprise from a creature built purely for parasitism,” Viola teased.
Berta Vera, listening to their exchange, shot the pair of them a sidelong look without breaking off from the fight. “Can the two of you stop chatting? What we should be thinking about right now is how to win this battle!”
“There’s no trick to it. All we can do is grind it down,” Viola said helplessly.
Seizing a gap while the Return to Ruins Armor blocked a few worm whips, Jie Ming turned the Ash Return to Origin Hand on one section of the worm bodies.
A greyish-white radiance covered the worms across an area several thousand metres wide, trying to turn their state back to what it had been before they were parasitised.
But the radiance held for only a few breaths before it began to fluctuate violently, and then it collapsed.
Jie Ming withdrew the technique. “Tch! What a pain!”
The energy inside those worm bodies was too strong. Even without any specialisation in time law, the thing could resist the Ash Return to Origin Hand on the strength of its enormous energy reserves alone.
On the other side, the parasite inside the mountains had realised too that the three of them would not be easy to deal with.
The land around it swelled once more, and the whole mountain range grew sharply in volume.
Rock surged up from underground and fused with the worm bodies, forming an even more colossal body.
Within a few breaths, a range that had been tens of thousands of kilometres long had swollen to hundreds of thousands, taking up very nearly the entire sky.
“Well, looks like I’m taking the beating again.” Jie Ming sighed, having quite a clear understanding of his own role.
He held nothing back any longer. The spiritual power within him ran at full strength, and his Third Layer Dharma Form unfolded in the void.
A dark-golden giant two hundred and fifty thousand kilometres tall rose up from the ground, its broad-backed, bear-waisted silhouette standing straight.
Both faces opened three eyes at once, and the golden vertical eye in the centre of each brow shot out a dazzling pillar of light.
Light God Transformation activated at the same time. The dark-golden glow on the Dharma Form’s surface, already immense, abruptly turned a blinding, incandescent white, like the statue of a burning sun god.
Faced with the enormous Dharma Form that had suddenly appeared before it, the parasite let out a roar and charged straight at it.
Jie Ming had no intention of backing down either, and drove the Dharma Form forward to meet it.
An incandescent white fist slammed into the surface of the mountains. The Great Annihilation Divine Light coating it punched through the enemy’s energy shield, while the fist itself smashed great swathes of rock and worm bodies to pieces.
But the parasite was far too huge, and the breach that one punch had opened was, by comparison, negligible.
In the face of Jie Ming’s attack, the parasite struck back without the slightest hesitation.
Hundreds of thick worm whips reached out from inside the mountains and lashed at the Dharma Form all at once.
The worm whips had no especially unusual ability of their own; they were simply condensed pure force, but every blow carried enough of it to tear space apart.
With the protection the Return to Ruins Armor offered, taking a few hundred worm whips head-on was easy enough, but it could not hold up against attacks that never let up.
In what was almost the blink of an eye, the Return to Ruins Armor overloaded and collapsed.
The Light God Transformation energy on the Dharma Form’s surface kept bursting apart under the lashing of the worm whips, but Jie Ming held on through it by means of his formidable self-healing and the Return to Ruins Armor, which he raised once again.
While the giant of light and the giant rock beast grappled with each other, Viola and Berta Vera were lending their help from the flanks.
Viola’s Law of Pain shrouded a large stretch of the mountain range. Its greyish-white light seeped into the cracks between the rock and the worm bodies, trying to break down the enemy’s resistance from within.
The Law of Pain proved to be quite effective against a creature of such enormous size.
In the middle of the fight, Jie Ming could clearly feel the parasite stiffen, and he seized the chance at once to slam home several heavy punches.
Berta Vera’s side of the fight went steadily and by the book. She wove electromagnetism and gravity together into one shockwave after another, pounding them unceasingly into the joints of the mountain range in an attempt to sever the parasite’s control over its body.
But the parasite’s bulk was simply too great.
Although for the moment the three of them had battered it full of holes, it never showed any sign of collapsing.
Its terrifying energy reserves let it keep regenerating new worm bodies to fill its wounds, and even in the middle of the battle its body went on swelling.
Seeing this, Jie Ming let out a helpless sigh, but all he could do was grit his teeth and keep grinding away at it.