I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 946: Descending as Sovereign

At the other end of the spatial rift.

Jie Ming quickly sensed the change in the space and frowned slightly. “It’s being suppressed.”

Augusta stood to one side, her long black hair drifting slowly in the turbulent spatial currents.

Hearing this, she sensed it for a moment. “The other side must be planning to use mental energy to forcibly suppress the opening of the spatial passage. And by the look of it there are quite a lot of them. We don’t have the advantage.”

Jie Ming said nothing. He could clearly sense it too: at the other end of the rift, a vast mental force was steadily gathering.

There was no need to guess. The other side was mustering reinforcements.

“In a situation like this, forcing our way in isn’t realistic any more,” Augusta said.

“Never mind that the spatial passage won’t open. Even if we could break through right now, we’d run straight into their encirclement.”

Jie Ming nodded, agreeing with Augusta’s assessment.

The Holy Spirit side was merely countered by them; that did not make it weak. If they really were ambushed by the Holy Spirits while passing through the spatial passage, Jie Ming truly did not think he would survive.

“Besides, it looks like the other side only means to suppress it rather than seal the spatial passage completely. So they must still be preparing a counterattack.”

“Exactly.” Jie Ming turned to look at Augusta.

“In that case, you stay here and keep applying force to the spatial rift with the Black Giant priests, to create the illusion that we’re still here. I’ll find a way to slip in from another region.”

Augusta thought it over for a while, then nodded in agreement. “All right.”

Jie Ming went on, “Once I’ve finished my preparations over there, you can teleport out together with the Black Giants. They can teleport straight to my side.”

“Fine!” Augusta asked nothing more.

Augusta turned and walked toward the array the Black Giant priests had already laid out beside the spatial rift. Mental energy welled out of her and flowed into the array.

Jie Ming, meanwhile, began using the parameters displayed by the spatial passage before him to deduce the data he needed.

Over some ten-odd days, by calculating the spatial passage’s parameters, Jie Ming soon worked out the approximate coordinates of the Holy Spirit race’s plane cluster.

Leaving Jack’s plane, he entered the endless chaotic void, and using the spatial coordinates, he soon teleported to the vicinity of the Holy Spirit race’s plane cluster.

In the endless chaotic void, he could see that the Holy Spirit race arranged its planes much as wizard civilisation did: the planes under its control were drawn close together to form a cluster, like a tightly packed bunch of grapes.

But the Holy Spirit race’s plane cluster was far more compact than wizard civilisation’s.

Tens of thousands of planes were squeezed together with only the tiniest gaps between them, and some even shared parts of their spatial barriers.

The core of the whole cluster was three enormous dark purple planes, each far larger than any of the others.

Jie Ming guessed that one of them had to be the main plane, which was also where the spatial rift had opened before.

But Jie Ming did not go near it. His gaze soon moved away from the main plane. “No need to go there yet.”

There were far too many Holy Spirit Kings there, and after the earlier clash, the enemy was surely on high alert by now.

If he charged straight into the main plane, it would be the same as throwing away every advantage he had.

The truly safe approach was to first find a breach that no one would be paying attention to.

Jie Ming closed his eyes, and a wisp of mental energy quietly spread out from him.

Very soon, he caught hold of a familiar aura.

“This is the one!”

At the edge of the plane cluster, a thoroughly ordinary-looking plane was slowly rotating.

Jie Ming had once picked up information about this plane from that King of Spreading Fear, which meant the fellow had frequently come and gone from here.

And now… it was dead.

That meant that, in this plane at least, there would be no Holy Spirit King standing guard for the time being.

With no powerhouse holding the plane at the moment, it was the perfect springboard for an invasion.

Over the next ten-odd days, he kept calculating the spatial coordinates.

Ten-odd days later, Jie Ming raised his hand. “That’ll do.”

A spatial array quietly unfolded.

The next instant, his figure simply vanished.

When he reappeared, Jie Ming had already crossed that thick plane barrier and was inside the plane.

…

…

The King of Spreading Fear’s plane was a fairly standard continental plane.

At its centre stood a gigantic palace, built entirely from a blend of biological carapace and dark metal.

And around this palace spread a thriving city.

In the city, Holy Spirits were bustling back and forth.

They rode a kind of ostrich-like creature, using it as livestock for riding and hauling goods, or simply buying and selling it outright.

“Fresh palma, picked just today, only three crystal coins!”

“Come take a look, see how sturdy this slave beast is.”

Hawkers’ cries rose on every side. Apart from all kinds of food and daily goods, the most common trade here was probably in slaves of every foreign race.

Suddenly a storm swept down from the sky and threw the whole market into disarray.

“What’s going on?!”

“Oh no, my stall’s been blown away!”

For a moment the entire city was in an uproar.

Some Holy Spirits hurriedly clutched their belongings, while others desperately grabbed hold of their mounts.

But just then, every Holy Spirit present suddenly froze at the same instant.

A pressure so heavy it felt almost physical bore down from the sky, and their tentacles stiffened by pure instinct.

One of them raised its eyes without thinking, then began to tremble in terror.

“The… the sky…”

But no one needed its warning. Everyone could feel it: the sky was rapidly growing dark!

It was as if something enormous had blotted out the sun.

But the sky soon brightened again, except that compared with this plane’s usual purple sky, the light this time was exceptionally dazzling.

Thud!

The goods in one Holy Spirit’s grip dropped to the ground, and everyone around it flinched.

Their bodies stiff, they turned their compound eyes and finally saw what was in the sky.

It was a gigantic figure that almost filled their entire field of vision, with dark golden radiance spilling down from the sky.

Simply by standing there, it seemed about to crush the whole sky.

The noisy city fell silent in an instant, but very soon screams burst out all at once!

“Monster!!”

“Run!”

“What is that thing?!”

“Quick, hurry and tell the King!”

The whole city erupted into pandemonium.

The Holy Spirits fled in a frenzy. Great numbers of livestock bolted in fright, overturning stalls and stampeding wildly through the streets.

Meanwhile, Jie Ming, his Dharma Form unfolded, looked down on the panic below without any expression.

…

…

A short while earlier, the moment he had entered the plane and shown himself, the entire sky had erupted with dazzling light.

Feeling the power rushing at him, Jie Ming raised an eyebrow slightly:

“There’s even an automatic defence system? Looks like the Holy Spirit race manages the planes under its control very tightly.”

But a defence of this level meant nothing at all to Jie Ming as he was now. He did not even fight back. He simply let the attacks keep pounding against his Return to Ruins Armor while his attention was fixed on the ground below, where he spread out his mental energy.

As for the commotion caused by the small storms the attacks’ aftershocks had whipped up, that was not something Jie Ming was concerned with.

“Hm?”

Suddenly, Jie Ming’s gaze fell on a creature that looked very much like an ostrich.

These creatures had long, slender legs and powerful bodies, their necks held high. They looked very much like the large birds Jie Ming remembered, only a great deal bigger.

But the True-False Void-Piercing Pupil’s analysis of the creature’s body turned up something odd.

Looking at the results, a flicker of surprise passed through Jie Ming’s eyes. This so-called livestock had an exceptionally complex brain structure, and a nervous system far more developed than any ordinary beast’s.

That meant its brain had even reached the level of a fairly mature intelligent lifeform.

Yet now these creatures were nothing more than mounts the Holy Spirits led around.

“So that’s how it is…”

The answer was not hard to guess. These creatures were probably not livestock to begin with. Quite possibly they had once been a race with a complete civilisation and intelligence of its own.

Only later, parasitised by the Holy Spirit race’s tendrils, their minds had been wiped away, leaving just their bodies, and in the end they had become livestock.

Jie Ming looked at the market scene below, his expression a little complicated:

“That’s a nuisance. If every region the Holy Spirit race controls is like this… the harvest may fall a good way short of what I expected.”

After all, wizard civilisation did not conquer planes simply to expand its territory.

Knowledge, technology, special lifeforms, systems of civilisation… those were the things of real value.

If the Holy Spirit race had turned an entire intelligent race into mindless creatures, then all of those things had naturally ceased to exist. It was as good as wiping out the most valuable part outright.

“Really…” Jie Ming shook his head.

But soon, he turned his eyes once more to the Holy Spirits running back and forth in the market.

The Holy Spirit race itself ought to have mastered a fair amount of technology. Even if these Holy Spirits had not gone so far as to seize all the knowledge of the civilisations they controlled, they should still have quite a lot of it stored away.

More importantly, Jie Ming had already confirmed earlier that Holy Spirit bodies were genuinely useful: eaten, they could help a wizard purify their mental energy.

That meant the Holy Spirit race was itself a rather fine resource.

At this thought, Jie Ming’s brow smoothed out. “I’ve lost a lot of knowledge, but at least there’s still something to gain.”

With that thought, he stopped hiding himself and unfolded his Dharma Form.

“In that case, I’ll just have to use you lot to make up for the shortfall in my spoils of war!”