I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 989: Reconnaissance

After that interception force was wiped out, the ship-plane’s voyage returned to calm.

Over the next several months, although signs of enemy life activity could still occasionally be detected in the distance, no behemoth ever again approached of its own accord.

Clearly, that earlier battle had made the scaled beasts in the vicinity realize that this expeditionary force was not easy to deal with.

Since it could not be intercepted easily, there was no point in continuing to send small forces over to die.

And so, a month later, Jie Ming and the others arrived safely at the target region.

“Don’t go any closer for now. Begin reconnaissance.”

Inside the ship-plane, Peyton stood before the command platform and gave the order to the wizards responsible for maintaining the arrays.

“Activate the long-range observation arrays. Priority search targets are enemy plane clusters, behemoth gathering zones, and any ninth-level creatures that may be present. Sync all data to the command system.”

As the order went out, under the joint casting of a great many wizards, several hundred reconnaissance arrays activated one after another.

Vast swaths of runes lit up across the bow of the ship-plane, and the immense computing system, gathering information from the surroundings, rapidly integrated the spatial fluctuations, elemental changes and signs of life activity around them, gradually converting the endless chaotic void, so hard to observe directly, into one clear image after another.

Jie Ming, standing to one side as research consultant, was likewise examining the constantly refreshing data.

Before long, the ship-plane’s central computing system had summarized the anomalous regions.

In fact, since entering this region, they had already traveled a considerable distance without a break.

Yet along the way they had found no planes at all, had encountered nothing like elemental storms or spatial-distortion turbulence, and had rarely seen even a high-concentration elemental pocket.

Under normal circumstances, the endless chaotic void should not be this… “calm.”

Now, from the data the long-range reconnaissance had obtained, Jie Ming quickly understood why.

“So that’s it,” Jie Ming said, looking at the light screen.

Beside him, Jack, whose computational ability was far too poor, was still staring at the mass of data streams on the light screen without having sorted them out; hearing this, he instinctively turned a blank look toward his mentor.

Jie Ming pointed to several data regions on the light screen and explained to him:

“The scale of the fighting between the two sides far exceeded the estimates. The aftershocks of the battles not only destroyed most of the planes; even the surrounding elemental storms and spatial storms were affected. Under the interference of massive energy aftershocks, the energy circulation that had been sustaining the elemental storms was destroyed as well, which is why such a vast blank region appeared.”

This was not hard to understand.

Things like elemental storms and spatial turbulence might sound chaotic, but for them to form at any real scale actually required some degree of power circulation as well.

If the aftershocks were intense enough, they would naturally destroy even the power circulation of the elemental storms themselves, ending up in the state seen now.

“But that’s not right either. It explains why this region is so calm, but it doesn’t explain why there are no planes.” Halfway through, Jie Ming suddenly began arguing against himself.

Faced with aftershocks of the same intensity, a plane, as a self-circulating aggregation of elements, was actually quite resistant to this kind of force, thanks to its plane barrier.

Even if the planes near the battle zones had been destroyed by the aftershocks, it should not have come to every plane across so vast an area vanishing without a trace.

Quickly combing through the data again, Jie Ming soon found where the problem lay. “Wait, something seems off over there?”

He pointed to another region on the light screen.

Hearing this, Wizard Peyton gave the order without hesitation, turning the reconnaissance to explore in that direction.

As the reconnaissance pushed deeper and deeper, a behemoth gathering zone of enormous scale finally appeared before everyone’s eyes.

Wizard Peyton glanced at the scene relayed back onto the light screen, and a chilling smile appeared at the corner of his mouth. “Wizard Jie Ming lives up to his name. It seems we’ve found the real quarry.”

What the light screen showed was a “stronghold.”

One look was enough to tell it was a garrison site built by the Behemoth Alliance, but not a single intact plane could be seen there. In their place were countless plane fragments of every size.

These fragments crisscrossed one another, some fitted together, others linked by special spatial structures, and in the end they were pieced together into enormous nests of every conceivable shape.

In other words, the main body of those nests was shattered planes!

Some of the plane fragments had also been reshaped by special powers, their surfaces covered in masses of intricate energy patterns, as if they had undergone long-term modification.

Large numbers of behemoths lived in these nests.

Some were curled up resting on huge continent fragments, some were moving among one another and mating, and others simply sprawled at the edges of the nests, letting the servant races beside them go about their business on the plane fragments.

As for the behemoths’ servants, most of them were collecting resources of every kind from the plane fragments.

They hauled minerals or elemental crystals from the fragments to designated spots, and some of the smaller servants even burrowed inside the plane fragments to harvest special substances that had not yet fully dissipated.

Judging by the minerals and elemental crystals laid out beside the behemoths, these were presumably their food.

Not every behemoth was so “particular,” though.

In the images shown on the light screen, Jie Ming saw one exceptionally massive behemoth that seemed bored; it simply reached out a claw, snapped off a chunk of continent fragment from beside its nest, and casually stuffed it into its mouth.

Before it, that continent fragment was like a cracker in an ordinary person’s hand.

The behemoth chewed a few times, seemed to find the taste good, and snapped off another piece to go on swallowing, without the slightest care for what might once have existed on that continent.

“That’s really…” For a moment Jie Ming did not know what to say about it.

He had already had some expectations about their way of life from his earlier contact with behemoths.

But seeing with his own eyes something like this, masses of shattered planes pieced straight into nests, their substance then used as everyday resources, still seemed excessive.

These behemoths seemed not to care in the least whether a plane was intact.

For them, it was enough that it still contained matter and energy they could use.

Peyton, however, showed little surprise. “That’s simply how the Behemoth Alliance lives.”

He called up more detailed data and enlarged several of the regions.

“These things are born enormous, and their dependence on a planar environment is far lower than that of ordinary life. As long as there is enough matter and energy around them, they can survive in the endless chaotic void for long stretches. Intact planes, for them, are actually not a necessity.”

Jie Ming went on examining the data, and was soon startled by the numbers on the light screen.

“That many?”

According to the reconnaissance results so far, the number of behemoths in this camp alone already exceeded a million.

Moreover, every life form the Behemoth Alliance called a behemoth had reached the eighth level.

Those below the eighth level were classed among the servant peoples, taking on work such as gathering resources, maintaining the nests and supporting combat.

In other words, there were more than a million eighth-level behemoths before them.

As for the sixth- and seventh-level servants, they were too numerous to count.

It was just as well that these behemoths could survive by directly absorbing the energy of the endless chaotic void; otherwise, with behemoths in these numbers gathered together, no plane whatsoever could have borne the load.

But even for the group serving as the behemoths’ servants, the energy and matter consumed each day was an astronomical figure.

Jie Ming even suspected that a large part of the reason the Multiracial Alliance did not want to cooperate with the Behemoth Alliance was that it could not afford to feed them.