I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 996: The Strength of Breathing Soil

Suddenly, a sense of danger came from directly overhead.

Jie Ming’s movements paused, and an indescribable pressure had already enveloped the void around him.

Someone had made a move.

And the target was him.

Jie Ming jerked his head up. On the distant battlefield, the black lizard-like behemoth that had been trading blows with Peyton had abruptly turned its head, and its enormous pupil looked across layer upon layer of space toward the place where he stood.

Just one look.

Yet in that instant, the space around Jie Ming seemed to lose its right to function normally.

The flow of the elements came to a sudden standstill, and several defensive arrays collapsed on their own.

Evidently, the commotion of Jie Ming’s operation had been too great, and the ninth-level behemoth had discovered that its nest was gone.

It had not worked out what exactly had happened, but it still instinctively turned its gaze onto Jie Ming as the culprit, and then launched an attack almost as an afterthought.

To it, this did not even count as a real move.

At most, it had noticed some annoying insect wrecking its things and crushed it in passing.

But for Jie Ming, this one strike was already more than enough to kill.

“Defend!”

Dixon’s voice rang out almost in the same instant as the danger.

In truth, his reminder was not needed at all.

From the moment Jie Ming decided to cast Breathing Soil Creation, Dixon had anticipated that an operation on this scale could not possibly be hidden from the ninth-level behemoths.

To keep Jie Ming from being ambushed the moment his casting ended, he had not only arranged for wizards to seal off the camp’s perimeter, but had also, at Jie Ming’s request, deliberately held back a group of wizards skilled in controlling matter.

And those wizards had long since made ready.

Just as that intangible force was about to fall on Jie Ming, tens of thousands of nearby wizards acted at once.

Driven by wave after wave of their power, the Breathing Soil that Jie Ming had only just refined flew straight into the path of the incoming attack.

The Breathing Soil tumbled over and over, and before it had fully unfurled, it collided head-on with the ninth-level behemoth’s power.

Boom!

In that instant, the entire void seemed to grow heavy.

With the Breathing Soil at its center, a vast swath of space warped visibly to the naked eye.

The surrounding elemental tides were squeezed out in every direction, and in the distance some of the smaller behemoths were even sent tumbling backward by the shock.

As for that clump of earth-yellow Breathing Soil, it began to swell madly the instant the collision came.

Breathing Soil grows when it meets wind, and hardens when it meets water.

When it comes into contact with outside matter and energy, it expands without end, using the energy and matter it absorbs to reorganize its structure.

And so, before the attack released by the ninth-level creature had even fully arrived, the vast energy it carried poured into the Breathing Soil and became the fuel for its expansion.

The earth-yellow light flared abruptly, and the Breathing Soil, which had only been the size of a planet, rapidly stretched outward.

Loose matter kept gathering in, the gaps inside were rapidly filled, and the whole mass of Breathing Soil swelled at an astonishing rate, like a wall that had suddenly been thrown across the battlefield.

In the mere blink of an eye, it had expanded far beyond its original scale, and a colossal structure of matter stood between Jie Ming and the ninth-level behemoth.

At the same time, the interior of the Breathing Soil was changing as well.

As more energy poured in, its density rose rapidly. The once-loose matter gradually solidified, and the texture of thick rock strata surfaced on its exterior.

The wizards in charge of controlling matter could only barely nudge it into changing direction; they had no time at all to interfere with the changes inside it.

Fortunately, their task had never been to manipulate the Breathing Soil precisely.

As long as they could make it block the attack, that was enough.

And Jie Ming, having taken in the situation before him, turned without the slightest hesitation.

“What are you waiting for? Run!”

He did not spare it a second glance. He cast the Great Void Step directly, his figure flickering again and again as he swiftly withdrew in the direction away from the ninth-level battlefield.

Seeing this, the other wizards present likewise abandoned their control over the Breathing Soil without hesitation, each using their own means to flee the area as fast as they could.

As for what would happen next?

That was left to the Breathing Soil.

Jie Ming had no interest in personally testing whether he could withstand a casual blow from a ninth-level creature.

Time to go, time to go.

His figure had only just vanished when the black lizard behemoth’s attack erupted in full.

The intangible force slammed viciously into the Breathing Soil.

The earth-yellow wall of stars caved in instantly, and huge, bottomless cracks appeared across its surface.

Several chunks of Breathing Soil the size of stars were knocked clean away, finally bursting far off into countless fine streams of matter.

Yet that force did not dissipate there. It went on grinding away the matter in its path, trying to erase the entire mass of Breathing Soil completely.

The surface of the Breathing Soil melted away rapidly, vast quantities of matter losing their original structure and turning into fine shreds of energy and dust that were flung far away.

But at the same time, still more energy kept pouring into the interior, driving what remained of the Breathing Soil to keep swelling.

The ninth-level behemoth’s power wore it down without pause, while the Breathing Soil expanded in an unending stream, and for a time the two sides actually settled into a strange sort of stalemate.

“It’s actually holding?”

Dixon gazed ahead, a flicker of astonishment passing through his eyes.

He had known, of course, that the material Jie Ming had refined on such a staggering scale must have something special about it.

But never had he imagined that this material would go on functioning even in the face of a ninth-level creature’s attack.

That was a ninth-level!

Even though the other side was locked in battle with Peyton, and this attack had only been a casual strike made on a whim, the gap between a ninth-level and an ordinary creature could still not be overlooked.

Under normal circumstances, even a mass of seventh-level wizards casting defensive wizardry together would be killed in a single blow!

Yet the material before them was stubbornly maintaining its own structure even as it continued to take damage.

As time passed, that intangible force finally began to weaken.

More and more cracks spread across the surface of the Breathing Soil, and the intact portions were battered out of shape again and again, but in the end, the ninth-level behemoth’s attack still failed to destroy it completely.

At last, with a violent tremor, the residual force dissipated, and the battlefield gradually returned to calm.

The earth-yellow wall that had stood across Jie Ming’s path was by now riddled with holes.

Most of the Breathing Soil had been ground away in the attack, and the remainder had been scattered into several fragments of varying size.

The smallest of them was still the size of a mountain range, while the largest was nearly on a par with a star.

Its surface was covered in cracks, yet it still maintained an intact material structure, floating silently in the void.

For a moment, the vicinity fell into a brief silence.

Then, almost every gaze snapped toward Jie Ming.

Dixon was no exception.

This eighth-level fate wizard had still been considering how to pull Jie Ming out from under the ninth-level behemoth’s attack, only for events to unfold completely beyond his expectations.

Not only had Jie Ming withdrawn from the danger zone, but, more absurd still, that clump of Breathing Soil had actually held.

“This is the material you refined just now?”

One of the seventh-level wizards in charge of controlling matter could not help speaking up, only realizing after he had asked that his question was utterly meaningless.

This was already beyond anything an ordinary defensive material could explain.

Dixon was silent for a moment, then turned to look at Jie Ming, who had just reappeared. “You expected this all along?”

Jie Ming shook his head.

“No. I only knew this stuff could absorb outside matter and energy, expand continuously, and change its structure. As for whether it could block a ninth-level creature’s attack, I’d never tried it before either.”

That was not a brush-off.

Breathing Soil Creation did possess an extremely strong capacity for transforming matter, but exactly how powerful an attack it could withstand ultimately depended on its scale and on how much outside energy was available.

Jie Ming’s original purpose had been nothing more than to use the Breathing Soil to buy himself a little time.

He too had never expected this stuff to actually block a casual blow from a ninth-level creature.