Translator: AnubisTL
Fortunately, the team member was too far gone to care about such things. He only managed to say in a broken voice:
"Don't... go out... Those who ran out found the city outside... is even worse than the camp! That strange disease... it's already spread everywhere! The whole city... is becoming a dead city!"
As if to confirm his words, a non-human scream, a horrific mixture of grinding metal and tearing flesh, erupted from a nearby building and abruptly cut off.
"Sir... I'm so tired..."
Endi stood frozen as if struck by lightning.
He suddenly remembered his own inexplicable fatigue... A terrifying thought, like a venomous snake, began to gnaw at his sanity.
He could no longer hear what the two people beside him were saying. Endi shoved his adjutant aside and staggered back into the military camp, sprinting toward the warship docking port.
He was lucky. He encountered almost no resistance on the way, as if even his deranged comrades had ignored him.
Finally, Endi reached his warship and, with his last ounce of strength, activated the Emergency Symbiosis Protocol.
The icy mechanical interface pierced his flesh, and the familiar sensation of connection returned. But this time, instead of a surge of power, it brought a... sense of loss of control.
He looked down and saw his semi-fluid body metalizing at an unprecedented rate.
This metalization was chaotic and distorted, clashing violently with his meticulously calibrated mechanical arm. It felt as if two distinct wills were vying for control of his body.
"Damn you... wizard!!!"
Endi used his last conscious thought to unleash a curse filled with endless regret and venom.
The next moment, his consciousness plunged into darkness.
His body merged with the warship, transforming into a frozen sculpture of metal and flesh.
And Endi, along with this military camp, this city, became merely the starting point of the symbiotic scourge's spread.
Jieming's simplified fungus, which had been designed to act more slowly, had inadvertently become the catalyst for a greater catastrophe.
Thousands of kilometers behind the giant spirit realm's defense line, a city named Silverglow City maintained its facade of prosperity.
Though merely a small city, its scale, due to the vastness of the giant spirit realm, rivaled that of a mid-grade nation.
As a hub for military officers' families and elite descendants, it exuded an opulence surpassing many larger cities.
Towering metal skyscrapers shimmered with luxurious neon, while ornate private shuttles zipped through aerial channels, as if the battlefield's devastating defeat and the spreading plague of terror had no bearing on this place.
Inside a soundproofed room of a lavish residence, a relatively small, young indigenous creature nervously checked that all doors and windows were tightly sealed.
It furtively retrieved two exquisite containers filled with viscous, faintly glowing liquids of different colors.
Then, under its own excited gaze, it carefully poured the two liquids into a single cup.
For slime-like creatures whose reproduction method involved fusing a part of their body with their mate to create the next generation, mixing these two liquids was considered a deeply taboo act in giant spirit realm culture.
As it became engrossed in the process...
Bang!
The heavy alloy door burst open with tremendous force!
The young indigenous creature trembled, nearly spilling the liquid it held.
It was about to stammer out an explanation when it saw the faces of its parents, who had burst in, not with anger, but with unprecedented terror!
"Run!!!" The parents' mental scream was filled with despair.
The next instant, blinding light consumed its vision.
A deafening explosion erupted overhead, shaking the entire room violently as the ornate dome cracked and shattered!
War clouds had gathered in the sky.
Wizard cannon fodder units, massive as floating mountains, had somehow broken through the long-range vigilance network.
They materialized abruptly above the city, their shadows instantly plunging the once-bustling metropolis into darkness.
Then, countless spell beams of varying colors, each radiating destructive energy, rained down from the heavens!
Boom! Boom! Boom...
Towering metal buildings twisted and collapsed under the onslaught of light. Lavish airships detonated into fireballs mid-air, and meticulously maintained sky gardens were instantly reduced to scorched earth.
Against this sudden, overwhelming assault, the hastily organized air defenses were as futile as a mantis trying to stop a chariot.
Any aircraft attempting to escape were precisely targeted and shot down by the wizards, becoming fireworks in the night sky.
Jieming hovered in mid-air, indifferently observing the city below being rapidly "formatted" into oblivion.
After completing the first round of attacks, he joined the other wizards in commanding their cannon fodder units to descend.
The Black Giants under his command acted like demolition crews, their massive bodies and irresistible strength flattening entire city blocks and crushing everything in their path, leaving no corner untouched.
The "symbiotic scourge" fungal strain developed by Jieming far exceeded expectations.
In less than a month, the once-impenetrable defenses of the giant spirit realm had collapsed from within.
The plague had destroyed the bedrock of their army—the hundreds of millions of low-tier units.
While fifth-tier experts could forcibly expel or suppress the fungal strain using their immense energy and mental power, their numbers were too few relative to the entire civilization.
Without the support of their vast army, these high-tier combatants proved utterly powerless against the wizards' meticulously targeted spells, their resistance becoming futile.
Thus, the war entered its second phase: systematic physical eradication.
With each sixth-tier wizard at the core, massive wizard legions advanced steadily like a comb, methodically combing through the realm.
Their objective was clear: to destroy every strategically vital or densely populated city, town, and outpost in the giant spirit realm, completely annihilating its war-making potential.
Jieming was currently carrying out such a mission.
As the Black Giant Legion violently cleared the area, some high-level indigenous individuals hiding in the ruins or underground bunkers were forced to reveal themselves and flee in panic.
But they barely surfaced before being instantly annihilated by the wizards surrounding them, who had already locked onto their targets and unleashed a concentrated barrage of precise spells.
Just then, Jieming's peripheral vision caught a figure writhing in terror in the shadows beneath a crumbling wall, desperately trying to escape.
His attention had barely been drawn to it when...
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
Four razor-sharp attacks, fueled by a desperate will to kill, erupted from the shadows directly beneath him!
An energy blade, corrosive fluid, spirit spikes, and high-frequency vibration waves converged on Jieming from four cunning angles.
Yet not a ripple of emotion crossed Jieming's face.
"Old tricks," he said, not even bothering to adopt a defensive stance.
During the initial landing battles, such ambush assassinations relying on shadows or blind spots had indeed caused some trouble for the wizards.
But with more combat experience, the logistics wizards had long since thoroughly researched the indigenous' abilities. They had developed multiple counter-detection spells and early warning wards.
Almost the instant the attacks were launched, the largest Black Giant leader beside Jieming moved.
Activating its innate talent, the time flow around it warped violently!
Within the temporal disorder domain, its speed surged dramatically, while the incoming attacks became bogged down in the invisible deceleration field as if sinking into mud.
Four dull thuds rang out almost simultaneously.
The Black Giant leader materialized beside the four infiltrators like a ghost. Its massive, liquid-metal-coated palm crushed three of the assassins, along with the shadows they were hiding in, with effortless ease, as if crushing bubbles.
As it gripped the last indigenous creature, whose aura clearly reached the fourth tier, the native let out a desperate, enraged, and bewildered spiritual roar:
"Why?! Why are you invading us?! What did we ever do wrong?!"
Jieming glanced at the struggling slime, his eyes devoid of pity, showing only a trace of contempt and indifference.
He couldn't even be bothered to waste words explaining the wizard civilization's logic of "eliminating potential rivals" or mentioning the giant spirit realm's "dark history" of enslaving dozens of planes and evolving by plundering the limbs of others.
In the endless void, the law of the jungle reigns supreme.
Justice and injustice often depend entirely on one's perspective.
More often than not, the very concepts of justice and injustice cease to exist.
The relationship between civilizations is more akin to a food chain within an ecosystem.
The process of one civilization annihilating another is as natural and inevitable as a predator devouring its prey.
"If there's one problem," Jieming murmured to himself, "it's probably just your bad luck."
The Black Giant leader closed his five fingers, and the mental fluctuations of the last assassin abruptly ceased, dissolving into a pool of metal-laced sludge.
Looking up, he saw that not only Jieming's team but also the wizard squads deployed in other regions had encountered similar desperate resistance or suicidal assassination attempts.
Yet under the wizards' well-prepared detection, early warning, and countermeasure systems, these acts of defiance served only to increase casualties and highlight the indigenous people's despair, proving utterly futile.
The wizards were quite indifferent to the remaining indigenous people who had gone into hiding and no longer showed themselves.
As long as they didn't emerge to interfere with the wizards' mission, they couldn't be bothered to waste energy on a thorough, carpet-style hunt.
Their primary objectives were to raze the cities, destroy the outposts, and obliterate all infrastructure that could support the war effort.
Jieming's attention soon shifted away from this minor incident, and he immersed himself in his internal space.
There, a special talismanic seal was faintly shimmering with an imperceptible, hazy glow. Strands of Mortal Dust Qi, each imbued with the lingering obsessions, desires, and traces of civilization, were being drawn from the destroyed city ruins below and converging toward it.
The highly developed giant spirit realm, with its rich civilization and diverse life forms, provided him with a long-awaited abundance of high-quality Mortal Dust Qi.
It's a pity the entire battlefield is too vast. Many areas are beyond the effective range of my Mortal Dust Attractor talismanic seal, Jieming thought with some regret.
(End of the Chapter)
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