novelraw Chapter 498: Fighting with Back to the Water
Chapter 498: Fighting with Back to the Water
When the rainbow light converged once more and Jie Ming’s figure re-solidified, his condition had already reached an extreme state of wretchedness.
His robes remained undamaged, yet the exposed skin across his body was covered in countless fine blood-lines—the aftermath of excessively overdriving his spiritual power.
His breathing came ragged and heavy, like a tattered bellows; every inhalation brought a scorching, knife-like pain in his lungs.
His dantian was nearly depleted, and after continuous high-intensity expenditure, his mental power had grown dim and murky.
He landed on a cracked expanse of gray-black earth. Looking around, he saw only desolation, deathly stillness, and nothing else.
In the distance the horizon shimmered with thin heat haze; the sky remained that same oppressive leaden gray.
“One full day…” Jie Ming rasped to himself, anger causing him to clench his teeth hard enough to ache.
The deadly pursuit between him and that sixth-ring wizard of the Tower of Annihilation, spanning tens of millions of kilometers, had now lasted an entire standard day.
Far from improving, the situation had plummeted sharply, growing more suffocating by the moment.
To compensate for the fatal flaw that “Light Form can only travel in straight lines,” Jie Ming had already shifted tactics long ago. He no longer sought maximum-distance linear flight; instead he adopted intermittent “short-burst redirection.”
After flying in Light Form for a stretch, he would forcibly dispel it, immediately pick a new direction, then transform into light and flee again.
Sometimes only a few seconds, sometimes slightly longer—doing everything possible to disrupt any predictable pattern and prevent the enemy from easily anticipating his landing points.
This method did produce some results in the beginning, but ultimately it treated symptoms rather than the root cause.
The gulf in strength between them was simply too vast.
Every redirection, every dispel-and-restart of Light Form, required time and produced energy fluctuations.
As a result, the window of actual travel time Jie Ming could gain with each burst grew shorter and shorter.
The speed of light is fixed; travel distance is directly proportional to travel duration.
Once Jie Ming’s effective travel distance fell below a certain threshold, ultra-long-range spatial teleportation was replaced by spatial jumps.
And to a sixth-ring wizard’s mastery of spatial techniques, short-range spatial jumping was as natural as breathing.
With one side weakening and the other strengthening, the distance between them was being closed at a terrifying pace.
The closer the distance, the narrower the safe time window Jie Ming had for each Light Form burst.
Shorter windows meant the actual distance he could escape in each attempt was shrinking dramatically.
Thus a vicious cycle formed.
The strategic space between Jie Ming and this wizard was being squeezed and devoured bit by bit, just like sinking into quicksand.
Finally, as this latest Light Form ended and he felt the near-total exhaustion radiating from within his body, Jie Ming silently came to a halt.
He did not immediately flee again. Instead he swiftly took out several of the highest-grade recovery potions and downed them all in one go.
The potion’s power poured into him like sweet spring water into parched cracked earth, nourishing his nearly empty spiritual sea and exhausted fleshly body.
Thanks to the continuous adaptive evolution granted by his body-forging method, Jie Ming’s recovery rate and absorption efficiency toward potions had grown stronger and stronger. This dose was just enough to let him, barely activate the Five Aggregates Rainbow Mirror once more.
Yet he did not leave.
Instead he slowly exhaled a breath thick with the metallic tang of blood. His gaze turned sharp and resolute.
“No more running.”
If he continued like this, his condition would only worsen until, at the moment his strength gave out completely, he would be effortlessly crushed.
Rather than being hunted down in disgrace until death, better to turn around—while he still had strength left—and bare his fangs!
A fight with no retreat!
But time was too short.
The enemy’s pursuit speed far exceeded expectations; there was simply no time to calmly set up the kind of complex composite killing arrays he had used before.
The only thing Jie Ming could do now was arm himself to the teeth.
He closed his eyes and sent his consciousness sinking into his internal cave-heaven.
In the next instant, more than a dozen strangely shaped metal components were summoned forth, hovering behind him.
Each metal pillar was roughly two meters long, perfectly rhomboidal—narrow in front, wider at the rear—gleaming with a dull metallic sheen. Their surfaces were densely etched with extremely intricate three-dimensional energy-guiding runes and micro-teleportation arrays.
They arranged themselves in a precise formation along both sides of Jie Ming’s spine, their pointed ends angled slightly outward, as though draping the gray-robed wizard in a pair of cold, ferocious metallic wings.
This was precisely the combat system Jie Ming had once developed to synergize with the Mysterious Astral Mortal Dust Barrier, later shelved due to a shift in his technical path, and now reactivated in desperation: [Floating Cannons].
Offensive spells such as Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light possessed unique energy structures and activation logic, making them extremely difficult to stably carry or continuously trigger using conventional rune-seal wizard artifacts.
This rendered Jie Ming’s earlier “Great Radiance Formation” tactic—relying on saturation bombardment from vast numbers of rune-seal wizard artifacts—unsuitable for these modified spells.
The core of Great Radiance Formation lay in using the spirituality of the Five Aggregates Rainbow Mirror to automatically coordinate thousands upon thousands of rune-seal wizard artifacts, forming a comprehensive curtain of fire.
But for a combat system built around spells that required constantly replacing expended wizard artifacts, what was needed was precise “barrels” and an efficient “ammunition feed system.”
These rhomboidal metal pillars were the barrels.
Each was hollow inside, with a sophisticated chain-linked teleportation chamber at its core.
The “ammunition” for every floating cannon consisted of thumb-sized, specially crafted wizard artifacts, each containing a single sealed charge of Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light.
Once the frontmost wizard artifact was triggered, it would be instantly teleported back into the internal cave-heaven through the micro-array at the muzzle to recharge.
Simultaneously, the rear teleportation array would push a freshly charged spare “round” from the cave-heaven into firing position.
The floating cannons themselves—their levitation, movement, and formation adjustments—were autonomously controlled by spirituality detached from the Five Aggregates Rainbow Mirror, functioning like extended limbs.
Meanwhile, ammunition scheduling within the cave-heaven, trigger timing, targeting, and spell control all required Jie Ming’s full mental concentration.
Maintaining such high-intensity mental output, precise energy manipulation, and meticulous oversight of material flow within the cave-heaven placed an enormous burden on him.
If not forced into a true life-or-death corner, Jie Ming would never lightly employ this still-immature system.
The dozen-plus floating cannons subtly adjusted their angles as though alive. Runes across their metal surfaces lit up one after another, entering pre-activation standby.
Not long after Jie Ming finished arming himself…
Several thousand meters ahead, high in the sky, space was abruptly torn open by an invisible hand!
Gray-white mist poured out first. Then, the figure of the Tower of Annihilation wizard, shrouded within that mist, stepped forth like Death emerging from the abyss—suddenly manifesting!
No words were wasted.
The instant the enemy’s form stabilized, a fierce glint flashed in Jie Ming’s eyes. The metallic wings at his back abruptly erupted with blinding dark-golden radiance!
“Fire!”
BOOM BOOM BOOM!!!
More than a dozen extremely compressed dark-golden light pillars—each only barrel-thick—exploded from the tip of every floating cannon!
Under Jie Ming’s control, the beams adjusted trajectory slightly mid-flight, curving from multiple angles to devour the enemy who had only just finished teleporting and whose form had not yet fully steadied!
Every beam contained energy condensed to the absolute limit. Wherever they passed, space was scorched with lingering ripples of distortion; the thin air was completely ionized, releasing piercing crackling explosions.
Almost simultaneously with Jie Ming’s attack—
Beneath the hood of the Tower of Annihilation wizard, the two points of scarlet light suddenly blazed!
He did not even wait for his body to fully solidify. Merely raising the right arm wrapped in gray-white mist, he pressed downward toward Jie Ming’s position from afar.
Under the sixth-ring wizard’s vast mental power, massive quantities of elemental force were directly mobilized.
RUMBLE!!!
Above Jie Ming’s head, the sky across several hundred kilometers abruptly darkened!
Dark-gray clouds surged violently. Space itself collapsed inward and twisted under some terrifying force!
In the end, an enormous heaven-supporting palm—composed entirely of chaotic spatial folds and boiling gray-white mist—manifested out of thin air like divine punishment, and slammed down toward Jie Ming!
Even before the palm reached him, the horrifying pressure had already caused the ground below to crack inch by inch. Countless gray-white rock crystals were crushed to powder by the invisible force field, sending dust plumes soaring into the sky!
The next moment, both attacks struck their targets almost simultaneously!
The dozen-plus beams of Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light Jie Ming unleashed smashed viciously into the gray-white mist surrounding the Tower of Annihilation wizard.
The anticipated explosion did not occur.
The highly condensed destructive energy, upon touching the mist, vanished like a clay ox into the sea—rapidly worn down and neutralized by the frenzied inter-cycling, mutually annihilating light-dark energies within the fog.
The mist roiled violently, its color dimming noticeably, yet the wizard at its core stood utterly unmoved. Through the now-thinned mist his scarlet gaze coldly locked onto Jie Ming.
And that mountain-shattering giant palm likewise struck solidly at Jie Ming’s position!
Hummm…
There was no earth-shaking roar—only a deep, soul-shaking drone, as though the entire world were being compressed.
At the impact point, space twisted into a complete chaotic tangle.
Light and dark, positive and negative, creation and destruction… countless opposing elements and laws were forcibly mashed together in a tiny area, endlessly colliding, annihilating, regenerating, and annihilating again!
Each micro-annihilation released terrifying energy, yet all of it remained constrained within the palm’s force field, forming a continuously raging explosion.
When the gray-white giant palm slowly dissipated, what remained was a colossal palm-shaped crater more than one hundred kilometers in diameter and thousands of meters deep.
Its walls were mirror-smooth, displaying the vitreous texture of material that had been flash-melted by extreme heat and then rapidly cooled. At the bottom, wisps of unstable annihilation energy still lingered, hissing corrosively.
At the very center of the palm crater, a somewhat slender gray-robed figure slowly straightened.
It was Jie Ming.
The Return to Ruins Armor enveloping him flickered with unprecedented frequency, its transparent surface covered in a spiderweb of fine cracks, as though it might shatter completely at any second.
His face was deathly pale; a thin line of fresh blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
“One strike… consumed more than sixty percent of the reserves?” Feeling the feedback from the Return to Ruins Armor, Jie Ming’s pupils involuntarily contracted.
That seemingly casual palm actually contained energy manipulation refined to an extreme degree.
It was not crude overwhelming force, but countless minute, continuous opposing-element annihilation shocks.
These annihilation impacts were like billions of the tiniest files, simultaneously grinding away at his defenses from every direction.
In theory the Return to Ruins Armor possessed storage capacity sufficient to absorb thousands upon thousands of standard sixth-ring spells—yet in a single instant more than half of that capacity had been filled.
This meant that, at the intensity the enemy had just displayed, Jie Ming’s Return to Ruins Armor could withstand at most one more attack of equal power before completely overloading and collapsing!
At the same time, far outside the attack range, violent fluctuations rippled through the mist enveloping the Tower of Annihilation wizard.
Those two scarlet points stared fixedly at the battered yet still upright figure in the center of the crater.
The emotions surging within them were no longer pure killing intent and icy calm, but a turbulent mixture of shock, disbelief… and even a trace of… dread.
“He actually… withstood it?”
For the first time a low, hoarse voice emerged from deep within the mist—carrying clear instability.
That palm had appeared casual, yet in truth it had drawn upon profound comprehension of the Law of Annihilation—power sufficient to instantly cripple or even kill an ordinary early-stage sixth-ring wizard!
And this fifth-ring wizard had not only defended against it—he hadn’t even lost combat capability on the spot!
This fellow… really was only fifth-ring?
The gray-white mist churned furiously. The scarlet glow within it blazed even brighter, locking unblinkingly onto the figure in the crater.
Killing intent boiled to its absolute peak.