novelraw Chapter 499: Dead and Revived?
Chapter 499: Dead and Revived?
The battle instantly entered white-hot intensity.
In theory, with the enhancements from his modified spells, Jie Ming’s offense, defense, and mobility had all reached the standard of a sixth-ring wizard.
Yet in actual combat, he discovered that at his current level, facing a sixth-ring wizard was still far too strenuous!
Jie Ming’s figure moved like lightning. The Great Void Step was pushed to its absolute limit, leaving countless afterimages in the sky that blurred the line between real and illusory.
The metallic wings at his back acted like a swarm of slaughtering hornets with independent will. Their muzzles remained locked onto the figure within the gray-white mist, relentlessly unleashing torrents of destruction.
One after another, dark-golden streams of scorching light erupted from the tips of the floating cannons, crisscrossing through the air.
Because the interval between each shot of Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light and the next was so minuscule, the beams that should have flashed and vanished instead became continuous laser-like barrages.
Wherever these sustained beams swept, space was scorched with long-lasting bands of high-temperature distortion that refused to heal. The barren ground below suffered even worse.
Dark-golden streams raked across the surface; rock silently vaporized, gray-white earth melted into boiling lakes of glass.
Even farther away, entire hillsides were sliced clean through at the waist. The upper halves of mountains slid slowly in blinding radiance before crashing down in plumes of dust that blotted out the sky. Under the dense cover of these light streams, Jie Ming himself conducted frantic high-speed maneuvers.
He shot vertically upward one moment, executed sharp-angled turns the next, then drifted unpredictably like a falling leaf—doing everything to shake off the enemy’s ever-present lock.
Yet the sixth-ring wizard’s attacks clung to him like maggots on bone.
“Crying Soul Fire Crows!” A cold, low shout came from within the gray-white mist.
Dozens of birds formed entirely from flames materialized out of thin air. They shrieked silently, trailing tail flames that seemed capable of scorching souls, and closed in on Jie Ming from every direction.
Wherever they passed, air froze and then burned, leaving bizarre trails of ice and fire.
“Annihilation Sound Ring!” The wizard clapped his hands together. A pitch-black ring, constantly vibrating at high frequency, abruptly expanded!
It was not a physical object, but a pure fusion of sound waves and the Law of Annihilation.
This sound wave surpassed conventional speed of sound, spreading at an unimaginable hyper-velocity to instantly envelop several kilometers of airspace around Jie Ming.
Where the ring passed, space groaned under unbearable strain; all energy flows became sluggish and chaotic.
And most numerous of all were those plain yet utterly lethal gray-white beams of annihilation.
They shot out from every angle within the mist, each one precisely predicting Jie Ming’s evasion paths and forcing him to expend endless effort on extreme dodges.
Whenever a beam grazed the Return to Ruins Armor, it erupted in piercing “sizzles”—the sound of highly condensed annihilation energy clashing fiercely against the armor.
Jie Ming was completely on the defensive.
His only means of holding out were the continuous suppressing fire from the floating cannons behind him, and the Return to Ruins Armor on his body that could automatically draw replacement modules from his cave-heaven, refreshing itself almost without interruption.
But very often the Return to Ruins Armor could not withstand even two strikes before shattering.
More frequently, he was forced to temporarily converge several streams of Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light in front of him, forming a massive dark-golden light shield—or swing them into a brilliant light sword to cleave apart incoming flocks of fire crows or forcibly split sections of the sound ring.
Yet this was ultimately drinking poison to quench thirst.
The continuous firing of the floating cannons placed enormous strain on both mental power and computational capacity, while the enemy’s attack density gave him no chance to catch his breath.
The disadvantage snowballed relentlessly.
Finally, in the instant he forcibly cleaved apart three annihilation beams—causing his body to stiffen for a fleeting moment…
“It’s over.”
Within the gray-white mist, those two scarlet points of light suddenly flared!
A palm of extreme condensation, formed from a “light-dark annihilation singularity,” ignored spatial distance entirely. It seemed to “grow” directly out of the void right in front of Jie Ming’s chest.
Taking advantage of that minuscule gap when his Return to Ruins Armor had shattered and not yet replenished, it slammed solidly into his chest!
Where the palm made contact, matter evaporated instantly like dew under sunlight.
Jie Ming’s gray robe, flesh, bones… everything that constituted his body at the point of impact silently dissolved into the most fundamental nothingness under the extreme annihilation damage.
The annihilation even spread backward along the connections of energy and soul!
Half of Jie Ming’s chest, along with his head, vanished as though frames had been skipped—like a pencil drawing erased by an invisible eraser. From scalp to skull, from brain to soul core… all of it was utterly obliterated.
In those final moments, black eyes was reflected only the distant gray-white mist, which also appeared heavily depleted and violently fluctuating.
The headless corpse froze in midair for an instant, then lost all strength. Like a puppet with its strings cut, it plummeted toward the already devastated earth below.
The metallic floating cannons behind him extinguished their light in an instant, falling as lifeless scrap metal alongside the body.
BOOM!
The corpse crashed heavily onto the once-molten, now-cooled vitreous ground, kicking up sprays of crystalline shards.
The world seemed to fall abruptly silent.
Only the distant rocks ignited by battle aftermath continued to crackle and burn, and the wind moaned as it passed through the scarred gullies.
In the air, the gray-white mist slowly converged and re-formed into the figure of the Tower of Annihilation wizard.
But at this moment, his condition could hardly be called good.
His fully elementalized body had visibly thinned; even the unsteady energy core within could be faintly glimpsed.
The signature scarlet pupils had dimmed considerably, revealing deep exhaustion.
To ensure a one-hit kill, that previous “Hand of Annihilation” had drained nearly ninety percent of his remaining mental power.
He slowly descended to a spot not far from Jie Ming’s corpse. His scarlet gaze swept over the headless remains and the scattered, energy-dead wreckage of the floating cannons.
Finally, from his taut state, he relaxed ever so slightly.
“In the end… only fifth-ring.” The hoarse voice carried the indifference of victory, along with a trace of barely perceptible relief.
However…
In the split second his mind loosened, change erupted!
Among the seemingly randomly scattered floating cannon wreckage—muzzles pointed in various directions—several had, unbeknownst to him, subtly adjusted their angles during the fall. Now their muzzles faintly pointed toward his position!
HUM!!!
The dim metal surfaces abruptly erupted with blazing dark-golden radiance!
These Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light beams had been compressed even further—down to less than finger-width.
And with that came devastating destructive power.
The timing of the attack was viciously precise—exactly when his mind had relaxed and fatigue had opened minute gaps in his defenses!
“What?!” The scarlet in the sixth-ring wizard’s pupils shrank to pinpricks!
Facing near-point-blank light-speed strikes, he had no time to mount a complete defense.
PUFF! PUFF! PUFF!
Three beams of extreme condensation pierced through the already tottering mist barrier like hot knives through butter, viciously embedding into his elementalized body!
“AAARRGHH!!!”
A non-human, blood-curdling scream exploded from the mist!
Where the beams struck, gray-white mist boiled madly, exposing the violently shaking energy core within.
Terrifying annihilation energy corroded inward from the wounds, clashing fiercely with his own annihilation power and causing secondary devastation!
In a single strike, his already poor-condition body suffered catastrophic damage!
His elemental body flickered unstably, as though it might collapse and dissipate at any moment. His aura wilted to the extreme.
He staggered backward. The scarlet pupils stared fixedly at the three floating cannons that were slowly losing their final glow and turning into worthless scrap. In his eyes burned shock, fury, venom… and finally, a trace of genuine fear.
These cannons… were deliberate?!
A final trap set by that wizard before death?!
And at that moment, an even more soul-shaking scene unfolded.
In the distance, the headless corpse—which should have been thoroughly dead, brain and heart annihilated, even soul shredded—suddenly… twitched.
Then, under the sixth-ring wizard’s near-stupefied gaze, the corpse shakily braced itself against the ground with its hands and slowly stood up.
At the charred, severed edge of the chest, granulation tissue wriggled madly as though alive.
Bones, blood vessels, nerves, muscles, skin… regenerated at visible speed.
In just two or three seconds, a head identical to the previous one had regrown.
Jie Ming raised his newborn hand and touched his cheek and neck somewhat uncomfortably, as though confirming something.
Then he turned his head. With those still pitch-black, calm eyes, he looked toward the distant, gravely wounded, near-collapse sixth-ring wizard who was on the verge of self-destruction.
“How is this possible…” The figure in the mist let out a hoarse, trembling voice filled with incomprehension and bone-deep horror. “Your heart and brain were clearly gone… I shattered your soul as well! You should be dead! Why… why can you still stand?!”
Jie Ming did not answer immediately.
He gently rolled his newly grown neck, producing faint cracking sounds, before finally speaking in a voice weak from surviving calamity:
“Yeah… why am I still alive?”
He seemed to be asking the other, yet also asking himself.
The next second, that puzzled gaze abruptly turned icy.
“Die!”
The remaining floating cannons lit up once more, aimed at the gray-white figure teetering on the brink of collapse.
The gravely wounded sixth-ring wizard let out a desperate, unwilling roar, attempting one last struggle as he gathered his final strength…
But Jie Ming gave him no chance.
All surviving floating cannons, together with the index finger of his raised right hand, erupted with their final radiance simultaneously.
Several dark-golden beams completely engulfed that gray-white figure.
The sixth-ring wizard ultimately released only one short, shrill wail before it was cut off.
The gray-white mist melted away like snow under sunlight.
In the end, only a small handful of element ash—stripped of all spirituality—drifted down gently onto the scorched and shattered earth.