novelraw Chapter 500: Gravely Wounded
Chapter 500: Gravely Wounded
The world between heaven and earth finally fell into absolute silence.
He had won.
With the body of a fifth-ring wizard, he had slain a sixth-ring wizard in perfect condition.
Watching that gray-white mist completely annihilate and dissipate, the taut string in Jie Ming’s heart snapped all at once.
A violent wave of weakness surged through his entire body like a tsunami. He could no longer hold himself upright; his legs gave way, and his whole person collapsed heavily onto the cold, shattered ground.
The world spun before his eyes. Everything in his vision blurred. All he could hear was his own ragged breathing, like a broken bellows.
From the depths of his soul came no longer simple pain, but something far more terrifying and fundamental—a sensation of “absence” and “tearing.”
It was as though a massive chunk of the foundation of his existence had been ripped away, leaving the remainder riddled with cracks, on the verge of total disintegration at any moment.
He did not know how much time passed—perhaps a quarter-hour, perhaps a much longer torment—before Jie Ming finally managed to gather a thread of scattered consciousness.
With trembling effort, he lifted an arm now heavy as lead and used the last remnants of his control over his internal cave-heaven to retrieve several crystal potion vials that glowed with soft light. His fingers shook so badly he could scarcely grip the tubes. In the end he simply shoved them whole into his mouth, bit down brutally, and swallowed the viscous, honey-like liquid along with the crystal shards in one gulp.
These were the highest-grade mixtures of [Soul Sweet Spring] and [Life Primordial Plasma] potions—specially formulated to repair severe soul damage and physical trauma. Each vial was worth over ten billion military merits.
One, two, three…
He emptied every high-tier soul-healing potion stocked in his cave-heaven, gulping them down like a cow chewing peonies.
The cool, gentle medicinal power flowed down his throat, but it brought little relief. Instead it was like a thin stream poured onto a parched, cracked riverbed—immediately devoured and absorbed by the enormous “void” and “fissures.”
Only when the last empty vial slipped from his powerless lips and shattered crisply against the vitreous ground did Jie Ming finally feel the soul-crushing agony that had threatened to pulverize his consciousness ease by the slightest degree.
He gasped for breath. Sweat had long since soaked through his tattered gray robe, clinging coldly to his skin.
The relief of surviving disaster did not immediately rise. In its place came deeper confusion and bewilderment.
“Why… am I still alive?”
This question—not only the desperate cry the sixth-ring wizard had uttered before vanishing—now lodged itself deeply in Jie Ming’s own heart.
He knew full well what kind of attack he had endured.
That “Hand of Annihilation” had first destroyed his heart and brain.
Of course, for many wizards who had undergone profound physical modifications, such purely corporeal injuries might not be absolutely fatal.
What was truly horrifying was that extremely pure annihilation energy flowing backward along the connection between life and soul, acting directly upon the essence of his soul!
More than sixty percent of his soul had been utterly annihilated in the instant of contact, reduced to nothingness.
The remaining forty percent had been blasted into fragments—countless tiny pieces that had almost completely lost contact with one another.
The experience of having one’s soul torn apart alive, with the core of one’s existence erased by more than half, was something Jie Ming never wanted to go through a second time.
By any common sense, such an injury would have instantly killed even a sixth-ring wizard specialized in survival—perhaps even causing a slightly weaker seventh-ring existence to fall on the spot.
In plain terms, even Jie Ming himself, after taking that blow, had not expected to live. He had closed his eyes and waited for death, waiting for the Substitute Doll to revive him.
Yet the anticipated activation of the Substitute Doll—the sensation of rebirth and revival—never came.
Instead, in that absolute desperation where his soul had shattered and teetered on the edge of total dissipation, he discovered with terror that he was somehow… still “alive.”
Not revived. Not reborn.
Simply “not dead.”
His soul had indeed fragmented; more than sixty percent was truly gone. Yet his consciousness strangely persisted, diffused across those broken soul fragments—like residual reflections still visible in a shattered mirror.
Though the fragments had lost their tight connections, the final, almost imperceptible resonance between them had not been completely severed.
In this way—beyond the comprehension of any fifth-ring wizard—he continued to “live” within a pile of soul wreckage that should have signified death and finality.
It was akin to an ordinary person whose body had been completely dismembered, head and heart chopped into pieces, yet whose vital signs stubbornly persisted, even allowing faint thought.
Absurd. Horrifying. Utterly contrary to the fundamental laws of life and soul.
This was also the key reason Jie Ming had been able to use the floating cannons for a surprise attack that struck the sixth-ring wizard—who would ever guard against a heap of already “dead” wreckage?
As for later using the spirituality of the Five Aggregates Rainbow Mirror as adhesive and scaffolding to forcibly reassemble the shattered soul fragments, piecing together a barely complete soul outline, then activating the Body-Forging Method and potions to regenerate his flesh…
By comparison, that seemingly “death-and-rebirth” action had become a merely “technical” difficulty—arduous, but comprehensible.
The true enigma remained that initial question: Why, after more than half his soul was destroyed, had he not died outright?
Why could his consciousness still persist within the broken soul?
In all his battles up to now, through countless fierce fights and grievous wounds, he had never suffered an injury this severe—permanent loss of more than sixty percent of his soul essence!
Even the most potent potions capable of instantly restoring a sixth-ring wizard’s soul damage would see the vast majority of their power wasted and lost when faced with his fragmented soul.
Thus, even after consuming every last high-tier soul potion in his stock, he could clearly sense that his soul had recovered less than twenty percent of its “quantity.”
The remaining forty percent or so was a real, hollowed-out absence—like a gaping void that had been carved away.
This absence brought not only constant, bone-deep agony, but also sluggish, blurred thinking—as though his mind were shrouded in thick frosted glass.
His perceptions had dulled; the world seemed to have lost most of its color and detail.
Only now, with the pain slightly eased, did Jie Ming have the strength to begin contemplating this hair-raising question.
But truthfully, the fact that he could still think in such a state was already astonishing… even terrifying.
“Fuck… this hurts worse than being dead…” Jie Ming lay weakly on the ground, cheek pressed against the cold, rough surface. Every breath tugged at the pain in his soul, forcing a low murmur through clenched teeth. “Might as well have let the Substitute Doll just revive me straight away…”
The words “Substitute Doll” flashed through the darkness like lightning, abruptly illuminating his chaotic thoughts.