novelraw Chapter 504: Aggravated Injuries
Chapter 504: Aggravated Injuries
Above the sky, torrents of energy surged like a tsunami.
The holy son stood at the center, arms spread wide. His dark-gray robe billowed without wind, the spiral emblem upon it seeming to come alive, slowly rotating.
Three female wizards formed a triangular formation a hundred meters behind him, eyes tightly shut. From the center of each brow extended faint silver threads of mental power, linking to the complex array that had emerged at the back of the holy son’s head.
The mental fluctuations of all four had completely synchronized, as though they had become one entity.
“Ignorant arrogance must be cleansed with suffering.” The holy son’s voice was ice-cold as he raised a hand and pressed downward through empty air.
The assault arrived in an instant.
Within a hundred meters around Jie Ming, space abruptly collapsed inward. Invisible barriers converged from every direction.
Immediately following came [Entropy Increase Disintegration Wave]—gray-white ripples spreading from the holy son’s palm. Wherever they passed, material structures spontaneously disintegrated, energy tending toward chaos.
The third wave was [Agony Shriek], an intangible, formless mental attack stabbing straight toward the soul.
Three overlapping attacks descended almost simultaneously. Each individual strike already surpassed the limit of ordinary fifth-ring spells. Stacked together, their instantaneous explosive power approached the threshold of sixth-ring.
Yet…
Jie Ming stood motionless in place. Not even the hem of his robe stirred.
Return to Ruins Armor had perfectly blocked every shred of the enemy’s damage.
The first wave of spatial compression crashed into the domain. A force capable of crushing mountains vanished like a clay ox into the sea—unable to raise even a ripple—silently devoured by Return to Ruins Armor.
The collapsing spatial structure was forcibly smoothed flat. Energy was extracted and channeled deep into the domain.
The second wave of gray-white ripples struck the domain’s edge. Its special property—guiding spontaneous material and energy disintegration—met what felt like an absolutely frictionless wall.
The ripples attempted to infiltrate and erode, but the rune arrays circulating within Return to Ruins Armor instantly reversed the entropy-increase process. Chaotic energy flows were reorganized and tamed, converted into docile stored energy.
The third wave, Agony Shriek, fared no better. Its mental malice melted like ice thrown into a furnace. The remaining energy was likewise transformed and absorbed.
Jie Ming “perceived” the energy storage progress inside Return to Ruins Armor slowly rising.
A trace of surprise flickered in his heart.
The energy level of these triple-stacked attacks was considerable. Every second poured in energy equivalent to dozens of standard fifth-ring spell barrages.
If not for Return to Ruins Armor’s extremely high absorption and conversion efficiency—and its storage capacity having been reinforced multiple times—an ordinary fifth-ring defensive spell would likely have overloaded and collapsed in an instant.
“So that’s how it is.” Jie Ming’s gaze swept across the three closed-eyed female wizards linked behind the holy son. In that moment he understood the mechanism.
A wizard’s spellcasting essentially involved constructing a spell model with one’s own mental power, then drawing on environmental elements to complete the release.
The greater the power and the more complex the structure, the higher the demand on mental power consumption and computational ability.
Though a fifth-ring wizard’s mental power was strong, continuously unleashing attacks approaching sixth-ring power placed an extreme burden on them.
Yet these four had temporarily paralleled their computational power and mental energy pools through mental threads—with the holy son as the primary caster.
The three female wizards had essentially become the holy son’s “external processing units” and “backup power sources.”
That was how the attacks could flow so continuously and stack in power.
“If I hadn’t taken out one of them earlier, this guy probably could have unleashed genuine sixth-ring level spells. The technical approach is solid… unfortunately…” Jie Ming felt no ripple in his heart.
Theory was theory; practice was practice.
Even if they truly could release sixth-ring standard power, it meant nothing to the current Jie Ming.
Return to Ruins Armor’s defensive standard already far exceeded conventional sixth-ring protective spells.
Moreover, having personally witnessed a true sixth-ring wizard’s strike briefly overload Return to Ruins Armor with terrifying might, this seemingly magnificent and ferocious barrage appeared to him no more threatening than a child hammering a steel fortress with a wooden mallet.
Plenty of spectacle, precious little substance.
At this rate of energy infusion, they could bombard him for an entire day and still be nowhere near saturating Return to Ruins Armor’s storage.
Seeing Jie Ming stand utterly unmoved under his onslaught—even his expression unchanged—the holy son’s eyes flashed with a trace of barely perceptible shock.
“Struggling on the verge of death!” He sneered coldly. The mental link among the four flared brightly as a new round of attacks began to brew.
This time, fine black cracks appeared in the surrounding space—the prelude to high-grade spatial sorcery.
But Jie Ming had already lost patience.
Soul-rending pain surged against the boundaries of his consciousness like relentless tides.
Every breath felt like countless fine needles piercing his soul fragments. He had no mood left to play games with this fellow!
He raised his right hand. In the wizard artifact at his wrist, a Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light round was already prepared.
He pointed.
Dark-golden radiance erupted once more—condensed to needle-like sharpness, stabbing straight toward the holy son’s brow.
A layer of iridescent rainbow shield bloomed again before the holy son.
This time Jie Ming saw it clearly: the shield was thin as cicada wings, refracting dazzling, dreamlike luster—as though a fragment of rainbow had been frozen in the void.
Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light struck the rainbow shield. The dark-golden beam plunged into an extremely viscous colloid.
Its speed abruptly slowed. The condensed energy structure was peeled away layer by layer by the rainbow light—decomposed into harmless fundamental elemental motes that drifted apart.
Ultimately, at the cost of shattering the barrier, the attack was once again neutralized.
“Heh.” The holy son let out a soft laugh, brimming with smug mockery. “Stop wasting effort. This [Seven-Colored Rainbow Wall] is personally bestowed by my sect’s Grand Elder—a technique specifically designed to counter highly condensed energy attacks.”
He leisurely adjusted his cuffs. The way he looked at Jie Ming now was the way one might look at a corpse:
“Your defensive means are indeed impressive. But when your attacks are ineffective against me, how long can your defense possibly hold?”
Jie Ming frowned, growing visibly more irritable.
The pain in his soul was intensifying.
Every thought, every mobilization of power, felt like scraping his brain with a dull blade.
He had originally not wanted to draw from his internal cave-heaven. Even operations that once felt as natural as breathing now risked aggravating his injuries if overused in his current state.
But now it seemed unavoidable.
If he wasted more time with these apparently unhinged individuals and reinforcements arrived, things would become troublesome.
“Fine.” Jie Ming muttered to himself, as though convincing himself.
He closed his eyes. Enduring wave after wave of increasingly violent soul-tearing agony, he sank his consciousness into his internal cave-heaven.
Inside the cave-heaven, with the bulk of the Black Giant army still “on duty” at the encampment, the space felt somewhat empty. Only the hundred Black Giant Priests he had deliberately reserved earlier remained, busily moving about.
Mobilizing them required temporarily opening stable spatial passages on his body surface to “transport” matter from the cave-heaven to the main plane.
Normally this process consumed negligible computation. But in Jie Ming’s current soul state, like porcelain barely glued back together, any exertion risked complete disintegration.
Yet he had no choice.
“Come out.” The command went forth with his will.
At the edge of the Return to Ruins Armor domain on his body surface, fifty dim vortices opened simultaneously.
Space rippled like water. Intense energy fluctuations caused the distant holy son’s expression to shift slightly.
Fifty pitch-black figures stepped silently out from the vortices.
Each stood roughly three meters tall. Their bodies were covered in flowing layers of black liquid metal that devoured all light, leaving only profound shadow.
Priest robes swayed faintly. At the top of each staff, dark-red gems concealed subtly circulating runes.
The fifty Black Giant Priests hovered silently before Jie Ming, forming a pitch-black wall.
The smugness on the holy son’s face froze instantly, then twisted into a disdainful sneer: “Ridiculous! Do you really think you can defeat me with these cannon-fodder units?!”
He unleashed another massive barrage.
Yet the moment those attacks touched the Black Giant Priests’ bodies, they were absorbed by a transparent force field.
The defensive method was identical to the one on Jie Ming—Return to Ruins Armor.
The greatest advantage of traditional wizard artifacts was that the user needed no understanding of the stored spell’s principles. Mental power alone could activate them.
Jie Ming had naturally not been stingy when crafting so many artifacts before the battle. Every Black Giant he brought had been equipped with a full set.
“How… is this possible?!”
This time the holy son was genuinely shocked. Even the three female wizards behind him could not help opening their eyes, their mental threads flickering unstably.
Jie Ming paid no attention to his astonishment.
The searing pain from deep in his soul darkened his vision. He nearly lost his footing.
Forcing clarity of mind, he issued the simplest order to the Black Giant Priests:
“Attack. Targets: the four ahead. Annihilate.”
The fifty Black Giant Priests raised their staves in unison.
The dark-red gems at the tips blazed with blinding dark-golden light. Vast power surged, stirring violent elemental tides in the atmosphere.
In the next instant, dark-golden radiance flooded the field of view.
Fifty beams of Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light wove into a net of death, blanketing every inch of space occupied by the holy son’s squad.
The holy son released a shrill, piercing scream.
Every protective artifact on his chest, wrists, and neck simultaneously erupted with maximum radiance.
[Seven-Colored Rainbow Wall] deployed at full power, layer upon layer of iridescent curtains attempting to resist.
The three female wizards also shrieked, pouring all their mental power into the link in a desperate attempt to construct a joint defense.
But against this absolutely overwhelming assault, it was futile.
The layered Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light beams were stalled for only an instant before shattering every defense.
Unbounded terror finally filled the holy son’s eyes.
In that sliver of life-or-death time bought by his frontmost protections, his hands formed a bizarre seal.
“Transfer!”
Blood light flared. The bodies of the three female wizards beside him suddenly stiffened. Expressions of extreme agony and disbelief appeared on their faces.
Their bodies were forcibly pulled and twisted by an invisible force, instantly swapping some form of “connection” with the holy son.
The next moment, the dark-golden flood engulfed their positions.
The three female wizards did not even have time to scream before being completely vaporized under the concentrated barrage of Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light—not even the finest dust remained, as though they had never existed.
When the light finally dissipated, the holy son knelt on one knee in midair, gasping heavily. His face was deathly pale; blood seeped from all seven orifices.
His gray robe hung in tatters, scorched black in many places.
Clearly the transfer secret art had not fully succeeded. Residual shockwaves had still inflicted serious injury.
But he had survived.
The price: the complete annihilation of his three “attendants.”
Jie Ming watched expressionlessly. He felt not even a ripple at such a method of sacrificing others to preserve oneself.
In the wizard world, he had seen far crueler things done in the name of survival.
“Continue.” Jie Ming’s command was curt and icy.
The fifty Black Giant Priests’ staves lit once more.
Runes within the dark-red gems refilled. Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light entered excitation state again.
“No!!! I am the Holy Son of the Chaos Secret Cult! My ancestor is…” The holy son roared in desperation and unwillingness, attempting to invoke his background.
But the Black Giant Priests had no interest in his nonsense.
Second volley.
This time, no more substitutes to transfer damage.
The holy son’s final life-saving trump card—a strange crystal hidden in his heart—exploded violently, releasing a brief time-distorting force field in an attempt to deflect the beams.
But under the absolute firepower of fifty sixth-ring-level attacks, this struggle was like an ant trying to stop a chariot.
The time field was brutally torn apart and pierced.
Dark-golden radiance swallowed him completely.
The roaring cut off abruptly.
When the light faded again, only a few slowly drifting flakes of charred ash remained—along with several high-tier wizard artifact fragments, their spiritual light extinguished, covered in cracks.
That arrogant, overbearing “holy son” had been utterly annihilated from matter to soul, leaving not a trace behind.
The battle was over.
Jie Ming’s body swayed. He could no longer hold himself up and collapsed forward.
One of the Black Giant Priests guarding silently at his side stepped forward without a sound. An arm covered in black liquid metal reached out and steadily supported him.
The touch was cold, yet carried a solid, reliable strength.
“Master.” The priest’s voice sounded directly in Jie Ming’s mind—low and respectful.
Jie Ming lacked even the strength to respond.
The weakness and searing pain from deep in his soul had reached their peak. Darkness crept in at the edges of his vision. His consciousness flickered like a candle in the wind, on the verge of extinguishing.
Forcibly opening fifty spatial passages at once and mobilizing fifty sixth-tier units had inflicted massive secondary damage on his already collapsing soul.
Fortunately, the encampment was now very close…
With his last thread of clarity, he tremblingly raised a hand and pressed the specially made distress rune on his wrist, transmitting a rescue signal and his coordinates to the forward camp at Noren Workshop.
“Return… to camp…” Jie Ming used his final scrap of lucidity to issue the last command to the Black Giant Priests. “Full speed… escort…”
The fifty Black Giant Priests moved at once.
Four of them carefully lifted Jie Ming, keeping him protected at the center.
The remaining forty-six spread out to form a tight escort formation around the perimeter.
Simplified versions of Return to Ruins Armor deployed at full power across every priest’s body, linking into a single pale-golden defensive domain.
In the next moment, they transformed into forty-six streaks of pitch-black light, tearing through space and racing at maximum velocity toward the coordinates of the encampment.