novelraw Chapter 529: Simple and Brutal Trump Card
Chapter 529: Simple and Brutal Trump Card
Chapter 529: Simple and Brutal Trump Card
The light screens inside the room had not yet fully closed. Tactical images and data analyses floated in mid-air.
Clark walked to the main control console, casually shut down several of the screens, then turned to look at Jie Ming.
“I just received the intelligence you submitted from this mission.” His voice was as calm as ever, but the next words left Jie Ming stunned.
“Well done. Winning against ‘Imaginary’ was truly beyond my expectations.”
Jie Ming blinked. Before he could react, Viola’s sharp intake of breath came from the side.
“Wait, wait!” Her voice cracked. “Imaginary?! Not some other sixth-ring wizard, but Imaginary? And you ‘won’ against him?!”
Jie Ming turned his head and saw Viola’s delicate little face written with three big characters: “What the hell.”
Her silver-gray eyes were wide as copper bells, her mouth slightly open, completely losing her usual elegance and composure.
It wasn’t just her.
Several seventh-ring wizards who had not yet left were still standing in the corner of the command center. Upon hearing this, they all turned their heads, their gazes locking onto Jie Ming in unison.
Jie Ming felt somewhat uncomfortable under the stares, but at least he now knew that the “Imaginary” in question was the sixth-ring wizard who used the Imaginary Law. He gave a light cough and asked softly:
“Um… is ‘Imaginary’ very famous?”
“Famous?” Viola nearly blurted out. “More than famous! Do you even know what kind of person that guy is?”
Jie Ming shook his head.
Viola took a deep breath, seemingly trying to organize her words, but ultimately decided on the most direct explanation:
“Purely in terms of combat power, he is indeed not at the absolute peak among sixth-ring Title Wizards. But that’s only because the Imaginary Law he controls is inherently inferior to those specialized in destruction.”
She paused, then continued:
“But… listen carefully! In any other field, against any lower-level target, this guy’s efficiency is ridiculously high!”
Jie Ming blinked. “This… I actually understand somewhat. After all… Imaginary uses the Imaginary Law.”
“No! You don’t understand the implications at all!” Viola’s voice was firm and decisive.
“The ‘target’ I’m talking about isn’t just lower-level enemies, but lower-level civilizations! For example, when our Workshop wages war on other civilizations’ planes, if the other side has beings above sixth ring capable of controlling the plane’s origin, we can only advance slowly with large armies to avoid mutual destruction. We rely on logistics to gradually spread out and on wizards to grind down strong enemies and fortresses one by one. But if it were Imaginary…”
She looked at Jie Ming and spoke word by word:
“He can skip all the intermediate conquest processes. Relying on the special nature of the Imaginary Law, he can bypass the control phase and directly dominate the plane’s origin, then clear the field.”
Upon hearing this, Jie Ming was stunned.
“You mean…”
“I mean!” Viola interrupted him. “While other sixth-ring wizards still need to slowly grind against the enemy’s armies, defensive systems, and native laws with their own wizard armies, Imaginary can directly ‘define’ the outcome of the conquest.”
“His efficiency in plane conquest is frighteningly fast. At least half of the Tower of Annihilation’s current scale owes a portion of the credit to him.”
After she finished speaking, she stared at Jie Ming with a brand-new gaze that was almost one of awe:
“This guy is terrifyingly strong against enemies below his own power level, and you… actually defeated him head-on.”
Viola remained silent for a full three seconds, then asked in an extremely complex tone:
“Jie Ming, be honest… are you already stronger than me now?”
Jie Ming opened his mouth, still thinking about how to answer, when a nearly inaudible light cough came from the side.
Clark’s gaze lingered on Viola for a moment before he nodded thoughtfully.
“That makes sense.”
Viola’s heart suddenly rang with alarm bells.
“After the war ends, you will train together with the living plane of ‘Starfall’ under my guidance. As your senior, you cannot be overtaken by your junior.”
Viola’s face instantly turned green.
“ Mentor! That’s not what I meant! I was saying…”
“Mm.” Clark had already shifted his gaze away, his tone as indifferent as if he were commenting on pleasant weather. “I know. But I think you’re right. It’s indeed time to give you some extra burden.”
Viola opened her mouth but ultimately said nothing, only glaring fiercely at Jie Ming.
Jie Ming spread his hands innocently, indicating that this really had nothing to do with him.
After the brief interlude, Viola decisively changed the subject and asked the question Jie Ming was equally concerned about:
“ Mentor, what is the current situation?”
Clark was silent for a moment before he slowly spoke:
“Basically… both sides have already shown their hands.”
Jie Ming’s heart tightened. “Shown their hands? Our trump cards have been discovered as well?”
Clark glanced at him and gave a slight nod.
“The Workshop’s trump cards need to be deployed in a dispersed manner. During this process, one of our seventh-ring wizards encountered the enemy’s wizards in their rear. Although he successfully withdrew, the other side should have already guessed our intentions.”
Jie Ming fell silent.
This was indeed one of the worst-case scenarios.
Once a trump card was known to the opponent, both its deterrent power and practical effectiveness would be greatly reduced.
But what he was more curious about was another matter: what kind of trump card required seventh-ring soul-type wizards to take action to locate it, and made even Viola say that “even after discovering it, we can’t stop it”?
“Viola mentioned earlier that we found the enemy’s trump card, but at the current stage we cannot stop it.” Jie Ming looked at Clark. “Why is that?”
Clark did not answer directly. He turned around and operated the main control console for a few moments.
A massive light screen slowly unfolded before the three of them.
“You should know the purpose of the trump cards we are preparing, right?” Clark asked.
Jie Ming thought briefly. “To create an advantage for the eighth-ring wizards’ decisive battle in the final stage?”
The corners of Clark’s mouth lifted slightly, revealing a trace of satisfied smile.
“Being able to see that is very good.”
As he spoke, he adjusted the image on the light screen.
What the screen displayed was a vast gray-white desolate plain.
The sky was leaden gray, and the ground was an endless stretch of dead, silent rock layers with no signs of life—a standard scene of an abandoned plane.
“This is footage recorded by a magic terminal,” Clark explained calmly. “From a reconnaissance wizard who successfully infiltrated the enemy’s rear.”
The footage advanced. The lens crossed the wasteland, passed over several low hills, and then…
The wizard in the footage stopped.
Not far ahead, the scenery showed no obvious difference, but the markers on the screen told Jie Ming that it was an extremely sophisticated spatial isolation barrier.
The reconnaissance wizard took a deep breath and stepped across that boundary.
In the next instant…
The wasteland disappeared.
In its place was a massive array that covered the entire field of vision.
The array’s intricate, dizzying patterns spread, intertwined, and nested layer upon layer across the ground. Every line flowed with a cold, faint glow that seemed capable of freezing the soul.
At each key node of the array, more than fifteen seventh-ring wizards sat cross-legged.
Their eyes were closed, expressions focused, with law halos of various colors circling around them.
Around these seventh-ring wizards were nearly a hundred sixth-ring wizards.
They were arranged in specific formations, continuously feeding energy into the array and assisting the seventh-ring wizards in maintaining an unimaginably vast spell structure.
And at the center of it all…
Directly above the array, approximately two thousand meters in the air, floated a gigantic sphere of light with a diameter exceeding one kilometer.
The light sphere emitted a soft white glow all over, like a miniature sun, yet it carried no temperature and leaked no energy fluctuations. It simply hovered there quietly—pure, serene, and… eerie.
“This is…” Jie Ming’s voice sounded strange.
“The trump card prepared by the Tower of Annihilation,” Clark’s voice remained calm. “That light sphere, after detailed probing by this soul-type wizard, has been confirmed to essentially be an extremely complex magnetic field confinement layer.”
“Magnetic field confinement layer?”
“Correct.” Clark nodded. “It appears as a luminous body because that magnetic field isolates everything inside and out—including light. Light from within cannot escape, and external light cannot enter. The white light we see is actually the result of it reflecting electromagnetic radiation from all external wavelengths.”
Jie Ming stared fixedly at the sphere of light, his heartbeat beginning to accelerate.
Listening to this description, an ominous premonition crawled up his spine like a cold snake.
He swallowed hard and asked the question he least wanted to ask:
“What… is inside it?”
Clark was silent for a moment.
That brief silence felt as long as a century.
Then his voice sounded again, still calm—calm to the point of being heart-stopping:
“After detailed calculations, what is inside is close to twenty trillion tons of antimatter.”
In an instant.
Jie Ming’s face turned green.
Twenty trillion tons.
Antimatter?!!
How did these two words even go together?!
In his mind, countless data exploded forth like a frenzy…
The instant antimatter came into contact with normal matter, it would completely annihilate, converting into pure energy.
The energy conversion efficiency of annihilation was 100%, far surpassing any nuclear fusion or fission reaction.
The energy released by the annihilation of one gram of antimatter was equivalent to twenty thousand tons of TNT.
One kilogram—twenty million tons.
One ton…
One trillion tons…
He didn’t dare calculate any further.
He finally understood what Viola meant by “even after discovering it, we can’t stop it.”
That sphere of light, that seemingly harmless soft glowing orb with a diameter of one kilometer—once it lost control…
The entire battlefield, both sides’ camps, the millions of wizard armies…
would all be completely vaporized by that pure energy that annihilated everything.
Jie Ming’s lips moved. After a long while, he managed to squeeze out a hoarse sentence that was almost inaudible:
“As expected of… the Tower of Annihilation.”
He paused, then added dryly:
“Truly… a simple and brutal trump card.”