novelraw Chapter 532: A New Eighth-Ring?
Chapter 532: A New Eighth-Ring?
Chapter 532: A New Eighth-Ring?
The intensity of the explosions far exceeded all estimates.
The first wave of chain annihilation lasted a full thirty seconds.
When the air blasted away by the shockwaves surged back and the scattered antimatter fragments came into contact with new matter once again.
A second, even larger eruption followed immediately.
Then came the third wave, the fourth wave…
Each round of explosions tore apart the defenses that the transmutation array had painstakingly constructed.
Each wave of impact consumed the spiritual power that countless wizards were desperately pouring in.
Deep within the camp, the wizards channeling their spiritual power had faces as pale as paper.
The sky no longer showed its original color.
There was only the endless pure white light of destruction, along with the defensive barriers that were repeatedly torn apart and reformed, barely holding on.
Dionysius stood at the highest point of the command center, hands tightly clenched.
He was waiting.
In the distance, at the alliance camp.
At the top of the Chaos Secret Cult’s towering spire, several blurred figures were also watching this earth-shaking collision.
“Those madmen from the Tower of Annihilation…” one of them murmured, his voice carrying an unmistakable trace of shock. “They really dared to play it this way.”
“To them, it doesn’t matter,” another said calmly. “If they win, the battlefield becomes ours. If they lose, they don’t lose much either.”
“Hah, let’s go. It’s our turn to act as well.”
The sea of destruction continued to expand madly.
On the Noren Workshop’s side, every wizard still able to remain conscious was desperately squeezing out their spiritual power, manipulating the super-wide-area transmutation array to hold up layer after layer of protection amid the unending annihilation explosions.
No one had any strength left to pay attention to other directions.
Nor did anyone notice that on the opposite side of the plane ravaged by the antimatter tide, a certain region that had been hidden beneath multiple layers of phase space was undergoing changes.
The Chaos Secret Cult’s trump card had moved.
It was a massive hollow hidden deep underground.
Unlike the Tower of Annihilation’s simple and brutal antimatter light sphere, the Chaos Secret Cult’s arrangement was far more concealed.
From the very first day of the war, this hollow had been hidden within complex phase space interlayer, guarded in shifts by three seventh-ring soul-type wizards who isolated all possible detection.
Even the Noren Workshop’s soul-type wizards had only managed to capture a single image after paying a heavy price, and had been forced to withdraw heavily injured.
Inside the hollow surged gray-black mist like an ocean.
However, the source of that mist was somewhat different from what the Noren Workshop had previously deduced.
The emotional energy of several million wizards had indeed been collected.
The fear, despair, and madness produced by tens of billions of cannon fodder units during their slaughter had indeed been gathered.
But all of that was merely “supplementary material.”
The true core was a mass of profound blackness suspended at the deepest part of the hollow, shrouded in heavy seals. It was so deep it seemed capable of swallowing everything.
That blackness had no temperature, no energy fluctuations, and not even any sense of presence.
It simply floated there quietly, yet it caused every being who saw it to feel an uncontrollable wail rising from the depths of their soul.
That was… death itself.
Not the death of any single life.
But the death of a plane.
This super-large plane serving as the battlefield had itself been pieced together from dozens of abandoned planes.
Those planes had already suffered complete extinction of life and total depletion of resources when they were spliced together.
In the words of wizards, they had already “died.”
But death did not mean complete nothingness.
The Chaos Secret Cult’s latest developed technique could collect the “death wails” produced at the instant of those planes’ demise, the residual will containing endless sorrow and despair from the complete end of a world, and transform it into a usable form of energy.
This “plane-death-level” emotional energy far surpassed the emotions of ordinary living beings in quality.
If the emotions of several million wizards were a small stream, then the death wail of a single plane was a vast ocean.
And on this battlefield, the Chaos Secret Cult had collected the deaths of more than a dozen planes.
What churned in the depths of that blackness was the despair from the end of more than a dozen worlds.
This was the true killing move capable of harming eighth-ring wizards.
Of course, the high-rank wizards of the Chaos Secret Cult were well aware that the power gathered from the deaths of these dozen or so planes might only be able to exert a relatively weak influence on one of the two eighth-ring wizards from the Noren Workshop.
But in battles between eighth-ring wizards, even a “relatively weak influence” was enough to tilt the scales.
For deciding victory or defeat, it was sufficient.
“The time has come.”
The seventh-ring wizard in charge of manipulating the trump card raised his head. Through layers of rock and phase space barriers, he sensed the antimatter tide still raging in the distance.
The Noren Workshop had poured all its strength into resisting that sea of destruction.
Every ounce of energy from the super-wide-area transmutation array was being used to construct defenses and redirect explosions.
They no longer had any attention to spare.
“Begin transfer.”
The order was issued.
The massive hollow that had been hidden for over a month, along with the gray-black mist and the core blackness inside it, began to slowly emerge from the phase space.
It appeared on the surface as quietly as foam rising from beneath the water.
Then, the auxiliary arrays that had long been arranged around the hollow lit up simultaneously.
Their sole purpose was to launch the black energy mass that had condensed the death wails of dozens of planes.
The target was the four “suns” suspended high in the sky.
That was the battlefield of the eighth-ring wizards from both sides.
The four “suns” floated quietly tens of thousands of kilometers away in the high sky, radiating light and heat bright enough to illuminate the entire plane.
And deep within that light, four figures that ordinary beings could not look at directly were engaged in a contest that transcended conventional understanding.
“Coordinate correction complete. Target locked. Prepare… launch!”
The gray-black mist churned violently.
The core blackness suddenly expanded.
In the next instant, a torrent of energy over a kilometer in diameter, formed purely from the condensed death wails of planes, erupted from that blackness!
Wherever it passed, every living being that perceived it, whether the constructs still fighting on the battlefield or the wizards in the distant camps, felt an uncontrollable wave of despair surge from the bottom of their hearts in the same instant.
That was the wail from the end of more than a dozen worlds.
That was the very taste of “death” itself.
The abyss-like black energy torrent, carrying a terrifying might that could shake even seventh-ring wizards to their core, shot straight toward one of the four “suns” in the sky!
“Success!”
Some Chaos Secret Cult wizards could not help but show expressions of excitement on their faces.
However, their expressions quickly froze.
Because just as that black energy was about to surge into the area enveloped by the light, it stopped.
It was not slowed, deflected, or canceled.
Instead, it came to a complete halt in a manner completely beyond everyone’s expectations.
That kilometer-wide torrent of death, powerful enough to influence the battle between eighth-ring wizards, simply floated motionless in mid-air, as if time itself had frozen around it.
All the Chaos Secret Cult wizards who witnessed this scene were stunned.
“What happened?!”
“Did the array malfunction?”
“Impossible! All nodes are operating normally!”
The seventh-ring wizard in charge of the trump card furrowed his brows tightly. His spiritual power surged madly into the array as he tried to reactivate the black energy mass.
Yet no matter how he urged it, that torrent of death remained completely still, like an insect frozen in amber.
But soon the people of the Chaos Secret Cult noticed something was wrong, because it was not just that.
The distant sea of destruction still raging madly, the continuous annihilation tide triggered by the detonation of twenty trillion tons of antimatter, had also stopped.
All explosions, all impacts, all spreading destructive energy froze in the same instant.
The antimatter fragments that had been blasted outward, the white light being released during annihilation, the shockwaves tearing through space…
Everything, everything, was frozen in place like an image with the pause button pressed.
The battlefield fell into dead silence.
On the alliance camp’s side, everyone was rubbing their eyes with all their might, refreshing their perception, and restarting detection spells.
“What exactly happened?!”
No one could answer.
And just as unease spread among all the alliance wizards, something even more terrifying occurred.
A spiritual fluctuation so vast it was indescribable suddenly spread without warning.
The fluctuation had no specific target. It simply rolled outward across the entire plane like a tide.
Yet even the aftershocks of this fluctuation were enough to cause every living being that perceived it to suddenly see black before their eyes!
It was the instinctive submission and trembling of the soul in the face of that boundless spiritual power.
Inside the camp, countless wizards below the fifth ring directly collapsed to the ground.
Sixth-ring wizards barely managed to steady themselves, but their faces were deathly pale.
Even seventh-ring wizards, in that instant, felt an overwhelming sense of insignificance rising from the depths of their souls, like ants gazing up at the starry sky.
The fluctuation lasted less than three seconds.
But when it dissipated, one inescapable realization remained in everyone’s mind…
That was…
The power of the eighth ring!
Although this power’s aura had not yet touched the realm of fixed laws and could not resist ninth-ring world modification.
In terms of quantity, it had genuinely reached the eighth ring!
Saladin, the current supreme commander of the alliance, was the first to snap out of that dazed state.
He was a veteran seventh-ring wizard who had experienced countless plane wars and witnessed countless powerhouses.
Yet at this moment, his usually steady face showed only a complex expression mixing shock, bitterness, and deep helplessness.
He paused, then revealed an extremely bitter smile at the corner of his mouth:
“We’ve lost.”
The words were spoken lightly.
But every high-rank wizard of the alliance present heard them.
No one refuted it.
Because in the instant that terrifying spiritual tide swept across, everyone had understood…
This war was already over.
No matter how terrifying the Tower of Annihilation’s antimatter reserves were, no matter how many plane death wails the Chaos Secret Cult had collected, no matter how great an advantage the alliance held in bottom-level forces…
The moment the other side created a new eighth-ring combat force and personally intervened in the battlefield, everything had lost meaning.