Chapter 646 - 548: The Eerie Plane and Silence
Chapter 646: Chapter 548: The Eerie Plane and Silence
The dizziness brought on by the ultra-long-distance teleportation had not yet fully faded when Jeming already felt the desolate and rock-hard texture beneath his feet.
The free-flowing Elements in the air were extremely thin, carrying a kind of dry, rusty smell.
He lifted his eyes and looked around; all about him was a boundless dark-red wasteland, and at the end of the horizon he could occasionally see massive Metal structures half-buried in the soil.
"So this is the Ship Plane." Jeming understood.
He was all too familiar with this kind of war base remodeled from an abandoned Plane.
Space Stabilization was excellent, suitable for large-scale troop assembly; the only drawback was the scarcity of free Elements. It was regarded as the primary military base for Wizards waging Plane War.
Buzz!!!
The air trembled continuously, and teleportation light kept flaring up around him.
Figures walked out one after another from the silver-white spatial ripples, each exuding a more terrifying presence than the last.
Jeming swept his gaze over them and was slightly shocked.
Every Wizard emerging from the light radiated an oppressive force that made the air itself twist.
In the elite missions he had participated in before, Second and Third Level Official Wizards were the main force.
But here, everywhere his eyes landed he saw Fourth and Fifth Level Wizards, and there were even quite a few Sixth Level Grand Wizards who stirred Law Resonance with the slightest movement of their hands and feet.
Farther away, atop several raised platforms, a few auras as unfathomable as the Abyss stood there silently.
"Those are... Seventh Level?" Jeming restrained his aura, his heart suddenly clear.
"Information processing and Destiny Element knowledge... sure enough, it’s a field where High Level Wizards cluster together."
Likewise, Planes that involved information processing and the Law of Destiny were inherently the domain of High Tier Wizards.
If a Wizard’s Level was insufficient and they came here, they might not even be able to perceive the existence of the enemy, much less talk about fighting.
Wizards were all smart people; naturally, they wouldn’t casually throw their lives away.
However, Jeming’s attention soon shifted away from his colleagues.
He turned his gaze toward the sky overhead, and as he saw the scene above, his pupils abruptly contracted.
The firmament of the Ship Plane had been torn open by an enormous black rift stretching across ten thousand miles.
On the other side of the rift, the most eye-catching thing was not the varicolored Chaotic Void, but an existence that would make any researcher feel their scalp crawl.
It was a sphere so orderly it was practically a work of art.
Under normal circumstances, the background color of the Endless chaotic void was twisted and chaotic, like countless paints splashed together at random and then violently stirred.
So-called Planes, in essence, were nothing more than a cluster of Elements that, by chance, formed order and finally gave rise to miracles.
Thus, even the Plane barriers with the sharpest boundaries weren’t particularly conspicuous when placed within the vaster Endless chaotic void.
A normal Plane set in the Endless chaotic void was like finding a slightly more uniform patch of color amid chaos, its outline only barely distinguishable.
But this Plane was different!
This Plane... was too regular.
The entire Plane formed a perfect sphere, a circle in the geometric sense.
And its color was pure white, without the slightest trace of any other hue, as though some power had forcibly unified all internal colors into the same frequency.
Against the chaotic, twisted, and jumbled background of the Endless Void, this Plane seemed like a geometric body trimmed out by some supreme logic.
It floated against the background of the Chaotic Void, so out of place it was almost painful to look at.
Even stranger, this Plane gave off an abnormally deathly stillness.
Jeming had seen countless Planes. Even a Plane on the verge of collapse, or a Plane whose resources had been completely drained—those that Wizards called abandoned Planes—would still show some "activity": Energy tides, Elemental flows, or even the Plane’s own pulsation.
But this white sphere had nothing.
It just hung there in silence, with no atmospheric circulation, no Plane tremors, no reaction of any kind.
Like a pallid, lifeless eyeball, overlooking the entire Void.
"This is way too regular..." Jeming murmured. "So regular it doesn’t look like something formed naturally—it’s more like a massive... storage unit."
In any case, with Jeming’s current reconnaissance methods, he couldn’t find a single flaw in this sphere.
"What the hell is this thing..."
A Wizard’s mutter drifted over from not far away.
Jeming didn’t even need to turn his head to know it was a supporter who had just teleported in like himself.
As more and more supporting Wizards arrived, that anomalous sphere in the sky was noticed by an increasing number of people.
A commotion spread through the crowd.
Deep voices rose one after another from the surrounding Wizards, a mixture of awe, fanaticism, and solemnity.
In the face of unknown terror, Low Tier Wizards might be afraid, but to this group of truth-seeking elites, it was more a kind of greed and excitement toward High Level knowledge.
Curiosity, astonishment, excitement...
All kinds of Emotions blended together, yet not a single person acted rashly.
After all, there were no idiots among Wizards who could Cultivate to this Level.
There were still three days left until the assembly time stated in the notification. Some people gathered in small groups to converse in low voices, others found a corner to sit alone and rest with their eyes closed.
Jeming also withdrew his gaze.
He crouched down and pressed his palm against the wasteland’s ground.
Alchemy activated, and the gray-brown soil wriggled, condensed, and took shape under the effect of his Spiritual Power...
In the blink of an eye, a simple yet comfortable backed chair appeared in place under the workings of Alchemy.
Jeming sat down at his leisure, closed his eyes, and let his consciousness sink into his Inner Grotto Heaven.
"Begin synchronization self-check."
Inside the Grotto Heaven, five hundred Black Giant Priests were sitting in perfectly uniform ranks around an altar that had long since been constructed.
That was an information transmission device paired with the Fate System. Through the Incense Fire Divine Dao link, it could establish cross-Plane communication with the massive believer cluster far away on the Purgatory Sulfur Plane and obtain support from the Fate System.
"What’s the operating status of the altar and the Fate System?"
"Master, Fate System load at 3.2%, logic checks normal, information overflow redundancy has been cleared." The voice of the Black Giant Priest leader sounded in Jeming’s mind.
At the same time, this Black Giant Priest also projected the information he saw onto a light screen:
[Fate System connection status: Stable]
[Cross-space Energy transmission: Normal]
[Information flow parsing level: Efficiency 88%]
Although the efficiency dropped a bit because this was an additional transmission system, it was still sufficient.
Jeming withdrew his consciousness, satisfied.
Three days were enough for him to confirm the Fate System’s operating status, so he didn’t have to worry about it failing on the battlefield.
...
...
At noon three days later, an overwhelming pressure that seemed capable of igniting the entire wasteland descended without warning.
That pressure came without any warning, yet it was as heavy as a whole Plane pressing down on everyone’s shoulders.
Jeming’s breath hitched, the Spiritual Qi in his body automatically circulating to resist, and then that pressure vanished in an instant.
All the Wizards on the wasteland rose to their feet at the same time.
In the sky, a man whose eyes flickered with red light like starlit embers stepped down through the air.
He was a middle‑aged male Wizard who looked a little over forty, with short gray‑white hair and a stern face, wearing an extremely minimalist gray robe.
He had no Energy leaking out at all; he simply floated there quietly, yet all the Wizards present instinctively lowered their gaze.
There was no doubt this was the initiator of this Plane War, the Eighth Level Wizard leading the expedition.
"I am Martin of the Heart of Ashes."
The man’s voice wasn’t loud, but it clearly entered everyone’s ears.
"You should have read the intel on this Plane before coming." Martin’s gaze swept across the crowd. "But intel can’t describe this Plane’s dangers in detail. What I must tell you now is: this Plane is extremely dangerous, especially in ways that target data and information processing capability. If any of you have no confidence in yourselves in this aspect, you can still leave now."
No one moved.
The whole field was silent, no one wavering.
Martin seemed to have anticipated this long ago. He raised his hand, and an enormous holographic image spread out in front of the rift.
It was footage recorded by the Ship Plane.
In the footage, "Heart of Ashes" Martin charged at the front, followed by five Seventh Level Wizards, dozens of Sixth Level Wizards, and a densely packed Wizard legion of over a hundred thousand.
They passed through that black rift, entering a pure white Plane.
Then...
No sooner had their front feet stepped into the Plane than trouble struck the next moment.
The leader, Martin, was basically unaffected.
But behind him, three Seventh Level Wizards lost consciousness in an instant, their bodies falling straight down.
Immediately afterward, twenty people among the Sixth Level Wizards collapsed at the same time, like puppets whose strings had been cut all at once.
Further back, the Wizard legion fell into chaos, the front ranks toppling in swathes, while those in the rear finally reacted, urgently halting and retreating in alarm.
The scene froze.
"Heart of Ashes" Martin’s voice sounded: "We have already examined all the Wizards who were hit. Every one of them, along with their Magic Network Terminal, their personal Witchcraft Artifacts, and even the various imprints in their Sea of Spirit, have fallen into a bizarre ’silence’ state."
Martin waved his hand, and hundreds of floating medical pods were transported to the center of the wasteland, evenly distributed for the surrounding Wizards to inspect.
The pod doors opened, revealing the ’unconscious’ Wizards inside.
Jeming quickly approached one of the Wizards.
It was a Sixth Level Wizard, female, still wearing the battle robe she had worn during combat.
Jeming activated the All‑Purpose Eye, and a torrent of data flowed through his vision.
Bodily functions normal, Sea of Spirit intact, even the Magic Network Terminal was still running, and the Sea of Spirit remained active.
Those imprints, thought activities, even instinctive Magic deductions were all operating normally.
Like a machine with the engine running, gears turning, every component functioning as it should...
But there was "no effect whatsoever."
"Their thoughts are still roaring along, they may even have experienced thousands of battles in their minds." Jeming took a deep breath. "But all of their output vanishes at the very instant it’s about to execute."
Only then did he understand why "Heart of Ashes" Martin had used such strange wording.
Any attempt to transmit information outward from the Sea of Spirit—whether thought fluctuations or Spiritual Power projection—would, at the moment it was about to leave the Sea of Spirit, be transformed by some force into complete silence.
Not cut off or blocked, but ’silenced’.
Like sound still exists, but the air is gone and the vibration cannot propagate.
Jeming withdrew his Spiritual Power and raised his head to look at the face of that ’silenced’ Wizard.
Breathing steady, the eyeballs beneath her eyelids occasionally rolling.
She was thinking, she was active, but everything about her was trapped within her own body, unable to exert any influence on the outside world ever again.
"Indeed, they’re not in a coma, their thoughts are running normally. It’s just... they’ve been ’silenced’."
Jeming slowly straightened up.
He looked at the pure white perfect sphere hanging in the sky, then at the surrounding Wizards whose expressions were just as grim, and drew in a deep breath.
"As expected, this is troublesome enough."
He murmured, yet the corner of his mouth curved up slightly.