Chapter 657: Armistice Agreement
The battle had been costly, but the rewards were immense. Jiang Cai’Er had acquired the carcasses of thirty-six Divine King Level Exotic Beasts, and Li Xiang’s recent tempering, combined with the brutal fighting, had pushed him up another tier to Tier Fifty-Six. He also gained a massive amount of Achievement Points.
He poured all his Achievement Points into speed, feeling he was still too slow. The journey from Earth to Mars had taken him over twenty hours. After the upgrade, his Extreme Speed could reach 6,000 kilometers per second.
Of course, the distance between Earth and Mars wasn’t fixed, as it changed dynamically with their orbital positions. Calculating with the average distance of 225 million kilometers, he could now reach Mars in just ten and a half hours at Extreme Speed.
At their closest approach of 55 million kilometers, the journey would take a mere 2.5 hours. At their farthest, 400 million kilometers, it would only take 18.5 hours.
Jiang Cai’Er’s Supercomputing Center had not been damaged. With countless robots and a workforce of nearly three hundred million immigrants, rebuilding the base would not be a problem.
To guard against another attack from the Exotic Beast Army, several armories worked around the clock. Their fully automated assembly lines churned out replacements for all the damaged weapons, producing even more than they had before.
Li Xiang took the Twin Gouyu to a hidden location to heal them. For three days and three nights, he channeled the Star Dome Concerto. Not only did the two women recover to their peak condition, but this ordeal had also tempered them, further increasing their strength.
He also traveled deep into the core of Mars to check on Chiba Yuki.
Since Chiba Yuki’s foundation had been weaker—she hadn’t reached the Peak of the Divine King Realm before beginning her Fusion—the process was taking longer. However, she had already completed about 56% of it.
Chiba Yuki had sensed the war raging on Mars and had grown anxious. Seeing her daughter was injured, she had considered pausing her Fusion with Mars to go to the rescue. But then Li Xiang and the others arrived. Chiba Yuki breathed a sigh of relief, suppressed the impulse, and continued the Fusion process.
She knew that the sooner she became the Master of Mars, the more secure the planet would be, and the better she could help everyone.
Li Xiang comforted her for a time, sharing some of his own experiences from his Fusion with the Heart of the Earth, before leaving to attend to other matters.
While the battle raged on Mars, the Earth-Moon Element was also hit by wave after wave of attacks from the Exotic Beast Army. However, as the main base of operations, the Earth-Moon Element was defended by countless densely packed, high-powered Land-Based and Space-Based weapon systems. With Jiang Cai’Er’s main body presiding over the defense, they managed to forcefully repel three Beast Tides.
As more and more Supercomputing Centers were built and brought online, Jiang Cai’Er’s power grew by leaps and bounds. In fact, she was not far from reaching the Planet Dominator Realm.
「Three months later.」 A larger Beast Tide struck.
Over the next two years, the Beast Tides were relentless. On the Martian front alone, there were seven or eight Beast Tides with over five billion creatures each, but Li Xiang and the women managed to hold the line every time.
On Mars, seven bases had been completed, and eleven of the thirty-six Divine King Level Stellar Mother Ships had entered service. It was thanks to the assistance of these ships that Mars’s defensive capabilities had increased so dramatically.
As time went on, fending them off became easier.
‘This tiny planet Mars, and we still can’t take it?’ The state of the war enraged the Exotic Beast Kings. So, after a lull of more than half a year, the Exotic Beast Army organized its twenty-second major offensive since the war began.
This attack was unlike any before.
It was truly unprecedented.
Because this time, the Space Exotic Beasts had dispatched four at the Planet Dominator Realm.
Of these four Planet Dominator Realm Exotic Beasts, one was a former contender for the Sun. It had voluntarily given up its claim and joined forces with three newly ascended Planet Dominators—one from Venus, one from Uranus, and one from Neptune. They were accompanied by hundreds of Divine King Level, thousands of Divine Tier, and tens of thousands of Saint Tier beasts, along with countless more Below the Saint Tier. This so-called fifty-billion-strong Beast Race army swept toward Mars with overwhelming force.
They knew that the powerful members of the native Human Race were all gathered on Mars. Only by concentrating their superior forces and using absolutely overwhelming power to annihilate Earth’s high-end combatants in one fell swoop could they break the backbone of the Earth Humans. As for the rest, they were not worth mentioning.
The world-blotting Beast Tide was still tens of millions of kilometers away, but Li Xiang’s Nine Nether Falsehood-Breaking Gaze already saw it with perfect clarity. Even he couldn’t help but draw a sharp breath. ‘One against four… the pressure is immense.’
He could handle a one-on-two fight without issue. A one-on-three might be an even match. But one-on-four… ‘Especially when one of them is an old-timer, a being who’s been at the Planet Dominator Realm for who knows how many years and was once qualified to contend for the Sun… I really don’t have the confidence.’ To make matters worse, the enemy also had hundreds of Divine King Level beasts.
‘Of course, many of those at the Divine King Level are just pretenders,’ he thought. ‘For example, those who reached the Divine King Realm by performing Refinement on asteroids or satellites less than 100 kilometers in diameter, or even some less than ten kilometers. That kind of Divine King has the Realm in name only; their combat power isn’t much higher than someone at the Peak of Divine Tier. But there are just so many of them.’
Li Xiang and the women had never even considered such small asteroids and satellites. The ones Li Xiang had chosen for the seven women were all massive moons.
“Jupiter’s Moons I – Erin” had a diameter of 3,660 kilometers. “Jupiter’s Moons II – Yao Dance” was 3,121 kilometers. “Jupiter’s Moons III – Sunny Day” was 5,262 kilometers. “Jupiter’s Moons IV – Hua Mulan” was 4,820 kilometers. “Saturn’s Moon Titan – Yuki” was 5,150 kilometers. “Saturn V – Asatsuyu” was 1,530 kilometers. And “Saturn VIII – Yukigiri” was 1,460 kilometers.
On Li Xiang’s side, every individual at the Divine King Realm was a top performer in their class. Jiang Cai’Er was on another level entirely. Her Supercomputing Centers were spread across Earth and the Moon, and they were now rapidly covering Mars as well. If all the Quantum Computers from her Supercomputing Centers were combined and fused into a single celestial body, it would nearly be the size of a large planet. Moreover, her Fusion rate with the Supercomputing Centers had always been 100%.