A stream of light pierced through the golden glow on the Dharma Aspect's chest, then through the true body's chest and head, directly blasting a massive hole in Jie Ming's upper body—a hole with a diameter comparable to a small town—before disappearing into the depths of the Endless Chaotic Void.
Viola hovered at a safe distance, quietly watching Jie Ming's true body, which had been blasted away, its head shattered.
She raised a hand to cover her mouth, not hiding her laughter.
The laugh was crisp and bright, carrying a hint of mischief, transmitted clearly through their encrypted channel.
"How about it?"
She spoke slowly after laughing enough, her tone still lingering with the amusement of a spectator.
"Do you understand what type of attack that was?"
Jie Ming's ruined true body stabilized in the void.
His head was now only half intact; the forehead area containing the vertical eye between his brows was unharmed, but most of his face had vanished, revealing the dark-gold tissue rapidly wriggling inside.
Below the neck, a gaping hole had been blasted clean through his chest.
The flesh at the edges was visibly growing and reshaping.
New muscle fibers wove together layer by layer like fabric; shattered bones reconstituted from the fractures, emitting low, subtle grinding sounds. In the blink of an eye, most of Jie Ming's injuries had healed.
While grimacing and repairing his true body, he rapidly analyzed the data from that strike in his mental sea.
"I understand—the enemy used a purely high-compression energy attack."
Jie Ming spoke slowly, his tone carrying a hint of acknowledgment.
"No special attributes—just compressing stellar-level energy into an extremely small cross-section and firing it all at once. The power is indeed ferocious; conventional defense of a Level 7 being might not fully withstand it."
He flexed his newly regrown shoulder, feeling the bite between the new bone and the original, raising an eyebrow slightly. The power of that strike had indeed exceeded his expectations.
Crude method, no fancy attributes.
But the synchronized volley from tens of thousands of warships had clearly undergone extremely precise cooperative focusing, and with that dark red beam, the originally dispersed energy was forcibly concentrated at a single point, causing the energy density to skyrocket to a terrifying level in an instant.
Given Viola's physical constitution, if she had taken that hit, she would indeed have been injured.
After all, even without any special effects, sheer energy intensity exceeding a certain threshold could cause severe damage to the soul. So from the situation earlier, it was indeed optimal for him to charge at the front.
But he had definitely been "tricked" by Viola.
Jie Ming straightened up again, his healed jaw moving slightly in midair, bones grinding with faint clicks. He turned his head to look at Viola, who was still laughing, his expression caught between helplessness and resignation.
"Senior Sister, your bad taste really hasn't changed."
Viola laughed even more brightly upon hearing this, clearly not denying it.
Jie Ming couldn't be bothered to argue with her further.
He first quickly organized the data he had observed while being hit in his mental sea, then reported.
"During that volley, I sensed the complete military deployment inside the enemy's planar barrier." Jie Ming narrowed his eyes, continuously sorting the gathered data in his mind. "There are tens of thousands of Level 6 beings and Level 6 warships, as you also saw, Senior Sister. But within those Level 6 units, there are also over a hundred Level 7 beings and eight Level 8 beings."
He paused here, the vertical eye between his brows shifting slightly.
Actually, those Level 7 beings were manageable, but the eight Level 8 beings hid well, concealing themselves inside the warships and using various methods to shield their presence.
Unfortunately, their existence was still detected by Jie Ming's True Illusion Void-Shattering Eye.
"This should be roughly all the forces they've stored in this planar barrier. Fight or not?"
Jie Ming spoke calmly, perhaps even too calmly.
After all, "over a hundred Level 7, eight Level 8"—such numbers would make any normal Level 5 wizard consider retreating immediately.
If it were only Jie Ming alone, he would have to think carefully. But with Viola present, he wasn't too worried.
Sure enough, Viola didn't even blink; she even curled her lips slightly.
"Of course we... continue."
Her reply was crisp and decisive, without a hint of hesitation.
Jie Ming sighed, having expected this outcome.
Viola's strength was evident—her Law of Agony, when facing beings that inherently possessed the concept of "agony," had lethality that was absurdly high.
As long as the enemy couldn't instant-kill her, she would become an ever-stronger perpetual motion machine, growing fiercer with battle.
And he himself, though only Level 5, had his defense repeatedly reinforced through multiple iterations of the body-forging method.
With the two of them—one attacking, one defending—if they really went all out, they might not be without a chance.
Moreover, those Level 7 and Level 8 beings still hadn't shown themselves.
This indicated that these beings were likely even more afraid than they were.
After all, earlier when Jie Ming probed into the plane, short as the time was, he had gathered more than one fear signal.
The only trouble was that if they really continued fighting, he would definitely be the vanguard again.
"Fine."
Jie Ming turned around in resignation.
The second-layer Dharma Aspect materialized again in the void, dark-gold radiance rapidly reassembling behind him into a golden phantom five hundred kilometers tall. This time, he specifically reinforced the chest and head areas of the Dharma Aspect, to avoid being blown through again by that kind of volley.
The outline of the Dharma Aspect slowly straightened in the void, its massive hands once again gripping the edges of the rift that had shrunk somewhat in the planar barrier. Then, it suddenly exerted force.
Boom!!!
The rift was forcibly torn wider by him in both directions, the terrifying spatial dragging force causing the entire void to emit a low moan.
Then, Jie Ming's true body slowly squeezed into the interior of the plane again.
This time, he didn't just stick half his body in like before; instead, he sank his entire upper body bit by bit into the rift, his arms braced against both sides of the barrier, continuing to expand the wound in the sky that had been forcibly torn open.
Of course, the octopus-men fleet inside the plane wouldn't sit idly by and watch him barge in.
Inside the flagship's command cabin, the octopus-man commander's tentacles had already turned mostly white.
He stared fixedly at the massive dark-gold figure slowly squeezing into the sky on the screen, his orders coming without pause.
"Fire space annihilation bombs!"
Dozens of silver-white missiles howled out of launch silos on various warships, trailing long tails of flame, like meteors tearing through the night, diving straight at Jie Ming's Dharma Aspect.
Before the warheads truly got close, they all detonated in midair.
But these were not ordinary explosives; they were strategic weapons that created constantly collapsing spatial collapse zones at the point of impact.
The golden light around the Dharma Aspect was violently torn at the edges of the collapse zones, dragged into several visible cracks. The light at the edges of the cracks flickered unsteadily amid spatial distortion, as if about to go out at any moment.
Jie Ming glanced down at those collapsing spatial vortices, but his hands didn't pause at all.
Space annihilation?
Compared to the impact from the Reflection Dimension passage that directly erased everything, attacks of this level were at most a miniature version.
He had taken worse!
So facing this attack, Jie Ming neither dodged nor avoided, continuing to exert force.
"Fire strategic singularity oscillation cannons!"
Another command fell.
A particularly massive battleship suddenly blasted out a visible gravitational wave from its bow.
Where the wave passed, air was directly compressed into plasma, and spatial structure deformed violently under the pull of gravitational tides, as if an entire void passage had been twisted into a pretzel.
Boom!
The oscillation cannon struck the chest of the Dharma Aspect head-on.
The golden protective layer instantly dented into a massive depression dozens of kilometers in diameter. The golden light at the edge of the depression fluctuated wildly, as if it might collapse at any moment. Jie Ming's true body inside the Dharma Aspect was shaken and swayed slightly, but quickly stabilized again.
He assessed the extent of the damage and quickly made a record in his mental sea.
The power of this strike was indeed considerable, enough to penetrate the local protection of the Dharma Aspect.
But compared to that high-compression energy attack from the volley of tens of thousands of ships, the energy density was still a notch lower.
"Deploy dissociation fields!"
Pale green fields spread from the shield generators of each ship, quickly enveloping Jie Ming's Dharma Aspect.
In an instant, it was as if the entire void was covered by a dim emerald film.
Inside the field, the strong and weak interaction forces between particles were forcibly weakened, and the golden light on the Dharma Aspect's surface immediately showed fine cracks, like a piece of golden glass about to shatter.
Jie Ming looked down at the cracks, the vertical eye between his brows shifting slightly.
The principle of the dissociation field was to destroy the binding energy of matter at the molecular level. The first contact was indeed effective.
But that was all.
His body-forging method began to operate almost instinctively, conducting adaptive adjustments to the frequency of the dissociation field.
The cracks stopped spreading after a few breaths, then slowly began to heal.
Seeing that the attacks were still ineffective, the tentacles on the octopus-man commander's face had turned white, almost bloodless.
His orders kept coming, but the confidence in his voice was visibly draining away.
"What else can we use..."
"Use all trump cards—throw everything at him!"
For a time, all kinds of ultimate techniques began to pour ceaselessly toward Jie Ming.
Particle storms, phase tears, entropy fields, dimensional cuts...
Each one alone would be enough to make an ordinary Level 6 wizard steer clear.
But when these attacks landed on Jie Ming, the best they could manage was a limited effect.
And the second time they were used, the power noticeably decayed; by the third time, they were almost completely ineffective.
Only the pure high-compression energy volley from the beginning could barely maintain a relatively stable lethality.
But that also required tens of thousands of warships to synchronize their buildup and couldn't be fired continuously.
Among the fleet, an octopus-faced operator's fingers trembled wildly over the controls, his tentacles constantly adjusting parameters in front of the screen, trying to extract a logic from the detection data that could explain the absurd scene before him.
He failed.
He turned to look at his companion, finding the other's tentacles trembling just as much.
"Is this the 'Terminal Apostle'?"
He asked in a voice barely above a whisper, the fear in his voice so thick he couldn't suppress it himself.
His companion did not answer.
But the surrounding octopus-faces all heard it.
For a moment, silence spread like tidewater through every corner of the command cabin.
Many of the octopus-faces present had actually heard the name "Terminal Apostle," this calamity known as a natural disaster.
In the intelligence system of the Multiracial Alliance, this word occasionally appeared in the highest-level alarm bulletins.
But those bulletins were often vague, offering only some blurry parameters and exaggerated descriptions.
Most thought it was merely some special monster born from bizarre unknown rules.
Though extremely powerful, still just a savage and primitive existence.
Some even privately mocked the troops sent to the front lines to defend against the Terminal Apostle.
It's just a bunch of primitive creatures—why so nervous?
But today, for the first time, they truly witnessed the horror of this calamity face-to-face.
The data on the screen continued to refresh. The target's energy level remained stable at Level 5.
A mere Level 5 being, yet it endured the full firepower of the entire expedition fleet, tearing open the planar barrier layer by layer like peeling a nut.
Those strategic weapons capable of vaporizing small planes left a mark the first time, but the second time they were already harmless.
Dissociation fields, space annihilation, singularity oscillations—each was a top-tier attack method that could be written into textbooks, yet before him, they were like snowballs casually thrown by children.
Their worldview was being smashed to pieces, punch by punch.
More and more octopus-faced operators began to lose control of their fingers, their minds edging toward collapse.
Many octopus-men had tentacles shaking like sieves.
After all, their respiratory organs were located at the base of their tentacles; the more they tried to take deep breaths, the more their tentacles shook.
And Jie Ming was fully focused on pushing into the plane.
His body-forging method rapidly adapted and evolved under the relentless attacks.
Every time an attack struck his body, it automatically performed an iterative optimization against that type of attack.
Later, apart from that high-compression volley that pooled the energy of tens of thousands of warships—which could still push him back a distance—all other flashy special attacks splashed against him like raindrops on a stone slab, barely even creating ripples in the golden light of the Dharma Aspect.
He could sense that the Level 7 and Level 8 beings hidden deep within the warship formation were still continuing to hide.
But he didn't actively seek them out either.
After all, at this rate, in a few more hours, he would be able to fully pry open the entire planar barrier.
By then, they wouldn't be able to hide even if they wanted to.