ebookpocket.com Chapter 103 : Chapter 103
Chapter 103 : Chapter 103
Chapter 103: A Victory Without Cheers
Li Mu’s thinking was simple.
If humanity lost, then he would carry off the Mother Crystal and throw it as far away as possible,
in the hope of drawing the monsters away.
As long as the green hills remained, there would always be another chance someday.
But after flying over Pearl Military District, Li Mu quickly came to a stop.
The things falling from the sky were, for the most part, the corpses of enormous Profound Rank monsters.
And the low-grade monsters were retreating in a mad tide, like receding floodwater.
The Abyss monsters had been utterly defeated.
Li Mu flew to the front of the command center.
He saw Liang Huajun and the others returning from the battlefield.
There was a huge wound on Liang Huajun’s forehead, so deep that bone could be seen.
If one did not look closely, one might even think his skull had split open.
Liang Huajun was personally carrying the unconscious Wang Longcheng on his back.
Behind him followed Liao Feng, Commissioner Lu, and seven other Profound Rank martial artists.
Adjutant Zhang and the others also came running in from different directions in the distance.
Some of them were carrying wounded men on their backs as well.
Nearly everyone was injured.
Li Mu quickly went up to meet them.
Activating Fiery Eyes and Golden Gaze, he could still see the flow of True Qi within Wang Longcheng’s body, which meant Wang Longcheng was not dead yet. He was only injured.
Adjutant Zhang’s own shoulder and thigh were both drenched in blood.
Yet he still hurried ahead first and took Wang Longcheng from Liang Huajun’s back, immediately checking his injuries.
“Commander, I have failed the military district’s trust in me...”
Guidance Officer Liu stepped forward, his old eyes brimming with tears and his face full of guilt.
The moment Liang Huajun saw the look on Guidance Officer Liu’s face, he knew the casualties this time had to be severe.
He raised a hand and cut Guidance Officer Liu off.
“There’s no time for nonsense!”
“Pass the order down. Everyone who can still move is to go onto the battlefield and search for the wounded!”
“If they’re alive, we find the person. If they’re dead, we recover the body!”
“No soldier is to be abandoned in those mountains of corpses and seas of blood!”
“Contact the Surface Health Department and urgently mobilize every healer we have to come down and save people with everything they’ve got!”
Liang Huajun issued his orders in steady succession.
Everyone accepted their orders and left to carry them out.
After resting for a while and recovering some True Qi, Li Mu also joined the search team for the wounded.
He transformed into an eagle and patrolled the skies, sweeping the battlefield with Fiery Eyes and Golden Gaze.
Any living thing with True Qi flowing through it could not escape Li Mu’s eyes.
But as Li Mu flew onward, a deep sorrow rose in his heart.
The Li Mu of the past had lived in a peaceful country.
He had only heard people speak of how cruel war was, but had never experienced it himself.
Now, he had.
Humanity had won.
Yet there was no one cheering.
Waves of anguished crying drifted up from the mountains of corpses and seas of blood.
Together with the smell of blood, they spread across the wilderness.
The corpses of monsters stretched for miles, piled up like mountains.
Very few bodies remained whole. Severed limbs were everywhere, faces mangled beyond recognition...It was like hell itself.
Li Mu spent more than three full hours doing nothing but rescuing the wounded and handling the dead.
Reinforcements from the military districts of Linyuan City and Bloodpool City arrived one after another.
They began helping Pearl Military District and Red Moon Military District deal with the aftermath of the battle.
As for the soldiers who had participated in the fight, orders were passed down for the wounded to receive treatment and the uninjured to go rest.
After all, everyone had worked to the point of exhaustion.
Li Mu and the others also received orders from above telling them to leave the Abyss for now and return to the surface to rest.
Staying below would only add to the chaos.
The post-battle work alone would take at least a day or two.
First, they had to count the casualties, do everything possible to save the wounded, bury the dead, and provide for the military families.
After that would come the handling of monster corpses, as well as the restoration and reinforcement of all the war-related defensive measures, such as Libra Space and the Linked-Star Grand Defensive Array, in case the monsters launched another attack.
Only after all that would they review the combat recordings and award merit accordingly.
Li Mu, Zhang Zhiwei, and Lu Chenfeng took the elevator back to the surface together.
As they watched team after team of medical personnel board airships and be dispatched into the Abyss, all three felt the weight in their hearts.
The three of them got into Zhang Zhiwei’s car together.
Then they simply sat there in silence, staring blankly ahead.
The atmosphere remained quiet for more than ten minutes.
At last, Lu Chenfeng spoke first.
“Going home?”
Zhang Zhiwei started the car. “I’ll arrange a place first. We should wash all this off before going home.”
Li Mu looked at the blood covering the three of them and nodded in agreement.
Zhang Zhiwei drove while Li Mu called his mother to let her know he was safe.
After that, he opened the system.
Current Triumph Points: 12,850 points.
Li Mu had already spent a great many points, and yet he still had over twelve thousand left.
But there were far too many things he needed to improve right now.
Those twelve thousand points really did not feel like much to him.
So he began to calculate.
At present, Divine Weapon Art had once again been upgraded to the limit his cultivation could endure.
Whether it was his military rank and position, or higher levels of Divine Weapon Art and the Heavenly Immortal Art, all of it required him to raise his cultivation as soon as possible.
So Li Mu set his sights on three things.
Listen Close, Alchemy Art, and Blessed Field Art.
He began with Listen Close.
But when Li Mu tried to use 5,000 Triumph Points on Listen Close in one go,
the system prompted him that he could only use 3,175 points first.
So Li Mu spent the 3,175.
[Consumed 3,175 Triumph Points. Enhancement of “Listen Close” successful.]
[Listen Close: Store the divine weapon in the ear’s Xumi Space and cultivate through constant insight at all times, at 500% of normal cultivation speed.]
Li Mu froze.
Could it be that five times cultivation speed was the limit?
But when he tried using another 1,000 Triumph Points on Listen Close, it could still be enhanced further.
Only the cultivation speed did not increase anymore.
[Consumed 1,000 Triumph Points. Enhancement of “Listen Close” successful.]
[Listen Close: Store the divine weapon in the ear’s Xumi Space and cultivate through constant insight at all times, at 500% of normal cultivation speed. It can hear the killing wind of an enemy’s attack and unconsciously, with no cooldown, instantly cast your current strongest defensive cultivation art at 10% effectiveness.]
“What the—?!!!”
Li Mu’s jaw nearly hit the floor.
An unconscious trigger, no cooldown, and instant cast?!
Li Mu’s strongest defensive cultivation art right now was Dragon’s Final Resonance.
Which meant that, from this moment on, even if someone launched a sneak attack from behind and Li Mu never saw it, Listen Close would still anticipate the attack and automatically cast a Dragon’s Final Resonance shield in an instant.
And if some tentacle monster attacked him from multiple directions, then it would generate countless Dragon’s Final Resonance shields to block them.
Its effectiveness was only 10%, which meant the defensive power and explosive force of those automatically cast shields were both only 10% of the original.
It might be weak right now and not necessarily able to block much.
But the numbers were not what mattered. As long as he had Triumph Points, he could raise them sooner or later.
What mattered was the form of the skill.
As long as the skill framework was good enough, the numbers were only a matter of time.
Li Mu silently marveled at how absurdly powerful it was.
He checked his remaining Triumph Points. He still had 8,675 left.
He almost wanted to pour them all into Listen Close.
But his cultivation was important too.
So he opened Alchemy Art.
He spent 1,000 points and unlocked three pills.
[Low-Grade Qi-Gathering Pill] 100 points
[High-Grade Qi-Gathering Pill] 300 points
[Earthvein Spirit Splendor Pill] 600 points
He had unlocked the Low-Grade Qi-Gathering Pill because it was a prerequisite skill.
Without lighting it up first, he could not unlock the high-grade version.
Still, Li Mu did not think it was a waste.
Because for something low-grade, he had a feeling he would need it sooner or later.
As the name suggested, the High-Grade Qi-Gathering Pill gathered Qi into the body and directly accelerated cultivation.
And the Earthvein Spirit Splendor Pill was a step above even the High-Grade Qi-Gathering Pill.
Its effect was: to condense Spiritual Energy and strengthen the Meridians.
If the Qi-Gathering Pill increased the height of one’s cultivation, then the Earthvein Spirit Splendor Pill increased its depth and breadth. It belonged to the category of solidifying one’s foundation.
It was perfect, because whether the Spiritual Energy came from cultivating through Listen Close or from the Qi-Gathering Pill, it still needed to be refined.
At a time like that, swallowing an Earthvein Spirit Splendor Pill to refine all that drifting Spiritual Energy in an instant was a flawless match.
He had 7,675 Triumph Points left.
Li Mu opened Blessed Field Art.
Blessed Field Art consumed far more points than Alchemy Art.
Li Mu only upgraded it four times, yet it still cost him 3,500 points.
But the effects were also astonishingly obvious.
[When using Spiritual Spring water to refine pills, pill effectiveness increases by 10%.]
[Obtained a Spiritual Spring river channel with adaptive flow and unlimited circulation.]
[Blessed Field range expanded to 200 mu.]
[Blessed Field fertility increased to one day equals two years.]
One day equals two years. As the name implied, a plant grown there for one day would mature as though it had grown for two years.
Earlier, Li Mu had roughly estimated that Blessed Field plus irrigation from the Spiritual Spring only amounted to about one day equaling one year.
But now that he had a river channel with adaptive flow, he no longer needed to dig pits to store water, nor did he have to worry about whether the water from the Spiritual Spring source would flood or dry up.
Whenever he needed irrigation, he could simply divert water from the river channel.
Now, with the fertility of the Blessed Field plus irrigation from the Spiritual Spring, it should amount to something like one day equaling two and a half years.
That was enough for cultivation for the moment.
The next step was to buy a massive quantity of seeds, plant a great stretch of land, wait for the harvest, and then start refining pills.
He still had 4,175 Triumph Points left.
Li Mu fixed his eyes on a new Divine Ability.