Chapter 414: Research and Battle

The scarlet light of the alarm still flickered over the camp, but the atmosphere inside the research center had already transformed.

After the initial shock passed, Jie Ming exchanged glances with the logistics-system wizards in his group. To his surprise, he saw the same gleam in their eyes.

Excitement.

“Total assault? Full mobilization?” Allison, the specialist in pheromone decryption, licked her lips and rapidly operated the rune terminal in front of her. “Perfect! We were just lacking comprehensive behavioral data from high-tier living specimens! An operation of this scale will reveal everything: load patterns in the pheromone network, command hierarchy responses under extreme pressure, coordination mechanisms among eighth-tier individuals… all priceless data!”

“And the energy flows!” Another male wizard, focused on joint casting arrays, excitedly pulled up the monitoring interface. “A trillion-level force mobilizing transcendent power simultaneously—even if most are low-tier, the resulting environmental elemental tides and law disturbances are absolutely worth recording! We might even reverse-engineer deeper bindings between them and the plane’s energy from this!”

Jie Ming fully shared his colleagues’ sentiments.

Their research had indeed reached a bottleneck recently.

While eighth-tier specimens were precious, in the broader research sequence they were merely valuable singular “special” samples.

To truly understand the secrets of an entire civilization—especially its profound connection to a grand phenomenon like time reversal—studying isolated special individuals held limited significance… unless the time reversal itself was caused by a single special individual.

But existing research strongly suggested that possibility was extremely low.

Therefore, this ultimate all-out offensive that staked the survival of their civilization was the ideal observation window.

“Back up all ongoing research data! Package all half-finished analysis reports! Complete within three minutes!” As the special technical advisor, Jie Ming took command of the scene without hesitation. “All portable monitoring instruments, energy scanning arrays, pheromone capture terminals, law fluctuation recorders… take everything! We’re heading to the front line!”

No hesitation. No questions.

Every wizard present was someone who pursued knowledge to the marrow of their bones.

Almost the instant Jie Ming’s words fell, the laboratory filled with the dense sound of rune activations and mechanical whirring.

Data streams were rapidly compressed and sealed into crystals. Delicate observation instruments unlocked from their fixed mounts and were levitated by the wizards.

Jie Ming swept his mental power across his workstation, instantly backing up several preliminary analysis reports on time-law remnants in eighth-tier sample carapaces. The crystals were sent into a specially designated “emergency archive zone” in his Inner Cave Heaven.

Then, together with the other wizards, he levitated dozens of large and small instruments and rushed out of the laboratory, heading straight for the camp perimeter.

When they reached the front line and ascended to the designated observation zone above the main wizard formation, even with mental preparation, Jie Ming still felt his breath catch at the sight.

The Reincarnation Plane had a heaven-round, earth-square structure, offering an extremely wide field of view.

At this moment, on the distant horizon barely visible to the naked eye, a “line” was slowly rising.

It was not a line.

It was a wall.

A colossal black wall connecting heaven and earth, stretching beyond sight to left and right, built purely from writhing living bodies.

It advanced slowly yet irresistibly, devouring every gap between land and sky.

A force on the order of trillions had, in this moment, become the most direct visual impact imaginable—a moving continent, a living calamity.

Even from a thousand kilometers away, the low, droning hum of countless insect wings was faintly audible—a frequency powerful enough to cause the earth itself to resonate.

A faint, almost imperceptible scent began to spread through the air: the mingled odor of billions of carapaces rubbing together and special pheromones.

Yet this suffocating pressure lasted only an instant.

Jie Ming’s gaze quickly returned to calm.

His mental power, cooperating with the newly deployed ultra-long-range energy scanners, rapidly analyzed the black ocean.

“Target count confirmed… energy reaction intensity statistics…” he murmured to himself, fingers swiftly tracing runes on a recording crystal. “The vast majority are first- to second-tier life reactions. Proportion of third-tier and above is less than three per thousand… loose structure, lacking efficient synergistic energy links… pure numerical accumulation.”

Fear stems from the unknown. When the unknown is dissected into data, only research value remains.

Commander Frost evidently shared the same mindset.

Around the observation zone, the wizard legion was already in full readiness.

“Execute according to ‘Observation Protocol—Three.’” Frost’s calm voice came through the mental command network. “All unlocked targeted strike methods are authorized. Research squads, record the data you need.”

The order was given.

The war—or rather, a colossal live experiment—had begun.

The first to strike were not the wizards themselves, but the specially bioengineered cannon-fodder legions tailored to the Sickle-Skull’s carapace and physiological weaknesses.

A silver tide of modified hunting hounds surged forward first. From their maws spewed “Crystallization Disintegration Waves” capable of triggering specific elemental resonance in Sickle-Skull carapaces. Their claws were likewise imbued with specialized vibration frequencies.

Any Sickle-Skull struck found their sturdy carapaces rapidly brittling and cracking from within, like weathered stone.

Close behind came gene bombs dropped by countless aerial units.

These bombs detonated in midair, releasing clouds of nanomachines that hyper-overloaded the Sickle-Skull pheromone receptors.

Instantly, vast swathes of the black insect tide descended into chaos. Individuals collided with one another, even blindly attacking their own kind.

Next came the wizards themselves, unleashing optimized, iterated, and highly targeted witchcraft.

“Frequency Pollution Fields” expanded, distorting all pheromone signals within range and paralyzing the insect tide’s command structure.

“Compound-Eye Overload Flash Spells” erupted one after another across the enemy formation, blinding swathes of Sickle-Skull with blinding radiance and throwing them into disarray.

“Mass Acid Resistance Reversal Curse” took effect silently, causing the Sickle-Skull’s own acid sprays to begin corroding their own carapaces…

A trillion-strong army?

Before this meticulously custom-tailored death package, they were merely data points waiting to be harvested.

The black wall began to collapse the instant it made contact with the silver and energy tides.

Black vanished as though erased by an invisible eraser, disappearing in vast swathes.

Shattered carapaces, spraying bodily fluids, dissipating energy fell like a black avalanche, yet their forward momentum was abruptly halted—then reversed.

Jie Ming and all the logistics wizards had long since ceased marveling at the battle results. Their entire focus was now locked on the array of monitoring instruments before them.

Energy fluctuation graphs scrolled at high speed, recording the subtle resonances between the plane’s foundational laws and the energy ripples released by trillions of dying individuals.

Pheromone capture terminals flashed red, desperately seizing chemical signals of despair, chaos, final commands, and collapse amid the battlefield’s violent energy turbulence.

Macro law scanning arrays remained firmly locked on the central battlefield region—especially the positions of the three eighth-tier Sickle-Skull leaders—monitoring for any possible anomalous spacetime disturbance beyond normal parameters.

“Elemental tide readings anomalous! Coordinates (734, 291) region—elemental subsidence rate 17% faster than model prediction!”

“Pheromone network core frequency band showing high-intensity, high-compression ‘termination command’ broadcast! Attempting decryption!”

“Alert! Eighth-tier target energy reactions showing synchronized fluctuations! Suspected initiation of joint mechanism!”

On the observation platform, warning tones and wizards’ reports rose and fell in a tense yet orderly rhythm.

Everyone moved like wound-up mechanisms, eyes glued to screens, mental power frantically operating or recording.

Jie Ming’s task was to collect and archive the crystals at critical data nodes.

He moved between instruments like a phantom. Whenever a set of key data was fully captured and sealed, he swiftly retrieved the corresponding crystal and sent it into the Inner Cave Heaven.

Within the Cave Heaven, a new mountain of crystals—labeled “Fourth Loop—Total Assault Observation”—was rapidly taking shape.

Time passed swiftly amid slaughter and data collection.

Finally, the wizard responsible for global biological population dynamic monitoring issued an urgent alert: “Warning! Sickle-Skull battlefield surviving count has dropped to the preset ‘loop trigger alert threshold’! Time reversal probability rising sharply! Repeat—probability rising sharply!”

At these words, the atmosphere on the observation platform did not grow panicked—instead, it became even more fervent.

“All instruments, switch to maximum frequency sampling! Disregard equipment wear!”

“Focus on eighth-tier targets! Record their energy release patterns and law interactions in their final moments!”

“Pheromone network! Capture the global signal structure in the last instant before collapse!”

The wizards roared, pushing their instruments to the absolute limit, even at the cost of burning out some equipment lifespans.

They intended to squeeze out every last valuable piece of data before the “experiment” was forcibly reset.

Jie Ming’s crystal collection reached its peak speed. His entire body blurred into an afterimage.

His Inner Cave Heaven operated at full capacity, ensuring every crystal bearing precious data was safely stored.

Then, at a certain moment…

That fundamental pulling sensation originating from the root of the world descended without warning.

The fibers of time and space were once again plucked by an invisible hand. All things began sliding back toward their origin.

“It’s here!” Jie Ming’s mind rang with alarm.

In the final instant before his consciousness was forcibly stripped away and his vision began to blur and distort, his reaction reached its utmost limit.

His mental power exploded outward across the entire observation platform. The entrance to his Inner Cave Heaven expanded to its maximum.

Collect!

All still-operating monitoring instruments, uncollected recording crystals, even the crystal plates still being inscribed in the hands of nearby wizards…

Everything on the platform related to research and potentially carrying information from this loop was forcibly drawn into the Inner Cave Heaven in the blink of an eye!

Hum…

The world turned pure white, then plunged into void-like darkness.

The fifth loop began.