Just before the seventh-level Octopusman battle group completed its encirclement, Jie Ming had already charged into the periphery of their fleet.
In that instant, his figure transformed into a dark golden stream of light. He activated both Void Step and Light God Transformation simultaneously, his entire body skimming almost directly along the edge of the warship formation.
The foremost seventh-level Octopusmen reacted swiftly; their armor nozzles erupted with intense tail flames as three energy beams simultaneously sealed off his path ahead.
Jie Ming’s eyebrow twitched. Instead of retreating, he advanced, veering sharply upward.
Boom!
The first energy beam grazed his shoulder, piercing straight through the side of an escort ship behind him.
The second struck the surface of the Return to Ruins Armor, creating a small ripple that was barely absorbed by the steady-state field.
The third, following the trajectory of the second, broke through the Return to Ruins Armor, but he managed to dodge by shifting his position; the residual energy only shaved off a corner of his robe’s hem.
And he himself, taking advantage of the momentum, had already charged directly in front of that escort ship.
That was a standard sixth-level warship—long and narrow, its surface covered with a deep blue energy coating, and a dense ring of shield runes inlaid around the bridge.
With a single glance, Jie Ming quickly completed his preliminary assessment in his spiritual sea.
The material was primarily high-density alloy; the outer hull was layered with multiple energy buffer structures, and inside were embedded neural-linked control circuits. Compared to the warships of the Wizard Civilization, this craft seemed more like a fusion of biological control, energy technology, and racial consciousness. The technical approach was not particularly sophisticated, but it was structurally stable, suitable for mass production and long-term campaigns.
The thought had barely crossed his mind before his body had already moved.
Jie Ming raised his arm; the dark golden light on the surface of the Return to Ruins Armor instantly converged. His fist drew a heavy afterimage through the void and smashed fiercely into the bow of that escort ship.
Crack... Boom!!
First came a grating sound of metal fracturing, then the entire warship arched up from bow to stern with a hideous split.
The shield had just flared to life when it was torn apart by the energy-absorbing property of the Return to Ruins Armor. The energy conduits inside the ship exploded all at once, sending blue-white flames spewing from the crack.
The entire escort ship shuddered violently in midair, then, like an iron plate struck by a giant hammer, tumbled backward in a roar. "After them!"
The several seventh-level Octopusman warriors behind changed expression and instantly pulled up their suits.
But they were still a step too slow.
Jie Ming’s punch was not a simple brute-force strike; he used the impact to unleash Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light at close range.
A dark golden beam shot from his palm, penetrating directly along the hull crack into the interior.
The next moment, the warship began a chain of sympathetic explosions from its middle section.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
A massive fireball exploded in the void. The wreckage of the escort ship was blasted into pieces by the shockwave, and even the three low-level Octopusman warriors that had just rushed in nearby were caught up.
Those sixth-level Octopusmen could not fully deploy their shields in time; they were torn into several segments by the explosion. Armor fragments and limb remains tumbled through the void like black scraps torn by a gale.
Jie Ming showed no sign of stopping.
Taking advantage of the explosion’s aftermath to widen the distance, he casually turned and fired several beams of Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light.
Dark golden rays flashed across the void, precisely piercing the chests of two low-level Octopusmen trying to outflank him from the side.
Before those two Octopusmen could even scream, their bodies were blasted into two clouds of scattered blood mist under the impact of the highly compressed energy. At the same time, the All-Purpose Eye and the True Illusion Void-Breaking Eye were operating at high speed.
Using this brief engagement, he quickly scanned the shattered armor fragments and the hull structures of nearby warships.
These Octopusmen’s armor was even closer to a biological synergy path than he had anticipated.
The armor was not a simple external defense; it was semi-parasitic equipment.
The energy conduits inside the armor automatically adjusted their output frequency according to the wearer’s neural signals. There were latent energy resonance circuits between the shoulder guards, chest plates, and wrist guards. Once multiple fighters fought together, they could temporarily boost overall shield efficiency.
In other words, these Octopusmen’s equipment determined that their greatest strength lay in group coordination.
Taken individually, they might not be impressive, but once formed into battle formations, shield stacking and fire coordination would increase exponentially.
No wonder the previous volley of highly compressed energy had been so devastating, and no wonder his Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light had been completely ineffective.
Jie Ming quickly reached a conclusion.
He stopped focusing on those low-level Octopusmen and instead redirected the All-Purpose Eye’s scan toward the fleet behind.
The energy cores of the warships were not in the bridge but distributed across six auxiliary energy wells on either side of the hull.
Each ship’s main cannon output had to pass through at least three layers of energy rectification before being released uniformly through the beam focusing array at the stern.
The advantage of this design was stability; the disadvantage was that energy storage was too slow and easily interrupted by external forces.
As for the Octopusmen’s armor, it was more like an extension of their own will to fight.
Using the True Illusion Void-Breaking Eye and the All-Purpose Eye, Jie Ming could discern details from those wreckages:
These Octopusmen’s tentacles would instinctively contract under high pressure, and the bioelectrical signals at the base of the tentacles would increase significantly, indicating that they transmitted emotional fluctuations through tentacle reactions in a state of fear.
In other words, their nervous systems were more susceptible to emotional interference than ordinary beings.
This also explained why Viola’s law had such a strong suppressive effect on them.
While analyzing, he continued his flight.
As he swooped beneath a large warship, the ship’s secondary cannons suddenly swiveled, and dozens of energy beams spat out from the hull’s side, forming a huge blue-white net that dropped toward him like a trap.
Jie Ming’s eyes turned cold. His body plummeted sharply in midair, skimming almost against the bottom of the hull.
In the next moment, he stomped down.
The underbelly shield of that warship let out a dull groan; the ship tilted violently, its side slamming directly into another cruiser that was adjusting course.
Boom!!
The two warships collided heavily in midair, their hulls twisted together in a tangle. Large-scale short circuits erupted inside, and explosions chain-reacted from the point of impact. Several low-level Octopusmen who had just rushed out of the hatch without completing their armor deployment were flung into the air, tumbling through the shockwave into the distance, where Jie Ming’s follow-up Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light reaped them all.
In just a few breaths, the periphery of the battlefield had fallen into chaos.
Yet Jie Ming’s analysis became ever clearer.
These Octopusmen’s individual combat skills were not weak, and their fleet scale was formidable.
But their combat system relied too heavily on coordination and formations. Once the front line was breached, the rear fleet would show significant coordination lag. In other words, if he could disrupt their rhythm in the shortest time, the threat of this fleet would immediately drop by an entire tier. "Knowing this weakness isn’t enough; I still need to find concrete methods."
"Then… find more material to study!"
Jie Ming’s eyes flashed. After dodging another volley from the pursuing Octopusmen, he actively adjusted his posture and charged toward another warship! The battle between the two sides had already lasted for several days.
The cloud layers had long been torn to shreds by repeated high-speed passes. Across the sky, dark golden streams of light and metallic tail flames flashed and interweaved, spanning the heavens of this plane.
Jie Ming’s figure flickered continuously among these cracks.
Using Void Step combined with Light God Transformation’s light-speed movement, he managed to never truly be trapped despite the encirclement and pursuit of over fifty seventh-level Octopusmen.
But he was also genuinely battered: the Return to Ruins Armor had been shattered countless times, and the edges of his robe had been shaved into long, thin tears by a few spatial cuts that grazed him. The rune light at the tears fluttered gently in the wind pressure.
Fortunately, after reaching the Dao Integration Realm, his control over the Light God Transformation state had improved significantly.
Even while moving at light speed, he could still turn nimbly.
Under conventional physical laws, no attack could catch a target moving so agilely at light speed.
No matter how dense the Octopusmen’s firepower or how fierce their encirclement, they could only occasionally graze him in the gaps of his dodges, inflicting no real damage. And while fleeing, Jie Ming was not idle.
A sixth-level Octopusman corpse he had snagged along the way was being repeatedly scanned by the All-Purpose Eye and the True Illusion Void-Breaking Eye, extracting useful information as thoroughly as possible.
From skin tissue to internal organ structure, from neural synapse signal transmission to the energy circuit layout inside the armor—all data was simultaneously recorded into the Five Elements Rainbow Mirror, rapidly constructing a complete physiological and equipment model of an Octopusman in the depths of his spiritual sea.
The analysis results came quickly.
The energy frequency bands of the Octopusmen’s armor, the modulation cycle of their shields, the physiological response characteristics of their nervous system… even the bioelectrical signals from their tentacles instinctively stiffening under tension—all were precisely annotated.
Without the slightest hesitation, Jie Ming directly fed these data into the Five Elements Rainbow Mirror, using the spiritual nature of his lifebound artifact for tactical deduction. Then, based on the optimal solutions automatically sorted by his Entropy Brain Talent, he began to deduce two brand-new targeted sorceries.
The first was used to lock onto the energy frequency band of the armor.
As long as the frequency of elemental fluctuations precisely counteracted, it could disable both the shield and the energy coating of the Octopusmen’s armor simultaneously.
The second was used to lock onto the Octopusmen’s nervous system. Based on their physiological traits, it would trigger a physiological aversion and discomfort reaction. Jie Ming did not expect this sorcery to kill them; he only needed to induce a natural bodily rejection in the Octopusmen.
The underlying rune structures of both sorceries were rapidly constructed within his spiritual sea.
At that instant, Jie Ming suddenly stopped his flight.
He stomped the cloud layer beneath his feet, shattering it. White mist exploded in all directions as he spun around abruptly, facing the more than fifty seventh-level Octopusmen that had been pursuing him relentlessly.
The pursuing Octopusmen were visibly stunned, but only for a moment.
The next instant, all of their attacks poured toward him simultaneously.
Jie Ming raised his hand.
The first sorcery he had just created spread outward from his center, forming an almost silent spherical wave.
When that seemingly ordinary energy wave swept across the battlefield, the armor coating on the Octopusmen quickly faded and peeled off as if doused with acid. Shield generators erupted with sharp overload alarms one after another, then all went silent.
Even the energy weapons hanging at their waists disassembled automatically in the wave, components clattering to the ground.
More than fifty Octopusmen simultaneously looked down at their failing armor, their tentacles frozen in midair.
But this was only the beginning.
The second sorcery was released immediately after.
Again, a spherical wave of energy spread outward, but this one had no visible light effect and was eerily silent.
The wave penetrated the Octopusmen’s bodies, precisely targeting their nervous system.
The next moment, an uncontrollable feeling of aversion and discomfort surged from every nerve ending.
It was a pure, physiological rejection reaction… like the discomfort humans feel when hearing the high-frequency screech of fingernails on a blackboard.
The eyes of some lower-level Octopusmen simultaneously lost focus. Bereft of armor protection, their bodies instinctively curled up in the air, tentacles hanging limply one by one.