Chapter 700: Striking at the Heart and 0-001

The discovery of the Trifoliate Star System completely upended Jie Ming’s original plan of “gradual occupation and slow digestion.”

The discovery of the Divine Armaments proved that the true core of the Tentacle Tree Civilization had never been in those colonial cities or fleet factories, but in the “Divine Armaments” scattered across the universe.

Every extra day of delay meant that more data on the Divine Armaments might be completely destroyed on those core planets.

He had no time left.

Jie Ming decisively readjusted his strategy: conquest of population was no longer the primary objective. Priority was now given to seizing information.

Leading three Level 7 Black Giants personally, Jie Ming split his forces into four groups and launched direct assaults on the Tentacle Tree Civilization’s most vital planets.

These were the civilization’s homeworld, first colonial capital, military research and development hub, and the location of its highest academy…

Thanks to the intelligence obtained earlier from the space station laboratory, these coordinates had already been clearly marked in the memories of the commanders they had previously read. Every one of these four planets represented the true lifelines of this civilization.

One could say these four locations were the places most likely to hold comprehensive information on all the Divine Armaments.

Of course, such an operation had both advantages and disadvantages.

Even without using the Causal Trace Shadow Technique, Jie Ming could guess that the news of the research institute’s fall had already been transmitted outward.

Even if no intelligence had leaked, a top-secret institute of this level would certainly send regular reports. Sometimes, the absence of a report was the biggest report of all.

The enemy would inevitably raise their vigilance.

Simply put, they would gather more combat strength around the core regions, just in case.

Jie Ming was not certain exactly how much combat strength the Tentacle Tree Civilization would prepare, but judging by his own standards, he would have concentrated all forces according to the worst-case scenario.

If they chose to attack these four locations directly, it would very likely result in greater losses than previously anticipated and deliver a near-catastrophic blow to the entire civilization.

The benefit, of course, was that with combat forces stripped from other planets, the Black Giants would face far less resistance when subduing them. However, the Black Giant elite units already held overwhelming superiority against this plane’s civilization, so this advantage was not fully realized. In short, by choosing to strike at the heart, Jie Ming’s war gains this time would inevitably decrease.

But now, Jie Ming no longer cared.

For a wizard, the most important thing had never been power or resources.

It was knowledge!

Tentacle Tree Civilization, homeworld.

The moment Jie Ming stepped out of the teleportation light, what greeted his eyes was a vast ocean of fleets that nearly filled the entire void. Just as he had predicted, after confirming that Jie Ming and his forces had uncovered the secret of the Divine Armaments, the Tentacle Tree Civilization immediately launched an extreme emergency response.

The last elites of the Tentacle Tree Civilization had all assembled.

This time, they were no longer the outdated ships hastily cobbled together from the colonies.

Floating beyond the homeworld’s orbit were entirely deep-gray main warships.

The armor layers on the hulls gleamed with a cold, hard metallic luster under the star’s illumination, and the dense arrays of ship cannons were arranged like steel forests.

The combined shields had been deployed long ago.

Layer upon layer of energy patterns interlocked in the void. Moreover, even higher techniques seemed to have been incorporated, transforming these energy shields from simple overlays into complex multi-resonance structures.

From a distance, they resembled a massive light net covering the entire star region.

Behind the fleet floated several experimental ships of distinctly different designs.

The hulls of these vessels were not yet fully enclosed; exposed energy conduits wrapped around the ship surfaces like blood vessels, and parts of the armor remained only half-installed.

The weapon arrays at the bows flickered with unstable purple-black light. Their energy fluctuations were extremely chaotic, yet they also radiated extreme danger. Clearly, these were “experimental machines” that had been forcibly dragged onto the battlefield before even completing live-fire tests.

Jie Ming merely swept his gaze across them before continuing forward without hesitation. Even as overwhelming beams of light shot toward him, he showed no intention of slowing down.

The Return to Ruins Armor silently devoured all the attacks, like an abyss that could never be satisfied.

Seeming to find the warships before him somewhat eyesores, Jie Ming raised his hand.

With a slight accumulation of power, the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light erupted.

A dark-golden beam blasted out from his palm, drawing a straight trajectory across the pitch-black cosmos that pierced through his entire field of vision.

The instant the first main warship made contact with the divine light, its combined shield collapsed instantly.

The energy structure forming the shield began disintegrating from the most fundamental particle level the moment it touched the divine light.

Then came the armor, the bridge, the engine bay, the energy core… The entire warship silently turned into nothingness as if erased by a rubber. Yet the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light did not stop there.

After entering the Dao Integration Realm, Jie Ming’s control over spiritual power had increased dramatically, and his understanding of various spiritual qi and elements was growing rapidly. The current Jie Ming could already maintain the release of the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light for extended periods.

The dark-golden light pillar was like a red-hot long blade slicing through butter, cutting straight through the center of the fleet.

Millions of warships were completely annihilated before they could even explode, leaving only a long dark-golden scar in the void. Jie Ming casually waved his hand, and the still-continuing dark-golden divine light swept horizontally like a sword light capable of cleaving the universe.

Thus, the remaining fleet was also drawn into it.

Because the attack’s energy was too dispersed this time, warships “finally” had the chance to explode.

Brilliant flames lit up one after another, but those explosions lasted only an instant before being swallowed by the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light along with the flames themselves.

Moments later, as the firelight died out, only a large cloud of incompletely dispersed particle dust remained in the homeworld’s orbit.

Jie Ming passed through the slowly expanding wreckage cloud and headed straight into the atmosphere.

The homeworld’s atmosphere was calmer than he had imagined.

His extremely rapid descent caused the airflow to part automatically around him, with cloud layers sweeping past beneath his feet.

With a visible shockwave dissipating, Jie Ming came to an abrupt stop.

He hovered high in the sky as the golden vertical eye between his brows slowly opened, overlooking the entire continent.

Prosperous.

Far more prosperous than expected.

Urban clusters stretched from the coastline all the way to the inland mountains. Transportation tracks covered the land like spiderwebs, and tens of thousands of giant metropolises were interconnected. But… it was too quiet.

There were no aircraft in the sky, no transport ships on the tracks, and not even moving figures could be seen on the streets.

It was no exaggeration to say the entire planet was as quiet as a tomb!

Suddenly, lights turned on.

All public screens, city projection towers, exterior walls of administrative buildings, orbital advertising matrices… every device capable of displaying images activated simultaneously.

The extreme contrast even gave Jie Ming the illusion that the entire planet had lit up at once.

An elderly figure appeared in the center of the screens. It was an extremely ancient Tentacle Tree.

Its bark was nearly pitch-black, the tips of its tentacles carried a heavy iron-gray hue, yet its eight crystal eyes shone with startling brilliance.

Its canopy was fully spread in a frenzied posture.

“Invader.”

A low vibration frequency spread across the entire planet through the global broadcast.

“I am the Homeworld Governor, lifelong academician of the Highest Academy, and chief person in charge of special weapons development.”

“You may call me Furnace Core.”

When he said this, his tone even carried a strange sense of pleasure.

Jie Ming watched the projection quietly.

“You are very strong.” Furnace Core slowly extended his tentacles. “So strong that our main fleet couldn’t last even a few minutes before you.”

“Fortunately, I never intended from the beginning to waste our final trump card on the fleet.”

His tentacles whipped backward fiercely, and the scene switched to a massive cavity deep within the planet’s core.

Floating at the center of the cavity was a dark-gray war armor over five hundred meters tall.

The armor’s outer shell was completely dyed red with blood. Countless biological fluids of different colors flowed continuously along the armor seams and were slowly absorbed. The energy core inside its chest throbbed violently like a heart.

With every beat, the entire monitoring image trembled.

“Divine Armament. Designation 0-001.”

Furnace Core’s voice gradually grew fanatical.

“We spent ten entire generations trying to activate it. Genes, frequencies, protocols, spiritual energy… we tried everything.”

“But all failed!”

“However, we later discovered something.”

His crystal eyes widened bit by bit. “When it comes into contact with a sufficient amount of biological life force, it begins… to awaken on its own.”

The camera cut back to Furnace Core. All the tentacles on his canopy had now stood completely upright, like a burst of black thorns.

“Therefore… to kill you, I have released neurotoxin across the entire homeworld! Cities, villages, civilians, military… all our people will become the activation energy for 0-001.”

“And you…” He stared fixedly at the camera, as if looking straight at Jie Ming through it, “Invader. The planet beneath your feet shall be your grave!”

The projection suddenly went dark.

The next instant, the entire world began to shake.

Jie Ming clearly sensed that it was the planet itself that was moving.

Continents flipped, oceans overturned, and mountain ranges were uprooted as if by invisible giant hands.

From space, the originally blue-and-green planet was rapidly deforming.

The crust first collapsed, then gathered and restructured. Countless continental plates were kneaded together like clay.

Deep within the planet’s core, 0-001 was operating at full power.

It frantically absorbed all biomass and energy from the entire planet.

The Tentacle Tree corpses that had died from the neurotoxin were still squeezed for their final traces of life energy even after death, becoming fuel for the Divine Armament.

A previously stable perception suddenly triggered an alarm, causing Jie Ming’s pupils to shrink slightly.

The next moment…

Boom!!!

A destructive energy torrent erupted from inside the planet and slammed directly into his chest.

The Return to Ruins Armor instantly absorbed the vast majority of the energy, but the pure physical impact still sent him flying.

Jie Ming’s body smashed through the atmosphere and continued into outer space, only stabilizing after being blasted tens of thousands of kilometers away.

He looked down.

It could no longer be called a “planet.”

A gigantic humanoid silhouette tens of thousands of kilometers tall was slowly rising from the void, like a divine statue forcibly assembled from the entire planet. The oceans had been compressed into a massive water sphere embedded in its chest.

Mountain ranges and mantle material flowed continuously across its surface, seeking stable structures once more, while the former cities had completely vanished.

Jie Ming’s three eyes locked onto the planet’s core simultaneously.

There, 0-001 was burning.

Upon seeing this scene, Jie Ming immediately understood that this Divine Armament was not a simple weapon of war.

It was an anti-civilization annihilation unit!

Once a civilization fell, it would convert the entire planet along with its entire population into a final weapon.

It would leave the enemy with no resources, leave no civilization with any spoils, only a rampaging giant beast of destruction.

“Interesting…” A strange light flashed in Jie Ming’s eyes.

Since this Divine Armament had such an effect, it meant the Tentacle Tree Civilization’s previous guesses about the origin of the Divine Armaments might have been wrong! But now was not the time to think about that.

After all, once activated, this thing would frantically attack all living things around it.

With the entire planet having been sacrificed, its only remaining target was him.

Jie Ming slowly exhaled.

Then, dark-golden light erupted violently as his thousand-meter true body unfolded in the void.

The dark-golden giant with a tiger’s back and bear’s waist stepped forward. Qi and blood surged across his body like a furnace as both faces simultaneously opened their three golden vertical eyes. Immediately after—

The Second Layer Dharma Form descended!

A five-hundred-kilometer-tall golden phantom slowly rose behind him.

Even in just a few short days, Jie Ming’s Dharma Form had made enormous progress. It was more condensed and vastly larger than last time. The originally blurry regions at the edges of the Dharma Form’s silhouette had now shrunk by nearly half.

When those three golden Dharma Eyes slowly opened, the entire star region seemed to darken for an instant.

Meanwhile, the planetary behemoth reconstructed from the entire homeworld had finally stabilized its form completely.

It slowly raised an arm—a terrifying giant hand composed of continental plates, liquid mantle, and metallic core.

Then… it smashed down with a punch!

Before the fist even drew close, space had already begun to shatter.

Layer upon layer of spatial ripples spread wildly outward. Small asteroids and fleet wreckage floating along the path were instantly shaken into fine powder.

Jie Ming did not retreat. His Second Layer Dharma Form met it head-on without hesitation.

The five-hundred-kilometer-tall Dharma Form looked as insignificant as a speck of dust before the tens-of-thousands-of-kilometers-tall planetary behemoth.

Boom!!!

Fists collided.

The entire void shook violently.

Impact rings interwoven with dark gold and deep gray swept across the star region at near-light speed.

The asteroid belt was instantly blown apart, elemental turbulence was forcibly flattened, and even the light cast by the star visibly distorted under this clash.

Jie Ming and his Dharma Form were both sent flying backward.

He only stopped after smashing through a dwarf planet at the edge of the home star system.

The dwarf planet shattered explosively behind him, sending countless fragments flying in all directions.

Standing amid the broken stellar debris, he slowly raised his head. The three pairs of golden eyes on his two faces blinked simultaneously.

He himself had not suffered any real injury. The Return to Ruins Armor and the Second Layer Dharma Form had converted and absorbed most of the impact from that punch.

But…

“What a punch!”

Since stepping into the Dao Integration Realm and condensing the Second Layer Dharma Form, no existence had ever been able to knock him back head-on.

The corners of Jie Ming’s mouth gradually curved upward, and his eyes grew brighter and brighter.

In the next instant, the five-hundred-kilometer-tall Dharma Form condensed behind him once more.

The Body Forging Method had absorbed the negative effects from the earlier exchange of blows and undergone adaptive evolution.

Reflected in Jie Ming’s Dharma Form, it appeared even more radiant and far heavier than before.

He took one step forward. The still-unsettled energy aftermath beneath his feet exploded violently.

Treading upon surging spatial turbulence, he charged once more toward the planetary behemoth formed from the entire star.