The ma.s.sive fleet patiently waited at the border of the Abyss’s entrance.
This “Bermuda Triangle” was as familiar as their backyard at this point, and they had gone in and out so many times that they had long since lost track.
The Sea Beasts in the Abyss fully replenished themselves wave after wave, and the soldiers had eaten so much Sea Beast flesh that they were even beginning to get sick of it.
However, today would be the end to all of this.
The fleet began to close in on the entrance as they dropped their anchors nearby.
Two scouts deftly circled the vortex once before reporting back. “Sect Master, the hunting mission was successful. We managed to capture one Demonic King and two Demonic Lords.
This Demonic King, which alone would have been enough to throw an entire city on the mainland into despair, had been easily captured by these two scouting parties. Obviously, they had dispatched far too many Demonic Kings during the past five years.
Su Chen didn’t even bother glancing at it and immediately pulled out an item.
This item was a pouch. When he opened it, a large group of bugs crawled out of it. These bugs were each as large as a fist; a pair of translucent wings sprouted from their backs, and razor-sharp mandibles dangled in front of their faces. They were naturally the Catastrophe Bugs.
Over these past few years, Su Chen had performed lots of research on many areas. Part of his efforts had been concentrated on better understanding these bugs.
And now, they were one of the weapons that Su Chen was planning on using to deal with the Sovereigns in the Abyss. He had finally pulled them out to use in this last expedition.
These current Catastrophe Bugs had been bred and improved from the original Catastrophe Bug. There were some differences between this variant and the original, and one major one was that these bugs were weaker than the originals.
The original Catastrophe Bugs were immune to all Origin Energy attacks, and they also possessed the innate ability to travel along streams of Origin Energy. In other words, they could chase an Origin Skill to its source. In addition, their attacks also ignored all Origin Energy barriers.
These bugs basically completely countered any Origin Energy user. They didn’t fear any Origin Energy attacks, and they could only be dealt with through physical means.
At first glance, Su Chen’s version of the Catastrophe Bugs appeared far inferior in comparison. Instead of being completely immune to Origin Energy, they merely possessed an 80% resistance to it. Even though that sounded quite impressive on paper, their relatively weak physical bodies meant that the twenty percent that affected them would most likely easily kill them.
Their ability to ignore Origin Energy defenses was also limited. It would take them some time to eat their way through a more powerful barrier.
There was nothing that Su Chen could do about this. The Catastrophe Bugs were simply too hard to control. If he wanted to resolve all of these issues, it would probably take him a few more years of dedicated research.
In the end, he had chosen to make the Catastrophe Bugs’s mutations regress their capabilities. This allowed him to control them much more easily.
This was a pretty typical mindset for reverse-engineering a problem. ‘If I can’t control you, then I will weaken you until I can.’
That was the thought process that had given birth to the revised Catastrophe Bugs.
Su Chen had managed to tame all of these Catastrophe Bugs, and all of them were fertile brood mothers.
Following Su Chen’s whistle, all of the Catastrophe Bugs flew into the air and headed towards the Demonic King and Demonic Lords that had just been captured.
The Sea Beasts had been securely restrained, and they were only able to thrash about helplessly and howl as the brood mothers crawled inside their bodies. However, these roars only served to whet the bloodthirst of these Catastrophe Bugs, just like a warrior’s fighting spirit in response to another warrior’s fierce war cry.
The bugs subsequently started rapidly devouring the Sea Beasts, extracting large quant.i.ties of energy before finally entering the reproduction stage.
The breeding capabilities of the Catastrophe Bugs were incredibly high. As long as they had enough food, they would constantly reproduce.
The three Sea Beast carca.s.ses rapidly became breeding grounds for the Catastrophe Bugs. Soon, waves of new Catastrophe Bugs would begin to from the carca.s.ses.
In order to ensure that these Catastrophe Bugs wouldn’t slip out of his control, Su Chen had already given them medicine to ensure that they wouldn’t live longer than an hour.
After some time, Su Chen reckoned that it was about the right time and motioned to another group of soldiers off in the distance.
These few Boundless Sect disciples guarding the entrance to the Abyss sent out a signal of their own, and a boat began to head off in their direction.
This boat was a bit strange because it was packed to the brim with barrels of wine.
The thousands of barrels of wine were being transported across the sea by this boat, but Zhong Zhenjun, an Ultimate Emperor Realm cultivator, had been tasked to guard it. Obviously, this boat was incredibly important.
“Release!”
Following this command, Zhong Zhenjun sprang into action. The boat was lifted up and then sent plummeting into the Abyss. At that exact moment, a spark of Origin Energy ignited, lighting up the barrels of wine instantaneously. Pale blue liquid liberally sprayed everywhere, but at that moment, it disappeared into the Abyss along with the boat.
This liquid was another medicine that Su Chen had developed to deal with the Deep Sea Sorrow.
Because this medicine was meant to target the entire Abyss, enough medicine had to be made to fill an entire boat. And in order to produce this much medicine, the fleet had expended quite a bit of resources. If they wanted to make another batch, it would probably take them another five years, or perhaps even longer as many of these ingredients were becoming harder and harder to find.
The medicine had been released, and the Catastrophe Bugs bred. Preparations were being hastily made for battle.
Actually, at that moment, the battle had already begun. These actions were merely the preliminary shots of the initial skirmish.
The Sovereigns of the Abyss, who lacked intelligence, couldn’t possibly have prepared a counterstrategy in advance, which gave the fleet a crucial opportunity.
What had carried them through this arduous campaign entire time had always been their mental strength, which was enough to make most people fall into despair.
“How much…… will this medicine weaken them?” one of the soldiers asked quietly.
All they knew was that this medicine would weaken the Sovereigns, but Su Chen had never told to what exact extent.
Perhaps this was because even he himself wasn’t clear what the answer was.
“Each Sea Beast is different. Some have an innate resistance to poison, while others don’t. Some have unique maturation processes, and those who became enthralled by the Deep Sea Sorrow while they were nothing but common Sea Beasts will be affected more than already strong Sea Beasts who came from far away. There might even be some who became Sovereigns before this, and they’ll be affected the least. So how much the Sea Beasts will be weakened is…… hard to say,” Su Chen explained with a tinge of regret.
Those who understood his explanation began to explain to those around them in even simpler terms. “Also, the distribution of the medicine is affected by time and many other factors. As such, it’s extremely hard to predict what the exact decrease in strength will be, which is why the Sect Master didn’t give us an exact number.”
“What we need the most in this battle is courage. We are going to fight, and the rest will be up to fate.”
“That’s right. Warriors ask no questions. All they do is make their preparations to die.”
“But I just want to throw this out here. I say, what are we still waiting for?”
“For the medicine to take effect, of course, and for those Catastrophe Bugs to breed some more. You ask too many questions. Why not figure it out yourself?”
“Keep those mouths shut.”
In the face of an order from a direct superior, the chattering subsided, and a deep silence fell across the surface of the sea. Even the waves themselves appeared eerily silent.
Even so, everyone was aware that a ma.s.sive change was taking place in an area that they couldn’t perceive.
They had no idea how well the medicine was dispersing or working, but the Catastrophe Bugs were already showing a noticeable change.
By now, the three ma.s.sive carca.s.ses had practically been completely devoured. Large swarms of Catastrophe Bugs continuously flew out from their withering remains, filling the sky. The soldiers watching felt the hair on their scalps tingle.
“ZZZzzz!”
A shrill buzz began to fill the air as the Catastrophe Bugs charged fearlessly into the Abyss, serving as the vanguard forces.
They were the tip of the spear, the cannon fodder, and the constantly unending supporting cast.
After the Catastrophe Bugs started pouring into the Abyss, the Oceanids were the next to spring into action.
The seven Sea Kings appeared, with the Oceanid ruler Greatcloud at the forefront.
The Oceanids had finally come out in full force due to the importance of this final mission. Apart from those needed to maintain the critical defenses, almost all of their fighters were present, including Greatcloud himself.
This Oceanid was unnaturally large, and his face was covered in fiery-red hair.
His upper half was naked, and he wielded a trident in his hand.
This trident was the Oceanids’ famous weapon, Neptune’s Trident.
“Leader Greatcloud, I leave it in your hands,” Su Chen said as he cupped his hands in greetings.
Su Chen and Greatcloud had already met many times throughout the course of the past five years, so there was no need for them to greet each other excessively.
“We Oceanids have been waiting for this day for far too long,” Greatcloud said faintly.
As he had said, the Oceanids had been waiting for this day to come for a long time.
As such, it was only natural that the Oceanids would take to the front lines without fear.
Following his command, the seven emperor-realm Oceanids jumped into the Abyss as well, forming the second wave of attackers.
The third wave, however, was not a group of more soldiers.
A ma.s.sive wave of puppets began to rush out of the palace floating in the sky.
Giant puppets!
Now that the final battle was before them, Su Chen had revealed yet another one of his trump cards.
The Catastrophe Bugs had been somewhat restricted in their combat ability, but these giant puppets were his true killing move.
Even though there were only forty of them, they were of extremely high quality. Thirty-six of them were Mountain-Cla.s.s, each strong enough to single-handedly fight off an army. Their strength was equivalent to a Thought Manifestation Realm cultivator’s.
The remaining four were the legendary t.i.tan-Cla.s.s puppets.
These t.i.tan-Cla.s.s puppets had been constructed from the Refined StarG.o.d Metal that Su Chen had taken from the Mother G.o.ddess Sect and the Darkness Prison Metal that he had received from Eternal Night. By employing the talents of countless Craftsmen and constructing the necessary secondary-cla.s.s Sark’s Nuclei by relying on the blueprints, he was able to create these four puppets.
Making these giant puppets had basically burned through almost all of his resources.
Each t.i.tan-Cla.s.s puppet was as strong as an Ultimate Emperor Realm cultivator.
No one knew that this was actually Su Chen’s most powerful trump card.
Zhong Zhenjun had originally believed that the Boundless Sect was Su Chen’s ultimate trump card, but they turned out to merely be a mid-tier portion of his strength. At the time, it had seemed as if he was lacking in experts who stood at the very pinnacle.
What he didn’t know was that Su Chen had burned through his fortune to construct this group of puppets, filling that gap in his a.r.s.enal.
But even though those t.i.tan-Cla.s.s puppets were strong, there were only four of them, and activating them consumed an incredible amount of resources. This was why Su Chen wasn’t willing to use them lightly.
Today, however, the time had come to lay it all on the line.
Zhong Zhenjun’s heart trembled when he saw this group of unfathomable puppets charge into the Abyss.
How many trump cards was this guy still holding onto?
Even though his ambition to joust for control with Su Chen had been quelled a long time ago, his innately compet.i.tive personality still made him feel like he had suddenly suffered quite a harsh blow.
It was as if everything he had constructed in his imagination had been brought tumbling down almost instantaneously.
The fourth wave of attackers was Su Chen and Gu Qingluo, who fearlessly jumped into the Abyss.