With the appearance of that figure, the furious Golden Behemoths finally chose to lower their banners and stop their attack.
The two Golden Behemoths, each more than twenty meters tall and sturdier than fortresses, slowly retreated while nodding repeatedly as if they had heard something.
They bowed toward the purple figure. Their enormous eyes actually showed both fear and respect.
Light flashed. Ten rings appeared before them. Silver light flickered again and again, taking the more than eighty injured Behemoth giants on the ground into spatial rings. After that, the two Golden Behemoths exchanged a glance and growled at the same time, announcing the retreat.
Then, without caring about the few surviving warriors of the three orc races, they sprang away at top speed and rushed toward the Far Northern Wilderness.
The towering mountains, which rose into the clouds, were like flat ground beneath their feet. In only a short while, they disappeared from sight.
With that, the Behemoth squad withdrew. The remaining orcs scattered like birds and beasts. As for those who were severely wounded and unable to move, or already dead, no one paid them any attention.
The world of orcs was that cruel. When resources were scarce, being sacrificed was common.
Because of the Golden Behemoth's enraged strike, the earth below had thrown up a sandstorm that blocked sight. Along with faint spatial ripples, many of the dead orcs on the ground vanished, as if they had been transported to another space.
"Tsk, tsk. What a pity. Not a single Behemoth died. If I had gotten a Behemoth giant corpse out of this, the harvest would have been enormous."
Wu Ling hovered in the air, organizing his gains from this trip. He had obtained quite a few orc and dragon rider corpses, but fewer human mages and warriors.
The main reason was that Wu Ling chose carefully while collecting things. The orcs looked poor at a glance, and aside from Behemoth giants, ordinary orcs had only average research value. He had no need to spend too much effort on them, so he chose only a few powerful individuals who were likely commanders.
As for the humans, many warriors and mages had also died, but most had living allies near them. He could only collect the ones no one was paying attention to, so the harvest was not large.
The dragon riders were the most miserable group. Because of a certain person's zither magic, they had gone berserk and charged straight into the orc army in a suicidal assault, heavily damaging the orc force. The price was their total destruction. Not even a complete corpse remained.
Wu Ling spent quite some effort before finding and collecting a few relatively intact dragon rider corpses. The information on their bodies should be somewhat useful to him.
After picking through the battlefield, Wu Ling looked toward the young man sitting on the city wall with both hands on a zither.
"The protagonist of the Qin Emperor world, huh? With my interference, he no longer has that super divine artifact, and the Golden-Armored Forbidden Insects are my target too. What will your future become? You will not actually end up happily married to the Mother Demon King, will you?"
Thinking of that, Wu Ling revealed the smile of someone watching a show.
"No, wait. Without the super divine artifact, whether he can even reach that stage is a problem. Future Qin City alone should be enough for him to choke on."
Just as Wu Ling was preparing to leave, a figure standing on a distant rooftop caught his attention.
"That is... Sula, the heroine?"
Wu Ling's eyes shifted uncertainly. He still had a fairly strong impression of this girl who had lost one soul and one spirit.
In the end, Wu Ling sighed and muttered, "Forget it. To gain something, one must give something up. Ye Yinzhu is not a bad person. Aside from the final ending, there is not much to criticize about him. Since I took your opportunity, I will help protect your wife."
Sula had originally been standing there, gazing toward Ye Yinzhu and thinking about what attitude she should use to face him later. Then she suddenly sensed a presence arrive behind her.
She was just about to leave her position in alarm when her eyes rolled back and she fainted. With her current level, she could not last even one move against Wu Ling.
Before losing consciousness, Sula vaguely heard him say, "Relax. This is only equivalent exchange."
The Far Northern Wilderness lay in the north of Longinus Continent. It was forbidden territory to humans and the land where the orcs reproduced.
Ten thousand years earlier, in the Qin Emperor universe, the Eastern Dragon and Western Dragon continents had collided. Heaven and earth lost color. The sun and moon went dark. After the present Longinus Continent formed, the collision changed the environment across many regions and brought with it a spatial rift that led to a massive disaster.
That long catastrophe ten thousand years ago had completely changed the structure of Longinus Continent.
Before it, the western dragon race numbered more than one hundred thousand, with even more lesser dragons. The Behemoth race was not much weaker than the dragon race either. That had been the peak age of beast-kind.
At the time, the humans on the Western Dragon Continent were only dependents of the major races, existences at the bottom of the continent.
But after that near world-ending disaster, many experts of the Eastern Dragon Empire sacrificed themselves for the world. The humans of the west recovered, gathered strength, rose up, and changed the entire continental situation in one stroke.
They allied with the western dragon race, which still preserved a fair amount of strength at the time. First, they destroyed the Eastern Dragon Empire. Then they launched a surprise attack that destroyed the four divine beasts of the orc race, burying the other competitors completely. Afterward, the western humans used their population advantage to force the dragon race into compromise.
In the end, the mages of the Seven Towers of Falan became the true rulers of the continent. Even if the dragon race's Seven Dragon Cities were nominally equal to the Seven Towers of Falan, that was only in name.
Now, across the vast Far Northern Wilderness, Wu Ling was strolling at an unhurried pace.
Half a month earlier, he had refined the dragon souls he collected into one soul and one spirit, then placed them into Sula's body. After completing her three souls and seven spirits, he carved three powerful soul-defense Magecraft arrays to protect her soul from being destroyed again. That was all he could do for now. As for her future, that would depend on her own fate.
"It should be around here. According to that old fellow Noxis's memories, this is the battlefield where he destroyed the Golden-Armored Forbidden Insect race."
Wu Ling observed the surroundings and murmured to himself. He had entered deep into the Far Northern Wilderness and come here according to the memories inside Noxis's crystal ball precisely to search for one of the four divine beasts of the orc race: the Golden-Armored Forbidden Insect.
The four divine beasts of the orc race, like the Sacred Giant Dragon, were genuine tenth-rank divine beasts. They were the five divine beast races of the old Western Dragon Continent.
The Sacred Giant Dragon and the Amethyst Behemoth were the most outstanding and complete in strength. They could basically contend with weaker individuals among the eastern divine dragons.
The other three divine beasts, the War Beast, the Mountain Giant, and the Golden-Armored Forbidden Insect, had obvious strengths and weaknesses. Because of that, they could be targeted and killed more easily.
Back then, Noxis had relied on his own strength to destroy those three races. When he later fought the Amethyst Behemoth, both sides perished together.
Based on Wu Ling's knowledge of the plot, among this generation's four divine beasts, the Amethyst Behemoth, War Beast, and Mountain Giant had already been born for some time and were approaching adulthood and peak strength. Trying to target them would be troublesome.
The Golden-Armored Forbidden Insect, however, seemed to have been born only recently in this period. Children were always the easiest to deceive. If he remembered correctly, this generation's Golden-Armored Forbidden Insects were mutated, and they were a pair of twin sisters.
Wu Ling waved his right hand. A human-shaped object suddenly stood before him. It was the human-shaped soulcraft artifact he had created, code name: Dragon Frame.
It could be controlled by Wu Ling placing Rose or another clone inside, or it could operate like a machine, executing orders after hearing commands.
"Dragon Frame, search this region for me."
After receiving Wu Ling's order, the Dragon Frame's eyes flashed. A crack appeared in the ground, and the Dragon Frame shot out.
A short while later, accompanied by a fierce wind and a series of whining cries, the Dragon Frame slowly landed beside Wu Ling. Each of its bony hands was holding a large insect.
The two little creatures were plump and round. Their soft, fleshy bodies looked somewhat clumsy, each about one meter across. Their pale golden eyes glittered faintly. Their bodies were milky white, and if they were placed in snow, they would be impossible to spot.
They looked like two oversized ladybugs. Right now, they were being held by a pair of dragon claws. Their pale golden eyes flashed constantly, and the cute white dots at the very front of their heads, almost like noses, kept twitching. They were clearly furious.
"Wuwu..."
Perhaps because Wu Ling kept observing them without answering, or perhaps because being held in the air was extremely uncomfortable, the pale golden eyes of the two insect beasts flashed. Extremely intense energy fluctuations immediately gathered.
The upper halves of both insects lifted at the same time. Their bodies released milky-white light, translucent like jade.
Their bodies seemed to swell slightly from the rear. The swollen portion rapidly moved forward.
Whoosh. Whoosh.
Two milky-white balls of light shot from their mouths, aimed directly at the Dragon Frame's fierce and dignified head. The balls of light were not large, and their glow was very faint. They did not look especially powerful. Yet under Wu Ling's signal, the Dragon Frame dodged them at once.
Then an eerie scene occurred.
The milky-white light balls flew through the air for only a moment, but the sky and clouds immediately changed color.
Those light balls had contained no magical-element fluctuations at first. Yet after being exposed to the air for only a few seconds, every magical element within a hundred-meter radius around them turned violent and rushed into the two milky-white light balls at astonishing speed.
When those berserk magical elements entered the light balls, they did not make them expand. Instead, they compressed even more violently.
Then came a boom.
No, the unimaginable roar was so violent it was impossible to tell whether it was one explosion or two. The terrifying shockwave spread to a nearby cliff. The scene of mountain collapse and earth fracture was terrifying. The fierce energy fluctuation was almost comparable to two Forbidden Spells colliding.
The explosion made the entire mountain tremble. The surroundings filled with violent clouds of flying sand and stones.
It was hard to imagine that such destructive power had been released by two little insects. The turbulence in the air lasted a full ten minutes before gradually calming. The entire cliff was on the verge of collapse, covered everywhere in palm-wide cracks like giant earthworms. No one knew whether it might fall apart in the next moment.
"That attack really is terrifying. It is already comparable to an ordinary Titled Sage's ninth Spirit Skill, and there were two shots in a row. If someone took both head-on, even a Titled Sage would probably lose a layer of skin if they survived."
Wu Ling looked at the collapsing cliff and sighed in admiration.