Chapter 688: Interrogation

Jie Ming stood in the yellowish-gray skies of the Infernal Sulfur Plane.

Sulfur storms swept across the land, carrying the scorching heat of ashes and the acrid smell of melted metal.

Below him lay a vast steel graveyard currently being dismantled.

Countless black giants shuttled back and forth like an efficient colony of worker ants. Under the command of the black giant priests, they methodically disassembled the warships frozen in time.

Huge hulls were sliced into multiple sections. Armor plates, stripped of their energy cores, drifted slowly downward from midair, yet upon touching the ground they made no sound whatsoever due to the effects of temporal stasis.

Jie Ming watched all this in silence.

Gazing at the results of his own handiwork, Jie Ming—who could be considered to be leading a planar war for the first time—suddenly murmured:

“So that’s how it is…”

He had finally understood one thing.

Why the wizard civilization could walk unhindered across the endless chaotic void.

Today’s war had laid the answer bare before him.

The wizards’ dominance in the endless chaotic void was indeed supported by immense power.

But when it came to raw strength—setting aside the far-too-transcendent combat prowess of ninth-ring wizards—the difference in fighting power between the two sides in many planar wars the wizards encountered was not overwhelmingly crushing.

The reason the wizards could still secure an overwhelming advantage in such situations was because…

Every individual wizard was a civilization unto themselves.

Jie Ming slowly raised his hand and gazed at the power flowing in his palm.

In ordinary civilizations, knowledge was dispersed across billions of individuals.

When problems arose, they needed meetings.

They needed debates.

They needed research.

They needed approvals…

Even in a state of war, which was supposed to act as a catalyst for technology, it often took years—or even over a decade—for a new technology to go from proposal to battlefield deployment. Wizards were different.

A single high-ranking wizard constituted an entire, complete scientific research system.

At the same time, that high-ranking wizard was also a strategic-level striking force.

On the planar battlefield, what wizards did most often was locate the enemy’s blind spots in knowledge, drag the battlefield into domains the enemy could not comprehend at all, and then…

End the war.

Simple. Brutal. Effective.

Jie Ming fell silent for a moment, then the corner of his mouth twitched.

“Simple my ass.”

Because while it sounded easy, it was actually so outrageous it defied common sense.

One person using their own knowledge reserves to crush the accumulated wisdom of countless generations of an entire civilization.

What normal person could achieve that?

Beneath the seemingly simple and brutal combat style lay an absurdly demanding requirement.

Only wizards—those peculiar existences—could do it.

Only this group of old monsters who treated knowledge as sustenance, laws as toys, and could live for thousands or tens of thousands of years without dying would wage war in such a luxuriously perverse manner.

Yet precisely because of this…

Once this method of fighting took shape, it truly became unsolvable.

Jie Ming subconsciously glanced down at the frozen warships below.

From the start of the battle to their defeat.

These Tentacle Tree Civilization forces hadn’t even understood where they had lost.

At that thought, he suddenly smiled.

“No wonder the wizard civilization loves fighting above its level.”

“When the knowledge you’ve mastered isn’t even on the same plane, numbers become meaningless.”

The wind swept past from high altitude, stirring the edges of his black robe.

Jie Ming gathered his thoughts, looked downward, and gently waved his hand.

The altar clusters below lit up simultaneously. Large-scale teleportation arrays roared into operation.

More black giant legions marched out from pillars of light.

They split into hundreds of small teams and, under the priests’ command, entered the time-stopped zones.

The frozen fleet hung suspended in the sky.

Their postures were eerily artistic, like sculptures solidified in place.

Some main cannons had only charged halfway; the blazing white spheres of light at their muzzles were still in the process of expanding.

Some warships were in the middle of turning.

Their hulls tilted at angles that defied gravity, yet they remained pinned in midair as if nailed by invisible spikes.

Black giants clung to the surfaces of the hulls.

Following the structural diagrams Jie Ming shared in real time, they precisely located the weak points in the armor.

They then expertly peeled away the warships’ plating.

Under the information-sharing of the Incense Fire Divine Dao, even though these black giants had only just begun, they worked with near-mechanical proficiency.

At the same time.

Jie Ming suddenly raised his hand and pointed gently toward the outside of the plane.

The next second.

In the void, a ring of faint blue arcs lit up around the time-frozen reserve fleet left behind.

The arcs spread at extreme speed.

In the blink of an eye, they transformed into a massive gelatinous shadow covering the entire fleet.

It was… the Nest.

As it revealed its form, the Nest’s sky-blotting blue gelatinous body slowly contracted its boundaries.

It floated near the planar rift like a deep ocean covering the sky.

Countless semi-transparent tentacles swayed gently in the void. With every oscillation, faint blue ripples spread through the surrounding space.

Following Jie Ming’s command, the enormous blue body that had been hidden emerged slowly from the gaps in the rules.

It was as if some colossal entity had risen from the deep sea and broken through the surface.

Such a perfect opportunity—Jie Ming naturally wouldn’t forget to conduct live combat testing on the Nest. When these warships tried to breach the planar barrier, he had already deployed it.

The order he had given the Nest earlier was simple.

Hide.

Wait for him to act.

Then synchronously take over the reserve fleet outside the plane.

With its newly added ability to integrate into laws, even sixth-ring wizards would find few capable of detecting the Nest’s presence.

The Nest itself was not skilled in the time domain.

But after multiple rounds of modification, its biological foundation was now that of an information lifeform.

And time stasis was essentially freezing the flow of information.

For the Nest, which could freely manipulate its own information structure, seeing it once was enough.

Jie Ming recalled that when he had activated the time stop earlier, the Nest’s semi-transparent tentacles had clearly shown synchronized oscillations.

It had been “learning.”

Or more accurately… copying.

Although the precision of the time freeze replicated by the Nest was far inferior to the original.

It was more than sufficient against a fleet whose strongest members were below sixth level.

In the void.

The Nest split off several hundred giant tentacles.

Each one precisely coiled around a frozen warship.

Then it began dragging them downward for transport.

One after another.

They were pulled into the Infernal Sulfur Plane through the still-unclosed planar rift.

Below, corresponding black giant reception teams waited. Upon receiving each warship, they immediately and skillfully breached entry points, searched, sealed, and disassembled them for containment.

The entire battlefield had swiftly shifted from a state of war into a large-scale demolition site.

Jie Ming floated in midair, his spiritual power spreading across the battlefield like a spiderweb.

While rapidly copying the internal information and data from every warship, he sent real-time instructions to every black giant team.

“The main entrance is beneath the third armor layer on the port side.”

“Don’t tear it completely; the structure below is unstable.”

“That one is a supply ship. The internal energy storage units haven’t been removed yet—prohibit elemental strikes.”

“Preserve the database intact.”

“Don’t touch that silver core. It will self-destruct.”

Countless commands flowed at high speed through the spiritual network.

Meanwhile, Jie Ming himself began silently reviewing the entire war within his spiritual sea.

From the information obtained at this stage, he could only say that his caution had been correct.

He pulled up the technology tree copied from the flagship’s database.

Streams of light screens unfolded in his spiritual sea.

Communications, weapons, engines, shields, energy…

He browsed them quickly.

In conventional fields, the Tentacle Tree Civilization was actually nothing special—below average for a sixth-level civilization.

Not weak, but not particularly strong either.

Even so, this civilization possessed technologies that caught Jie Ming’s attention.

His gaze paused for a moment.

“Quantum entanglement communications…”

He narrowed his eyes slightly.

In ultra-long-distance communication technology, this civilization had even surpassed many civilizations with seventh-level combat power.

Quantum entanglement was troublesome. It transmitted information directly through quantum state collapse.

In other words.

The information did not “pass through” space.

It appeared directly at the receiving end.

It could not be intercepted like electromagnetic waves or energy signals.

If the enemy had successfully sent a message back to their home plane earlier… the consequences would have been far more troublesome.

At that thought.

A trace of relief rose in Jie Ming’s heart once more.

Then he flipped to another series of technologies: the self-destruct systems.

“How exaggerated. Just how worried were these guys about their warships being captured…”

Physical detonation, energy overload, database wipe, memory melt…

There was even a complete “anti-information-state dissolution system” capable of reducing an entire warship into disordered particles in extremely short order. In terms of self-destruction, the Tentacle Tree Civilization was ruthlessly thorough.

Jie Ming remained silent for a few seconds, then chuckled.

“These tentacle trees’ worries weren’t entirely unfounded, but they were still one move short.”

If his actions had been even a fraction slower earlier.

What would remain now would probably be nothing but piles of metal garbage in the middle of formatting.

But there were no “ifs” in this world.

Jie Ming sat cross-legged in the void for a moment, formally archiving this memory into his spiritual sea memorandum.

This was his habit.

During post-battle reviews, every mistake and every stroke of luck would be recorded.

Because one of the things wizards taboo most was mistaking luck for strength.

Moments later.

Jie Ming opened his eyes again.

The containment work below was nearing its end.

All warships had their weapon systems removed.

Energy cores were extracted, external interfaces were all inscribed with sealing runes, and they were uniformly dragged toward the temporary containment zone in the northern hemisphere.

As for the captives, they remained in a state of temporal stasis.

These captives were carried out from inside the hulls batch by batch, sorted, and numbered.

They now awaited Jie Ming’s handling.

Jie Ming looked down and pondered for a few seconds.

Then he spoke: “I’m returning to the laboratory. Bring their fleet commander over.”

“Yes!”

Inside the laboratory.

It was still illuminated by that cold, pale blue light.

The air was filled with the mingled scents of metal, reagents, and energy crystals.

Jie Ming walked to the main experiment table. While studying the newly copied data, he waited quietly.

Heavy footsteps soon sounded.

Black giants escorted several time-frozen Tentacle Tree officers into the laboratory.

The one at the front—with the densest canopy and silver-gray tentacles—was the fleet commander.

Because of the temporal stasis, his expression still carried the shock from the instant of defeat.

Several tentacles hovered in midair, as if still trying to issue one final order.

The officers behind him looked even more disheveled.

Some had burst canopies, others had curled tentacles.

One young officer had even curled himself into a ball.

The black giant priest bowed his head slightly.

“Master, the individuals have been brought.”

Jie Ming nodded. With a fluctuation of spiritual power, he lifted the temporal stasis.

Crack.

It was like some invisible amber shattering.

In the next instant.

All the captives regained consciousness simultaneously.

The fleet commander jerked his head up.

In his crystalline eyes still lingered the final scene before being frozen.

The falling flagship.

The interrupted communications.

The piercing alarms.

And then…

He saw Jie Ming.

An existence that completely defied their cognitive framework.

Two legs.

A structure resembling ape-like beings.

Even though Jie Ming appeared very calm and displayed no imposing aura, the moment the commander saw him, the bark across his entire body cracked with fine patterns. Several tentacles instinctively moved to shield his front.

He staggered backward. The two officers beside him collapsed directly to the ground, their crystalline eyes flashing wildly.

The entire laboratory fell into dead silence.

But not all the officers were so timid.

Suddenly, a change occurred.

A deep-brown old officer erupted violently!

Jie Ming could clearly sense that within his spiritual fluctuations, fear was instantly replaced by madness.

Boom!

Violent energy exploded from auxiliary machinery hidden inside his trunk.

More than two hundred tentacles simultaneously equipped mechanical spikes. Barbs popped out as dark green venom rapidly coated the tips.

Then.

The propulsion unit hidden on his back spewed flames, propelling him toward Jie Ming like an out-of-control heavy war chariot!

But Jie Ming merely glanced at him indifferently.

Time.

Froze once again.

The officer remained locked in his pouncing posture, solidified in midair.

The flames surging from the propulsion unit formed an almost artistic shape.

The black giant priest calmly waved his hand. Two black giants stepped forward and directly carried this “sculpture” out.

The laboratory returned to dead silence.

This time.

No more “trees” dared to move.

Jie Ming indifferently raised his chin toward the Tentacle Trees before him. His expression remained calm, showing no sign that he had just been subjected to a suicide attack. In perfectly standard Tentacle Tree language, he said:

“Speak. What is your choice?”

All the officers looked at Jie Ming in utter disbelief.

They could not understand at all.

Why this monster… could even speak their language.

As for Jie Ming, he remained indifferent to the Tentacle Trees’ reactions.

After all, for an individual, the premise of determining whether one had been attacked was whether the attacker could actually cause real harm. In Jie Ming’s view, the sudden assault by that Tentacle Tree was no different from an ant waving a grain of sand while charging an armored vehicle. Therefore, not only Jie Ming, but even the black giants beside him paid no mind to the earlier attack.

At most, a few black giant priests felt that these creatures’ behavior had been excessively rude toward their master.

But since Jie Ming had not spoken, they naturally would not take it upon themselves to deal with the offenders.

As for why he wanted to interrogate these trees… it was simply a whim.

He had already extracted all information regarding their home plane. Even if they refused to cooperate, a bit of research would allow him to locate the specific coordinates.

The reason for this interrogation now was purely to gauge their attitude.

If nothing else, if the other party was willing to surrender, Jie Ming wouldn’t mind adding another race to his plane.

Although the Tentacle Trees were not humanoid, they were a pure technology-side civilization.

And the greatest characteristic of technology-side civilizations was that their basic education was never poor—making them more than qualified as believers for the Incense Fire Divine Dao. Coincidentally, ever since the Infernal Sulfur Plane had absorbed ten planes and become a medium plane, Jie Ming’s territory had felt rather empty. Even with maximum expansion, the regions suitable for black giants to live in accounted for less than half.

The remaining vast area needed normal biological races like the Tentacle Trees.

The fleet commander’s crystalline eyes swiftly swept over Jie Ming and then toward the doorway.

A battle-hardened veteran, he quickly analyzed the current situation and his predicament.

Even though their races were completely different, from Jie Ming’s displayed aura and bearing he still understood the other party’s indifference. His thoughts spun rapidly. In the end, he slowly retracted all his tentacles, letting them hang neatly at his sides.

Then he bent his trunk, pressing his canopy almost to the ground so that the tips of all his tentacles touched the floor simultaneously.

In Tentacle Tree civilization, this was the highest form of submission ritual.

“I.”

“Deep Root Fleet Commander.”

“First-Class Expeditionary Chief Officer.”

“Harlowen Council Nomination Candidate.”

“Am willing to surrender unconditionally.”

His voice was low and steady.

Jie Ming looked down at him.

Moments later.

He suddenly spoke:

“Name.”

The commander’s body trembled visibly. Then he answered in a low voice:

“Varak.”

The laboratory lights flickered slightly as Jie Ming had already turned away: “Take him to complete the reception procedures.”

“Classify and detain all captives. Separate technical officers from combat officers.”

“Screen personnel responsible for databases and communication systems separately. I need their assistance in organizing the data.”

The black giant priest bowed his head.

“Shall captive treatment follow the standard protocol?”

“Mm.”

Jie Ming nodded.

“Provide complete living space and basic supplies. Those willing to cooperate may move freely within designated areas.”

“As for those unwilling to cooperate…”

His tone was calm.

“That is their own choice.”

Varak remained prostrated on the ground.

At the words “move freely,” the tips of his tentacles trembled faintly.

The fear in the other officers’ eyes finally began to slowly recede.

At least… they wouldn’t die for the time being.

Jie Ming no longer paid them any attention.

He turned, walked back to his seat in the laboratory, and activated the analysis array.

Buzz…

Strands of faint blue runes rose slowly, their glow illuminating the side of his face.

His gaze had already returned to the civilization’s database.

Now.

Was the time to truly begin dissecting this civilization.