Chapter 142-4: King of Ideas Catastrophe Legion (4) |
[Boss, it seems the Lord of Ecstasy has great ambitions. He actually wants to copy the Black Tide’s combat system and has even made an Ecstasy Tower. Interesting.]
“The question is, is this tower useful?” Qi Sheng looked at the purple tower, slightly speechless.
[Obviously it has only copied the form, while the internal structure is a complete mess and there is no corresponding Rule power blessing. A tower purely converted with the power of ecstasy is more like a display piece. But the tower does show a trend of further updates and upgrades. Many gaps for additional spirit patterns have been left inside. It appears to be in a stage of improvement and upgrading.]
[Most interesting of all, the tower has constructed a massive mental radiation grand array. The Ecstasy race seems to want to use this mental radiation array, just like a Black Tide Evil Spirit, to control units in battle via mental linkage.]
“Where are the unit templates?”
[There really are some. Do not forget that the Palace of Ecstasy captured various alien lifeforms from the Monster World and even those descending into the Monster World. These are the Ecstasy race’s research references. Then, by condensing the power of ecstasy, they copy low-spec energy lifeforms as if kneading clay on an assembly line.]
[I sensed 120 production pathways in the tower. After injecting energy, the corresponding templates can be generated. But all the templates are slapdash. They cannot at all reproduce the racial talents that different lifeforms should have, at best copying a few ability traits.]
As it spoke, Guide switched the view to the interior of the tower.
Qi Sheng immediately saw a labyrinth of energy paths. Under Guide’s deduction, energy ran along different paths and would finally condense into specific units.
[Stone Forest Beast]
Analysis Information: An incomplete Stone Forest Beast template. Generated by injecting the power of ecstasy, it possesses a weakened version of the Stone Forest Beast’s physical strength.
[Shadow Giant Wolf]
Analysis Information: An incomplete Shadow Giant Wolf template. Generated by injecting the power of ecstasy, it possesses a weakened version of the Shadow Giant Wolf’s physique and a weakened speed trait.
—
At a glance, they were all weakened copy templates.
Qi Sheng could fully understand this.
How could copying a complete combat unit template be easy. First there were two major problems to solve.
The first problem was analyzing life structure.
Guide indeed mastered the Rule of analysis and could assist him in presenting the structure of any lifeform or item.
But the Lord of Ecstasy clearly could not do this. His process of studying life structure required scanning with mental power and even dissection tests, which would inevitably miss many structural nodes of the lifeform that were hard to detect.
Second was the use of materials.
He possessed sacrificial power that could transform into all things. By consuming sacrificial power he could generate perfectly copied life. In fact this could no longer be called copying at all. It was a one-to-one creation.
The Lord of Ecstasy obviously could not do this either.
In Guide’s analysis, the power of ecstasy was likewise a Rule energy with very high plasticity.
But it was still far from having the property of transforming into all things. What was generated along the unit template pathways was not flesh-and-blood life but energy lifeforms purely simulated with the power of ecstasy, unable to provide the racial traits that flesh-and-blood life should have.
There was only a framework, without the racial talents of living beings. Such copies could not be said to lack combat power, but the gap with the original was enormous.
Loving to study is good, but the Lord of Ecstasy had clearly not learned well.
Just as Qi Sheng was about to learn more, the Ecstasy race warrior standing on the tower platform raised a hand and pointed forward, and a surging power of ecstasy poured into the tower.
Various lifeforms were bred in the purple mist.
Under the Ecstasy race warrior’s control they swept toward the polar-bear-like monsters on the snowy plain.
But what made Qi Sheng find it ridiculous was that the purple tide controlled by the Ecstasy warrior was truly abstract in its sweeping.
Some of the lifeforms broke away from the main force and went the wrong way.
Some lifeforms had the upper body of one lifeform’s template and the lower body of another’s, limping as they walked, looking extremely uncoordinated.
There were even lifeforms that, after being created, stood dazed in place due to incomplete life structures and could not receive signals transmitted by the Ecstasy Tower.
The Ecstasy race warrior responsible for controlling the purple tide also wore a ferocious expression, appearing to be in great pain.
Trying to control many things at once without the Black Tide’s perfected mental linkage system made the scene chaotic.
Just then, the purple eye floating behind the Ecstasy race warrior extended tentacles to connect to the warrior’s back.
With the infusion of mental power, the sense of control immediately improved quite a bit.
But it still could not effectively control the Ecstasy army. They stumbled forward the whole way, and more than half fell behind before even entering the giant bears’ territory.
This scene made Qi Sheng burst into hearty laughter.
He finally understood what was going on.
The Ecstasy race had clearly studied the Black Tide’s legion system and thought the construction of that legion system was very powerful, so they wanted to imitate and copy it.
But they had only copied the surface, while the internal architecture was a total mess.
Even the mental linkage was unstable and there was a problem with coverage range. It could be called a fantastical army.
Most absurd of all, the unit template architecture was not even complete.
With all kinds of chaotic units and no system to speak of, more than half disconnected before the fighting even started.
Then there was the Evil Eye’s design.
In the Black Tide system, the Evil Eye was functional support, but the Evil Eye created by the Ecstasy race was more like a mental power charging pack, which could also be understood as a power bank.
When controlling the purple tide caused the Ecstasy warrior’s mental power to be overconsumed, they connected the power bank to provide mental power endurance.
As for database retrieval, battlefield analysis, perception mode, and the like, none of the core functions were present.
It had no intelligence at all. Its only purpose was charging.
How was this a catastrophe? It was pure clownery.
At last, under the Ecstasy warrior’s control, the purple tide approached the giant bears.
What followed was a very uncoordinated combat scene. While the energy lifeforms of the Ecstasy legion constructed from purple energy attacked the giant bears, they also pounded their own legion’s lifeforms.
As for controlling the lifeforms to unleash abilities, there were so many that the Ecstasy warrior could not possibly control them precisely.
[Hahaha, this Ecstasy race is something else, actually trying to control lifeforms purely with mental power. You have to know that the Black Tide’s mental linkage control is more like a kind of telepathic control. It is not this brute-force, pure mental power control at all. What on earth are they thinking, to play with a legion system like this.]
Hearing Guide’s words, Qi Sheng could not help but laugh as well.
The Ecstasy warrior’s behavior was like remote control, needing to control different remote controllers at the same time. The process was truly laborious.
The Evil Spirit’s way of controlling the Black Tide could be understood as ‘thought mapping.’
For example, when the Earthmind Evil Spirit commanded the Black Tide to attack, it did not need to issue any orders. The Black Tide would act according to its thoughts.
In between, the Evil Eye provided thought transcoding, generating countless linked action commands.
The whole process was silky smooth, with no restrictions. Thoughts were commands.
The Ecstasy warrior’s method of control was the complete opposite.
As Guide said, it was purely brute force with no technique at all, just hard operation.
It was like a person needing to generate countless arms, one arm drawing a circle, one arm drawing a square, one arm drawing a triangle, and so on, needing to control different arms for detailed operations all at once.
It controlled the Ecstasy legion with a multitasking-to-the-Nth-degree method.
This was also why the battle scenes of the purple tide army were so abstract.
During the course of battle, part of it would often crash while another part suddenly acted. It was clear that the Ecstasy warrior on the tower platform had his brain cells nearly squeezed dry. He simply could not control the group and could only keep switching screens.
If there had to be an advantage, it was not nonexistent. The only decent aspect of the purple tide copied by the Lord of Ecstasy was the devour-and-remold capabilities.
After units composed of the power of ecstasy died, they would be reabsorbed and reused, but the conversion rate was only 45 percent of the Black Tide’s.
This ratio might seem low, but it was already very high.
The Rule traits of the Black Tide were by no means comparable to the power of ecstasy. Reaching nearly 45 percent of the Black Tide was already extremely good even in the Monster World.
But apart from this advantage, everything else was a complete mess.
It was clear that the Lord of Ecstasy very much wanted to improve and was trying hard, but there was still a long road of exploration before success.
One could only say he was commendably brave.
[Boss, look what I found.]
At that moment, the scene before Qi Sheng shifted westward.
A few seconds later, the image froze before a creature entirely purple, constantly wriggling, and as huge as a small mountain.
“This is a Swarm hive mind?”
[No, more accurately, this is the Ecstasy hive mind.]