Chapter 410: Hatred
Innumerable ants, scattered across various locations, suddenly began to glow with a faint white light, like fireflies.
This unusual phenomenon immediately caught the attention of many, but with the system's announcement, the curious onlookers quickly dispersed.
Countless white lights aggressively invaded the entire ant colony network. Under the overwhelming pressure of completely disparate powers, the mutated ant queen, nestled in the core of the Secret Realm, steadily lost ground. The intelligence transmission network it had painstakingly built collapsed in vast sections, leaving it utterly powerless to resist.
Ultimately, it was merely a Fourth-Tier creature; its individual combat prowess was even inferior to some powerful Third-Tier beings. Facing an assault far beyond its own tier, its ability to hold out until now was already well deserving of its rating.
It had only received a lower Fourth-Tier evaluation within the Alliance of Ten Thousand Beasts' power grading system, which was copied from humanity, due to its extraordinary vitality and formidable information acquisition capabilities.
"He's here!" The terrified ant queen, upon discovering the invasion of its internal network, rapidly pulled the highest-level alarm, seeking to alert the upper echelons of the Alliance of Ten Thousand Beasts.
As the one responsible for intelligence gathering, it possessed special equipment capable of transmitting its information to the Alliance Elder Council at the fastest possible speed.
Alas, the mutated ant queen only managed to grab its emergency communicator and utter those three words before Bai Mo fully seized control of its body.
The white light, representing Bai Mo's presence, began to torrentially surge forth.
The network spread by the mutated ant queen spanned a considerable distance, covering various cities across the Land of White, which was why it took Bai Mo nearly half a minute to complete his takeover of the ant colony network.
It was precisely this slight time lag that allowed the ant queen to react and activate its communicator to send the alert.
Even swifter than the ant queen's reaction was the energy field enveloping the entire Secret Realm. In the very first second of Bai Mo's power descending, a subtly alarming, terrifying force began to coalesce around him.
This force had always lain dormant in every corner of the forest, and Bai Mo's appearance immediately stirred it into a frenzy.
To counter the pervasive repulsion, Bai Mo's power continuously descended upon the mutated ant queen's body.
Its basketball-sized body possessed an exoskeleton comparable to steel in hardness and toughness—armor that seemed to represent the pinnacle of crustacean evolution. Yet, at this moment, it was being squeezed and cracked everywhere by the even more explosive power within.
The ant queen, which could once ram through human bodies with its steel-like form as easily as a cannonball, was now nothing more than a fragile cinder ball.
This unassuming little creature was currently enduring the descent of an immense power utterly disproportionate to its physical strength. Anyone who glanced at it would inevitably think it was about to explode at any second.
White radiance streamed from the cracks, steadily eroding the dark yellow energy field. It was vividly like a demon suddenly descending upon the Celestial Realm, the entire world roaring in protest!
Bai Mo could clearly sense that the repelling force was extremely hostile towards him, seemingly intent on obliterating him at all costs.
A super monster capable of razing a city in a single thought should not appear in this tranquil and peaceful world, destroying its beauty!
The energy field, originally extremely faint and difficult to observe, gradually intensified into a deep dark yellow as the repulsive force continuously grew stronger.
The yellow light, ceaselessly surging from all directions, and the white light, incessantly pouring from within the ant queen's shell, mutually consumed each other.
More than a year ago, a similar scene played out. At that time, Bai Mo's white light, when confronted with the red radiance of the Disciple of the Crimson World, found the two to be on completely different levels of substance, with an almost ten-to-one loss ratio.
Now, the disparity seemed even greater; it took dozens of units of yellow light disappearing to barely manage to trade off against a single unit of white light.
The scattered yellow light, formed from a multitude, found it exceptionally difficult to contend with the white light, which belonged entirely to a single, unified will.
However, with millions of square kilometers of forest as its backing, this Secret Realm could certainly endure longer than Bai Mo, who at the time was still in the Six-Tier Chemosynthesis stage.
Before he stepped into the Seventh Tier, although he would have held a qualitative advantage by several folds, his quantitative power still couldn't compare to such an excessively vast forest.
Not to mention, such an energy field was far from simply being tied to plants.
"The hatred of living beings for humanity..." Bai Mo casually plucked a wisp of the surrounding yellow mist, toying with it in his palm, then allowed the mist to evaporate within his white-light-covered hand.
As early as several years ago, during a world symposium on mutated botany, scholars had already submitted relevant papers, publicly disclosing their research findings to the world.
"The composition of the Secret Realm Forest's protective field is, in essence, the collective hatred generated by trees against humanity's ceaseless plundering!"
This mist was fundamentally impossible to dissipate naturally. The hatred, caused by humanity's self-serving development over millennia and practically ingrained in their genes, was no longer a problem a single generation could resolve.
The initial trigger for the energy field's formation was a large number of plants mutating under the induction of Spirit Qi, gaining a faint consciousness.
However, due to their concept of time being clearly on a different plane than that of humans, it might take centuries for them to truly awaken, possess the concept of self, and become intelligent lifeforms in the strict sense.
These plants, which at the time still possessed only a faint consciousness, instinctively loathed humanity, who had been relentlessly destroying the forests for countless years.
Under this collective will, all mutated plants eventually gave birth to a protective energy field of unprecedented scale, designed to safeguard the forests within the Secret Realm from deforestation.
Unfortunately, even knowing the source of the energy field brought little opportunity for the Secret Realm's development.
The reason was that humans, unable to use any machinery within the Secret Realm, ultimately held no significant advantage when facing the swarming mutated creatures, and over time, they could even be besieged to death.
Humans below the Five Tiers would only detect a subtle discomfort upon entering the Secret Realm. As their duration of stay increased, more and more mutated animals and plants would join the encirclement. If they foolishly continued deeper, it would invariably lead to a dead end.
Occasionally, the corpses of slain adventurers would be exploited by special-ability creatures of the Alliance of Ten Thousand Beasts, who would extract memories to a limited extent, attempting to gain classified intelligence that ant spies couldn't obtain.
As for superhumans at or above the Five-Tier level, they would experience the same encounter as Bai Mo the moment they entered the Secret Realm.
The entire forest would relentlessly repel these extremely dangerous existences, then drive endless waves of cannon fodder creatures from all corners to clear the obstacles, until the opponent either fled or died.
PS: Got too engrossed in Kaleidoscope, almost forgot to update.
Comments