Molting the Mortal Coil

Chapter 998: Boarding

The Flying Ship circled around the top of the plateau, while a Flying Sword zipped around, banging up against the wall of the barrier. The prism shaped formations didnt react to the Flying Sword, which the people from the Chain Ocean Palace attributed to the formation being under the control of Sage and his people. In actuality, the formation could sense energy fluctuations and would automatically move to disperse any energy attack greater than a certain threshold. At this time, the Flying Sword was testing the barrier by ramming into it. It was enhanced by many talismans and coated with many boosting auras, but this was basically just an empowered physical attack, which the prism part of the formation would not interact with.

It was far more common for Cultivators and their equipment to be based upon energy based attacks. Even weapon cultivators mostly empowered their attacks with their weapon intent, a varied subset of laws that transformed their cuts into waves of cutting power. It was actually quite rare to find Cultivators that relied upon brute strength and physical attacks at the Nascent Soul level, that was usually the forte of Demonic Beasts. Only a few crazy cultivators would choose to focus on physical attacks and face off with Demonic Beasts head on. Since most Cultivators used energy attacks, the researchers on the Inner World put quite a lot of work into the development of this formation that was extremely efficient against them.

A few minutes later, Sage smiled widely, Found it.

The three from the Chain Ocean Palace had made no progress, merely circling around the area once and poking the barrier a few thousand times along the way. They had begun a discussion on what step to take next, but it was already too late for them. Eighteen Shard Rifles appeared in the air around Sage, held in the air by his Spirit Power and spreading out to get the proper angle for their targets. Then the stars faded from the pupil of his left eye while his eye slowly transformed to match the one on his forehead. A pair of lines ran across horizontally and the gold color spread outwards from his iris to cover all of the white sclera of his eye with what looked like golden scales. The black pupil split into three, one dot between the two horizontal lines with one above and below them.

The strange tri-pupil of his left eye and upon his forehead worked together to carefully track the Flying Ship, requiring two of the same eye to get good depth perception and using Foresight with his right eye to predict the way the ship would move and react. The Adjutors and research teams had already deciphered enough of the Flying Ships defensive formation and pointed out the weak points that Sage needed to target. Every group would have its own unique defensive formations because the most common ones would already be known to Formation Masters. Anyone who knew the weak points of an array would be able to crack it with much less effort so every organization made their own formations to prevent this problem. It was just too bad for them that Sage had hundreds of experts using bio-computers working on deciphering their arrays. Just a few minutes equated to multiple days of work on the Inner World, and when the extra information from the Timeless Eyes and Sea Locust Eyes were added in, they were able to pinpoint the weaknesses of the defensive formations on the Flying Ship.

The Shard Rifles swept outwards, having to move quite some distance away from Sage in order to get the proper angle to strike the weak points on the top and far side of the Flying Ship. Not only were they specific positions, the attacks also had to come from specific angles which meant they had to spread even further away to target the Flying Ship in the distance. Sage directed the rifles to the perfect locations before lighting up with energy and releasing beams of light. The glowing shards of Indigo Quartz flew through the air, empowered by Lunarstones and flashing out to strike the barrier of the Flying Ship in nine different places at the same time. Then another volley followed immediately after, launched by the second set of nine rifles. This formation needed layered strikes, striking faster than the Shard Rifles could charge, which was why a full eighteen were needed.

There was movement on the deck of the Flying Ship, but they were still at quite the distance and were at a loss for how to respond to this sudden attack. Xia Jing was doing his best to control the barrier of the Flying Ship and resist the attack, but the tiny shards were destabilizing the integrity of the ships shield. The ships energy was draining rapidly, and no matter how skillfully he tried to rotate and shift the barrier, it was still bleeding energy way too quickly. Xia Jing told the other two what was happening and the younger woman joined in to help him while the older woman, Deng Jian, sent her Flying Sword towards the nearest Shard Rifle. Unfortunately, the silvery weapon moved aside, dodging the sword. She controlled the sword to attack it again and then moved on to the next one, but each time she did the rifle would flip or roll out of the way, firing again and again without even an interruption.

She got anxious and timed her attack with when the rifle was going to fire and her sword interrupted the pattern that had been going on for quite some time. She was ecstatic, as the rate of disruption dropped drastically. It was just too bad that it was only one time. Three more Shard Rifles appeared near Sage and they targeted the Flying Sword blasting it with carefully aimed shards. The shards crashed against the auras coating the sword, cracking them and forcing it to start shedding talismans. These attacks stopped the Flying Sword from interrupting the first eighteen Shard Rifles and the nine weak points were targeted once again with rapid shots.

In desperation, the Chain Ocean Palace members tried to fire their Sky Lance again, but it was dispersed again just like the other times. With the energy of the Flying Ship depleted, it slowly descended and touched down upon the plateau where Sage and the others were waiting. Sage was pleased with this decision, as he would have had to interfere if they stubbornly refused to land. They could still choose to spend their Spirit Stones to charge the Flying Ship, but that would just lead to them burning through all their savings for a fight that seemed hopeless.

As soon as the Flying Ship touched down, Sage wasted no time in sprinting over to meet it. The three on board were not expecting him to approach them so quickly, nor were they expecting the black vine with purple thorns that swung over to them and wrapped around their bodies. They activated their defensive techniques and deflected the majority of the black vines and prevented the vine from wrapping around them or striking them with its potent venom. They put up a valiant defense, but they finally noticed the Parasitic Roots digging into their legs a moment too late.