Stealing The Heavens
chapter-865

After Princess Zhang Le had formed her avatar of the God of Thunder, she was able to command all the lightning in the world as effortlessly as if they were her arms. With just a thought, she could make bolts of lightning rain. And compared to those immortals, who had to perform incantation gestures and recite spells to unleash such powerful lightning attack, both her speed and the power of her lightning were much faster and stronger.

But she did not put in too much of her energy into this attack. After all, she was much stronger than her foes, and if she killed these thousand-odd Oracles with a single strike, she might attract some unwanted attention, which Wu Qi was trying best to avoid. Therefore, she had only used a little bit of her energy, making the power of the lighting about the same as the strongest attack unleashed by someone who had just stepped into the realm of the Supreme Oracle.

Over a thousand bolts of lightning poured down towards the Oracles across her. Her foes looked calmed and were reciting spells; immortal light and auspicious clouds were being emanated from the pagodas beneath them, and voices of someone chanting Buddha's scriptures could be faintly heard coming from across the distance. Vague shadows of Ghost Gods were visible behind them as well, baring their teeth and brandishing their claws. Judging from this display of might alone, they were not much weaker than Great Yu's Supreme Oracles.

Amid the show of bright light and clouds, all the pagodas grew to over ten thousand feet tall, their light and clouds joined as one and blotted the sky. Several oldest Oracles were laughing coldly as one of them said, "Wicked girl, do you really think you can hurt us with that weak lightning of yours?"

Before his voice had died away, however, the princess's bolts of lightning had struck the sea of floating clouds and bright light. A deafening explosion rang out as the clouds and light were torn to shreds, while over a hundred pagodas were blown apart. Fragments of metal shot and flew in all directions, hitting Oracles who were calmly performing incantation gestures and reciting spells. Dozens of them were struck in their throats by the projectiles and had their necks broken. Without even having the chance to cry out, they fell and crashed into the ground, turning into pieces of dead meat.

Princess Zhang Le was stunned. Her attack was only the first wave that served as a distraction, and the main attack would come from Yu Gu and the other old Oracles. She did not understand why the lightning she had casually unleashed was able to cause such heavy losses to her opponents, who appeared to be both aggressive and strong in cultivation bases.

It was clear that those seven-storied pagodas were fashioned after Great Yu's Supreme Towers, and they were even strengthened with Dao League's formations and Buddhism League's restrictive magic. Logically, their defense should be a few times stronger than that of Great Yu. But by the look of it, they were actually not much better than ordinary Heaven Immortal artifacts. In battles fought between Supreme Oracles, using defensive artifacts of such a grade was no different than courting death.

What surprised her the most was those Oracles killed by the fragments of pagodas. She could not believe that they did not even carry a life-saving artifact. The things that killed them were only fragments of the pagodas blown apart by the lightning, which did not have any magic power but only pure physical forces, and that was more than enough to kill over a dozen of them. What was this? A joke?

Princess Zhang Le looked at Wu Qi in a daze, while Wu Qi rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand and glanced carefully once more at those Oracles. He had not been wrong about them. Although on average, their cultivation bases were weaker than Great Yu's Supreme Oracles, they all had stepped into the same realm. He could tell that from their energy fluctuations. But why was the princess able to kill so many of them with just a lightning attack, as if they were made of tofu?

Bolts of lightning, thousands of them, continued to fall. Those proud and arrogant Oracles were now flying in panic all over the sky, squealing and yelling like mouses with fires on their tails. They even forgot about their pagodas, which were quickly blown to shreds when the lightning struck. The void was blotted with metal fragments, some as small as an adult's fist and some as large as a hill.

Amid the cries of agony, several Oracles had their limbs took away by the fragments; some were pierced in the chests or bellies, and some had their necks or shoulders cracked and broken. They fell from the sky, howling, and as they did not have the time to cast magic and fly back up, they crashed straight into the ground and turned into meat pastes.

There were others whose flesh were sliced away by fragments with sharp edges. These Oracles were all hundreds of years old, and they did not keep themselves as good as Great Yu's Oracles, that was to say, they were very skinny. The fragments had taken large chunks of flesh off them, and that made them shrieked at the top of their lungs in severe pain. Under such conditions, they could not continue fighting Wu Qi and others.

Wu Qi blinked his eyes in disbelief. What kind of Oracles were these old fellas? Their cultivation bases were awe-inspiring, he granted that, but he was disappointed by their ability to fight. Princess Zhang Le, on the other hand, was shaking her head. She had lost her interest to give them another lighting strike.

After a moment of chaos and a casualty of over three hundred men, the remaining Oracles retreated tens of miles from the battlefield, their bodies bloody. Standing on dark clouds, they looked over in the princess's direction, pointing and shouting in a fit of rage.

Yu Gu, standing next to Wu Qi and was clearly in shock, swallowed hard. He beckoned, and a black fragment of pagoda about the size of a man's head flew up into his hand. A tongue of dark flame burst out of his palm and began to burn at the fragment. With a sizzling noise and in just the blink of an eye, it was completely burned off, turning into wisps of green smoke and drifted away in the wind. What was left in his palm was a silver speck smaller than the tip of a needle.

"Ha!" Yu Gu laughed mockingly. "Great Yu's Supreme Towers are all crafted with various rare materials. It takes at least a billion kilograms of both innate and acquired essences of five elements to make each of them. I reckoned these fools had used less than half a kilogram of acquired essences of five elements in their pagodas. How could such inferior things be used on a battlefield?"

Upon hearing his comments, the other Great Oracles of Great Yu all shook their heads and laughed. For that moment, the pressure that had been weighing down on their shoulders vanished.

The reason that Supreme Oracles could become Great Yu's strategic forces were not only because they had mighty magic power and countless vicious spells and curses up in their sleeves, but most importantly, each of them had a Supreme Tower, which was equipped with countless mysterious and powerful restrictive magic. When both of them combined as one, they became a battle fortress.

Take Wu Qi's Dark Yin Celestial Tower as an example. Normally when he traveled in it, it was merely tens of feet tall, but when there was a need, he could transform it at any time into a huge tower that was ten thousand miles tall with a base that measured tens of thousands of miles in all four sides. Coupled with the countless restrictive magic in it, and its extraordinarily tough material, so long as an army of a million troops was stationed in it, it would immediately turn into a metal city all enemies were feared to face, for it was almost impregnable.

All Supreme Towers, including those ordinary ones which could not manipulate time, required a huge amount of materials to produce. The whole deposits of a few hundred mineral veins producing essences of five elements were just the basic; formations carved with various innate and acquired essences of five elements were a must, and for those with better quality, all kinds of innate spirit artifacts such as Pearls of Five Elements were added to provide them with endless energies. It took dozens and even hundreds of Supreme Oracles, who were experts in artifact refinement, a long time and a hard effort to produce each Supreme Tower. However, as soon as it was completed, it possessed the defense that was equivalent to that of a Primordial Artifact.

The seven-storied pagodas looked magnificent and powerful, but they were in fact crafted with inferior materials. Their quality was at most on par with middle or maybe upper-grade Heaven Immortal Artifacts. It was as if two equally strong men were having a duel across a hundred steps, but one was holding a tiny toothpick and the other was clad in a full suit of armor, holding all kinds of powerful long-range weapons. A duel like this was a complete one-sided slaughter.

Wu Qi twitched his mouth. Grinning coldly, he said, "If all the Oracles from outer heavenly realms are like them, a Supreme Oracle from Great Yu could have killed a thousand of them!"

All the old Oracles around him laughed, their faces relaxed. Yu Gu shook his head and said, "They are really weak. They... wait, what are they doing?"

Just as Wu Qi and others were laughing here, the hundreds of Oracles who had survived the first wave of attack raised their hands over their shoulders at the same time and began to recite a spell in unison. As their voices spread out, meteors as large as water buckets came falling down from the sky with bright tails behind them. They looked so dense that Wu Qi reckoned there must be at least hundreds of thousands of them. As they all looked up, the waves of meteors came raining down on them like a storm.

Yu Gu roared with laughter. Casually, he pointed out a finger, and immediately the Supreme Tower under his feet radiated a bright light and soared up into the air, transforming into a huge tower a hundred miles around. The meteors summoned by hundreds of Oracles smashed endlessly on the tower; the air rang with violent explosions, and numerous small mushroom clouds rose from its surface. And yet the tower did not so much as tremble, and its smooth and clean surface remained spotless like a mirror.

Yu Gu did not even activate its defensive magic. The attack was completely warded off by the tower's tough material. Waves of meteors crashed to pieces, shattering into countless debris and clouds of dust and sprinkling down towards the ground with bright sparks. None of them were able to hurt Wu Qi and others.

Princess Zhang Le suddenly said, "It seems they only know this magic."

Wu Qi was stunned, and so was Yu Gu, and everybody else.

The reason the human Oracles were feared by those immortals and Buddhas was that they had mastered numerous brutal and vicious magic, all of which came with terrible power that could kill someone without being noticed. Each of them had mastered at least several hundreds of such magic, and if they were Oracles who specialized in the research of magic in the Secret Palace, they could master thousands if not tens of thousands of lethal, bizarre magic.

It was these complex, unpredictable, vicious, and lethal magic that gave the human Supreme Oracles their formidable reputation.

These Oracles from the outer heavenly realm only knew one magic?

Yu Gu squeezed his lips into a thin line. Clenching his jaws, he said, "I thought we are fighting a pack of white tigers, and yet it turns out they are just a group of white kittens. My brothers, let's kill them all!"

Several old Oracles laughed hideously at the same time. They waved their right hands, and in the next instant countless strange-looking demons, fiends, ghosts, and monsters charged out, surrounding in plumes of black smokes, poisonous gases, ghosts flames and gusts of chill wind.