53: Chapter 50 Life Magic (Third Release, Requesting Monthly Pass) 53: Chapter 50 Life Magic (Third Release, Requesting Monthly Pass) Yvonne clamped his severed arm and roared loudly, his words provocative and filled with curses, as blood dripped from where his arm had been torn away, his complexion gradually turning pale.
Isabella hid herself well; she didn’t make a move and silently waited for Yvonne to die from excessive blood loss.
The entire underground plaza, including the sprawling Chasm Tunnel, had been cultivated with greenery by Isabella—a sorceress from the Naturalism Church who had meticulously groomed magical plants that could grow rapidly even in harsh environments without water and light.
The greenery secreted pollen invisible to the naked eye, which would rise with the gusts of wind and spread to every corner of the chasm.
This pollen was not fatal but targeted the central nervous system, causing those who inhaled it to suffer from delusions and hallucinations, disrupting their judgment, making their thinking blurry, and their emotions easily agitated.
The previous guards, now Archbishop Ivan, had all inhaled more or less of this pollen.
In other words, Isabella had already played a Field Card that reduced everyone’s intelligence; as the unwelcome guest seizing control, she turned the earth core cult’s lair into her own turf.
She was not disturbed and with her advantage maximized, she didn’t need to do anything—just waiting would suffice.
Isabella was not contented with just waiting, though, for battles between mages were best swiftly concluded; the longer the delay, the more uncertainties would arise.
The ground of the plaza bulged as vines rose up like serpents, hissing at Yvonne.
Devoid of their own consciousness, the vines under Isabella’s control moved as if each had a mind of its own; they didn’t advance in uniform step but moved variably—up and down, at tricky angles, forward and back, sometimes advancing in clusters side by side.
The unpredictable onslaught left Yvonne running ragged, unable to grasp any pattern and even less capable of figuring out where Isabella was hiding.
Wind blades continuously chopped the vines, only for more to burst forth from the ground—cut one head off and two more grew back.
Suffering from severe blood loss, Yvonne’s reactions slowed, and his ankle was caught by a vine; shortly afterward, he was slammed hard against the wall like a broken windmill.
Vines rushed forward en masse, hundreds converging to form a wall, rolling thunderously over everything in their path.
Suddenly, a flash of red light flickered.
The blood, dripping on the ground, abruptly transformed into serpents of fire, and the bloating flames greedily consumed oxygen.
An orange-red sphere erupted with a shockwave, incinerating all the vines sprawling across the plaza to ashes.
The flames burrowed underground, stubbornly persistent as a bone-attaching ulcer, quickly sweeping clean the roots spread beneath the surface.
Not only that, but the flames also burned away the hallucinogenic pollen in the air.
Yvonne slowly stood up and ripped off his white robe, revealing a slightly shriveled and aged body.
At the site of the severed arm, white flesh wriggled, growing a thick and boneless tendril.
By some means, his pale complexion also gradually improved, seemingly unaffected by the excessive blood loss.
“I thought I could lure you out.
I didn’t expect you to be such a coward.
A disciple of the Nature Goddess, espousing justice, can only attack from behind, using dirty tricks that cannot see the light of day…”
Yvonne spouted his rhetoric with an edge of mockery and ended with a cold laugh, “I know you’re delaying.
But am I not doing the same?
When the Underground King awakens, she will summon her children.
At that time, the entire town will spontaneously cry out the name of the master of the void.
You will wait for nothing but death.”
It had little effect; Isabella seemed not to care about the townspeople’s lives and deaths.
Even as Yvonne painted the scene as a living Hell, she remained as unmoved as a terrapin, not stirring in the slightest.
Seeing this, Yvonne began to mutter incantations, the sound of his chants rising from a faint murmur to a deafening outcry.
A torrent of Magic Power gushed forth, sketching a complex Magic Array Diagram beneath Yvonne’s feet.
Tentacles emerged from the array, initially spectral projections that solidified upon contact with the Four Elements.
The earth roared as from the abyss beyond the plaza, several tendrils over a hundred meters in diameter squirmed and climbed the cliffside.
If left unchecked, allowing the Underground King free reign to cause trouble, the entire Enrold Town would face an apocalyptic disaster.
On one side of the square, the earth and rocks rolled and heaved, and a giant bud twice the height of a man drilled out of the ground.
Two wind blades crossed, shot out like arrows released from their strings, piercing through Yvonne’s body, with the momentum carrying on to penetrate the thick rock walls of the square, severing a tentacle that was climbing upward at the midsection.
Yvonne’s body was sliced into several pieces by the wind blades and fell to the ground in disarray, but he did not die, and there was no splattering of blood or spilling of organs or intestines from the cut surfaces.
Clusters of wriggling foam bred and spread, seamlessly fusing his fragmented body with the surrounding tentacles, turning into a bizarre and grotesque creature.
Upon closer inspection, Archbishop Ivan’s current form bore a certain resemblance to the statue’s design.
The layers of the bud unfolded, and Isabella leaped out, looking at the distorted figure of Yvonne, her eyebrows slightly furrowed, with some uncertainty she said, “Life Magic?!”
Life Magic is diverse, and under normal circumstances, only legendary mages with clear intellect can master it.
Yvonne barely qualified, but his deviation from mainstream aesthetic tastes and his divergence from humanity conveyed a kind of universal nausea-inducing “beauty.” Rather than Life Magic, it was more as if his mind had endured an overload of knowledge, the essence of life became unbalanced, leading to complete contamination of himself.
“You know of Life Magic…”
Yvonne sized up the plump woman across from him, not laughing at her obese physique, and ominously said, “Indeed, looking at you, you have already mastered part of the Life Magic.
I see the longing for knowledge in your heart.
Perhaps one day, you will attain a perfect and flawless body just like mine.”
The perfect and flawless body in Yvonne’s eyes was one where limbs and head were separated from each other, each part connected to a tentacle.
The writhing tentacles seemed like blooming white plants, flowering and fruiting, with the head on the left, the buttocks on the right, here a hand, there a leg.
A loud noise shook the underground square relentlessly.
“Hahaha, because of your cowardice and caution, worrying only about preserving yourself, you have given the Underground King time to reach the surface,” Yvonne declared with a loud laugh.
“But you need not blame yourself.
The Void Lord will forgive your transgression.
After tonight, everyone will merge into one, and the townsfolk will forgive you, too!”
As he merged with the tentacles, Yvonne’s hands and feet began to tentacularize, and his facial features gradually blurred, becoming indistinct like eyes, nose, mouth, and ears growing on a tentacle.
Most preposterous was that his brain was singled out and lifted, completely exposed to the air.
Isabella watched coldly from the sidelines as Yvonne laughed, suddenly realizing something was amiss.
Another loud explosion, and the air gradually heated up.
Yvonne turned his head to look outside the tunnel; a fireball expanded, and flames scorched everything in their path.
The loud noise was not the Underground King breaking through the ground to reach the surface of Enrold Town, but rather the Underground King’s tentacles triggering traps, causing successive explosions, the tentacles being consumed by the flames, turning to ashes at an incredibly fast rate.
A wind blade swept across, chopping the blooming tentacles down to bare stubs with the ease of slicing vegetables.
The brain, given special attention, was directly burst into splatters.
Hot and fresh, straight out of the skull.
With a vacant gaze, Yvonne let out meaningless roars, the wriggling tentacles stitching together into a meatball two meters in diameter, extending four tentacles, crawling at high speed towards Isabella.