The surrounding chatter rose and fell in waves.
Apprentices gathered in small groups. Some still wore expressions of shock, while others had already begun excitedly discussing the species and rank of the Void Beasts. Still, others kept their eyes fixed on the inverted castle, their gazes burning with fanaticism.
Ethan withdrew his gaze.
Only one thought remained in his mind.
A Star Wizard.
What kind of existence was a Star Wizard who could own something like this?
Before he could dwell on the question, he was interrupted by a dull whistling of wind.
The bottom of the fortress opened.
Countless neatly arranged hexagonal ports opened simultaneously.
These ports were densely distributed across the bottom of the fortress, their edges glowing with a faint green light.
Inside the ports was pure darkness, revealing nothing.
Immediately following, countless figures flew out from those ports.
They had dark brown, wood-like textures across their entire bodies. Their forms were humanoid, possessing heads, trunks, and limbs, but their proportions were entirely different from humans.
Their arms were extremely long, hanging down far enough to touch their ankles, while their legs were short and thick, with wide feet that looked like tree roots.
They had no obvious facial features. The tops of their heads were clusters of dense, tiny vines, with leaf-like structures at the ends that swayed slowly in the air.
There were simply too many of them.
They surged out from the dense ports like a bursting dam or a swarm of bees from a hive. One after another, row after row, they spread out in overlapping layers.
Ethan's pupils constricted slightly.
Ten thousand?
A hundred thousand?
No, it was far more than that.
The speed at which those wooden figures emerged from the bottom of the fortress was incredibly fast; thousands more joined every second.
They dispersed in the air, flying toward the various academy formations on the plaza.
Soon, the sky above was covered by these wooden figures.
They were distributed evenly over every academy formation, spaced about ten meters apart, forming a massive, three-dimensional grid.
Each wooden figure hovered in a fixed position, arms hanging naturally at its sides. The leaf-like structures atop their heads swayed slowly as if sensing something.
Ethan looked up, his gaze landing on the wooden figure directly above him.
A Third-Tier Apprentice.
This wooden creature hovering twenty meters above his head emitted Life Energy fluctuations that were almost identical to the senior Third-Tier Wizard Apprentices in the academy.
Ethan shifted his gaze from the figure above him to the further reaches of the sky.
They were everywhere.
As far as the eye could see, the sky was filled with these wooden figures.
They were like a net cast across the sky, enveloping all several million people on the plaza.
Every academy formation had them overhead.
Every area was covered.
There were at least a million of them.
All just to maintain order.
"That is quite the grand gesture," he whispered to himself, his voice nearly inaudible amidst the gasps of the plaza.
"What are those things?"
"Treants, you idiot. Have you no worldliness?"
"Such strong energy fluctuations. Are they at least at the level of a Third-Tier Apprentice?"
Discussions broke out everywhere.
The wooden creatures hovered in the sky, their emerald-green energy cores rotating slowly without any superfluous movement.
Gradually, everyone was influenced by the Treants' presence and fell silent.
After an unknown amount of time...
At that moment, a high tower at the very top of the War Fortress suddenly lit up.
The light was a pure emerald green, spreading from the spire in all directions like ripples from a stone cast into water.
Everywhere the light touched, the color of the sky changed. The originally grayish-white clouds were dyed with a faint green tint, like fresh buds sprouting in spring.
The air began to vibrate.
Ethan could feel the wood-element energy particles in the vicinity suddenly become active.
The green specks of light that had been floating quietly in the air were now being seized by something, surging frantically toward the top of the fortress.
They moved so fast that the air emitted a low hum.
Then, the emerald light at the top of the fortress suddenly contracted.
The light collapsed inward, going from blinding to dim in an instant.
But the moment the light vanished, a figure stepped out from the fortress.
When the figure first appeared, it was only the size of an ordinary person, but the moment it stepped out of the fortress, it began to expand rapidly.
In just a single breath, the figure grew large enough to blot out the sun, nearly obscuring the entire fortress behind it.
Ethan looked up.
It was a giant composed of pure emerald-green energy.
Nearly a thousand meters tall.
It was woven from countless overlapping emerald halos that flowed constantly, like auroras spreading across the night sky.
With every flow, one could vaguely see countless fine runes forming, regrouping, and vanishing deep within the halos.
The figure's face was blurred, its features hidden by light, leaving only its eyes visible.
Those eyes were like two emerald stars embedded in the canopy of the sky, looking down upon the ten thousand Wizards, millions of Wizard Apprentices, and billions of cannon fodder.
The figure stood there in the void, and the air beneath its feet rippled in circles, spreading in all directions.
Ethan's vision was entirely occupied by that figure.
A body nearly a thousand meters tall, standing in the void like a world-propping giant from myth and legend.
Light particles drifted down from around its body like a fall of green snow.
The light particles landed on the plaza ground, on the shoulders of apprentices, and on the bodies of the cannon fodder, silently seeping into their skin.
The surrounding wood-element energy particles cheered and leaped like they had gone mad.
His Plant Affinity passive allowed Ethan to clearly perceive that every plant within dozens of miles bowed its trunk toward that figure in that instant.
An active, pious, and uncontrollable surrender.
Everyone on the plaza looked up.
No one spoke.
No one could speak.
The pressure radiating from that Elemental True Body was like a physical gravity field, pressing down on everyone's heads, shoulders, and knees.
The knees of the hundreds of millions of slaves, demon beasts, and creations in the cannon fodder legions began to buckle. Their bodies involuntarily sank, and then they knelt.
Ethan felt his legs tremble slightly, but he forced them straight again in an instant.
At the same time, he forced himself not to look away from that figure.
He didn't know why he was doing it.
Perhaps he simply didn't want to bow his head at a time like this.
Perhaps he just wanted to remember this feeling.
He would remember it; one day, he would have it too.
Just then, the hovering Treants in the sky moved.
In the same instant, they transitioned from hovering to a kneeling posture.
Their dark brown lower limbs bent slightly, their wide feet treading on the void. As their knees dropped, they stirred up visible ripples of energy in the air.
Their arms hung at their sides, and the leaf-like structures atop their heads all folded inward, pressing tight against their trunks, like subjects bowing their heads to a monarch.
A million Treants knelt in unison.
Then, all the Treants spoke at once.
"Master."
The sound merged into a massive wave of noise that echoed over the plaza, making ears ring.
The simultaneous voices of a million Treants at the Third-Tier Apprentice level was no less significant than the commotion caused by the four Void Beasts licking the spatial rift earlier.
Rate on N.U.
