Big Data Cultivation Chapter 797

Chapter 797: Chapter 797: Coming as Said Chapter 797: Chapter 797: Coming as Said The emergence of the wild beasts was quite abrupt. The city wall had been calm, but suddenly, a small black dot appeared in the yellow sand.

The black dot was visibly enlarging at a rapid pace.

Soon after, seven or eight more black dots appeared behind the first one, fervently chasing after it.

There was a stir on the city wall, and then someone shouted loudly, “The scout is back, prepare to receive!”

As the black dot rapidly approached the city wall, Feng Jun realized, “Is that actually a Sword Cultivator?”

The combat strength of a Sword Cultivator went without saying, particularly with their ability to fly on swords, but to be a scout… It seemed somewhat incongruent.

This Sword Cultivator was at the high tier of Qi Refinement, and his flying speed was unquestionably fast. Four black-crowned sand swallows and two tempest gulls were chasing him.

Behind them was a massive Crimson Flame Eagle, one of the dominant beasts of the desert and a bona fide wild beast.

The Sword Cultivator flew extremely fast, but the black-crowned sand swallows were also swift, occasionally spitting out stones with unbelievable speed.

The sand swallows and tempest gulls, both being Spirit Beasts, could spit sandstone that had a certain chance of injuring Qi-Refining Practitioners, especially useful against Sword Cultivators–although Sword Cultivators were mighty in combat, they were vulnerable, having poor defense.

Luckily, despite their weak defense, the Sword Cultivator had a very agile body technique. Darting left and right, up and down while flying on his sword, he adroitly dodged the attacks.

However, by dodging in this manner, he inevitably couldn't fly in a straight line, and thus they clung to him relentlessly.

With the city wall within sight, the Sword Cultivator suddenly increased his speed, just as the Crimson Flame Eagle let out a loud cry that echoed for miles.

The accelerating Sword Cultivator took the brunt of the sound, his body visibly faltering before he plummeted towards the ground.

The four sand swallows and two tempest gulls also cried out and swooped down on the Sword Cultivator in unison.

“You beastly demons dare!” A furious roar came from the city wall, and two figures shot out like lightning, both being Cultivators in the Nascent Soul Realm.

One of them, at the intermediate level of Nascent Soul, dashed straight for the Crimson Flame Eagle. Raising a hand, he pointed and two streaks of gold light shot out directly at the wild beast.

The other, a Nascent Soul beginner, went straight for the high-rank Qi-Refining Sword Cultivator.

Regrettably, neither of them was a Sword Cultivator, and their speed was somewhat slow. In the end, they did rescue the Sword Cultivator, but it seemed he was not lightly wounded.

While two Nascent Soul Cultivators stepped forward to intercept their own, the seven Spirit Beasts and the wild beast did not retreat but stood their ground, confronting the two Nascent Souls.

The two Nascent Soul Cultivators slowly retreated backward, trying to draw the opponents nearer to the city wall.

Yet, these seven flying creatures were not fools. They engaged in a stand-off, aiming to delay until their reinforcements arrived. Seeing their opponents reluctant to engage and trying to lure them near the city wall, they gave up the pursuit.

Then, they circled triumphantly outside the city wall a few times, as if they had won a battle.

In fact, although they didn't kill the Sword Cultivator, they had severely wounded him.

The Sword Cultivator, having flown back on his sword, was already running on fumes, utterly drained. Not to mention that the sand swallows' long-range attacks had also inflicted some damage on him.

Before long, the message brought back by the Sword Cultivator was spread around: the invading force of wild beasts amounted to at least forty to fifty thousand wild beasts and Spirit Beasts, and they had unified command, only a hundred or so miles from the city wall.

Ji PingAn couldn't help but clench his teeth upon hearing the news, “Damn, another fierce battle is upon us.”

Feng Jun contemplated another issue, “Are there many flying beasts among these wild beasts and Spirit Beasts?”

He felt that in head-to-head combat, Cultivators had a higher chance of victory, but if there were too many flying creatures in the enemy's ranks, the battle would be tough–air forces had too great an advantage over ground forces.

“Flying creatures make up about one-third,” Captain Ji PingAn replied somberly, “but many of them don't have long-range attacks, so there's no need to worry too much.”

About half a day later, rolling yellow sand in the distance heralded the arrival of the allied force of Spirit Beasts and wild beasts.

At the very forefront, a vast expanse of a dense mass of yellowish-brown ants, each more than ten centimeters long.

Upon seeing this, Feng Jun took in a sharp breath, “Just these iron-devouring ants, there must be more than four hundred and fifty thousand, right?”

Xia PingAn, knowing his limited knowledge on the subject, responded with a smile, “Among the iron-devouring ants, Spirit Beasts are extremely rare, one in a thousand. Generally, a hundred thousand iron-devouring ants can be regarded as ten thousand Spirit Beasts.”

The Ant Queen, also just a Spirit Beast, could command a hundred thousand iron-devouring ants, meaning one Ant Queen was roughly equivalent to ten thousand Spirit Beasts.

However, one must not underestimate these iron-devouring ants. When they roamed the desert, besides the flying beasts, the ground-dwelling wild beasts would only flee in a sorry state upon encountering them.

In fact, among flying creatures, only Sand Swallows, Stormy Petrels, or Peregrine Falcons could restrain them and prey on them. Slower flyers, if they happened to encounter the hatching flying ants, would also face a fierce battle.

Behind the Iron Devouring Ants was a massive group of Spirit Beasts: Scorpions as large as half a person, poison snakes that could fly for short periods, Golden Rock Sheep with incredibly strong charges, Drought Fire Turtles with unparalleled defensive abilities…
Other Spirit Beasts like jackals, wolves, tigers, and leopards could also be seen everywhere, and Feng Jun even spotted seven or eight Spiritual Hedgehogs.

There were relatively fewer savage beasts, only about twenty. As for how to identify savage beasts from a distance? That was easy–if one was alone, sitting there by itself, it was generally a savage beast.

Savage beasts suppressed Spirit Beasts in terms of rank, and generally, few Spirit Beasts wished to stay near savage beasts.

However, it was different for those of the same kind. Surrounding a Drought Fire Turtle, nearly a thousand other Drought Fire Turtles gathered, both large and small, and this one was at least three times bigger than the others, clearly a Drought Fire Turtle King that had ascended in rank.

This beast invasion was quite systematic. They stopped ten miles away from the city wall and didn't rush to attack. Instead, it seemed like they were… organizing their ranks?

At dawn on the second day, the savage beasts began their attack, but it was not a brainless, all-out offensive. They chose twelve spots and began fierce attacks.

At the level of savage beasts, they possessed a degree of intelligence. They had fought here not just once or twice, and knew that the human cultivators were also divided into twelve teams to manage defenses. They attacked one spot for each team, with precision.

Experience from past battles proved that this method of attack was very effective. When each thousand-person team came under attack, they wouldn't actively consider supporting their comrades–aiding others was one thing, but what if my own position is breached?

Of these twelve points of attack, four bore the brunt, another four had a moderate level of intensity, and the remaining four were slightly less intense.

On the sections of the city walls where they did not attack, the Spirit Beasts also posed an aggressive stance, clearly aiming to restrain the human cultivators.

On the first day, the points of attack were few, but some areas saw truly brutal fighting, with the number of cultivators dead already surpassing seventy, and the injured numbering more than two hundred.

The casualties of three hundred made up three percent of the more than ten thousand cultivators–the savage beasts had come prepared.

The casualties continued to mount on the second day. Although the cultivators had learned many lessons, in battle against savage beasts, some tactics truly were difficult to guard against.

For instance, some Spirit Beasts used poison, others could hide from sight, while others… simply outnumbered them in hordes, like the Iron Devouring Ants. A swarm of these creatures was something nobody wanted to face, and someone with a fear of swarms could faint on the spot.

On this day, sporadic battles also broke out in less critical areas because those heavily attacked suffered severe casualties. Meanwhile, cultivators in other areas were essentially doing nothing significant. Inequity in the battlefield could easily lead to chaos.

The Spirit Beasts had to guard against idle individuals going to reinforce others, launching occasional sneak attacks, while the idle cultivators, seeing the Spirit Beasts ready to pounce, couldn't help but launch some long-range attacks themselves.

What started as tentative skirmishes spiraled out of control as they fought, so on the second day, the fierce battles escalated to seventeen locations. The number of cultivators killed exceeded eighty, while the injured climbed to over three hundred.

In two days, the number of dead neared one hundred and sixty, and the casualties almost seven hundred.

Earth Realm's notion that an army's morale will collapse when casualty rates exceed thirty percent does not apply in the Cultivation World–in an army that collapses with thirty percent casualties, it's because the troops don't know what they're fighting for.

Whether it's for honor, belief, or even for spoils of war–as long as distribution is relatively fair, armies that continue fighting with over fifty percent casualties are common.

For cultivators pursuing self-improvement, sixty to seventy percent casualties really wasn't much. But having suffered such heavy losses in just two days, wouldn't the casualties reach sixty to seventy percent after twenty days of fighting?

The duration of a Spirit Beast invasion was hard to determine, roughly from half a month to two months.

The longest-lasting invasion took just over a year.

But back then, there was trouble within the Cultivation World itself. Few cultivators were responsible for defense, reinforcements were not reaching appropriately, and material losses could not be replenished satisfactorily. Believing there was an opportunity to exploit, the savage beasts attacked desperately, dragging the battle out for over a year.

The shortest invasion lasted only six days, yet provided no lesson to learn from–At that time, a Nascent Soul Immortal happened to pass by, thinking these savage beasts were rather arrogant. With a mere display of might, the savage beasts retreated haphazardly.

Now, the number of savage beasts outside the city walls had increased significantly, reaching nearly eighty thousand–to obtain this information, three more scouts had perished outside the walls.

Thus, the defenders discussed and formulated a counterattack plan–just taking hits was not acceptable.

So on the third day, elite squads began to break out of the walls, directly attacking the heartland of the Spirit Beasts.

Such maneuvers were highly dangerous. If the charge wasn't far enough, there was no deterrence, rather it might be seen as a provocation by the savage beasts. But if they charged too far, it wasn't guaranteed they could be retrieved back into the city walls–just watching the process of receiving those Sword Cultivators made it clear.

These groups of cultivators were called the Vanguard Squad and were composed of cultivators who had made mistakes.

Because of these decisions, the death toll among cultivators rose sharply on the third day, to more than one hundred and twenty.

Among them, the Vanguard Squad lost more than sixty cultivators, and keep in mind that the Vanguard Squad had only two hundred members in total.

However, in these three days, the location where Feng Jun's team of five was positioned suffered almost no damage.

Chapter end

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