148: Chapter 148 Hey you showing off in the east, stop with the gua sha!

The light bow was drawn to its limit, and twenty energy arrows wreathed in blazing flames coalesced on the bowstring. Lava-like patterns flowed across the surface of the arrows, and the intense heat they radiated caused the surrounding air to distort.

"Go."

The bowstring vibrated.

Twenty streaks of crimson light soared into the sky, trailing long wakes behind them like a reverse meteor shower. They accurately struck an area where Spore Pods were relatively dense, and then—

"BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM—!!!"

A series of chain explosions occurred.

The Fire Bomb effect triggered, and each arrow exploded into a fireball over fifty meters in diameter upon impact. The fireballs overlapped and merged, eventually forming a sea of fire covering nearly one square kilometer. The high temperature caused the biomass armor on the surface of the Spore Pods to sizzle, their dark green shells quickly turning charred and carbonized.

But it wasn't over yet.

The Ring of Fire Repulsion effect triggered immediately after.

With the center of the explosion as the origin, a visible circle of crimson shockwaves spread in all directions, bringing with it the searing heat of flames and a massive impact.

Wherever the shockwave passed, the Spore Pods were shoved hard as if by an invisible giant hand. Their originally orderly descent trajectories instantly became chaotic; some drifted sideways, some spun in place, and some were even pushed upward, flying back several hundred meters.

A temporary "vacuum zone" was cleared in the entire airspace.

Li Yuan lowered his bow, looked at the results of his battle, and nodded with satisfaction.

"The effect is—"

Before he could finish his sentence, the public channel exploded.

Sailo: "Holy crap! You show-off over on the east side! I'm talking to you! Stop messing things up!!!"

Sailo of the Light Giant Race was currently floating in mid-air with his arms crossed over his chest. The energy core in his chest was accumulating a Photon Stream—one of the signature skills of the Light Giant Race, a high-energy beam powerful enough to pierce through warship armor.

His target was a Spore Pod less than five kilometers from the ground. That thing had already been riddled with holes by his Rapid Emerium Ray, its surface covered in charred pits, and it looked like one more shot would completely destroy it.

And then Li Yuan's Ring of Fire Repulsion arrived.

"Whoosh—"

The Spore Pod spun like a whipped top, tumbling and drifting sideways at least three hundred meters in an extremely bizarre trajectory.

Sailo, who had already charged his Photon Stream to 90%, almost suffered internal injuries from the sudden interruption.

"Damn you!" he cursed, quickly interrupting the charge and switching to Rapid Fire Mode. Holding both arms forward, two slender but highly penetrative Emerium Rays shot from his palms, strafing the wildly flying Spore Pod.

"Zzap! Zzap! Zzap!"

The rays plowed three deep furrows into the surface of the Spore Pod, finally tearing the shell apart completely. The Spore Pod ruptured, and the un-deployed Zerg units inside struggled for a few moments in the energy rays before being killed one by one.

Sailo finally breathed a sigh of relief and immediately started ranting in the public channel.

Sailo · Plasma Spark: "Hey, whoever that is! Don't just throw around skills that can't even kill! It's even harder to hit them when they're blown away! Do you know how much extra energy I spent just to land that finishing blow?! Thirty percent! A full thirty percent!"

Li Yuan: "..."

He silently glanced at the results he had achieved—that cleared airspace was indeed spectacular, but thinking about it carefully, those Spore Pods that were pushed away... it seemed like not a single one had actually died?

They were just blown all over the place, and some had even flown into other defense sectors, increasing the workload for the teammates there.

Sai Wei: "Pfft... Li Yuan, even you have moments where you mess up?"

Chu Xinghe: "Hahahaha! I give that play a perfect score! The entertainment value is through the roof!"

Li Yuan's mouth twitched as he looked at these messages.

He had been feeling pretty good about himself...

He rubbed his nose awkwardly and muttered under his breath, "It seems a Tier 2 String-Controlling Weaver... is still too weak."

Weak?

Not really.

A Tier 2 String-Controlling Weaver, with Multi-Shot combined with elemental enchantments and battlefield magic, was already considered a quite powerful means of area-of-effect output in conventional combat. If that round of attacks had hit a normal Zerg Swarm, it would have cleared a massive area.

His previous performance in clearing the Tide Bugs was proof of that.

But the problem was, they weren't facing infantry now, but Spore Pods dropped from space orbit.

These things were essentially biological landing pods with shell strength comparable to warship armor, and they had multiple layers of buffering structures and energy deflection fields inside. Ordinary AoE skills were useful against them... but not very; one had to constantly accumulate damage to destroy the composite armor layer by layer.

However, if a Tier 2 String-Controlling Weaver couldn't do it, what about Tier 3!

Li Yuan's consciousness sank into the system interface.

[host: Li Yuan]

[Current Class: String-Controlling Weaver (Tier 2)]

[Required for Rank Up: life essence x1,000,000]

[Currently Held: life essence x1,087,632,945]

Over one billion eighty-seven million.

Upgrading to Tier 3 only required one million.

Not even a fraction of the total.

"Upgrade." Li Yuan didn't hesitate.

With a thought, one million life essence was deducted from the reserves, turning into a warm current that surged into his body. That warm current started as a mere trickle but quickly grew and surged, finally sweeping through every meridian, every inch of flesh, and every cell like a river bursting its banks.

Li Yuan could clearly feel that the energy circuits in his body were being widened, strengthened, and reshaped. The riverbeds that could originally only hold small streams were forcibly widened into great rivers; the originally fragile energy nodes were reinforced into sturdy gates; the originally loose energy structures were compressed, purified, and condensed into a more efficient form.

The entire process lasted about thirty seconds.

When the warm current receded, Li Yuan opened his eyes.

[Class Advancement Complete]

[Current Class: String-Controlling Weaver (Tier 3)]

[New Traits: Energy consumption increased to 100 points per attack, unlocked Song of Battle Skill - Guided Arrow, unlocked Tier 3 Elemental Strike Magic, unlocked Tier 3 Battlefield Magic, unlocked Magic Affinity - Stellar]

The first thing Li Yuan saw was that the energy consumption had increased to 100 points. It was only 10 at Tier 2 and only 1 at Tier 1—does the consumption increase tenfold with every rank up?

His face darkened.

At Tier 2, releasing a Multi-Shot only cost 10 energy points.

But now...

Li Yuan tried to activate the most basic Multi-Shot.

His energy instantly dropped by 100 points.

However, Li Yuan stared at his energy reserves—over 2 billion.

Extravagant! Having the Bei Ming Divine Art was truly extravagant. Since he had been hunting the Zerg Swarm recently, the density of free energy within the base's range had reached an incredible level.

The bei ming core was absorbing it with great pleasure. The bei ming core had no upper limit; the more it absorbed, the larger the total capacity, and the larger the total capacity, the faster it absorbed.

At a consumption rate of 10 shots per second at 100 energy per shot, that would be 1,000 energy points per second.

2 billion divided by 1,000... equals about two million seconds.

Twenty-three days.

Shooting non-stop for 23 days.

Li Yuan certainly couldn't shoot continuously for 23 days, so it was basically zero consumption. After all, there was energy regeneration and the Oral Essence Liquid developed by Senior Yimoku.

However, since it had increased tenfold, skills that he didn't have to worry about consuming before now actually had the possibility of being used up.

Li Yuan said gloomily in his mind, "Customer Service Miss, if you don't give me some earth-shattering changes, I'm definitely going to flame you to death."