The Void Realm, Spider Tower's Main City.
In this painting woven of black and white, jagged, misshapen knowledge creatures were armed into troop types, swiftly turning into uniform Spider Tower soldiers. Yet under the constraints of the Domain of Stillness, they remained nothing more than a smudge of stagnant gray. If they left the shelter of the Main City without the nourishment of the Flowing Gold River, taking even a single step forward would squeeze out all the time in their bodies.
Only raw, pristine knowledge creatures could move freely within the Domain of Stillness. Knowledge creatures armed into troop types were denied recognition by the Void Realm—*No taking the shape of sorcerers! Change back right now! If you don't change back, time will freeze you!*
Aside from Spider Tower, no other faction would arm troop types during the Domain of Stillness phase. Troop forms had a limited duration, and their movement speed could rarely match that of knowledge creatures, so most commanders followed the basic rule of "travel in original form, arm before battle."
Spider Tower naturally wouldn't break this rule.
For them to arm troop types within the Domain of Stillness meant one thing—
The Spider Tower Legion was about to charge straight from frozen time directly into another faction's turn!
*Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!*
Countless threads descended from the white curtain of the spiderweb in the sky, attaching to the Spider Tower soldiers, wrapping them into cocoons, and hauling them up into the web. At a glance, it looked as though they were ascending to heaven, yet also plunging into hell.
The next second, countless cocoons appeared within the web outside Giant Wood Fortress. The silk swiftly drew tight and coalesced into armor, and the Spider Tower soldiers stepping into time regained their colors once more. Their minds connected instantly to their commander's central command hub, corroding the land like venom and stabbing into the enemy's Main City like bayonets!
Move as fast as thunder, remain as inscrutable as the dark!
This was Spider Tower's doctrine of war, and Spider Tower's divine miracle!
Denzel watched as the Spider Tower soldiers, having breached the walls with great difficulty, became bogged down in grueling street-to-street fighting. By this point, Giant Wood Fortress was operating at full capacity. Outside, the Heroic Spirit Legion rushed back to reinforce their base, while inside, the minion forces had all finished arming into troop types. The web legion was bogged down as if wading through mud, unable to exert their full strength.
She couldn't help but let out a sigh. "If this were the complete form of the Spiderweb, the fortress would have fallen by now."
Spiderweb: the war divine miracle left behind for Spider Tower by the Omniscient Weaver.
According to common knowledge, divine miracles could only be invoked by gods, with angels being the absolute minimum threshold. On the Time Continent, however, commanders possessed only Two Wings combat power. Asking them to invoke a divine miracle was like demanding a 2D waifu jump out of a smartphone screen to marry you—they simply weren't in the same dimension.
In a sense, the Time Continent was like an enclosed kindergarten. No matter how cataclysmic the battles between Heroic Spirit Legions appeared, in the eyes of a god, it was merely toddlers squabbling. The problem was that gods couldn't personally step onto the playground to help the toddlers fight, so they had to resort to roundabout means to smuggle controlled weapons into the kindergarten through special channels.
To this end, the Omniscient Weaver had designed a special system: He scattered the divine miracle across the Gospel Country, then had Spider Tower gather the fragments and reweave them. It sounded simple enough, but in reality, it was an immensely intricate mechanism with an exceptionally long cycle—it required at least fifty years.
The reason the Grand Investiture of the Six Nations took place once every fifty years was precisely because every faction's strategic miracle required fifty years to prepare. This equilibrium had not been achieved overnight; it was a balance honed over a millennium. Back when Denzel first became a commander, the Grand Investiture had been held once every century. However, as an arms race drove all factions to speed up the recovery of their strategic miracles, the cycle had stabilized at fifty years over the past few centuries.
Through endless war and tactical maneuvering, commanders had grown increasingly elite, factional troop types ever more formidable, and strategic miracles ever more refined.
What if an enemy attacked before your own strategic miracle was ready?
Then pack up and wander off, preserve your surviving forces, and obediently bow out of this Investiture War.
Over her long career as a Heroic Spirit, Denzel had trampled underdogs whose strategic miracles couldn't keep up with the meta, and she had also been thoroughly battered by powerhouses who optimized their strategic miracles a step ahead of the rest. From this, she had gleaned two core takeaways:
First: strategic miracles truly decided victory.
Second: if you knew for sure you were doomed to lose, don't wait for your strategic miracle!
Having lost a conceptual incarnation, Denzel knew Spider Tower had virtually zero hope of making the top three this time. In that case, Spider Tower was better off launching the Investiture War prematurely. By dragging every faction into the mire and forcing them to trigger their strategic miracles early, she could bring everyone down to the same playing field—and perhaps snatch victory from the chaos!
Naturally, that was easier said than done. If Spider Tower tried to follow the White Ox's path to stage a raid against other factions, it would be utterly impossible.
After all, the other factions weren't fools. The moment they detected the Spider Tower Legion crossing their borders en masse, they would immediately pull their main forces back into their Main City and even lay ambushes around it. Once the Spider Tower Legion attacked, they would surround them from all sides, turning a raid into total war. To wage total war during someone else's turn, on someone else's soil, right outside someone else's Main City—Spider Tower would have to be out of its mind to squander its troops like that.
So, after discovering that Yaxiu and his companions possessed a method to cross the Flowing Gold River and realizing it was basically impossible to retrieve the Secret Incarnation herself, Denzel had shared the tracking method for the Secret Incarnation with every faction.
First, even if the Secret Incarnation was destroyed, it would eventually respawn; but if Yaxiu ascended to the Sanctuary with it, Spider Tower would truly lose the Secret Incarnation forever.
Second, Denzel despised people who refused to die and refused to submit, and there was nothing she enjoyed more than petty, spiteful moves that hurt both sides.
Third, Denzel wanted to gamble on luck—gambling that Yaxiu and his crew would flee into a Main City's territory.
Her gamble paid off.
She knew full well that ordinary sorcerers couldn't get anywhere near a Main City's territory. Yet Yaxiu's group could not only party up, but also possessed a mechanical contraption far faster than ordinary knowledge creatures, granting them the capability to breach that perimeter.
By leaking the intel that Yaxiu and the others carried the Secret Incarnation, she hoped the other factions would provoke them. This would not only lure out garrison forces from their Main Cities, but also force Yaxiu to flee all over the place, substantially increasing the chances that he would blunder into a Main City's territory.
The ideal scenario, of course, was that Yaxiu and his crew would become so infuriated from being hunted that they would willingly march into a Main City's territory to raise hell.
Still, Denzel had only been playing a low-stakes gamble without high expectations, mostly just drawing circles on the ground to curse them into taking the bait. Yet she never dreamed that before the White Ox had even completed a single circuit, the sorcerers would deliver the exact scenario she had hoped for!
They had barged into a Main City's territory carrying a conceptual incarnation!
The instant the purple of secrets painted the oasis, Denzel immediately applied to invoke Divine Miracle: Spiderweb and requested full supreme commander authority!
[Spiderweb]
[Active Effect · Weaving: Weaves a sub-web teleportation circle within areas coated in the purple concept. By expending spider silk, the Main City Legion can teleport from the master web to the sub-web.]
[Active Effect · Entangle: When soldiers expend spider silk, the silk grants them 3 additional layers of armor and applies the "Entangle" enhancement. Any enemy attacking an entangled soldier suffers a persistent debuff of 30% reduced speed and 30% slowed thought processing. The instant an entangled soldier's armor shatters, it splashes 3 stacks of venom onto all targets within 3 meters; enemy units afflicted with venom take continuous damage (venom stacks can accumulate infinitely).]
[Active Effect · Corrosion: The sub-web expands continuously at a rate of 3 meters every 10 seconds. Any enemy unit stepping onto the sub-web is bound, has all troop type skills disabled, and loses 3 layers of armor to corrosion every 10 seconds.]
[Passive Effect · Curtain of Omniscience: Spider Tower commanders can ignore the reverse golden rain, extending their maximum observation range up to 300 meters.]
[Passive Effect · Veil of Traps: Within the Main City territory enveloped by the spiderweb, effects such as "Weaving," "Entangle," and "Corrosion" become permanently active.]
[Ultimate Weapon · Destiny Weaving (Incomplete): Within a designated area, severs the fate threads of all enemy units, utterly annihilating their existence and preventing revival; mends the fate threads of all allied units, fully restoring their armor and instantly reviving any units slain this turn. Utilizing this skill consumes the entire spiderweb, and it can only be activated when web reserves exceed 50%.]
Chapter 422