Chapter 863: Difference in Values, State of the Reality Plane

"As for not sending anyone to command, this was not a decision I made alone; it was a joint resolution of the Seven Towers, and that includes you yourself!"

Badijiaer's explanation left Huo En speechless for a moment. He knew Badijiaer was right; war was indeed war, and not sending commanders was indeed a decision they had made together.

And the reason was simply to allow the Mages of the Seven Towers to grow rapidly, learn to cooperate and compromise, and step out of their narrow circles.

Huo En had expressed opposition at the time, but was ultimately persuaded by Badijiaer and the Princess. However, now that the matter was mentioned again, he could not help but feel some regret.

Therefore, the team that died not long ago also included people from his Jilan Tower. Even if they were only two Intermediate Mages, it still pained him greatly.

In Huo En's view, the probability of an Advanced Mage becoming a Legendary was nearly zero, let alone becoming a Great Arcanist later, but the probability of an Intermediate Mage becoming an Arcanist and then grinding their way to become a Great Arcanist was significantly higher!

He would rather lose two Advanced Mages than lose one Intermediate Mage; after all, who knew if the dead Intermediate Mage might have been a future Great Arcanist!

Of course, he could not say such things openly, but at the level of a Great Arcanist, one's thoughts and considerations were indeed different from those of ordinary people, or even ordinary Spellcasters.

……

Xia Duo never expected that his return could trigger a dispute among Great Arcanists. From the moment he lay down on the bed in his temporary quarters, he had almost forgotten all trivial matters, devoting himself entirely to the Mind Link.

At this moment, the Mind Link, with Xia Duo's conscious Projection as the hub and over a hundred Advanced Mages as branching Nodes, formed an invisible web flowing with sensory information and fragments of thought.

In this web, every Node was a window of Perception for Xia Duo, as well as a distributed subconscious processor, and simultaneously a terminal for executing his commands.

And the first formal command Xia Duo issued was—to acquire as much information as possible and share it into the Mind Link.

Whether it was the mission information received by each person, or the extrasensory information obtained through Scrying spells.

Only with enough information could a sufficiently clear battlefield situation be established; this was also a simple judgment Xia Duo made based on the small amount of military Knowledge he had been exposed to on Earth before crossing over.

Know yourself and know your enemy, and you will never be defeated.

Now, Xia Duo had a fairly sufficient understanding of the true capabilities of these hundred-plus people, or rather, the capabilities that could be used for coordinated combat.

As for the powerful trump cards of certain individuals, these were not within Xia Duo's considerations.

After all, so-called command and dominance were built on the foundation of win-win cooperation. If the interests of certain specific groups were to be sacrificed, this cooperation might fall apart immediately.

Perhaps one could talk about post-event compensation, but it would be difficult to negotiate a result that satisfied everyone in a short time, and once a consensus could not be reached quickly, this battle might already be considered lost.

Therefore, the best approach was to treat everyone as identical individuals, without holding any overly high expectations, as long as they could exert the abilities that normal Advanced Mages should possess.

……

After the information collection command was issued, information was shared into the Psychic Link Network one after another. This included images, sounds, smells, perceptions of the Magic Net, and various feedback from Scrying spells across the Green Field Plane.

In an instant, almost endless information circulated back and forth in the Psychic Link Network. In this moment, and for many moments thereafter, no active conscious information was transmitted within the Mind Link.

Except for Xia Duo, probably no one could "look directly" at such complex and infinite information!

Of course, while it was called infinite, it actually had limits and patterns to follow.

While Xia Duo's body fell into a deep sleep, his subconscious and Conscious Mind were both incomparably active. He dedicated his subconscious specifically to coordinating the subconscious of others to think and judge.

And he used his own Conscious Mind as the target for outputting results.

The first thing Xia Duo did was to establish a multi-dimensional Green Field Plane status map in his Conscious Mind, mainly including terrain, landscape, and the state of the Magic Net.

The most important of these was, of course, the state of the Magic Net. For a Spellcaster, other information was merely appearance; only by tearing through the appearance could one see Reality.

And at this moment, in this map of the true state of the Green Field Plane, there appeared as many as twenty-plus areas of Magic Net abnormality, which should be the Mythallar Nodes set up by the Cormanthor Elves.

Each one corresponded to the mission targets of Xia Duo and his fifty-plus teams.

Yes, the result derived from synthesizing most of the information was somewhat counter-intuitive: it was not fifty-plus targets, but only twenty-plus.

As for the reason, Xia Duo already knew it now.

On the surface of Reality, there was another layer of appearance constructed by terrain and landscape. If one were to execute the mission according to the appearance, half of the teams would be led to ineffective targets.

This was also the final effect of the tree abnormality phenomenon that Xia Duo had first discovered.

In fact, it was not just reflected in the forest itself, but by a very magical means, it had conjured out of thin air another half of the world that overlapped with the normal world but had no real significance.

Perhaps this was the Mythallar!

If it weren't for the fact that over a hundred Advanced Mages were sharing information simultaneously, allowing him to integrate a relatively true overall picture of the Plane, he himself might have gone astray.

But now, the situation was different.

Although Xia Duo did not have a deep understanding of the Mythallar, especially the Principles part, which could almost be said to be a blank slate, not knowing the Principles did not hinder him from destroying those Mythallar Nodes.

Often, destruction is easier than creation.

And knowing that there were likely only twenty-plus true Mythallar Nodes, Xia Duo felt more confident in his chances of victory.

……

The teams that were ambushed previously had all been heading toward true Mythallar Nodes. Others might not have noticed, but with Xia Duo's powerful memory, how could he not notice that the ambushing Elf Mages had only changed a few new faces after several encounters!

If the number of Elf Mages were large enough, there would be no need to replace people in the same team; they could just send a different team to ambush!

Even though the special nature of the Elven Magic System itself made the threshold for Elves to perform Joint Casting lower, it certainly wouldn't be without any threshold.

A skilled team suddenly adding a newcomer would surely have some impact.

Therefore, when Xia Duo persuaded everyone to accept the Mind Link, he said that the number of Elves might not be large, and only by uniting would they not be dragged down by successive ambushes.

And now, knowing that there were likely only twenty-plus Mythallar Nodes, this confirmed his previous speculation that the number of Elves was far fewer than he had imagined; at the very least, the number of Elf Mages might truly not be very large.