Chapter 259: Sunflower

Luo Qi waited for another while; a large crowd of his replicated versions were working frantically in the Consciousness World, seizing the final moments. His original body was leaning against the wall behind Du Zhengyi, which was currently the safest place. In the night breeze, Du Zhengyi stood steadily in front of him with a relaxed posture, though Luo Qi could feel the tension in the muscles beneath Du Zhengyi's shirt and could also sense the constantly rising curves of Du Zhengyi's Yajian energy in the Consciousness World; Du Zhengyi was casting some low-energy-consumption Magic.

He felt a bit restless, his back against the wall, his two arms crossed over his chest. If the Alien Seal Beast kept refusing to attack, were they planning to wear Du Zhengyi out? Constant small-scale discharging was still discharging, wasn't it? Sooner or later, he would run out of power.

"Brother, how do you plan to defend?" Luo Qi said, quietly observing Du Zhengyi while monitoring his energy wave wind chart in another field of vision; in truth, he was just distracting Du Zhengyi.

Du Zhengyi ignored him, his attention still focused on his own work; he was methodically setting up the Magic.

"Brother." Luo Qi shamelessly poked him from behind, "I find this current scene particularly familiar."

The annoyance of being interrupted rose up in Du Zhengyi with a "whoosh," almost causing him to withdraw from his state of being ready for battle. He had no time to tell Luo Qi to get lost and continued to calculate and adjust the subtle Magic parameters.

"Doesn't this look like a classic game—Plants vs. Zombies?" Luo Qi said, "You should be placing potatoes on the outermost ring right now, with various tripping plants in the middle, and then Peashooters; we are the little sunflowers!"

The Magic Du Zhengyi was brewing was interrupted, and Du Zhengyi himself froze there; as a self-disciplined elite Mage, he had never been so unreliable before, and for a moment, he could hardly face himself. Luo Qi was snickering at the punchline about the little sunflowers, and Du Zhengyi turned around and knocked him on the head.

Luo Qi clutched his head and chuckled, wanting to tell another joke, when suddenly a faint rustling sound emerged from deep within the earth of the courtyard, as if countless swimming snakes were drilling out from deep in the mud, from the centuries-old courtyard walls, and from the cracks in the stone slabs paved on the ground. That rustling sound made Luo Qi's scalp tingle and his spine go cold, "This is..."

Du Zhengyi turned his head, saying nothing, those deep black eyes staring intently at him. Luo Qi caught a glimpse of an unusual light from the depths of those eyes, his heart so tense it was about to go numb, "Ah, this is... what is this?"

"This is..." Du Zhengyi stared at him fixedly, as if he too were too nervous to speak, and Luo Qi was so scared he felt like vomiting. Although he had a plan, if something could scare Du Zhengyi like this, it would be Sauron reborn. Of course, not the Sauron guard from the braid dramas, but Sauron the Necromancer of Mordor. Whether he could shake such a terrifying thing was truly hard to say.

"This is..." Du Zhengyi's eyes were suddenly filled with amusement, "This is the sound of Seventh Grade Advanced Defensive Magic growing, you Third Grade little bean sprout."

Luo Qi was stunned, then turned his head away in embarrassment and anger to look at the wall illuminated by the campfire; he hadn't seen anything at all. Du Zhengyi extended his right hand, as if a master conductor signaling an orchestra hidden in the shadows, and responding to him were thousands of cold-light Fireballs, hovering in the quiet night courtyard.

Luo Qi gazed at the night sky, astonished and mesmerized; countless tiny Fireballs were like glass wind chimes hanging between heaven and earth, or like fluorescent plankton drifting down from an alien star. He didn't know what to say; although he knew these were merely Lighting tools prepared by Du Zhengyi for battle, the tiny Fireballs hovering in the air were serene and beautiful, and he could not understand how such beauty could exist on a battlefield before a bloody fight.

"Can you... teach me?" Luo Qi asked Du Zhengyi, "I can be your assistant; you can leave this kind of preparatory work to me."

"Teach you?" Du Zhengyi said, "And then wait for this place to be as bright as the end of the world with a nuclear explosion?"

Luo Qi unhappily shut his mouth; he had skipped quite a few lab classes, and his grasp of scale was indeed not very good. "Look," Du Zhengyi said in a low voice, and a cluster of Fireballs suddenly exploded with light; it illuminated an Alien Seal Beast that had nowhere to hide and revealed its form. Luo Qi's heart gave a start, knowing that the battle was only now truly about to begin.