Level 1 to Infinity: My Bloodline Is the Ultimate Cheat!-Chapter 876: Golden Harvest

Ethan hit the ground hard enough to rattle his bones.

Blackie caught him, but the force behind the impact drove both of them a full foot into the egg-packed sand. The recoil from that clash had been monstrous, far beyond what Ethan had expected. For a moment, the world rang in his ears.

His spear arm was completely numb.

Blackie didn’t have the luxury of checking on him. He was already unleashing wave after wave of wide-area attacks, lightning and flame tearing through the air in violent arcs. Swathes of smaller mosquitoes vaporized instantly, only for the empty space to refill as if nothing had happened. The swarm moved like a living tide, surging in without hesitation.

Above them, the two-kilometer-wide giant mosquito shuddered.

A sharp series of cracks echoed from its proboscis where it had collided with the Twilight War Spear. Fractures spider-webbed across the massive appendage, racing a hundred meters up its length before the entire structure gave way.

Bang.

Nearly a third of the proboscis shattered into jagged fragments. No blood sprayed out. No viscera. The broken section looked more like splintered chitin or brittle crystal than flesh.

"HOOOOON... HOOOOON..."

A low, agonized drone rolled across the desert.

The creature’s hill-sized compound eyes flooded with crimson. Thick red veins spread outward in branching lines, crawling over its body until its entire gargantuan frame was dyed a furious scarlet in seconds.

"Damn it, it’s enraged." Ethan’s expression darkened.

Now he understood why the Cloudfang elder had called it formidable. Even with the Twilight War Spear, even compressing multiple skills into a single focused strike, he had not been able to finish it. He had aimed for the proboscis because it was the only part within reach, but that might have been its most reinforced structure. Its body had hovered too high for him to target directly.

He had gambled.

And it had not been enough.

"Boss, what now? These little bastards don’t end!" Blackie shouted, strain creeping into his voice. He was pouring out high-level area spells just to keep the swarm from swallowing them whole. After barely a dozen seconds, the output was already exhausting. It was like firing siege cannons at gnats.

"Transform and take off!" Ethan barked. "We handle the big one first!"

"Got it!"

Blackie shifted instantly, his body rippling and expanding into his Black Qilin form. Ethan leaped onto his back, Twilight Spear clenched tight.

Blackie surged upward. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

They barely cleared the swarm before something unseen slammed into them.

It wasn’t wind. It wasn’t an attack they could see or hear coming. It was simply there, descending from empty air with overwhelming pressure.

"Ugh!"

"ARGH!"

Ethan felt his chest seize. Blood rose in his throat and spilled from his mouth. Blackie let out a strangled howl. The force crushed down on them, vast and absolute, shattering the momentum of their ascent and binding them midair like invisible chains. Ethan’s muscles refused to obey. Even his voice felt smothered, trapped behind clenched lungs.

They dropped.

BZZZZZZZZ...

The endless swarm converged from all sides, a dark curtain closing in.

Ahead, the enraged Mosquito King charged, its titanic mass alone enough to turn them into paste even without its shattered proboscis.

They were falling, paralyzed, unable to defend themselves.

Then—

THUMP. THUMP.

They hit the ground.

The binding vanished as abruptly as it had appeared.

Air rushed back into Ethan’s lungs. Control flooded into his limbs.

Just in time for the sky to disappear beneath a descending ocean of wings.

Blackie rolled to his feet, snarling. "There’s a restriction up there. Some kind of flight ceiling. The higher we go, the worse it gets."

That explained it. The pressure hadn’t been the mosquito’s doing. It was the environment itself.

"Switch," Blackie said quickly. "You take the small one, Boss. They’re too squishy, that’s no fun. I’ll deal with the Big one. Think you’re big? I’ll show you what’s big."

Before Ethan could respond, Blackie’s body began to swell.

He shot up to a kilometer tall in the span of a blink, then kept growing. Two kilometers. Two and a half. He finally stopped at three kilometers, a living mountain of scaled muscle and crackling energy. The Mosquito King, enormous as it was, was now eye-to-eye with him.

Blackie twisted his colossal frame and launched a devastating sideways kick.

The first blow smashed into the remaining stump of the mosquito’s proboscis. The second followed immediately, slamming squarely into its head.

BOOOOOOM.

The impact rippled through the desert like an earthquake. Dunes collapsed. Egg-sand avalanched in waves. The Mosquito King was flung backward, crashing flat onto its back with a thunderous detonation that sent shockwaves racing outward.

Ethan stared, impressed despite himself.

Blackie had not been bluffing. At this scale, size truly mattered. The smaller mosquitoes that swarmed over Blackie’s colossal form were little more than gnats, clinging and crawling but incapable of piercing his reinforced hide.

Seeing Blackie firmly in control, Ethan shifted into Owl Form.

At last, he could fully deploy area magic.

"Starfall Barrage."

It had been a while. The incantation felt slightly stiff on his tongue. He pointed a wingtip toward the aurora-lit sky, then traced a sharp downward arc.

The green glow above dimmed.

Countless pinpricks of silver light gathered overhead, condensing from nothingness. They began to drift downward like luminous snow.

Within a 630-meter radius, every small mosquito was marked.

Whoosh.

The stars seemed to fall gently, almost lazily, yet they struck with impossible speed. In an instant, the air turned brilliant silver. The skill was selective, targeting only hostile entities. And the swarm’s murderous intent made them perfect targets.

Millions of stars fell.

Tens of millions.

The sky became a curtain of silver rain.

When the light finally faded, the sphere around Ethan was completely cleared, the air empty and still for the first time since they had entered the desert.

Blackie, however, stood three kilometers tall. Ethan’s effective range could not cover him entirely.

It didn’t need to.

A pulse of crimson radiated from Blackie’s scales, and flames erupted across his entire body. The mosquitoes clinging to him ignited instantly, reduced to ash in a blink.

Ethan felt a faint stab of self-awareness. For once, he was the one providing support.

The battle between Blackie and the Mosquito King quickly turned one-sided. Lightning spears tore through the giant’s wings, shredding them into ragged lace. Firestorms engulfed its spindly legs, charring and cracking them until they buckled. Insects feared fire, and this one was no exception.

Ethan maintained Starfall Barrage, letting the silver rain continue unabated. As long as his Soul Power endured, any enemy that entered his range would be annihilated. For the moment, he was little more than a battlefield control tower.

Two minutes later, the Mosquito King let out a final, fading drone.

Its enormous body collapsed.

Blackie ended it with a sweeping wave of searing flame. The kilometer-long carcass caught like dry tinder, burning fiercely before collapsing into a mound of ash.

As the flames died down and Blackie shrank back to his normal size, he let out a puzzled sound.

"Huh?"

Ethan saw it too.

Where the corpse had burned, a brilliant golden light pulsed steadily.

At the same time, the smaller mosquitoes still throwing themselves into Ethan’s silver rain began to swell. They grew to the size of soccer balls before being obliterated. When they died, they did not simply vanish. Each one left behind a speck of golden light, like glowing grains of sand drifting downward.

"Boss, look at this!" Blackie bent down and scooped up a crystal the size of a basketball from the center of the Mosquito King’s remains.

Ethan landed beside him and took it.

"A beast core? No... it can’t be. Cores aren’t this large."

"Maybe because it was big?" Blackie offered.

Ethan shook his head slowly, eyes narrowing as he focused on the energy within. "No. The energy is too pure. Beast cores always carry chaotic residue from the creature’s instincts. This doesn’t. It’s clean. Refined."

His pulse quickened.

The crystal in his hands contained energy far more concentrated than the Energy Cores the Noble Eight Lineages fought bitterly over. And this one had dropped from a single creature.

"The little ones have them too!" Blackie called, catching a handful of the falling golden specks.

Ethan’s Starfall Barrage continued to pour down from the sky. Basketball-sized mosquitoes hurled themselves into the lethal silver rain, dying in droves.

And each death left behind another glittering fragment of gold.