Chapter 347 The Weird Red Corals

However, the result of the battle turned out somewhat disappointing to Ding Ning.

The prolonged battle finally ended with two-or three-tenths of over one hundred thousand numbfishes surviving and retreating from the battlefield.

The jellyfishes suffered great loss as well, but only half of them were killed the battle, and with the rest of them, there will still in great advantage.

Looking eagerly at the dead jellyfishes that filled the sea, Ding Ning dared not to walk approach them and felt upset.

Nevertheless, with the disappearance of the blood in the water, Ding Ning could get a clear sight. His heart jumped wildly when he saw the jellyfishes swallow the crystals that fell off from the dead numbfishes.

Similar to Spiritual Crystals of Water, these crystals emitted faint white light. The jellyfishes seemed to be afraid of these crystals and dared not to swallow the dead numbfishes until these crystals fell off from the numbfishes’ corroded heads.

After the jellyfishes swallowed all the dead numbfishes, there was a thick layer of crystals on the floor of the sea. Using their tentacles, the jellyfishes buried these crystals with sand and mud, and immediately, the sea water became muddy.

Ding Ning seemed in deep thought. From the looks of it, these jellyfishes were afraid of the crystals that emitted white light and were experienced in “swallowing the dead bodies of their enemies and obliterating all the traces”.

What were these crystals exactly? Could they be Spiritual Crystals of Thunder? Ding Ning could not help but wonder and felt excited.

Although Ding Ning was more interested in Spiritual Crystals of Water than Spiritual Crystals of Thunder, the latter, after all, was a kind of spiritual crystal with a rare property related to thunder.

It should be noted that even in the ancient martial world, objects with a property related to thunder and electricity were extremely rare, and cultivation methods with these properties were never heard of.

As an excellent traditional Chinese physician, Ding Ning certainly knew that there were minor elements with a property of electricity in human’s body, only that these elements were hard to further develop. Deng Nine-Finger’s skill, Lighting from Pupils, was the best proof for this.

The jellyfishes did not eat the dead bodies of their own kind, and instead, they dragged these bodies with them with their tentacles and swam away.

Ding Ning’s eyes lit up at the scene. Though he did not know where these jellyfishes were heading, as more and more jellyfishes left this sea, Ding Ning knew his chance was near.

He waited there like a patient hunter and did not move until there were only tens of blue jellyfishes left. The moment he was found by the jellyfishes, he used his Tri-colored Fire.

The fire might look small but had mighty power. Under the fire, the jellyfishes struggled in pain, trying to put out the fire on their bodies.

Like a single spark starting a prairie fire, a spark of Tri-colored Fire could turn into overwhelming flames in the blink of an eye. Soon, the huge jellyfishes were covered with burning flames.

Ding Ning looked indifferent when he watched the jellyfishes keep struggling and screaming in pain. He held no mercy for them.

At the top of the food chain, these vitiated jellyfishes destroyed the balance of nature badly, and they knew nothing but exterminating other species and killing. If they were left developing themselves, this sea would be turned into a dead sea.

When they had eaten up all the creatures near this sea, they would expand their territory outwards someday, and by then, they would bring a disaster to the whole ocean.

Uncovering the tens of thousands of Spiritual Crystals of Thunder that buried by the jellyfishes, Ding Ning could not hold back his excitement anymore, and collected all the crystals.

Different from Spirituals Crystal of Water, Spiritual Crystals of Thunder had four colors, white, blue, red, and purple, respectively, based on the spiritual energy of thunder they contained. The white crystals contained the least spiritual energy while the purple ones contained the most.

Ding Ning felt it a pity that he only found few purple crystals of the highest grade. Nevertheless, he was very happy to get this unexpected fortune.

After collecting all the Spiritual Crystals of Water from the jellyfishes that had been burned into ashes, Ding Ning felt as if he were playing a game of killing monsters and gaining equipment.

Staring at the leaving jellyfishes from afar with his black eyes, he was so curious about where these jellyfishes wanted to take these dead bodies to and wondered if they had a special place to bury these bodies.

With this strong curiosity, Ding Ning wanted to find out the answer and thus followed the jellyfishes driving his bubble.

Though using Tri-colored Fire would consume his power of soul and spirit, he could bear the consequence.

He was more afraid of the numbfishes, who could produce a shock of high volts, compared to jellyfishes. With his trump card, Tri-colored Fire, he believed he could always make it out alive unless he was besieged by tens of thousands of jellyfishes.

Ding Ning did not know how long he had followed behind the jellyfishes when he arrived at a large deep valley, which was much larger than the trench he had met before and at depths of up to six thousand meters.

It was hard for those huge jellyfishes to reach the bottom of the valley, let alone for other small jellyfishes.

When they arrived before a huge cave, the jellyfishes dragged the dead jellyfishes into the cave in swarms.

Ding Ning frowned as he stared at the mouth of the cave and wondered what the jellyfishes were doing. Were there even stronger jellyfishes in this cave? With this question in mind, Ding Ning was hesitant to take a risk to go inside the cave

However, a moment later, Ding Ning made up his mind. He gritted his teeth and followed the last jellyfish of the group into the cave.

Though he was under the protection of the bubble and was resistant to the temperature change around him, he still felt very hot under the scorching heat after he entered the cave.

He kept following behind the jellyfishes and was in fear. As he went further along the devious path inside the cave, he felt hotter and hotter.

When he finally reached the end of the path, he was in front of an open space and saw a wonderful world and was stunned.

“Are these… corals?”

Red coral thickets dotted the whole cave in front of Ding Ning. It seemed that the jellyfishes were in awe of the corals. While staying away from the corals, they threw the dead jellyfishes into the coral thickets with their tentacles.

Then, things became weird. The moment the dead jellyfishes touched the red corals, burning flames covered their bodies as if they had been lit by Tri-colored Fire. The flames were in the color of bright red, looking terrifying like blood.

In the blink of an eye, the cave was full of red flames, and the seawater was boiling under the scorching heat. It seemed that the jellyfishes could not bear the heat and withdrew backward quickly.

Ding Ning was startled by their sudden retreat and hurriedly hid in the coral thicket beside to avoid the jellyfishes despite the scorching heat.

Small as the coral thicket might be when compared to the huge jellyfishes, it was as large as a forest to Ding Ning and covered Ding Ning well. Besides, the jellyfishes’ senses were greatly weakened due to the scorching heat. As a result, Ding Ning barely escaped his fate of being found by the jellyfishes.

In every twenty years, the red coral would only grow three centimeters, and in every three hundred years, it would only gain one kilogram. As a result, on the land, the red coral was much more precious than gold. However, under this sea, there were coral thickets as large as forests, and each coral was about two or three meters high, so, Ding Ning could easily hid in them.

It was said that it took one thousand years for a coral to grow up and ten thousand years to grow red. The bright red color all over their bodies showed how precious these red corals were. Ding Ning had never thought that he would meet a huge coral forest under the sea.

When he saw these corals, the first idea that came into his mind was that he could make a fortune. When he got onto land, where the red coral was sold in the unit of a gram, he could sell any of these red corals at a sky-high price. Red corals of big size, high density, and clear red color and without any hole or white impurity, like these in front of him, would probably be sold at over ten thousand yuan per gram.

The point was that Ding Ning knew these corals were absolutely not ordinary red corals, judging by the bright red flames he saw before.

As far as Ding Ning had learned, red corals were a kind of organic gem with pleasing color and lustrous texture. They always grew under the sea one hundred to two thousand meters below the sea level, away from human beings. The natural red corals were actually a colony of myriad polyps, which grew very slowly and were nonrenewable. They were found only in few straits and thus were very precious.

However, at the moment, Ding Ning was in a deep-sea area six thousand meters below the sea level, not the Donghai Sea, where lived red corals. Why were there such tall and strong red corals?

It was obvious that the jellyfishes were cremating the dead bodies of their kind before, but red corals seemed not to possess any function of cremation. What those red flames exactly were?

As far as Ding Ning had learned, coral polyps fed on a variety of small organisms and could absorb calcium and carbon dioxide in the seawater during their growing up. They secreted calcium carbonate to form their hard skeletons that would become their supporting framework, while corals were exactly the secretion of the polyps.

“Were these red fires formed by coral polyps? No, impossible. Coral polyps are, after all, creatures living in the sea who could not resist high temperatures. How could they give out such scorching heat?” Ding Ning thought to himself.

He was so curious about the strange scene. He opened his third eye secretly and looked at the red flames and trembled in fear.

He found that those red flames were composed of countless small insects that were invisible to the naked eye. Those insects were in red all over and cylinder-shaped and had eight nearly transparent tentacles with a small mouth at each of the center of the palm.

If Ding Ning remembered it right, these insects were coral polyps, only that they were different from those coral polyps he knew. Ordinary coral polyps usually used the mouths on their tentacles to prey; however, the coral polyps Ding Ning saw at the moment breathed out flames from the mouths on their tentacles, and under the flames, the hard shells of those dead jellyfishes started to be dissolved and corroded.

In the blink of an eye, those dead jellyfishes were burned into ashes while their hard shells were melted into some transparent fluids like resins, which were eaten by the coral polyps later.

As one jellyfish’s dead body burned out, one Spiritual Crystal of Water fell on the floor, then, the second one, the third one…

Different from jellyfishes, who were afraid of Spiritual Crystals of Thunder, those coral polyps did not fear the Spiritual Crystals of Water though they did not like them either. As if they had not seen the Spiritual Crystals of Water that fell on the floor, they swallowed the leftovers of the dead jellyfishes greedily and attentively like eating the most delicious foods in the world.

After eating up all the leftovers of the dead jellyfishes, the coral polyps all returned to the coral forest and kept still while secreting something gelatinous like jellyfishes’ bodies. Through their digestion, the transparent fluids they ate were turned red. With his All-seeing Eye, Ding Ning found these red corals became bigger and bigger visibly.

He suddenly realized the reason why these red corals were so tall and strong was that they were composed of the red and nearly- transparent secretion the jellyfishes secreted after they ate the dead jellyfishes.

As all the coral polyps became dormant, Ding Ning’s heart was burning with eagerness as he looked at the Spiritual Crystals of Water in numbers on the sea floor.

At the moment, Ding Ning almost came to the conclusion that there might be two reasons why the jellyfishes made such a long way to the cave to cremate the dead jellyfishes. One was that the coral polyps had reached an agreement with the jellyfishes; the other one was that the jellyfishes knew the coral polyps would not usurp the Spiritual Crystals of Water, so, they gave those dead jellyfishes to the coral polyps, who burned them and turned them into red corals later. It was an equal deal.

Ding Ning did not which reason was the motivation behind the jellyfishes’ behaviors. If it was the later, he could collect the Spiritual Crystals of Water at his will.

If it was the former, he was afraid that the coral polyps would not allow him to take away these Spiritual Crystals of Water.

Nevertheless, Ding Ning was not a man who would return with nothing from a mountain of treasures. Since he had made it there, he would give it a try anyway.

In great fear, he picked up one Spiritual Crystal of Water, and the coral polyps made no reaction. Then, he picked up another Spiritual Crystal of Water, the third one…

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