I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 632: The Second Strange

The sealing progressed without a hitch.

The black rune hovered right above the salt jar, starting its slow descent.

The curse scripts' buzzing intensified, making the storage room's air vibrate in sync.

All was unfolding as expected.

Suddenly, trouble struck.

“Ugh…”

A muffled groan escaped the Curse Witch abruptly.

Her right arm—from shoulder to palm—contorted into a bizarre angle.

Muscles, bones, blood vessels, nerves… every tissue let out subtle ripping noises from that torsional power.

The Curse Witch's face darkened instantly, as no assailant registered on her senses.

Her left hand shot up swiftly, pressing the mangled right shoulder. Black light burst from her palm, fighting back against the twisting pressure.

The other wizards glanced her way instinctively, heightening their vigilance around them.

This reaction was expected.

When a companion gets hurt out of nowhere, focus naturally shifts to the incident.

Yet right then, as attention diverted from the finger to the Curse Witch, Jie Ming's spiritual force detected the shift in the salt jar.

The finger remained in place.

However, the peculiar power clinging to it had vanished.

Just a moment before, it pulsed with that ineffable “weirdness.” The next instant, it was completely gone.

The finger now appeared as a mere withered digit from a corpse, dotted with age spots.

Jie Ming responded on pure reflex.

His spiritual force surged to maximum, Fate Subsystem overclocking to trace the vanished power's path.

But it had dispersed too completely, erasing every trace, like it never was.

“It escaped,” Jie Ming uttered gravely.

The storage room's air turned frigid briefly.

Thanks to the Curse Witch's counter, the twist on her right arm faded quickly and ceased.

Her right arm was badly mangled, bones shattered in multiple spots, muscle fibers mostly ruptured.

Still, she merely furrowed her brow. Her right arm started mending on its own, bones crackling as they reset.

Her eyes locked onto the finger, pale gray irises narrowing.

“Tch.”

A frustrated tongue-click sounded from under the hood.

“One step too late,” she fixed her stare on the finger, voice laced with irritation. “The arm twist was meant to sow disorder. In that split second, it broke free from the finger.”

The deep blue-robed male wizard's face soured too. “Can we still track it?”

“Doubtful,” the Curse Witch confirmed with a nod. “That cursed thing's true form wasn't a real physical entity anyway.”

The mood in the storage room grew tense.

The Curse Witch's right arm had fully healed via her self-repair sorcery.

She wiggled her fingers to verify full mobility, then lifted her head. Her pale gray eyes scanned the group.

“Did anyone sense the force that twisted my arm?”

The burly male wizard affirmed. “I did. It hit out of nowhere, no prior signs.”

“Didn't feel like it originated from the finger,” the young female wizard pondered, brow creased. “My spiritual force stayed fixed on it throughout. Right before vanishing, the finger had zero odd energy shifts. That force seemed to arise from… elsewhere.”

The blue-robed wizard eyed the finger. “From our breakdown of that salted finger, its power ties to ‘saltiness’: salting food, inducing kidney damage, forcing a salty taste on victims. Twisting limbs isn't in its arsenal.”

“So either our analysis overlooked details…” The slender male wizard squinted. “Or this Strange hides traits we don't know about.”

“Or…” the life-system wizard continued, his form shifted back from elemental to flesh, color returning to his skin. “An external force meddled.”

One wizard's eyes lit up. “You mean another Strange is present?”

This idea ignited excitement in the storage room's atmosphere.

The salty finger had already showcased Strange entities' research potential.

For wizards, more was always better!

And the one who grasped the recent events best was Jie Ming, vigilantly monitoring everything from the outset!

Thus, all eyes turned to him.

Jie Ming stood by the stone, eyes not on the salt jar but fixed on some vague spot in empty space.

Deep in his pupils, golden light swirled gently—the mark of All-Purpose Eye and Fate Subsystem working in tandem.

“Earlier, I kept a constant watch on the fate conditions nearby,” Jie Ming stated, his voice calm and measured. “I certainly detected an irregular fate thread.”

“Which direction? Connected to the finger?” the deep blue-robed male wizard questioned at once.

“You guessed right. The subsequent force didn’t originate from the finger,” Jie Ming confirmed firmly. “At the fate level, that finger is ‘dead’; it emits no active fate. The power that warped the arm arrived from elsewhere. The precise direction…”

Shutting his eyes, he retraced the path of that fate thread within his mind. “Northeast, about one kilometer from our position.”

“Northeast, one kilometer,” the young female wizard mentally mapped out the town. “That points to the garden district on the town’s outskirts. An derelict noble estate lies there, with a lengthy corridor stretching behind it.”

The wizards’ spiritual energies all rushed toward that spot simultaneously. Moments later, they all sensed something amiss.

“Huh?!”

“We should check it out,” the deep blue-robed male wizard commanded resolutely.

Nine silhouettes burst from the fruit storage room, gliding over rooftops as they sped northeast.

For wizards, one kilometer passed in a mere blink.

Jie Ming touched down in mid-air over the manor garden, surveying the scene from overhead.

The place screamed long-term abandonment.

The main structure’s roof had caved in halfway, ivy snaked across the stone walls, and wild grass overrun the yard.

Yet the garden’s design remained vaguely visible: orderly walkways, shattered statues, and a wisteria-draped long corridor.

The corridor stretched roughly a hundred meters, supported by pillars etched with intricate designs.

Dust and scattered leaves blanketed the stone-paved floor.

But what truly drew Jie Ming’s gaze were the walls flanking the corridor.

Graffiti plastered the walls.

Typical childish scribbles—jagged strokes, sloppy colors, like a kid’s haphazard brushwork on stone.

As his spiritual force scanned the graffiti, Jie Ming’s eyebrows knit together faintly.

He dropped to one end of the corridor, with the other wizards following suit.

“This graffiti…” The young female wizard stepped up to the wall for a closer look. “It appears quite aged. The colors have soaked into the stone, dating back years at least.”

“Yet not every bit is ancient,” the Curse Witch indicated a wall segment. “This portion is fresh.”

Jie Ming glanced where she indicated.

A cleaner wall patch. The graffiti paints seemed recent, hues brighter. It depicted several human shapes.

Precisely nine figures, each in unique poses—standing, seated, arms folded, or legs crossed.

Despite the juvenile style and basic lines, each figure’s traits stood out strikingly.

Clothing shades, body contours, even fine postural nuances closely resembled the nine wizards.

Jie Ming spotted his own likeness.

That one sat legs crossed against the wall, mirroring his stance closely.

No face details on the figure, just two dots atop the head.

Jie Ming recalled keeping his eyes wide during the spiritual scan in the storage room.

The Curse Witch’s depiction was unmistakable too: black cloak, hood over head, just like back in the room.

But the detail that shrank everyone’s pupils was the right arm on her figure.

From shoulder to hand, the Curse Witch’s arm in the drawing had been blotted out with dark paint.

As though roughly daubed over with black, wiping the whole limb from the picture.

“This…” The burly male wizard’s eyes gleamed with curiosity. “When did someone draw this?”

Jie Ming crouched low, invoked the All-Purpose Eye, inspected the black paint’s drying state and seep depth, then probed its chemical makeup via spiritual force.

“Drawn just now,” he announced evenly. “The paint’s not fully set. Judging by seep rate and evaporation… mere seconds ago.”

Seconds ago.

Right at the moment the Curse Witch’s arm got twisted.

“So,” the deep blue-robed male wizard drawled, savoring the words. “Some unknown entity sketched our portraits along this corridor wall. Next, it blacked out the Curse Witch’s arm in the drawing. And then, her real arm contorted.”

“Highly probable,” the slender male wizard agreed. “This graffiti… or whatever produced it, holds the power to alter reality.”

All eyes turned back to the graffiti once more.

Nine wizards, nine portraits.

Except for the Curse Witch's right arm that got painted over, the remaining eight portraits remained intact.

However, Jie Ming spotted subtle signs of unfinished changes around the edges of certain portraits.

For instance, fingers on one had been repainted, a foot on another extended slightly, though these changes were eventually wiped away.

It appeared to be practice runs.

“This entity clearly shows signs of intelligence,” Jie Ming indicated the marks of alteration. “Check here, here, and here. It has altered the portraits repeatedly. It's experimenting, probing, gauging the extent of its power's impact on wizards.”

His eyes turned grave. “These marks reveal it has tried numerous times already. The wizards' resistance to laws proved too formidable, rendering prior small changes ineffective.”

“Then it seized the chance when we intentionally dropped our defenses to feel the curse's power. It ramped up its force, covered the whole arm in paint, and at last inflicted actual harm.”

“Though it was merely a twisted arm, hardly a grave wound for a sixth-ring wizard,” the Curse Witch wiggled her fingers, now moving freely. “Yet imagine if it boosts its power more? What if it covers my head next time?”

“I doubt it refrained from targeting your head out of mercy; it simply lacked the capability. We can't assume benevolence from such a creature,” Jie Ming denied with a shake of his head.

The rest pondered briefly before nodding quietly in unison.

This entity's power stood plainly revealed: altering reality via crude drawings.

Regrettably, every wizard understood that even the mightiest mechanism demands sufficient quantitative backing.

With inadequate numbers against superior ones, the mechanism fails utterly.

The earlier events clearly showed the wizards' superiority in numbers.

“Viewed this way, despite both being Strange, the salty finger and this graffiti differ starkly,” the young female wizard shifted to the corridor's opposite side, eyeing drawings on nearby walls. “The salty finger functions like a machine. It slays families one by one without adapting to circumstances, simply following rigid protocols.”

“This graffiti behaves otherwise,” Jie Ming pressed on. “It probed us first, then selected the Curse Witch as its initial victim based on the moment's conditions.”

She led the sealing effort, after all.

Her injury would halt the seal, freeing the salty finger.

“Was it aiding the salty finger's getaway?” The wizard in deep blue robes furrowed his brow deeply. “Can these entities even collaborate?”

“I'm inclined to call it coincidence. We never foresaw a second Strange, so in drawing fate lines, I gathered every fate linked to the Strange,” Jie Ming refuted while shaking his head.

“Thus, this entity got pulled in by our actions too. What truly matters is assessing its power level.”

His eyes fixed on the Curse Witch's right arm.

“Injuring a sixth-ring wizard was within its grasp. The harm was minor, succeeding only after the wizard willfully weakened defenses, yet it triumphed. Its 'reality modification' ability elevates its threat far beyond that finger's.”

Jie Ming swiveled to stare at the childish, twisted scrawls adorning the corridor walls, face stern, eyes brimming with heightened wariness.

Fellow wizards nodded their assent.

“But where has it gone? Does it cling to these drawings, or lurk elsewhere, manipulating them from afar?” another wizard inquired.

Jie Ming reignited the Fate Subsystem, extending his spiritual force wide to detect oddities in the local fate web.

Moments passed before his eyes snapped open.

“Fate lines swirl in chaos,” Jie Ming sighed, shaking his head. “Its core eludes me right now.”