I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 760: What the Details Gave Away
The Black Giant priests arrived quickly once they had their orders.
At Jie Ming’s instruction, they did not rashly begin detaching anything, and instead modeled the surrounding environment first.
Jie Ming himself crouched beside the energy device, fingers resting lightly on the edge of its casing, the All-Purpose Eye peeling back layer by layer the coating structure on its inner wall, a thing precise to the point of being uncanny.
It was then that a rush of hurried footsteps came up quickly behind him.
He did not even have to turn around to know who it was.
On this entire battlefield, the only person who could walk with a stride that was simultaneously smug and self-consciously reserved was Viola.
“The interrogation results are in!”
Viola came to a stop behind him, hands clasped behind her back, chin tilted slightly up, the curve at the corner of her mouth all but reaching her ears, her whole bearing radiating the air of someone who had made a haul.
“Exactly as we guessed, this bunch of octopus-faces is just one small detachment from their civilization. The whole main force of the octopus-man civilization has been broken up into dozens, maybe over a hundred, small squads, each carrying out a different task, scattered across several regions. Their mouths are tight, though, and there are restrictions laid into their souls, so getting anything useful out of them in a short time is going to be hard.”
She paused here on purpose, watching Jie Ming with bright, shining eyes, as though waiting for him to press her for more.
But Jie Ming only stayed where he was crouching and obligingly made an “Mm” sound, his gaze not even leaving the device.
Seeing this, Viola did not particularly mind, and simply carried on talking to herself:
“Still, thanks to how badly frightened our friend the commander was, I did pry the coordinates of a Multiracial Alliance outpost out of him.” There was a touch of pleasure in Viola’s tone as she said it.
But then something else occurred to her, and she spread her hands, her tone turning a little deflated:
“Pity that outpost’s combat strength is well past what the two of us can handle. Over a hundred eighth-level beings permanently stationed there, and a complete defensive system. There is no swallowing that one whole. All we can do is report it to the Star Ring Federation and sell the coordinates.”
“Though even just selling intelligence should get us a decent payment.”
Viola started tallying it up as she went, her slender fingers tapping at the air one beat at a time, as though working an invisible calculator. “The payment for the coordinates, plus the rest of the spoils from this operation, is about enough to lay out the whole early and mid-stage reconstruction of this plane. Merging the plane origin into my Law Solidification Domain, restoring the surface ecology, laying the foundations of a wizard tower… we might even have scraps left over to swap out a batch of laboratory equipment while we are at it.”
The more she talked the smoother it came, and the more pleased with herself she grew, an excitement she could not quite hold down showing at the corners of her eyes and brows.
But partway through she noticed that Jie Ming did not seem to be reacting at all.
The smile on Viola’s face faltered, and her thoughts finally pulled free of her own calculations and settled back onto him.
“Did you… find something good?”
She narrowed her eyes, and her tone shifted from that earlier smugness into scrutiny.
Jie Ming did not hide it.
He stood up and stepped aside, revealing the half-height dark gray cube of a device behind him in full to Viola.
The casing still bore no markings at all, and that non-reflective dark gray coating on its surface was so understated under the feeble light of the factory’s emergency lamps as to be almost unremarkable.
Viola gave it an idle glance at first.
But the next instant, as though she had sensed something, her brows drew slightly together.
She said nothing, only took two steps forward and laid her palm against the device’s casing.
The gray-white Law Solidification Domain unfolded soundlessly along with it, seeping slowly into every inch of the device’s interior.
Then her expression changed, and her whole bearing became that of someone who had just watched a treasure that should have been hers picked up in front of her by somebody else.
She clutched instinctively at her chest and retreated half a step, her face plainly written over with the words—bitter, heartfelt regret.
Seeing that expression of hers, Jie Ming’s eyes lit up sharply.
By the rules among wizards, spoils belonged to whoever found them, unless both parties had put in the work.
And more to the point, Viola had just handed the battlefield to him to deal with, which in itself was a tacit acknowledgment that everything found on the surface counted as his payment.
That expression on her face now amounted to telling him with her face…
The value of this thing was great enough that Viola was starting to regret what she had said a moment ago.
His own earlier assessment of it climbed another notch on the spot.
Once the initial excitement had passed, Jie Ming had come to think the thing was most likely some kind of energy extraction technology he could not detect.
A ninth-level creation was, after all, far beyond his reach, and the thought had been an idle one.
But going by Viola’s reaction now, could it really be…
“Senior Sister, this thing wouldn’t happen to be…”
Jie Ming ventured.
“That is right… a ninth-level creation.”
Viola all but forced the words out through her teeth, and yet every one of them was perfectly distinct.
She raised her eyes and gave Jie Ming a look, and that look was full of bitter, heartfelt regret.
“You cannot tell yet. Once you advance to the sixth level and have a Law Solidification Domain, you will be able to tell the moment you touch a thing like this… damn it, why do you have to be my junior brother? If only you were some wizard I did not know!”
She drew a deep breath, and her voice finally sank.
“The operating logic of this thing really is creation from nothing.”
“Only a ninth-level being can permanently invest a conceptual-level effect like that into a creation.”
Jie Ming had long since prepared himself for it, but hearing Viola confirm it out loud, he still could not help drawing in a breath.
Which meant this unremarkable half-height device was, of everything he had come into contact with since crossing over, the highest-level creation of the wizard world he had ever handled. “This… the Multiracial Alliance is spending on a rather grand scale.”
Jie Ming glanced at the Black Giant priests, who had already indicated the environmental modeling was complete. As he spoke, he carefully detached the device from the power supply chain and held it in his hands.
“Going by what you just got out of the interrogation, this ought to count as no more than a small detachment. Not even an outpost, just one of the hundred-odd squads the whole civilization was broken up into… and they carry a ninth-level creation around with them?”
There was a note of wonder in his tone he could not keep down, and a genuine shock as well.
“Put this thing in the Star Ring Federation… you would have to be at least an eighth-level True Name Wizard to have the clearance to even apply for one, wouldn’t you? Do they have so many ninth-level beings that they are bored out of their minds?”
He tossed out that last complaint without thinking, and was about to put the device away into his inner world when he noticed Viola had not answered.
He raised his head, and only then did he notice that the look of bitter regret on his senior sister’s face had vanished entirely.
In its place was a seriousness and a silence that very rarely appeared there.
Her arms were folded across her chest, her brows slightly knit, her silver-gray eyes fixed on the device.
But she was clearly no longer grieving over its going to Jie Ming. She was thinking about something a good deal deeper.
Jie Ming’s chest tightened slightly.
He had known Viola for several thousand years. He had seen her put on airs, seen her gloat, seen her make trouble on purpose, seen her preen. But the times she had been serious enough to go silent he could count on one hand.
“Senior Sister?”
He tried calling to her.
Viola seemed to come back from her thoughts only then.
She let her folded arms drop and walked at an unhurried pace to a viewport in the factory wall, looking through the broken frame at the battlefield outside, where the smoke was still rising. Under the pale violet sky, black smoke was still curling slowly upward in the distance, like so many scars that had not yet faded.
“What you said is not impossible.”
At last she spoke, her tone very level, without that habitual teasing lilt at the end of it.
Jie Ming blinked, not immediately registering which line she meant.
It was several seconds before he realized Viola was talking about that half-joking complaint of his:
“Do they have so many ninth-level beings that they are bored out of their minds?”
His expression went from blank to slowly serious.
Viola did not go on explaining right away.
She only looked quietly at the distant sky, seemingly sorting through various pieces of information.
After a moment, she spoke slowly:
“I have never been to the main front, so I do not know the details.”
“But there are some things you can work out roughly, as long as you put them together with the data we already have.”
She turned around, her back to the pale violet daylight beyond the viewport, half her face falling into shadow, which made her expression seem unusually still.
“The wizard civilization has never made public an exact figure for how many eighth-level wizards it has. But from what I know, the Star Ring Federation alone has over ten million eighth-level wizards on the books.”
“Add the Crimson Court, the Void Architecture Academy and the Anti-Entropy Alliance, and across all four great powers the total number of eighth-level wizards is, conservatively, above fifty million. Even if over half of them have to stay behind inside the wizard civilization’s own territory, the eighth-level wizards that can be committed to the main front still come to more than twenty million.” “And the wizard civilization has eight ninth-level wizards on the main front.”
Viola drew a light breath.
“Work it out and each of them has over two million eighth-level wizards taking orders directly from him.”
“And that is without counting the seventh-level wizards, who far outnumber the eighth. As support and reinforcement they are just as crucial a link on the battlefield.” Jie Ming stood where he was, listening quietly.
There was no great embellishment in Viola’s words, and it was precisely because of that that they weighed so heavily.
She glanced at him and went on:
“The Multiracial Alliance is the weakest of the wizard civilization’s three main enemies in the Endless Chaotic Void.”
“Even so, on the main front right now they are facing, at minimum, the legions of two ninth-level wizards at once.”
She did not finish the thought aloud.
But Jie Ming had already understood all of it.
Two ninth-level wizards, each with over two million eighth-level wizards under him and seventh-level wizards in the hundreds of millions.
In a war on that scale, the Multiracial Alliance was in all likelihood on the losing side the whole way through, and might well be getting beaten like a dead dog. But the fact that this power had held out through long ages without being wiped out entirely by the wizard civilization was itself proof that its combat strength was absolutely sufficient. No number of merely eighth-level beings would have earned them the right to hold out this long against a cannon-fodder sea of eighth-level wizards, to say nothing of the ninth-level wizards. So… the number of ninth-level beings the Multiracial Alliance possessed had to run far beyond what the two of them had previously understood.
And this machine corroborated the idea from another angle.
After all, a small detachment broken off and sent to a remote star region to do odd jobs was carrying a ninth-level creation on its person.
Which meant that to the Multiracial Alliance, ninth-level creations were very likely not a treasure that anchored the whole race, but standard-issue equipment that could be handed down in bulk to frontline units.
That conclusion was more alarming than the device itself.
And it completely overturned everything Jie Ming had understood about how the top-level combat power of the Endless Chaotic Void was distributed.