I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 761: An Absurd Species, and a Negotiation

The shock of what he had found in the factory echoed in Jie Ming for a good while.

But he soon pressed that agitation back down.

However many ninth-level existences there might be, that was the Multiracial Alliance’s stock of assets, and it had no direct bearing on what he had in front of him to deal with. Jie Ming did not look at it any longer. He put the energy device carefully away into his inner world, then left the factory together with Viola.

Inside, the Black Giant priests went on dismantling the remaining salvageable equipment, their movements crisp and efficient.

By the time they walked out of the factory’s main door, the sky had already darkened.

The pale violet sky had been dyed a deeper purple-red by the evening glow, and the last of the smoke was drifting slowly apart in the wind.

The outlines of the distant hills rose and fell in the twilight, looking unusually quiet.

As he walked, Jie Ming took the opportunity to tell Viola what he had discovered about this plane’s natives.

Viola heard him out, blinked, and her expression suddenly turned rather odd.

“So that explains it.”

She raised a hand, and the gray-white Pain Law condensed slowly at her fingertip into a tiny bead of light.

The surface of that bead seemed to reflect an emotional distribution map of the entire continent, fine threads of light circulating through it without pause.

“Ever since I arrived on this plane, something has felt off to me.”

She stared at the bead, eyes narrowing.

“The emotional presence across the whole continent of this plane is distributed extremely evenly. Not the octopus-men’s pattern, concentrated in their outposts, and not the ordinary animal pattern either, which rises and falls with population density. It is… on every inch of ground there is.”

“At first I thought the octopus-men had some special power, or that there were natives hidden very deep. Then during the interrogation I found the octopus-men had no such ability at all. Looking at it now, that was simply…”

She did not finish the second half of the sentence, but Jie Ming had already understood.

He looked instinctively at the weeds still surviving in the rock crevices around the factory, then out at the low shrubs along the edge of the distant hollow that had come through the fighting by luck, and his scalp prickled violently.

The plant-people were populations formed out of miniature individuals, and those populations in turn constituted an independent plant-person body.

If every independent plant-person body was a miniature city, then this plane’s natives… what were their villages? And on what scale did their civilization exist?

And… what reason was there to be sure they only existed in plant-person form?

He looked around again.

Over ninety percent of all the exposed ground on this plane was covered in dense green vegetation.

If “every single plant is a native,” then what they were standing on was not a battlefield at all.

It was a super-metropolis spanning an entire planet, inhabited by miniature residents numbering in the quadrillions!

Having reasoned that far, Jie Ming activated the Fate Subsystem almost as a stress reaction and began rapidly checking his own fate rules for any abnormal disturbance. Only after confirming there was nothing wrong did he slowly let out a breath.

It was not that he was making a fuss over nothing.

It was that the “Mycelord” he had once encountered in the Triad Plane Cluster had left an impression on him so deep it reached the level of trauma. An existence whose body had become a concept, who was itself nature, was simply too dangerous.

Had the seventh-level wizard leading the team not reacted in time on a fate prompt, that expedition force would very nearly have died to the last man.

And although the two derived their will from exactly opposite sources, the mode of existence of these plant-people and that of the Mycelord were nonetheless identical.

Even if their disposition looked a great deal gentler than the Mycelord’s, once “gentleness” was tangled up with the survival of an entire civilization, no one could say for certain how long it would last.

“How are you planning to handle these plant-people?”

Jie Ming asked, his voice dropping a little without his meaning it to.

Viola drew the bead of Pain Law at her fingertip back into her body, folded her arms across her chest, and looked at a stand of shrubs blackened by the fighting along the edge of the far hollow, thinking for a moment.

“We can talk to them once the battlefield is cleaned up.”

Her tone was even.

“It is going to be my plane from here on, after all. I ought to find out how many households actually live on my own ground.”

Over the time that followed, Jie Ming issued orders to both the Black Giants and the Tentacle Tree Civilization to accelerate the sweep.

The Tentacle Tree Civilization’s fleet split into several hundred small formations and began a dragnet search of the whole plane.

Every point with an anomalous energy reading was marked and inspected one by one.

But even a rough search of the entire surface of a plane still took several months.

During that time they found no shortage of life energy collection sites and small and mid-sized outposts the octopus-men had left behind, but nothing on the scale of that factory ever appeared again.

The equipment in those facilities was all standard issue as well. There was no second ninth-level creation.

Once the rough sweep was finished, Jie Ming had the Black Giants and the Tentacle Tree Civilization withdraw from the plane and return to the Infernal Sulfur Plane through the spatial rift. Then he and Viola went together to a basin deep within the plane.

It was ringed by mountains, its ground dished inward, and its vegetation had been dense to begin with.

On top of which the surrounding ranges had blocked most of the battle’s backwash, so it had instead become the most luxuriantly vegetated region on the whole plane after the war.

Inside the basin, great sweeps of purple-red moss carpeted the ground, with the occasional clump of shrubs whose leaves grew arranged in spirals.

When a light breeze passed over, a faint clean fragrance of plants filled the air.

But in the face of that scene of teeming life, Jie Ming honestly and dutifully unfolded the Grand Radiance.

Tens of thousands of wizard artifacts formed a giant ring array behind him, like a scorching solar disc hanging in the void.

The Return to Ruins Armor’s energy stabilization field expanded along with it, covering the entire basin under a layer of protective shielding.

His true body and Dharma Form unfolded together as well, and the Light God Transformation state activated in sync, his body converting to a semi-luminous state.

In the end, a thousand-meter dark golden giant crouched at the center of the basin, with the five-hundred-kilometer phantom of the Second Layer Dharma Form suspended behind it, stern, still, and full of pressure.

Jie Ming was, it was fair to say, fully armed now, every last piece of his combat power unleashed.

Viola, by contrast, did not look much changed.

She had only retied her long hair into a neat ponytail, and the Law Solidification Domain spread open beneath her feet.

The gray-white light was rather gentler than it had been in battle, but its coverage was larger for it, like a thin mist laid out without a sound, taking the entire basin inside itself.

She floated at the height of the true body’s shoulder and drew a deep breath.

Then, using the plant-people’s local language that Jie Ming had parsed out over these past months, with her Law Solidification Domain as the medium and combining it with the portion of plane origin control she had seized earlier, she transmitted a message evenly to every single plant on the whole plane.

In that message, her “words” were extremely blunt:

“I have obtained ownership of this plane. You plant-people now count as my property.”

“Next, we need to talk properly.”

Once the message had gone out, every plant in the basin moved.

Every shrub, every patch of moss, every towering tree dissolved its own form at the same moment.

Leaves fell soundlessly from their branches, bark peeled gently away from trunks, and every scrap of plant tissue had already begun reaggregating before it hit the ground. A green tide converged from the edges of the basin toward the center, the miniature individuals recomposing their own bodies at a speed beyond what the naked eye could resolve. Trunks, vines and leaves recombined in the space of a few breaths, gradually forming an entirely new outline.

It was a colossal, towering plant-person.

Its body was so large that Jie Ming’s thousand-meter true body could barely reach its knee.

Its body was aggregated out of every plant in the whole basin, its surface covered in a fine netted structure of vines, the branches and leaves at its crown swaying gently under the purple daylight, every leaf carrying a healthy emerald sheen.

The contours of its face were clear and gentle, and those eyes, pieced together out of petals of different colors, were looking quietly down at Viola and Jie Ming. Viola did not wait for it to speak first.

She used the plant-people’s language directly to repeat the message she had just sent through the plane origin.

“I have obtained ownership of this plane.” Her voice was very calm. “From this moment on, you are no longer this plane’s masterless natives. You are a subordinate species belonging to me.”

The towering plant-person kept its head lowered in silence, the vast eyes of petals watching her without a blink, and did not speak at once.

Viola did not mind. She went on, “As the plane’s master, I will provide a suitable living environment, resource supply and technical support by the standards of the wizard civilization, protect you from invasion by outside enemies, and do what I can to restore your populations to a better condition.”

“In exchange, you will pay a fixed quantity of resources each year as tax. And when necessary you will obey my orders, take part in the defense of the plane, or assist in my research.”

She raised her eyes and met that giant gaze of petals, thought for a moment, and then added one last line.

“Also, you may serve as my laboratory assistants and take part in some of my research work. Whatever knowledge you learn in the course of that research remains your own.”

Standing to one side, listening to his senior sister “negotiate,” Jie Ming could not help covering his face.

Granted, when communicating with a species whose customs were different, one should be as blunt as possible to avoid misunderstanding.

But… this was rather too blunt!

So blunt that even a line like “you are my property now” was laid out in the open without the slightest softening.

He had assumed that saying something like that would in all likelihood have both sides at each other’s throats immediately, and the Grand Radiance behind the Dharma Form had already begun quietly gathering itself.

But the plant-person stayed silent for a long time.

Those giant eyes of petals blinked slowly, and a rustling of leaves rubbing together spread out unhurriedly from its body.

It did not answer at once.

But from the vegetation all around the basin, connected to the giant, tiny points of green light rose continuously along those connections and merged into its enormous trunk.

Jie Ming could feel it clearly: an immense stream of information was passing between those plants at high speed.

So the plant-people were not failing to react.

They were using the consciousness of every population in the whole basin to calculate and debate at once.

The terms Viola had offered, their own past combat records against the octopus-men, plus the records of Jie Ming and Viola fighting the octopus-men, the gap in strength between the two sides, the cost and the return of resistance…

And that last item she had mentioned, that “knowledge learned in the course of research remains theirs”…

Every detail was deduced and weighed over and over inside that vast green ocean.

At last the colossal plant-person spoke. “We accept these terms.”

The finger Jie Ming had hovering at the Dharma Form’s chest eased slowly off the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light’s trigger rune.

The plant-people’s choice was understandable.

They had shared what other plant-people had observed of the fighting with the octopus-men, which amounted to having watched “with their own eyes” how this pair of “wizards” had crushed an entire octopus-man expedition force with the strength of two people.

Under those conditions, accepting the terms and becoming a subordinate species was a great deal wiser than resisting and being wiped out entirely.

Standing off to the side, Jie Ming could not help feeling a little envious.

Judging by what had just happened, these plant-people were exactly as he had analyzed them.

Their intelligence rose exponentially as the number of aggregated populations increased.

A single miniature individual was not especially intelligent, but when miniature individuals numbering in the quadrillions were linked together through a neural network, the collective intelligence they constituted was already a match for a top-level sixth-level wizard.

Viola’s willingness to take them on as laboratory assistants rather than a purely servile species was precisely because she had her eye on that potential.

Thinking of the new generation of living plant-person tissue he had already cultivated in his laboratory on the Infernal Sulfur Plane, Jie Ming could not help feeling a certain anticipation himself.

The scale was still small.

But given enough time and a suitable environment, those little things would sooner or later grow into towering giants like the one before him.