I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 762: Taking Stock, and the Apostles of the End

The light of the teleportation array faded slowly in the main laboratory on the Infernal Sulfur Plane.

The familiar elemental fluctuations, mixed with the faint sandalwood of the Incense Fire Divine Dao, flooded into his nose together.

Cold blue illumination still spilled steadily across the workbenches and the array screens, leaving the whole laboratory looking somewhat chill.

Jie Ming stepped out of the teleportation array and raised a hand to work his neck.

His joints gave a small crack, and only then did his body, which had been strung tight to the very limit, begin to loosen bit by bit from deep in the sinews.

As for the octopus-man prisoners and the intelligence on the Multiracial Alliance outpost’s coordinates, Viola was still looking for a suitable buyer.

Packaging it all up and selling it to the Star Ring Federation’s military department would of course have fetched a fairly considerable amount of military merit, but she plainly had no intention of unloading it so carelessly. With something like rare intelligence, shopping it around always squeezed out another few percent of return.

Jie Ming had no objection to that.

His own share had been agreed on long ago in any case.

The payment of five billion low-level military merits he had already collected in advance, and whatever price Viola managed to get later was down to her own skill. Before they parted the two of them had also settled it: once she found a buyer, she could simply transfer his cut to his magic network terminal.

The moment Jie Ming got back, he went first to the cultivation area beside the laboratory.

One independent cultivation room had already been tuned to the environmental parameters of Viola’s plane.

Stellar illumination in a pale violet spectrum, elevated air humidity, weakly acidic soil rich in trace elements… every metric had been calibrated into place by Jie Ming.

He then took several sealed test tubes out of his inner world, holding the living ganglion samples collected from the plant-people’s corpses, and placed them carefully into the nutrient solution.

Pale green liquid flowed slowly through the circulation pipes, like a quiet stream of life.

Within it, the living tissue unfurled its curled tendrils bit by bit, beginning to adapt to the new environment and to proliferate slowly.

Jie Ming split off a small portion of the living tissue as well and sent it into the dedicated cultivation tank beside it, the one connected to the Creation System.

As the passive catalysis function came online, the Incense Divine Power and spiritual qi inside the tank began fusing slowly at the preset ratio.

Pale golden light rose out of the rune array at the base of the tank and enveloped the living tissue.

Very soon, changes appeared at a speed visible to the naked eye.

Ganglia that would ordinarily have needed several days to complete a single division finished their first proliferation within a few hours under the Creation System’s catalysis. The new ganglia were extremely active, and the rate at which they established synaptic connections was several times faster than in the natural state.

“Not bad. It seems this species does possess the properties of a plant in itself, so it can be affected by the Creation System’s cultivation acceleration.”

Jie Ming nodded in satisfaction, noted the data in his experiment log, then turned and went back to his workbench.

The rest of the gains from this plane war needed sorting out too.

He loaded the plant-people’s body of knowledge into the computation terminal, and the light screens unfolded page after page before his eyes.

Jie Ming skimmed quickly past the parts of no consequence and soon found what he wanted.

Those plant-people’s attainments in systems for extracting life force were quite outstanding: the structure of the miniature biochemical reaction chamber, the purification and storage technology for life energy, the information transmission protocols of the population neural network…

Every one of those pieces of knowledge felt far from cheap, even judged by Jie Ming’s present standards.

He spent several days sorting and filing all of it in full, and even created a new category tag specifically to hold it separately. As for what had come from the octopus-men, that was an entirely different matter.

Judging by the data taken from prisoners and captured on the battlefield, the octopus-men’s individual cultivation system was quite sprawling.

Great heaps of techniques on how to strengthen the flesh, how to temper combat armor, how to break past one’s limits in battle, piled up into a mountain and looking exceedingly rich at first glance. But after skimming them once, Jie Ming confirmed that this material meant little to him.

He had the body forging method, and he had Solar True Fire body tempering. On the road of strengthening the flesh he had long since gone another way.

Those octopus-man techniques fell several orders of magnitude short of the body forging method in both efficiency and depth.

So he quickly packed them down, dropped them into the miscellaneous category, and turned his attention to the intelligence and general knowledge of the wider world extracted from the octopus-man commander’s consciousness.

The gains in that area were not especially large either.

The octopus-man commander simply did not know much.

The Multiracial Alliance’s internal architecture was, after all, far too vast, and since the octopus-man civilization had lost its ninth-level ancestor its standing had slid steadily to the margins, so far that it could not even touch the threshold of a mid-level decision-making conference.

What he knew came to no more than roughly how many outposts of comparable scale there were in his own assigned mission zone.

Above that it was all fairly ordinary common knowledge, and his understanding of the Multiracial Alliance did not even reach as far as Jie Ming’s own.

According to the commander’s memories, the reason for that was that even back when the octopus-man civilization still possessed a ninth-level existence, it had not counted as a core civilization within the Multiracial Alliance.

That piece of information made Jie Ming’s fingers pause.

A civilization that possessed a ninth-level being was already at the peak of the pyramid in the Endless Chaotic Void.

But if a civilization like that counted only as a non-core member of the Multiracial Alliance, then what level were the Multiracial Alliance’s core civilizations at? Still, it did corroborate from another angle the judgment he and Viola had reached earlier.

To the Multiracial Alliance, ninth-level existences really were not irreplaceable.

Which was why they would do something like issuing a ninth-level creation to a small detachment in a remote star region.

And while he was working through their general knowledge of the world, Jie Ming’s eye was soon caught by one particular term.

Namely that the octopus-men, or rather the Multiracial Alliance, did not simply call wizards “wizards” or “the enemy.”

They called them—“Apostles of the End.”

“…Strange?” Jie Ming could not help sinking into thought.

Going by the Multiracial Alliance common tongue he had parsed out, the sense of that appellation was, frankly, a little unusual.

Within the Multiracial Alliance’s common language system, the concept behind the root “End” was not a simple “ending” or “death,” but something closer to the fairly specific scenario of “the ending of a world.”

As for “Apostle,” its meaning resembled the most common religious vocabulary in many civilizations’ languages, denoting the envoy or agent of some higher existence. Apostles of the End could essentially be translated literally as the envoys who usher in the ending of the world.

That did not sound at all like a nickname tossed off on a battlefield… or rather, if it really were meant as a nickname, then “monsters,” or “wizards” itself, would have been rather more concise to pronounce.

The appellation looked much more like a formal designation used within the Multiracial Alliance over a long period and preserved through repeated cultural fusions. And when the octopus-men mentioned the term, there was no mockery or contempt in it whatsoever, only pure fear.

Jie Ming mulled it over for a moment, then quickly searched for terms like Sentience Calamity and Reflection Dimension.

To his surprise, he found both quickly. Their pronunciation differed from the wizard civilization’s language, but their inner meanings were similar, and they too were nouns pointing specifically at those two catastrophes.

“This… how should I put this?” There was something odd about Jie Ming’s expression.

Sentience Calamity, Reflection Dimension, Apostles of the End.

However you looked at it, those three were terms of the same class!

Put the three together and view them from the Multiracial Alliance’s standpoint, and it felt far more like a group of civilizations banding together to resist three world-scale catastrophes…

“Er, surely the wizard civilization would not be called a catastrophe… would it?”

By the end of that sentence, even Jie Ming himself sounded a little unconvinced.

He promptly opened his magic network terminal and sent Viola an encrypted call.

A few seconds later, a light screen lit up.

Viola’s face appeared on it. Behind her seemed to still be the interior of the octopus-man flagship’s wreckage, so she was evidently still handling the cleanup. That habitual smile was still hanging at the corner of her mouth, only carrying rather more obvious mockery in it than usual.

“What, missing me already?”

Jie Ming ignored the line with a straight face and came straight to the point, laying out what he had found.

When Viola had heard him out, the smile on her face drew in slightly, though a trace of the curve remained.

She did not launch into one of her usual torrents of explanation. She only tilted her head a little, her tone carrying the sense of “that is a long story and I do not intend to tell it right now.”

“Ah, that… once you reach the sixth level and fuse with a plane origin yourself, you will know.”

The words fell, and the call cut off at once.

After the light screen went dark, Jie Ming stood where he was, reached up to scratch his head, and felt rather at a loss for a moment.

Curiosity clawed at his heart like a cat’s paw, and he strongly suspected that Viola was deliberately withholding it purely to get back at him for finding the ninth-level creation!

Still, though Viola had kept him in suspense, what she said did indicate that this was something like “common knowledge” among high-level wizards. And it was also because of Viola that Jie Ming made up his mind once and for all to complete his advancement to sixth-level wizard as soon as possible.

The gains from this plane war really had exceeded anything he had imagined.

Once Viola sold off the intelligence on the outpost, even half a share would be enough for Jie Ming to clear his debt to Mentor Clark and, while he was at it, close the funding gap on building the Creation System.

As for the auxiliary stars of the All-Heavens Star Grand Array, those could stay empty for the time being.

In short, the gains from this plane war solved the problem of insufficient military merit, and even if Jie Ming never took part in another plane war, the long-term returns on his own technology would be enough to loosen up his finances again.

More importantly, this plane war had also let him see his own shortcomings more clearly.

Jie Ming did in fact know the reason. He had broken through to the Dao Integration Realm, but the time since had been far too short, a little over a century all told. And through most of that century he had been studying the All-Heavens Star Grand Array and the Creation System, without ever getting the chance to properly study the various divine abilities of the Dao Integration Realm.

Put plainly, what he lacked was not only military merit. He was short on time as well.

So it was time to advance to the sixth level.