I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 764: Refinement, Payment, an Attempt, and a Thought

After a few excited attempts, he felt the Law Solidification Domain was still not stable enough.

Jie Ming sat back down and closed his eyes again, beginning to fine-tune and firm up his own Law Solidification Domain.

Several hours later, the layer of dark golden Law Solidification Domain in the quiet chamber had steadied.

The membrane of light spread outward from where he sat cross-legged, covering the whole chamber exactly.

Its boundary could not yet be called broad, but he could clearly feel it expanding outward at a pace that was slow but unusually steady. The feeling was like that of a shoot that had only just broken through the soil.

It looked frail, but given time it would grow into a towering tree in the end.

Still, Jie Ming did not stop there.

He remained sitting cross-legged where he was and sank his consciousness into his spiritual sea.

On the Ring of Truth, the golden thread representing the Spiritual Qi Law hung at the very center, dark golden law fluctuations radiating continuously off it, steadying the domain’s foundation.

But the Spiritual Qi Law as it currently stood had only just reached the baseline needed to condense a Law Solidification Domain, and on the Spiritual Qi Law alone the domain’s structure was not stable enough. So Jie Ming began adding a few “tonics” to it.

He drew the dozen or so other golden law threads coiled on the Ring of Truth into the domain’s framework one by one.

However, Jie Ming did not commit those golden threads in their entirety.

The foundation of a Law Solidification Domain was still, in the end, the Spiritual Qi Law.

His mastery of the remaining laws had long since passed one hundred percent, and forcing all of it in would only let the guest overwhelm the host and scatter the domain’s central axis instead. So from each golden thread he took only the portion that fell below one hundred percent law mastery, letting them embed themselves into the domain as “auxiliary structures.”

That way they would not contest control.

Before long, those golden threads were rotating slowly around the Spiritual Qi Law as their central axis, filling in details for the whole domain, reinforcing its boundary and optimizing its operating efficiency.

As they embedded themselves bit by bit, the dark golden membrane, which had looked somewhat thin before, began drawing in and compacting, and the ripples along its edge gradually settled.

The flow of elements inside the domain began to take on a layered sense of order, like loose rivers forced into channels and finally given a direction that could genuinely be controlled.

Feeling all of this, Jie Ming grew steadily calmer.

Only now could his Law Solidification Domain be said to have truly settled its foundation.

Working out his limbs, Jie Ming rose and pushed open the door of the quiet chamber.

In the main laboratory, the cold blue illumination fell as quietly as ever.

The notification light on his magic network terminal was blinking, reminding him a new message had arrived.

Jie Ming opened it casually, and a transfer notice popped up on the light screen.

It was from Viola.

Going by the memo, the payment for the intelligence on the Multiracial Alliance outpost had come through.

“Oh? My breakthrough shouldn’t have taken all that long.”

Jie Ming checked his biological clock and confirmed that this breakthrough, counting the stabilization that followed, had taken him less than a day.

“That fast? It seems the thing really is in demand.”

Jie Ming glanced at the figure, and his eyebrow rose slightly.

Fifty billion low-level military merits.

Considering that, by their earlier agreement, his share was only half the total.

Which meant this piece of intelligence had ultimately sold for a full hundred billion low-level military merits!

“Hiss…” Jie Ming could not help drawing in a breath of cold air.

Even by the standards of his own net worth, that price was fairly outrageous.

The figure was a good deal higher than he had expected.

But thinking it over carefully, selling at that price did seem understandable.

Back when he and Viola had discussed it, the two of them had settled on having the intelligence paid out in low-level military merits.

Intelligence at this level could of course have been exchanged for high-level military merits instead.

But if she had taken high-level merits, Viola would probably only have been able to sell it for two or three billion.

That was not a small sum, but it did not suit the situation the two of them were in.

Judged by the high-level resources they could be exchanged for, the value of high-level and low-level military merits differed only by a factor of ten, but in practice the gap between the two could hardly be that small.

Because the two could not be exchanged for one another, and because high-level merits were worth more and harder to obtain, intelligence or information that could be traded for high-level merits carried a very heavy premium when traded for low-level merits instead.

Compared with splitting it evenly and each walking away with a billion or so in high-level merits, the far larger quantity of low-level merits suited him and Viola better. They were not short of high-level military merits at the moment. What they were short of was precisely the low-level kind, which could be spent directly on buying basic materials, repaying debts, remaking planes and paying the legion’s wages.

A light thought crossed Jie Ming’s mind: it seemed he had underestimated the size of the premium between high-level and low-level military merits.

Viola had been quick about it, though, finding a buyer this fast.

With this sum of merits, a large part of the funding problem Jie Ming faced could be eased.

The first order of business was, naturally, paying his debts.

He opened the transfer confirmation interface and cleared the remaining twenty billion and more he owed Mentor Clark in a single payment.

As the confirmation button went down and the successful transfer notice popped up on the magic network terminal, his mood lightened considerably along with it.

With the debt cleared, the rest of the merits all went into the procurement budget.

Jie Ming went straight to the Star Ring Federation’s military supplies trading platform and started placing orders in bulk.

Star-core fusion metal, life crystals, law stabilizers, high-purity elemental catalysts, temporal interference crystals…

Every one of the materials needed for the second half of the Creation System’s construction was consumed by the ton at a time.

The shopping list on the light screen scrolled steadily downward, and the terminal balance fell along with it at a speed visible to the naked eye.

Jie Ming did not begrudge it, though. These were all necessary expenses.

There were two main ways to improve a Law Solidification Domain. One was slow growth with the passage of time, and the other was, naturally, to raise one’s own mastery of the law.

Once the Creation System was complete, his mastery of the Spiritual Qi Law would rise another notch, and at that point the whole Law Solidification Domain could grow substantially. It would take a while yet for the materials to arrive, and that gap was a good chance to do something else.

He leaned back in his chair, thought for a moment, and soon had an idea.

He had only just broken through to the sixth level, and his Law Solidification Domain was still too weak. Using it to fuse a plane origin, or to resist the elemental turbulence of the Endless Chaotic Void, would both be far too dangerous.

But besides those two general effects, Jie Ming knew of another use for a Law Solidification Domain: investing it into wizard artifacts.

Giving a wizard artifact effects similar to those of the domain.

This was a technique only wizards skilled in alchemy would bother studying.

The wizard artifacts of the wizard world were products sifted out through countless wars and long ages.

What the overwhelming majority of combat wizard artifacts pursued came down to one word: reliability.

Cheap, hard-wearing, indifferent to their environment.

Whatever kind of law a plane ran on, they could at minimum perform their most basic function.

But there were also wizard artifacts of extremely high precision that would fail because of differences in law between planes.

Spatial wizard artifacts, for instance.

Such things were extremely sensitive to spatial parameters, and lost their effect the moment the plane changed.

But once a Law Solidification Domain was invested into them, these precision wizard artifacts gained properties similar to those of the domain itself and could go on operating stably in disregard of differences in law between planes.

The most typical example was the spatial ring.

Jie Ming had his inner world, which had long since replaced the function of a spatial ring, so he had no particular feeling about that side of it.

But for many wizards below the sixth level, the single question of “how to carry enough supplies while fighting across planes” was headache enough. An ordinary spatial expansion pouch could only be used on planes with specific spatial parameters, and would not open at all once the plane changed.

To pack a little more in, no few wizards would even cultivate sealing techniques specifically to seal and compress supplies for easier carrying.

Jie Ming had no storage troubles, but the Talisman-Rune Artifacts he had developed himself had always had one problem he could not get around.

The core principle of a Talisman-Rune Artifact was to strengthen wizardry with the energy control technology of the cultivation system, which demanded extreme precision in its data on external elemental fluctuations. Switch to another plane and he had to collect fresh elemental fluctuation data for it, then rewrite the core runes through the automated factories of his inner world, before the artifacts would work properly again.

So for a long stretch of time, he had been unable to bring his full strength to bear immediately when fighting on a new plane.

The reason Jie Ming had later come to make heavy use of purpose-built wizard artifacts storing modified spells was not only that the modified Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light and Return to Ruins Armor really were strong enough. The Talisman-Rune Artifacts’ poor adaptability, and how inconvenient that was on a plane battlefield, was a very important reason too.

And now, with a Law Solidification Domain, that problem finally had a chance of being solved.

Talisman-Rune Artifacts could finally be picked back up.

At that thought Jie Ming barely hesitated. He immediately bought a batch of relevant alchemical technical materials from his magic network terminal.

These techniques had never been difficult to begin with, and with his current capacity to learn, a few hours were enough for a preliminary grasp.

Still, Jie Ming did not start out by modifying a complicated Talisman-Rune Artifact. He decided to practice on a few simple wizard artifacts first.

He took several standard-specification extraordinary metal substrates out of his material store, opened the elemental furnace, raised the required elemental fluctuations into the specified band, and then began his first formal refinement.

The light of alchemy rose from his fingertips.

That light was like a docile thin stream, spreading slowly across the surface of the substrate.

Through the effect of alchemy, the metal molecules were rearranged under the pull of his mental energy, shaping themselves bit by bit according to the preset rune structure. At the same time, Jie Ming slowly unfolded the Law Solidification Domain he had only just formed.

The dark golden membrane extended out of his palm like an extremely thin sheet of water, covering the material’s surface without a sound.

Alchemy was responsible for reshaping the wizard artifact’s structure on the physical level, while the Law Solidification Domain seeped in simultaneously at a deeper layer of structure. This was the essence of “investing.”

Put plainly, it meant taking the Law Solidification Domain as part of the material and “blending” it into the wizard artifact’s internal structure.

Alchemy handled the shaping.

The Law Solidification Domain handled the granting of rules.

Once the two were layered together, a miniature operating logic of rules formed among the elements of the material that made up the wizard artifact, giving the wizard artifact itself a portion of the domain’s characteristics.

In other words, an extremely small but genuinely existing “miniature Law Solidification Domain” would be born inside the wizard artifact.

For the first wizard artifact he used as practice, Jie Ming had deliberately picked a simple type, so it took shape quickly.

Jie Ming held it up in his palm and swept its internal structure carefully with the All-Purpose Eye.

“Mm… you could just about call that half a success.” Jie Ming delivered his verdict.

Inside the wizard artifact an extremely small Law Solidification Domain really had formed, and the elements operating within that miniature domain were entirely unaffected by the outside environment.

The problem was that this miniature domain was not stable.

The presence of the Law Solidification Domain inside it was decaying, at an extremely slow rate.

By his rough estimate, without reinvestment it would only hold for about half a month.

Clearly, this was still down to a lack of practice on his part.

“There is quite a bit of room to optimize the synchronized infusion of alchemy and the Law Solidification Domain. The circulation logic inside the domain has to be readjusted too, if I want to get as close as possible to a permanent investment.” Jie Ming recorded what this failure had taught him.

Beyond that, Jie Ming also noticed an extremely interesting phenomenon.

By the description in the technical materials, investing a Law Solidification Domain into a wizard artifact meant “cutting” a portion out of the domain and fusing it into the wizard artifact as material.

Yet he did not feel his own Law Solidification Domain had weakened at all.

After thinking it over, Jie Ming put the wizard artifact into an isolation array, cutting off every outside influence completely.

Having removed it from the coverage of his own Law Solidification Domain, Jie Ming examined the domain around himself carefully again, only to find that its range and intensity had not weakened in the slightest.

“Interesting…” Jie Ming spent a moment sensing it in silence.

Then he ran the phenomenon through several rounds of deduction in his spiritual sea and slowly worked out the thread of it.

The Law Solidification Domain was, in essence, the manifestation in the material world of thought that had broken past the limits of the soul.

Fundamentally, it was the power of thought.

And thought had one most basic characteristic: it is not diminished by being used.

Thinking once does not cost you the ability to think again.

Recalling a memory does not make you forget it.

Since the Law Solidification Domain retained the essential characteristics of thought, then in theory it likewise would not be consumed by being “used.” And because the Law Solidification Domain was itself the substantiation of thought, in a certain sense it was already a preliminary form of creation from nothing. …Although, owing to the particular nature of the Law Solidification Domain, no additional energy or matter was in fact born out of thin air in the process. Jie Ming leaned back in his chair, fingers absently rubbing the practice wizard artifact he had just finished refining, the look in his eyes growing steadily deeper. The wizard civilization’s planning of its own path of development was more brilliant than he had imagined.

So the two core characteristics of the ninth level, limitless power and having whatever one conceives of come true, were already being dabbled in preliminarily as early as the sixth.

The Law Solidification Domain was thought made external, the earliest rough form of having whatever one conceives of come true.

And investing wizard artifacts without consuming the domain itself already showed the faint beginnings of limitless power.

From the sixth level onward, every level was closing on both of those ultimate goals at once.

Small wonder that only wizards above the sixth level were called high-level wizards.

And small wonder that the higher a wizard’s level, the stronger his ability to fight above his level against the creatures of other civilizations became.

On the surface, it looked like a wizard fighting above his level.

But in reality, every high-level wizard had, to some degree, grasped a portion of the ninth level’s characteristics.

The higher the level, the more completely it was grasped.

In fights below the ninth level, a wizard punching above his weight looked like the low striking the high, but in essence it was the high striking the low.

It was ninth-level properties striking the non-ninth-level, an inversion of fighting above one’s level.